Battle dress
Below is an article from Ha'aretz, the Israeli daily, about a Palestinian Israeli lecturer who has been victimised because he refused to allow soldiers uniforms or weapons in his class. Bear this in mind when anyone says that they support academic freedom and that is why they oppose the academic boycott of Israel:
Tony Greenstein
By Tamara Traubmann and Yuval Azoulay
About 15 students, most of them Jewish, were waiting for the filmmaker Nizar Hassan when he got to the restaurant outside Sderot. They hugged and kissed him. Their relations seemed open and warm - a far cry from the image of the aggressive and contemptuous lecturer that has clung to Hassan for the past few months, since he reportedly threw an army-reservist student out of his class for showing up in a uniform.
The students met with Hassan last Wednesday, after demonstrating on his behalf, along with other students and a few lecturers, on the campus of Sapir Academic College in the western Negev town of Sderot. Right-wing activist Itamar Ben-Gvir and a group of young followers of the late ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane gathered for a counter demonstration, which the students had organized in support of reserve soldiers. Numerous journalists were on the scene as well, but Hassan chose to keep his distance from them. In his opinion, the Israeli media not only published erroneous information about what happened during the lesson, but also prejudged him in their militaristic discourse.
Hassan did not, in fact, eject student Eyal Cohen, a lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces reserves, from the classroom. Rather, he told him: "I am absolutely unwilling to have people bearing arms and in uniform - whether of the police, of Fatah or of Hamas - come to my class." However, since November, when the mistaken reports were first published, Hassan has been under public attack by senior IDF officers and politicians, and behind the scenes by senior staff and students at the college, where he has worked for the past four years.
The Knesset's Education Committee passed a resolution condemning the lecturer who "refused to teach a student because he was in IDF uniform and armed." A disciplinary procedure was launched against Hassan and he was suspended even before the procedure was concluded. Someone stuffed a photograph of him with a swastika scrawled across it into his mailbox.
An ultimatum had been given Hassan by the college's president, Prof. Ze'ev Tzahor: Apologize to the student and declare that you respect the uniform of the IDF, or you will be fired. But by last Thursday, when the ultimatum expired, Hassan had neither apologized nor made the declaration. On Monday the college published a statement that it had started the process of terminating his employment and said that he would be required to attend a hearing on the matter in the future. Hassan himself learned about this from the press. "I will not apologize," he says in a first interview to an Israeli paper since the start of the affair. "I prefer to beg in the streets of Nazareth and eat crumbs.
From the moment this became a political issue, there is no possibility of apologizing. And they turned it into a political issue by not saying from day one that the story is a lie and by not leaving it as a matter between teacher and student."
'Teaching human beings'
Nizar Hassan, 47, a documentary filmmaker, grew up in the village of Mashhad, in the Lower Galilee. He lives in Nazareth and is married and the father of two children. His films (which include "Ejteyah," 2003, about the defense put up by the Jenin refugee camp during the IDF's Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, and "Cut," 2000, about the Sephardi Jews of Moshav Agur) are screened at international film festivals. He is a well-known director outside Israel.
"I have had inquiries from all over the world," he says. "At the moment everything is at a standstill. I don't want to exploit the incident or even talk about things like that."
Hassan meanwhile is considering an appeal to the Labor Court. "What happened here is unacceptable - it infringes on my rights. It will not end here. I will take it to every place in the world to prove that I am right."
The incident occurred last November 8 during a workshop entitled "Script and Research in a Documentary Film," he says: "I enter the classroom and see the legs of a soldier, the lower part of the body. I see a hand sliding across a pistol or something like that - I can't tell one weapon from another. I didn't recognize him, maybe because of the uniform. I asked him who he was, and he replied, 'What do you mean, who am I?' I thought maybe he wasn't one of my students, because never in my life did I imagine I would ever teach a student like this. I ask him, 'Are you a student of mine?' He says he is and I ask what his name is. I see he is registered. For a moment I thought to myself that there was even something comic about this whole extraordinary situation.
"I said, 'I am absolutely not willing to have people attend classes with weapons and in uniform - any uniform.' One of the students said, 'That's the way it is everywhere in the world.' I decided that I didn't want to open the issue to discussion, because it was a new class. I said, 'It's not acceptable to me. I will not tell anyone not to come or to leave - you should understand that you don't come here in uniform and with a weapon.' I turned to the student and said, 'Because you didn't know that and I didn't mention it, you can stay.' He said, 'I came straight from reserve duty, and I came like this because it says in your syllabus that a student is allowed to miss only one class.' I told the class, 'You are allowed to miss up to three classes, and the college allows a student in the reserves to miss more.' Then I started the lesson."
How long did that exchange take?
Hassan: "Maybe three minutes."
Hassan says he then went on to talk about Hollywood, which produces formulaic films, and on the freedom of thought which a director needs. "I said that a director must not think in terms of 'Yes, commander!' A director cannot accept a 'Yes, commander' mentality." (Eyal Cohen, the student, told the committee that he felt this was aimed directly at him, to humiliate and mock him.)
In another context, when the lecturer explained that a good director knows his remarks are not sacrosanct, a discussion developed in which one of the students went back to the issue of the uniform and asked, "And if a woman wearing a head-covering entered the classroom, how would you react?"
What did you reply?
"I asked what that had to do with it. [I said:] 'I respect the belief of every person, whether they wear a skullcap or a veil, or any other faith. I am not an 'Arab teacher' and you are not Arab, Palestinian or Jewish and Israeli students. You are students and I am the teacher, and I teach human beings! I do not want to see weapons here, I do not want to see uniforms, and I request very much that you not bring the war into my class. I teach human beings.'
"Then the student said, 'I am a human being, too.' I told him, I do not teach uniforms, not of policemen, not of soldiers, not of Hamas and not of Fatah, not of anyone ... I added, 'Because I am afraid of not being fair with you, when you come next time' - some say I said 'when you come next time, without the uniform' - I will first give you 10 minutes to say what you want.' And that was the end of the affair."
Why didn't you let him speak then?
"In the messy situation and pressure that was created, I thought it would be better if everyone would go home, calm down and start over next time. It was my decision as a teacher not to generate chaos in the class."
From that moment, the class proceeded. As it ended, a "color red" rocket-attack alarm sounded and everyone, including the lecturer, ran for cover.
The committee asserted that there could be no invalidation of the legitimate presence of people in uniform in the college. "Reserve service in Israel is inseparable from the fabric of civic life," the committee stated. "This is a basic fact that cannot be denied or repressed, and it undoubtedly sets apart Israeli reality and way of life. Its roots are even deeper than the security constraints in which Israel has found itself since its inception. The IDF is a citizen army in every sense of the word."
Hassan does not share this sentiment. According to his logic, weapons and uniforms do not enter the classroom, "and with all due respect to Israeli logic, uniforms are a symbol of violence. Maybe some Israelis have begun thinking of their weapons like their children, or the extension of one of their organs - I am sorry to say that, and I say it with extremism to shock people a little. There is nothing like this anywhere in the world. I also do not accept the view that 'we here are in a special situation.' Even if there is a special situation, we have to change it."
You made the decision to work in an Israeli academic institution - you know the rules of the game.
"No."
Can you lay down rules in the classroom even on a nonacademic matter?
"First of all, I have every right to argue with every rule and fight for rules that are appropriate for me. Compromises between people are exactly the name of the game, and the game is to be open. Israel has not yet emerged from its fixed ideas. Just say that you are a militaristic society that cannot live without weapons and uniforms, and that will be the end of the story. What do you want from me? Take me out of the game. Build yourselves a college in your image, a Jewish-Zionist college, with values like those the committee talks about, where a condition for teaching will be a declaration of respect for uniforms. Even if I return to Sapir, it will still be unacceptable to me for a student to enter my class in uniform and with a weapon ... [If] I decide to stay, it is my right to wage a bitter battle, together with my colleagues and students, so uniforms will not be allowed. Not because of my feelings of frustration, as the committee said, but because I believe a complete separation is needed between the arenas. Even if I were in Syria, I would insist that no weapons or uniforms enter the classroom."
But you know - everyone knows - that the army is everywhere in Israeli society.
"I know no such thing. I went out into the Israeli street and did not see what you are describing. And even if it were the case, so what?"
Were you surprised to see a uniformed soldier in your class?
"It surprised me, and how. Everyone keeps saying 'uniform' as though we were talking about a piece of cloth. It is not some rag. Is it convenient for everyone to say it's just a piece of cloth? Fine, live with your illusion."
'From the soul'
Hassan doesn't answer to any conventions. He is critical of everyone, including the ostensibly radical left, the Ashkenazi-liberal, Arab-loving, provincial-patronizing left, and the self-important colleagues from the film and art world. Nevertheless, many of his students took his side. His supporters, and some opponents, too, spoke admiringly of a "tough" and critical person, who spurs his students to achievements and gets them to do things they didn't believe they had in them - a teacher who does not give up on any student.
"He teaches from the soul," says the student Sivan Petel, who describes herself as "extreme right wing." "He is a type of Nietzsche, someone who murders all the gods and laws we were raised on, and opens your mind to other things. Not everyone is capable of studying with him; there are some people who will never understand him."
The impression gleaned by the committee from the testimonies of student Eyal Cohen, the dean of students and senior college staff is that Hassan is an "outstanding" lecturer, who has an "impulsive character" and imposes a "regime of fear" in the class. The college does not have a formal set of disciplinary regulations or a charter concerning the behavior of students and teachers. According to Prof. Tzahor, the committee acted on the basis of a decision of the internal academic council and according to the academic ethos, which he summarizes as: "Politics - only as far as the classroom door." Tzahor and the committee maintain that a lecturer is forbidden to bring politics into his classes or to force his ideological opinions on the students.
But it turns out that there is plenty of politics at Sapir, and not only in Hassan's classes. Students Rotem Azoulai and Elad Zamir describe other cases in which teachers offended students, or where lecturers talked about politics and expressed their opinions, but were not subjected to disciplinary action. The head of the college's Film and Television Department, Avner Faingulernt, told the committee that one lecturer told her class why her son would not join the "occupation army." Tzahor says he was unaware of that case.
In another incident, Dr. Shlomit Tamari told a Bedouin student to remove her head-covering because it is an element of suppression. No disciplinary action was taken against her, either. "I told the student that I hadn't intended to insult her," Tamari says. "I told the college that I have academic freedom, and I can talk about that subject and I am continuing to do so."
Tzahor says in response that the college administration "does not have a double standard." He says that "a first case is treated more leniently, but in Hassan's case it keeps recurring": The lecturer was warned in the past not to bring politics into his classes. Tzahor adds that in the present case an official complaint was filed (see box), which required steps to be taken. Hassan asserts that, "I didn't want to assume the role of a 'member of the minorities,' asking for special consideration in the wake of a personal problem he has with the IDF uniform. Nothing would have happened." But because Hassan refused to conform to Israeli convention, he paid a steep price - and not only in terms of losing his and his family's livelihood.
Hassan: "I was slaughtered. Incorrect reports were published and no one stood up and said 'It's a lie!' People tried to take advantage of the case. There were a great many personal slanders and gossip on the part of people who were interviewed on condition of anonymity. Someone wrote that I said yehudon [kike] - a word I had never even heard of until then. People didn't even ask for my response. How can Ze'ev Tzahor not be ashamed to condemn me in the Knesset, before the committee even made a decision? How can you condemn behavior before you know what happened?"
Tzahor says he expressed his opinion about Hassan's remarks only after he clarified the facts. As for his comments in a meeting of the Knesset's Education Committee, Tzahor says: "I said that if Nizar made those remarks it was a grave act." The word "if" does not appear in the transcript of the committee's meeting.
Crossing red lines
The IDF was outraged by the incident and several senior officers including Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi spoke to Tzahor about it. While talking about other matters, "the question of what we intended to do about it was raised [by Ashkenazi]," Tzahor recalls. "I replied that we would make an announcement upon taking action. I explained to him what I had explained to everyone: Everything will be done according to the academic ethos."
In a letter he sent Tzahor when the incident first became known, the head of the IDF Personnel Directorate, Major General Elazar Stern, threatened to terminate the army's cooperation with the college - which would mean a loss of revenues from tuition and budgeting for hundreds of soldiers who go there. Stern's impression was that the college had not taken the "measures that are called for" against Hassan and "did not behave with the proper determination." He added that "in the name of the IDF," he expected a "sharp, public, official condemnation": "At least," Stern wrote, "the college administration should demand that Hassan apologize to Lieutenant Cohen as a condition for his continued employment."
Three days after the first media report, the Sapir administration convened the internal academic council. Its members, who are lecturers, denounced Hassan's remarks and said that "measures" had to be taken. The council decided to establish, for the first time in the college's history, a committee chaired by Prof. Uri Regev, and including Prof. Yigal Elam and lecturer Yehudit Morag.
The council did not ask to hear Hassan's version of the events before deciding to create the committee, nor was he invited to its meeting. The decision was made on the basis of a report submitted by Tzahor, who says he clarified details of the incident with Cohen and Hassan, and found no significant contradictions. "At first I didn't realize it was a hearing. I thought it would be a proper committee of inquiry, to investigate the lie," Hassan says.
When the storm broke, he was in Paris editing his new film, about the Shi'ites in Lebanon, which has since been aired widely on European television stations. In his view and that of his lawyer, Ester Livni, the incident did not mandate the establishment of a committee, but should have been dealt with internally in the department. "The very fact of the committee's existence, like Nizar's suspension, was a surrender to pressures," Livni says. Tzahor maintains he did not encounter any pressure from the army and that the college's action was transparent and orderly.
Department head Faingulernt was also abroad at the time. He told the committee that if he and Hassan had been in Israel, matters would have been worked out satisfactorily - without a disciplinary procedure. "Things would have calmed down, because there have already been worse cases," Faingulernt says. However, the committee took a different view. Its report, issued at the end of last month, stated that Hassan "crossed red lines of rules of behavior." He was instructed to apologize to Cohen.
The committee stated that Hassan's "behavior and militancy toward the student is totally unacceptable and deserves the sharpest condemnation," and that "if behavior of this kind recurs," Hassan will be fired. In a letter to Hassan, Tzahor added that he must declare his respect for the IDF uniform. According to Tzahor, a "softened version" was afterward proposed to Hassan, which he also rejected.
Hassan is particularly incensed at the committee's conclusions. "Nizar tried to cloak himself" in a viewpoint that describes a separation between the military and civilian arenas, the committee wrote. However, "we find [that viewpoint] utterly groundless, and we also doubt that this was what influenced his behavior in the face of the student's appearance in a reservist uniform." In his behavior, "Nizar abused his status and his authority as a teacher to flaunt his opinions, feelings and frustrations as a member of the Arab national minority in Israel, cloaking himself in a 'humane' and 'universal' garb, whereas in fact he demonstrated a stance of brute force bearing a distinctly nationalist character, completely symmetrical to crass nationalist outlooks which are also widespread, it must be said, in Israeli Jewish society."
Hassan: "To begin with, I am not a member of a minority: I am a Palestinian, and proud of it. Second, on what basis did they decide that I do not have humane values and that this was not a position of principle? They did not even ask me about my attitude toward Jordanian or Lebanese or French soldiers, or any soldier as such. The committee did not have a shred of doubt that I was motivated by frustration. How can they talk about what they claim is the experience of the Arab minority in Israel without having a clue about it? After all, they do not even know Arabic. But still they reject absolutely the possibility that I have universal values that were my reason for acting."
"Maybe so," says committee chairman Regev in response. "It's clear that he has arguments, but a situation like this is not pleasant. That is why we wrote that that is how he and his lawyer see it, and this is how we see it. There can be nothing more natural than different people forming different impressions. I think the report is balanced, as far as we were able to be balanced. We took into account all the considerations. I definitely thought, as we all did, that our recommendations strike a balance between his crossing of red lines and his excellence as a teacher."
15 February 2008
14 February 2008
The Case of the Great PeacePalestine Petition Swindle
Recently a petition appeared on notorious anti-Semitic site PeacePalestine.
In case you missed it she is also associated with IHR:
http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com/
The amusing thing about their exercise is the obvious misdirections, deceptions, manipulations and duplicity it displays.
Firstly it implies that Rizzo and Atzmon are being hounded by Zionists. This they know to be a lie. Which they indirectly admit by usage of the phrase "They have been attacked by Zionists for a long time, but they are also being attacked by certain other people who are in the movement for Palestine.”
So why all the hoohah about Zionism if it isn't Zionists attacking them? The only conclusion can be a deception. To the uninformed reader it looks like they are signing a petition against Zionist false charges of anti-Semitism. The people carrying out the campaign are declared anti-Zionists
The text makes an appeal for solidarity with "two outstanding personalities who are also great fighters for the implementation of freedom and liberty to all the subjugated peoples of the world", well all except the collective 'Untermenschen' ("subhumans") under the 3rd Reich.
Their appeal startlingly fails to address what they are being charged with: anti-Semitism and the distribution of Holocaust Denial literature.
Witnesses for the Defence
Now instead of issuing more condemnation we shall let the players concerned speak for themselves on their innocence:
Gilad Atzmon:
"'I'm not going to say whether it is right or not to burn down a synagogue, I can see that it is a rational act."
"the Jewish state and the sons of Israel are at least as unpopular in the Middle East as their grandparents were in Europe just six decades ago. Seemingly, it is the personification of WW2 and the Holocaust that blinded the Israelis and their supporters from internalising the real meaning of the conditions and the events that led towards their destruction in the first place."
"The idea that Zionists have taken over America might sound bizarre in the first instance but we must remember that this kind of strange scenario does happen."
“we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously…. …. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of theelder of Zion’ are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy… I would suggest that perhaps we should face it onceand for all: the Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus who, by the way, was himself a Palestinian Jew.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Atzmon#Other_work
http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/saying%20NO.htm
http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/protocols.html
http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/onanti.html
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=1559
And here is a site that is linked on Rizzo's Peace Palestine (in the links down the left of the site):
http://www.nowarforisrael.com/
It's run by the KKK a.k.a David Duke
Administrative Contact:
Manager, Domain webmaster@davidduke.com
PO Box 188
Mandeville, LA 70470
US
985-626-7714
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=nowarforisrael.com
And if you are new to this topic and don't know who David Duke is:
http://www.davidduke.com/general/no-war-for-israel_4.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke
This has been known to her for over a month and here is her reaction to a complaint:
“Oh, Didn't know No War For Israel was Duke's site, if it indeed is. Seems you know a lot more about Duke than I do. But, please, don't let facts stand in the way of your preconceived ideas about the racism of my blog. Carry on.”
http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2008/01/12/hilarity_at_peacepalestine.php
So concerned has Rizzo been about this 'oversight' that the link is still there.
Character witnesses
The sham petition exercise then shoots itself in the foot spectacularly:
"We declare that he [Mr Greenstein] does not speak for us or in our names when he attacks these and other activists."
Now, let's hear from some esteemed friends and supporters from the list of signatories speak in defence of their friends' good character:
Paul Eisen:
'Ernst Zundel was once involved in the publication of a book called The Hitler We Loved and Why, but Ernst Zundel was not the only German who loved Hitler and is probably not the only German who still loves Hitler. Millions of Germans loved Hitler who for twelve years impacted on them as no German has or probably ever will, and, though they never sayso, must, deep down still cherish his memory.’
http://www.zundelsite.org/zundel_persecuted/may20-05_eisen.html
Note who is being discussed and is hosting this article, Ernst Zuendel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Z%C3%BCndel
Atzmon distributed this very "great text" from his mailing list and describes its author as his "friend"
(Editor's note: Eisen was great choice to write this piece as his depth of understanding of the 3rd Reich seems to stop just short of knowing that Hitler was Austrian and not German.)
Radical Free Press, Canada
Where do you start with this vile cesspit of racial hatred? Well here's just a taster:
"HOW DO WE STOP THE JEWISH CONTROL OF AMERICA?
Here are 3 options:
* Convert to Judaism and be part of the Single-Party political system in America.
* Convert to Judaism and be part of the Jewish-Takeover of former Christian America.
* Don’t convert to Judaism. Instead call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to grow a revival of Christianity in America.
~Only when America is a Christian nation once again will the Jews lose their power to lead us all by our noses as sheep to the slaughter!"
http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=681#more-681
But be sure to check out the edifying topics such as:
# Jewish Banking Cartel (83)
# Jewish Holocaust Industry (78)
# Jewish Lobby (113)
# Jewish Media Monopoly (106)
# Jewish Porn Industry (51)
# Jews (149)
# Jews Behind Bolshevik Revolution (47)
You will be unsurprised to learn that the site is under investigation by the Anti-Hate Team of the Canadian Human Rights Comission:
http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=629
Here is Rizzo's response to a complaint about the blatantly racist site:
“The webmaster, who is not even the author of the piece wrote me telling me they were a site that was anti-Zionist and defended Palestinian rights. “
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=1706#comment-42889
In case the signature and link disappear their existence is recorded here:
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/02/391057.html
Hmm, sounds like a couple of people who “we know well” that also peddle racism and claim they are just “anti-Zionists” and that they “defend Palestinian rights”. Makes you wonder if they see one as a pre-requisite for the other.
Wendy Campbell:
"The Holocaust has been made into more of a religious dogma than historical fact, since there exists no original source materials to back up their claims which are all based on conflicting eye-witnesses. "
http://www.countercurrents.org/campbell240108.htm
Look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Campbell
In case you missed it she is also associated with IHR:
They still openly disseminate the long discredited fraudulent Leuchter Report that concludes:
“After a thorough examination of the alleged execution facilities in Poland and their associated crematories, the only conclusion that can be arrived at by a rational, responsible person is the absurdity of the notion that any of these facilities were ever capable of, or were utilized as, execution gas chambers.“
http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/inside.shtml
And offer some real gems that are a companion to any anti-racists library:
Out-Of-Print Books
Keith Stimely's Revisionist Bibliography — 1981
Theodore Kaufman's Germany Must Perish!
Paul Rassinier's The Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses (former title: "Debunking the Genocide Myth")
David Hoggan's The Myth of the Six Million
Michael Connor's Dealing in Hate
Current Books
Richard Harwood's Did Six Million Really Die?
Fred Leuchter's Forensic Examination and Engineering Report on the alleged Nazi gassing facilities at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek (aka The Leuchter Report)
Duplicity
You will note that the large volume of their text isn't about the two individuals concerned. It sidesteps the case against them completely, thus lending the impression that their support for Palestine is the issue. Instead it comprises largely of a sizable chunk of ranting about Zionism; a short bit about Rizzo and Atzmon with no background to the issues whatsoever; and then comes the worst misdirection: it interpolates a call for solidarity with the people in Gaza.
So what exactly are people signing up for? Support for holocaust denial and anti-Semitism? A polemic against Zionism? Or outrage at the dreadful situation in Gaza?
It is impossible to determine since the plea makes a hash of them all, but given the scant focus on the two people mentioned and the charges against them, they cannot honestly claim all those numbers as supporters.
We will leave the reader now fully equipped with a representational summary to decide whether the charges stated are true or false.
13 February 2008
Palestine not Vanity – A Question of Honesty: A reply to Paul Rooij’s Snakes in the grass
One of the Atzmon/Rizzo clones to have recently surfaced is 'writer' Paul Rooij. Fresh from trying to deface the Cork PSC site he is an editor for, he has penned a delightful article 'Beware of the snakes in the grass'.
Brendan Behan wrote that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, apart from one’s own obituary. But in the case of Paul Rooij I’ll make another exception. What, you may ask was the point of a 1700+ word personal attack on me? How did it advance the cause of the Palestinians or the struggle of the oppressed? Indeed whose cause did it serve?
Rooij uses the adjective ‘vile’ no less than four times. I’ve written a ‘vile’ article about him and made ‘vile’ accusations of anti-Semitism against Atzmon and Rizzo [AR]. He spends a lot of time saying very little. I am also ‘contemptible’. But what Rooij doesn’t do is explain what lies at the heart of the present controversy over Gilad Atzmon and his acolytes.
Granted that Rooij doesn’t like my article, what he doesn’t explain is why. And that is characteristic of his whole article. Here is a nasty person, Tony Greenstein, attacking the freedom loving AR. The only question missing is why, hence the profusion of adjectives such as ‘contemptible.’ Ad-hominem as a substitute for reason is hardly the basis of Voltaire, still less John Stuart Mill. It is the hallmark of the wannabe tabloid journalist.
It is also a question of honesty. The background is quite simple. As a writer about Zionism the UCC Cork PSC database has a collection of my articles and an introductory page of author details. http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/authors.php?auid=367 Paul Rooij, as an editor, decided to abuse his position so that his personal attack on me took for criticising Atzmon etc. took over the page. It was clearly insulting and therefore unacceptable. There was no reason why he should have pride of place on a page which introduces my articles. Rooij’s comments are now on a link from the front page. Of course I complained to Ireland PSC about this and mindful of the fact that they want to build solidarity with the Palestinians, and most people with their heads screwed on don’t want to associate with holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, PSC ensured that Rooij’s comments were relegated and he wasn’t able to succeed with his act of intellectual vandalism. You see trade unionists don’t go a bundle on anti-Semitism and fascism, and both of those things Paul Eisen, to whom I’ve been ‘uncivil’ subscribes.
But despite his synthetic outrage, what Rooij didn’t explain was that Eisen wrote Holocaust Wars http://www.zundelsite.org/zundel_persecuted/may20-05_eisen.html which can be found on the site of a neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel. Since this pamphlet is an uncritical tribute to Zundel it isn’t a question of a far-right site borrowing his material without permission.
And what does Eisen’s pamphlet actually say?
The Hitler we loved and why…
'Ernst Zundel was once involved in the publication of a book called The Hitler We Loved and Why, but Ernst Zundel was not the only German who loved Hitler and is probably not the only German who still loves Hitler. Millions of Germans loved Hitler who for twelve years impacted on them as no German has or probably ever will, and, though they never say so, must, deep down still cherish his memory.’
Quite what does this apologia for the leader of German fascism have to do with support for the Palestinians? Leaving aside that Hitler was a mass murderer, hated by the German workers and also an imperialist, who was careful not to support the Arab uprising 1936-9, because he thought the British Empire was a wonderful institution, what possible purpose can be served by these pro-fascist sentiments?
Or the following apologetics for holocaust deniers or ‘revisionists’ as Eisen terms them?
‘But they do deny the Holocaust narrative as we know it in three specific areas.
· They deny that there ever was an official plan on the part of Hitler or any other part of the Nazi regime systematically and physically to eliminate every Jew in Europe.
· They deny that there ever existed homicidal gas-chambers;
· They deny the figure of six million Jewish victims of the Nazi assault and claim that the actual figure was significantly less.’
This is a pretty good summing up of the case for holocaust denial. The fact that the evidence is overwhelming – documentary records, eyewitnesses, admission by the perpetrators – you name it, no evidence is acceptable to those who are in denial. In fact the only historian with any reputation amongst them, David Irving, was not only trounced in the libel action he brought against Penguin Books but he accepted that gas chambers were used everywhere but Auschwitz, and then it depended on whether one could see holes in the roof where the gas pellets were dropped!
But again, what has this to do with the Palestinians? Atzmon distributes Eisen’s pamphlets and now signs up to all the above nonsense. Read Gilad Atzmon – Now an Open Holocaust Denier.
Interestingly Atzmon didn’t even bother to deny the thrust of the article, that he is now a holocaust denier. More and more evidence from Germany is coming to light that Atzmon has explicitly declared that he doesn’t believe that there is any forensic evidence for the holocaust. He describes the Socialist Unity site as ‘socialist Jewnity’. Is this the kind of statement designed to elicit support for the Palestinians? It resembles the ramblings of his hero, Israel Shamir, who with Eisen he has vigorously defended, who ended up describing the party of Avigdor Liebermann, the nakedly transferist Deputy Prime Minister of Israel thus:
‘Even less substantiated is Makdisi’s weird claim that YB is a "racist party" and for them, "non-Jews are not welcome". As a matter of fact, the YB is the least Jewish nationalist party in the Knesset outside the Arab block’ It was our criticism of Shamir that prompted the The Protocols of the Elders of London article that Rooij thinks so highly of.
When Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Zionists oppose anti-Semitism in the Palestine solidarity movement we don’t do so because we think that Eisen and Atzmon are a threat to Jews in the West. They are not. We do it because their antics, and those of their followers, are dangerous to the cause of the Palestinians. It really is that simple.
Rooij attacks the idea of Jewish organisations campaigning around Palestine. Yet it is no secret that western Jewish leaders support Israel as do many in the Jewish community. It therefore makes sense to have groups which are Jewish who aim to mobilise amongst other Jews against the Israeli state. Just as white groups also fought apartheid.
But according to Atzmon, and presumably Rooij:
‘by fighting Zionism in the name of their Jewish identity they approve Zionism…. To demand that Jews disapprove of Zionism in the name of their Jewish identity is to accept the Zionist philosophy…. if we regard Jewish identity as a national definition then the label ‘Jew for peace’ or ‘Jew for human rights’ makes sense. … Jews cannot criticise Zionism in the name of their ethnic belonging because such an act is in itself an approval of Zionism.'
When the Boycott campaign was at its height last summer, what was the reaction of the Zionists of the Board of Deputies of British Jews? Did they stand in wonder applauding those Jews (Zionists according to Atzmon) who were active in the movement? According to the Jewish Chronicle (22.6.07.) at their monthly meeting ‘deputies also gave vent to their anger – particularly at Jews who supported the move (for boycott).’ Strange that.
But the whole point is that we don’t accept that Jewish identity and Zionism are synonymous. What Atzmon is saying is that if you are Jewish, not for national but political, cultural or whatever reasons, then you are a Zionist. But that is exactly what the Zionists also say! So for all the insightful, searching, thought-provoking analysis which Rooij says I am trying to censor, what it all boils down to is our criticism of the Zionist analysis of Gilad Atzmon.
Anyone with any knowledge or understanding of Zionism beyond the trivial and superficial waters in which Rooij fishes will know that it was anti-Semitism that gave birth to Zionism. If Rooij and co. knew anything about Zionism then they would know that from the very beginning Political Zionism made an alliance with anti-Semites. Theodore Herzl wrote that:
‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. We want to emigrate as respected people.’ (Diaries pp. 83/4)
‘In Paris ...I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.’ (Diaries p.6)
At this very moment the Jewish Agency is scouring Jewish communities trying to increase the present low level of emigration to Israel. France, Germany, Britain, Russia all have them. What possible purpose does it serve to engage in anti-Semitic discourse? If it were successful it could only result in what the Zionists themselves want – increasing emigration of Jews to Israel. Which is why Zionism has never opposed anti-Semitism.
As A B Yehoshua said (Jewish Chronicle 22.1.82.) ‘Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help to rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real antisemite must be a Zionist.’
If Rooij had got about a bit more in London he would know that Jewish organisations do anything but segregate themselves off. I don’t recall seeing Rooij at last year’s valentine day blockade of Carmel Agrexco for example. There were plenty of people from JAZ and Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods there. But picketing Israel’s largest export outlet in Britain as part of Jewish groups is to be a Zionist according to Atzmon!! Clearly words have lost all meaning for these people.
Rooij describes me on the Cork PSC article as close to the anti-boycott Engage. But that is ironic since I have campaigned ceaselessly to support boycott. Unison, the second largest union in Britain voted to support boycott last summer. I spoke in favour of that position, as a Jewish member of the union, and it was passed by at least 80%. For that I am some form of racial segregationist?!! Get real Rooij.
Ironically, at the same time, Atzmon was denouncing the academic boycott as ‘book burning’ (and here).
The one semi-sensible question Rooij asks is what in American society produces support for Zionism. But the only answer his friends provide is ‘the Jews’. Apart from ignoring the much more numerous Christians for Zionism they totally fail to even begin to answer it. Yet it is not difficult to understand why the USA projects its power in the way it does – economic, military, imperial reasons – oil for example. But this means having an analysis of class society and imperialism, something Atzmon and friends explicitly reject. Its reminiscent of the Nazi explanation of capitalism – it’s all to do with the Jews. The problem was that capitalism survived without any Jews. Likewise the US would support Israel even if there were no Jews there because it is in its interests to do so.
Rooij alleges on the Cork PSC site that I am no longer an anti-Zionist. Not true and of course he could find no example to back this up, apart from criticism of Atzmon etc. In fact my hostility to Zionism is undiminished but so is my hostility to all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism.
I helped found the Return magazine and Jews Against Zionism. I was a founding member of British PSC and the Labour Committee on Palestine which achieved support for a democratic, secular state at the 1982 Labour Party conference. I am a member of J-BIG, out on the streets over Gaza each weekend, campaigning in my union for Boycott. These are the acts of a Zionist?
There are a number of errors in Rooij’s article, eg. That I sent ‘defamatory letters’ to the venue where Atzmon was due to speak. Not true. I sent no letters. It was an article in the local press that alerted them to the meeting. Nor was it a church hall. But it is this attention to detail that marks out Rooij as the quality journalist that he is.
Rooij alleged that I had called Atzmon and Eisen ‘fascists’ or ‘Nazis’. I pointed out that was untrue, so what was his response? ‘Sue Blackwell is Greenstein's comrade, and together they have waged their vendetta against Atzmon, et al. Blackwell's website for some time carried a section on "Nazis" and Gilad Atzmon featured in that page.’
Yes Sue Blackwell, who led the academic boycott is my comrade. But surprising as it may seem, I am not responsible for her web site! This is what is usually called guilt by association. McCarthyism in other words.
Rooij warns us to be aware of ‘snakes in the grass.’ I can only suggest that he looks in the mirror because England has very few snakes, apart from the odd viper.
Tony Greenstein
Brendan Behan wrote that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, apart from one’s own obituary. But in the case of Paul Rooij I’ll make another exception. What, you may ask was the point of a 1700+ word personal attack on me? How did it advance the cause of the Palestinians or the struggle of the oppressed? Indeed whose cause did it serve?
Rooij uses the adjective ‘vile’ no less than four times. I’ve written a ‘vile’ article about him and made ‘vile’ accusations of anti-Semitism against Atzmon and Rizzo [AR]. He spends a lot of time saying very little. I am also ‘contemptible’. But what Rooij doesn’t do is explain what lies at the heart of the present controversy over Gilad Atzmon and his acolytes.
Granted that Rooij doesn’t like my article, what he doesn’t explain is why. And that is characteristic of his whole article. Here is a nasty person, Tony Greenstein, attacking the freedom loving AR. The only question missing is why, hence the profusion of adjectives such as ‘contemptible.’ Ad-hominem as a substitute for reason is hardly the basis of Voltaire, still less John Stuart Mill. It is the hallmark of the wannabe tabloid journalist.
It is also a question of honesty. The background is quite simple. As a writer about Zionism the UCC Cork PSC database has a collection of my articles and an introductory page of author details. http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/authors.php?auid=367 Paul Rooij, as an editor, decided to abuse his position so that his personal attack on me took for criticising Atzmon etc. took over the page. It was clearly insulting and therefore unacceptable. There was no reason why he should have pride of place on a page which introduces my articles. Rooij’s comments are now on a link from the front page. Of course I complained to Ireland PSC about this and mindful of the fact that they want to build solidarity with the Palestinians, and most people with their heads screwed on don’t want to associate with holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, PSC ensured that Rooij’s comments were relegated and he wasn’t able to succeed with his act of intellectual vandalism. You see trade unionists don’t go a bundle on anti-Semitism and fascism, and both of those things Paul Eisen, to whom I’ve been ‘uncivil’ subscribes.
But despite his synthetic outrage, what Rooij didn’t explain was that Eisen wrote Holocaust Wars http://www.zundelsite.org/zundel_persecuted/may20-05_eisen.html which can be found on the site of a neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel. Since this pamphlet is an uncritical tribute to Zundel it isn’t a question of a far-right site borrowing his material without permission.
And what does Eisen’s pamphlet actually say?
The Hitler we loved and why…
'Ernst Zundel was once involved in the publication of a book called The Hitler We Loved and Why, but Ernst Zundel was not the only German who loved Hitler and is probably not the only German who still loves Hitler. Millions of Germans loved Hitler who for twelve years impacted on them as no German has or probably ever will, and, though they never say so, must, deep down still cherish his memory.’
Quite what does this apologia for the leader of German fascism have to do with support for the Palestinians? Leaving aside that Hitler was a mass murderer, hated by the German workers and also an imperialist, who was careful not to support the Arab uprising 1936-9, because he thought the British Empire was a wonderful institution, what possible purpose can be served by these pro-fascist sentiments?
Or the following apologetics for holocaust deniers or ‘revisionists’ as Eisen terms them?
‘But they do deny the Holocaust narrative as we know it in three specific areas.
· They deny that there ever was an official plan on the part of Hitler or any other part of the Nazi regime systematically and physically to eliminate every Jew in Europe.
· They deny that there ever existed homicidal gas-chambers;
· They deny the figure of six million Jewish victims of the Nazi assault and claim that the actual figure was significantly less.’
This is a pretty good summing up of the case for holocaust denial. The fact that the evidence is overwhelming – documentary records, eyewitnesses, admission by the perpetrators – you name it, no evidence is acceptable to those who are in denial. In fact the only historian with any reputation amongst them, David Irving, was not only trounced in the libel action he brought against Penguin Books but he accepted that gas chambers were used everywhere but Auschwitz, and then it depended on whether one could see holes in the roof where the gas pellets were dropped!
But again, what has this to do with the Palestinians? Atzmon distributes Eisen’s pamphlets and now signs up to all the above nonsense. Read Gilad Atzmon – Now an Open Holocaust Denier.
Interestingly Atzmon didn’t even bother to deny the thrust of the article, that he is now a holocaust denier. More and more evidence from Germany is coming to light that Atzmon has explicitly declared that he doesn’t believe that there is any forensic evidence for the holocaust. He describes the Socialist Unity site as ‘socialist Jewnity’. Is this the kind of statement designed to elicit support for the Palestinians? It resembles the ramblings of his hero, Israel Shamir, who with Eisen he has vigorously defended, who ended up describing the party of Avigdor Liebermann, the nakedly transferist Deputy Prime Minister of Israel thus:
‘Even less substantiated is Makdisi’s weird claim that YB is a "racist party" and for them, "non-Jews are not welcome". As a matter of fact, the YB is the least Jewish nationalist party in the Knesset outside the Arab block’ It was our criticism of Shamir that prompted the The Protocols of the Elders of London article that Rooij thinks so highly of.
When Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Zionists oppose anti-Semitism in the Palestine solidarity movement we don’t do so because we think that Eisen and Atzmon are a threat to Jews in the West. They are not. We do it because their antics, and those of their followers, are dangerous to the cause of the Palestinians. It really is that simple.
Rooij attacks the idea of Jewish organisations campaigning around Palestine. Yet it is no secret that western Jewish leaders support Israel as do many in the Jewish community. It therefore makes sense to have groups which are Jewish who aim to mobilise amongst other Jews against the Israeli state. Just as white groups also fought apartheid.
But according to Atzmon, and presumably Rooij:
‘by fighting Zionism in the name of their Jewish identity they approve Zionism…. To demand that Jews disapprove of Zionism in the name of their Jewish identity is to accept the Zionist philosophy…. if we regard Jewish identity as a national definition then the label ‘Jew for peace’ or ‘Jew for human rights’ makes sense. … Jews cannot criticise Zionism in the name of their ethnic belonging because such an act is in itself an approval of Zionism.'
When the Boycott campaign was at its height last summer, what was the reaction of the Zionists of the Board of Deputies of British Jews? Did they stand in wonder applauding those Jews (Zionists according to Atzmon) who were active in the movement? According to the Jewish Chronicle (22.6.07.) at their monthly meeting ‘deputies also gave vent to their anger – particularly at Jews who supported the move (for boycott).’ Strange that.
But the whole point is that we don’t accept that Jewish identity and Zionism are synonymous. What Atzmon is saying is that if you are Jewish, not for national but political, cultural or whatever reasons, then you are a Zionist. But that is exactly what the Zionists also say! So for all the insightful, searching, thought-provoking analysis which Rooij says I am trying to censor, what it all boils down to is our criticism of the Zionist analysis of Gilad Atzmon.
Anyone with any knowledge or understanding of Zionism beyond the trivial and superficial waters in which Rooij fishes will know that it was anti-Semitism that gave birth to Zionism. If Rooij and co. knew anything about Zionism then they would know that from the very beginning Political Zionism made an alliance with anti-Semites. Theodore Herzl wrote that:
‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. We want to emigrate as respected people.’ (Diaries pp. 83/4)
‘In Paris ...I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.’ (Diaries p.6)
At this very moment the Jewish Agency is scouring Jewish communities trying to increase the present low level of emigration to Israel. France, Germany, Britain, Russia all have them. What possible purpose does it serve to engage in anti-Semitic discourse? If it were successful it could only result in what the Zionists themselves want – increasing emigration of Jews to Israel. Which is why Zionism has never opposed anti-Semitism.
As A B Yehoshua said (Jewish Chronicle 22.1.82.) ‘Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help to rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real antisemite must be a Zionist.’
If Rooij had got about a bit more in London he would know that Jewish organisations do anything but segregate themselves off. I don’t recall seeing Rooij at last year’s valentine day blockade of Carmel Agrexco for example. There were plenty of people from JAZ and Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods there. But picketing Israel’s largest export outlet in Britain as part of Jewish groups is to be a Zionist according to Atzmon!! Clearly words have lost all meaning for these people.
Rooij describes me on the Cork PSC article as close to the anti-boycott Engage. But that is ironic since I have campaigned ceaselessly to support boycott. Unison, the second largest union in Britain voted to support boycott last summer. I spoke in favour of that position, as a Jewish member of the union, and it was passed by at least 80%. For that I am some form of racial segregationist?!! Get real Rooij.
Ironically, at the same time, Atzmon was denouncing the academic boycott as ‘book burning’ (and here).
The one semi-sensible question Rooij asks is what in American society produces support for Zionism. But the only answer his friends provide is ‘the Jews’. Apart from ignoring the much more numerous Christians for Zionism they totally fail to even begin to answer it. Yet it is not difficult to understand why the USA projects its power in the way it does – economic, military, imperial reasons – oil for example. But this means having an analysis of class society and imperialism, something Atzmon and friends explicitly reject. Its reminiscent of the Nazi explanation of capitalism – it’s all to do with the Jews. The problem was that capitalism survived without any Jews. Likewise the US would support Israel even if there were no Jews there because it is in its interests to do so.
Rooij alleges on the Cork PSC site that I am no longer an anti-Zionist. Not true and of course he could find no example to back this up, apart from criticism of Atzmon etc. In fact my hostility to Zionism is undiminished but so is my hostility to all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism.
I helped found the Return magazine and Jews Against Zionism. I was a founding member of British PSC and the Labour Committee on Palestine which achieved support for a democratic, secular state at the 1982 Labour Party conference. I am a member of J-BIG, out on the streets over Gaza each weekend, campaigning in my union for Boycott. These are the acts of a Zionist?
There are a number of errors in Rooij’s article, eg. That I sent ‘defamatory letters’ to the venue where Atzmon was due to speak. Not true. I sent no letters. It was an article in the local press that alerted them to the meeting. Nor was it a church hall. But it is this attention to detail that marks out Rooij as the quality journalist that he is.
Rooij alleged that I had called Atzmon and Eisen ‘fascists’ or ‘Nazis’. I pointed out that was untrue, so what was his response? ‘Sue Blackwell is Greenstein's comrade, and together they have waged their vendetta against Atzmon, et al. Blackwell's website for some time carried a section on "Nazis" and Gilad Atzmon featured in that page.’
Yes Sue Blackwell, who led the academic boycott is my comrade. But surprising as it may seem, I am not responsible for her web site! This is what is usually called guilt by association. McCarthyism in other words.
Rooij warns us to be aware of ‘snakes in the grass.’ I can only suggest that he looks in the mirror because England has very few snakes, apart from the odd viper.
Tony Greenstein
12 February 2008
Indymedia Capitulates To The Anti-Semites And Holocaust Deniers
Maybe it was a mistake to expect anymore of them, but Indymedia does describe itself as a ‘network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.’
It also has Guidelines which state under Discrimination:
posts using language, imagery, or other forms of communication promoting racism, fascism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia or any other form of discrimination
may be hidden.
This guideline however has been completely ignored. It is inoperative. Some people, not myself, had high hopes that the two day meeting in Nottingham on 9-10 January 2008 would resolve these problems. Instead it led to the resignation of at least one more member and the entrenchment of the supporters of anti-Semitism and holocaust denial in the collective, led by ftp and jackslucid.
Most people know the story. Gilad Atzmon, a racist ex-Israeli has been allowed to post freely to Indymedia articles justifying the holocaust Say no to the Hunters of Goliath and legitimising revisionist historians Esther to Aipac. Those who have sought to respond to these articles have had their replies hidden by ftp with the acquiescence or worse of the collective.
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/01/389837.html
Instead the IM Collective has adopted a new category. Articles which some want to hide and some want to display openly are now ‘disputed’. On the night of 10th January the Hunters article was declared disputed and then readmitted and then disputed, with red slabs ‘disputed’ all over it. By the morning these had changed to feint pink! By the time this article had been written all that was left was a message saying the article was disputed but otherwise it could be read as if it were any normal article on IM.
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/world/2007/08/378213.html?s=disputed
What is particularly outrageous is that the IM Collective decided to ban Tony Greenstein from posting, for being honest with the hapless mods., but when it came to Gilad Atzmon a ‘block’ was put on such a proposal by our old friend Free the Peeps (Roy Bard). In other words regardless of whether there is or is not a majority the proposal didn’t go through. Result? The person who complained about anti-Semitism is banned and the anti-Semite is allowed to continue posting. And these people want us to believe they take racism serious?
And if to emphasise that the complainant was the problem the following was put in extra big letters!
Agree that what Greenstein has done and his campaign has been disruptive. All agreed this was the case. This is not a personal problem, it is a political problem. Responsibility of the collective to discuss this.
And who are the people that IM are defending? The minutes, which hide more than they reveal, apart from an inability to spell, contain a couple of sentences which sum up the problem:
‘There was a discussion about the anti-Semitism issue and indymedia's definitions about what constitutes anti-Semitism.
Concern that this is a prelude to an increasing climate of hiding Palestinian articles or criticisms of Israel.’
And therein lies the rub. Zionists have for so long attacked supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists as anti-Semitic, that now that the real anti-Semites are coming out of the woodwork, the IM Collective, and to be fair not only them, have difficulty in telling the difference between the genuine article and the person that the Zionists have defamed. It is the problem of crying wolf. But although the IM collective has little in the way of political theory or ideology, it isn’t that difficult telling the difference between a false accusation of anti-Semitism and the real thing.
Let us take the petition in support of Mary Rizzo and Gilad Atzmon which has even been hidden by Atzmon’s servile dogsbody, ftp:
Mary Rizzo, the editor of the anti-Semitic ‘peacepalestine’ blog posted the following comments on the Socialist Unity site vouching for the bonafides of one of the signatories to the above petition – The Radical Press:
'The Radical Press presents thought-provoking and intelligent information and analysis. It is absolutely NOT anti-Semitic, but many who might not agree with its harsh critique on Israel might try to label it as such, so that people will create confusion between the two, and things never change.
I hope you realise that it is a valuable resource, and any campaigning made to insinuate that it is a racist site is not at all accurate.
Mary Rizzo
And indeed it is a valuable resource, albeit not for the reasons that Rizzo gives. It is valuable because it is instructive in the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. And if anyone believes otherwise then they are welcome to dip their toe in its poisoned waters.
But what are the 'thought-provoking and intelligent information and analysis' that so impresses Mary Rizzo, who is not a woman to be easily impressed (except when it’s Atzmon who’s doing the talking)?
Well There are articles on the:
Jewish Banking Cartel (82) Jewish Holocaust Industry (77) Jewish Lobby (112) Jewish Media Monopoly (105) Jewish Porn Industry (50) Jews (148) Jews Behind Bolshevik Revolution
http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=681#more-681
There is a delightful article by Brother Daniel on the same site. Entitled (what else?)
AMERICA IS RUN BY JEWS
By Brother Nathanael Kapner
Brother Nathanael bronathanael@yahoo.com
AMERICA IS NOW A JEW-RUN NATION. Here is a list of the prominent Jews who run America: [I wont bore you with the list]
Elsewhere we learn that ‘Judaism is a "chameleon" culture/religion. It "becomes" whatever is necessary in order to deceive and trick non-Jews’
http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=681#more-681
"The Jew also believes he is destined to own and rule the whole world as a ‘master race.’"
"The Jews are not going to stop what they are doing to us! We are going to have to stop them, even if that means separating them from our midst permanently!"
"Jewish supremacists thrive and thieve more successfully in a country without a strong majority that is well-organized for its own self-interest, as whites used to be before the Jewish Trojan Hebrew Horse rode into town"
"the whole concept of "multiculturalism", the kind offered up like a steady dietary staple on a majority of college campuses, was created by Jews. In fact, as political dissident author Curtis Maynard explains, a Jewish woman actually wrote a whole primer to encourage and spread this alien ideology."
"Abortion is a modern and grisly Jewish death trade. Jews run 50% of abortuaries in America (though only comprising 2% of the population) and they make up the leadership of nearly every pro-abortion activist group…. the main impetus or stimulus for the Jewish abortion cheerleaders is to dramatically lower the white birthrate, thereby killing off their chief competitors and decreasing the white surplus population."
"Most teens in America have a far more favorable view of homosexuals than their parents or grandparents ever did. But this is the Jewish way. Brainwash, propagandize and then recruit, recruit, recruit like hell! But as Jewish homosexual organizations try to indoctrinate sexually confused young people into the gay death style there seems to be more at work here than simple "tolerance" or "diversity" issues. This is an effort to tear asunder the notion of "traditional family" that has been the bedrock of Western survival….Though not all homosexual enthusiasts are Jewish, their leaders surely are."
"All of these facets of the Jewish blueprint have one central theme. They impose sickness and social disease and degeneracy and death by constant fiat." [4] January 31, 2008
[1]http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=681
[2] http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=663#more-663 and
http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=563#more-563
and http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=436#more-436
[3] http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=683#more-683
[4] http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=674#more-674
One wonders whether the IM collective would recognise the above as anti-Semitic? Chances are that ftp and the useful idiots who support him would no doubt think that it was just a case of exuberant anti-Zionism. One wonders whether the women (are there any women left?) on the collective recognise that a statement such as ‘Abortion is a modern and grisly Jewish death trade’ could come straight from Streicher’s Der Stuermer.
These are the sick people that the IM Collective have hitched their wagon to. Instead of junking FTP, Phunkee and Jackslucid they have instead decided to give a free pass to genuine fascists and anti-Semites.
Yes, after months of battling to get the Indymedia collective to bar holocaust deniers and anti-Semites from posting articles, we have a situation now, after their meeting at the weekend, whereby anti-Semites are welcome and their opponents are banned!
Below are 2 articles here and here which result from the fallout from the meeting in Nottingham at the weekend. Naturally they are hidden,
And If you want to know why Knuckles and her friend Atzmon are holocaust deniers just read
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=1559#comments
The Indymedia fellow-travellers with racism and anti-Semitism are incapable of telling the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Some of them think they are doing Palestinians a favour by publishing this sort of garbage.
There is nothing the Zionists love better than to demonstrate that supporters of the Palestinians are anti-Semitic. Indymedia UK has now done all it could to prove them right.
Tony Greenstein
It also has Guidelines which state under Discrimination:
posts using language, imagery, or other forms of communication promoting racism, fascism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia or any other form of discrimination
may be hidden.
This guideline however has been completely ignored. It is inoperative. Some people, not myself, had high hopes that the two day meeting in Nottingham on 9-10 January 2008 would resolve these problems. Instead it led to the resignation of at least one more member and the entrenchment of the supporters of anti-Semitism and holocaust denial in the collective, led by ftp and jackslucid.
Most people know the story. Gilad Atzmon, a racist ex-Israeli has been allowed to post freely to Indymedia articles justifying the holocaust Say no to the Hunters of Goliath and legitimising revisionist historians Esther to Aipac. Those who have sought to respond to these articles have had their replies hidden by ftp with the acquiescence or worse of the collective.
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/01/389837.html
Instead the IM Collective has adopted a new category. Articles which some want to hide and some want to display openly are now ‘disputed’. On the night of 10th January the Hunters article was declared disputed and then readmitted and then disputed, with red slabs ‘disputed’ all over it. By the morning these had changed to feint pink! By the time this article had been written all that was left was a message saying the article was disputed but otherwise it could be read as if it were any normal article on IM.
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/world/2007/08/378213.html?s=disputed
What is particularly outrageous is that the IM Collective decided to ban Tony Greenstein from posting, for being honest with the hapless mods., but when it came to Gilad Atzmon a ‘block’ was put on such a proposal by our old friend Free the Peeps (Roy Bard). In other words regardless of whether there is or is not a majority the proposal didn’t go through. Result? The person who complained about anti-Semitism is banned and the anti-Semite is allowed to continue posting. And these people want us to believe they take racism serious?
And if to emphasise that the complainant was the problem the following was put in extra big letters!
Agree that what Greenstein has done and his campaign has been disruptive. All agreed this was the case. This is not a personal problem, it is a political problem. Responsibility of the collective to discuss this.
And who are the people that IM are defending? The minutes, which hide more than they reveal, apart from an inability to spell, contain a couple of sentences which sum up the problem:
‘There was a discussion about the anti-Semitism issue and indymedia's definitions about what constitutes anti-Semitism.
Concern that this is a prelude to an increasing climate of hiding Palestinian articles or criticisms of Israel.’
And therein lies the rub. Zionists have for so long attacked supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists as anti-Semitic, that now that the real anti-Semites are coming out of the woodwork, the IM Collective, and to be fair not only them, have difficulty in telling the difference between the genuine article and the person that the Zionists have defamed. It is the problem of crying wolf. But although the IM collective has little in the way of political theory or ideology, it isn’t that difficult telling the difference between a false accusation of anti-Semitism and the real thing.
Let us take the petition in support of Mary Rizzo and Gilad Atzmon which has even been hidden by Atzmon’s servile dogsbody, ftp:
Mary Rizzo, the editor of the anti-Semitic ‘peacepalestine’ blog posted the following comments on the Socialist Unity site vouching for the bonafides of one of the signatories to the above petition – The Radical Press:
'The Radical Press presents thought-provoking and intelligent information and analysis. It is absolutely NOT anti-Semitic, but many who might not agree with its harsh critique on Israel might try to label it as such, so that people will create confusion between the two, and things never change.
I hope you realise that it is a valuable resource, and any campaigning made to insinuate that it is a racist site is not at all accurate.
Mary Rizzo
And indeed it is a valuable resource, albeit not for the reasons that Rizzo gives. It is valuable because it is instructive in the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. And if anyone believes otherwise then they are welcome to dip their toe in its poisoned waters.
But what are the 'thought-provoking and intelligent information and analysis' that so impresses Mary Rizzo, who is not a woman to be easily impressed (except when it’s Atzmon who’s doing the talking)?
Well There are articles on the:
Jewish Banking Cartel (82) Jewish Holocaust Industry (77) Jewish Lobby (112) Jewish Media Monopoly (105) Jewish Porn Industry (50) Jews (148) Jews Behind Bolshevik Revolution
http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=681#more-681
There is a delightful article by Brother Daniel on the same site. Entitled (what else?)
AMERICA IS RUN BY JEWS
By Brother Nathanael Kapner
Brother Nathanael bronathanael@yahoo.com
AMERICA IS NOW A JEW-RUN NATION. Here is a list of the prominent Jews who run America: [I wont bore you with the list]
Elsewhere we learn that ‘Judaism is a "chameleon" culture/religion. It "becomes" whatever is necessary in order to deceive and trick non-Jews’
http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=681#more-681
"The Jew also believes he is destined to own and rule the whole world as a ‘master race.’"
"The Jews are not going to stop what they are doing to us! We are going to have to stop them, even if that means separating them from our midst permanently!"
"Jewish supremacists thrive and thieve more successfully in a country without a strong majority that is well-organized for its own self-interest, as whites used to be before the Jewish Trojan Hebrew Horse rode into town"
"the whole concept of "multiculturalism", the kind offered up like a steady dietary staple on a majority of college campuses, was created by Jews. In fact, as political dissident author Curtis Maynard explains, a Jewish woman actually wrote a whole primer to encourage and spread this alien ideology."
"Abortion is a modern and grisly Jewish death trade. Jews run 50% of abortuaries in America (though only comprising 2% of the population) and they make up the leadership of nearly every pro-abortion activist group…. the main impetus or stimulus for the Jewish abortion cheerleaders is to dramatically lower the white birthrate, thereby killing off their chief competitors and decreasing the white surplus population."
"Most teens in America have a far more favorable view of homosexuals than their parents or grandparents ever did. But this is the Jewish way. Brainwash, propagandize and then recruit, recruit, recruit like hell! But as Jewish homosexual organizations try to indoctrinate sexually confused young people into the gay death style there seems to be more at work here than simple "tolerance" or "diversity" issues. This is an effort to tear asunder the notion of "traditional family" that has been the bedrock of Western survival….Though not all homosexual enthusiasts are Jewish, their leaders surely are."
"All of these facets of the Jewish blueprint have one central theme. They impose sickness and social disease and degeneracy and death by constant fiat." [4] January 31, 2008
[1]http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=681
[2] http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=663#more-663 and
http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=563#more-563
and http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=436#more-436
[3] http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=683#more-683
[4] http://www.radicalpress.com/?p=674#more-674
One wonders whether the IM collective would recognise the above as anti-Semitic? Chances are that ftp and the useful idiots who support him would no doubt think that it was just a case of exuberant anti-Zionism. One wonders whether the women (are there any women left?) on the collective recognise that a statement such as ‘Abortion is a modern and grisly Jewish death trade’ could come straight from Streicher’s Der Stuermer.
These are the sick people that the IM Collective have hitched their wagon to. Instead of junking FTP, Phunkee and Jackslucid they have instead decided to give a free pass to genuine fascists and anti-Semites.
Yes, after months of battling to get the Indymedia collective to bar holocaust deniers and anti-Semites from posting articles, we have a situation now, after their meeting at the weekend, whereby anti-Semites are welcome and their opponents are banned!
Below are 2 articles here and here which result from the fallout from the meeting in Nottingham at the weekend. Naturally they are hidden,
And If you want to know why Knuckles and her friend Atzmon are holocaust deniers just read
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=1559#comments
The Indymedia fellow-travellers with racism and anti-Semitism are incapable of telling the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Some of them think they are doing Palestinians a favour by publishing this sort of garbage.
There is nothing the Zionists love better than to demonstrate that supporters of the Palestinians are anti-Semitic. Indymedia UK has now done all it could to prove them right.
Tony Greenstein
11 February 2008
The Anti-Semites Feel the Heat
Can you imagine anything more ludicrous? At a time when over a million Palestinians are under siege from Israel, when hunger stalks the streets and fighter planes soar over the horizon, we are asked to sign a petition in solidarity with two well known anti-Semites – Gilad Atzmon and Mary Rizzo!
Petition: for two activists... that you know well
Still it is true that we know them well!
This petition is a sign of the desperation of Atzmon that people have started to wake up to what he and his groupie Rizzo stand for. In particular they have been rebuffed by Ireland PSC.
The Cork Database bio for Tony Greenstein was defaced by Atzmon supporter Paul de Rooij, a self-styled journalist who produces no copy of consequence. Rooij landed a role as editor of the database which is run by UCC Cork PSC (despite him living in London). As part of Cork PSC which is affiliated to Ireland PSC which was therefore affected by this action.
Earlier this week, the offending comments of Rooij were relegated to well-deserved obscurity being buried within the article alongside critical comments concerning what had happened. Atzmon & Rizzo got the message - that wherever they surface anti-racist and democratic elements would be shining the light on them.
Which is why various right-wing conspiracy sites have taken up the petition, most of them not having a single comment beneath, such is the enthusiasm for this initiative. E-mails have been sent far and wide, which is how we came to learn of this little initiative. And of course it is now the main story on Rizzo’s anti-Semitic PeacePalestine sewer.
The final paragraph of this pathetic ‘petition’ begins ‘We also take the opportunity to condemn the strangling siege that is being imposed over the Gaza Strip…’
And that is what it is about. The siege of Palestine is an afterthought for these people. Solidarity with Atzmon’s ego and his one-man fan club Rizzo is what it’s all about. Those who have put their name to the petition should seriously ask themselves whether they believe that supporting holocaust denial and anti-Semitism is the best way to go about supporting the Palestinians.
Atzmon first came to our attention when defending another open anti-semite and holocaust denier, Israel Shamir or Jermas the Swedish fascist. There is little doubt that Shamir, who has repeatedly lied about his background, is an Israeli state agent. The fact that Atzmon has risked all to support him must raise doubts about
what his real agenda is about.
Those Palestinians who have signed this petition in the belief that they are somehow supporting their sisters and brothers in Palestine should think again. They wouldn’t want to think, in years to come, that what they really signed was a petition in support of Israeli agent(s).
No such justification attaches to Oren Ben-Dor, law lecturer at Southampton University who has knowingly signed an anti-Semitic petition. He is well aware that Atzmon attributes the crimes of Zionism to 'Jewishness' rather than imperialism or colonialism. In so doing Atzmon merely reflects the racism of Zionism which also attributes to Arabs various racial qualities.
Petition: for two activists... that you know well
Still it is true that we know them well!
This petition is a sign of the desperation of Atzmon that people have started to wake up to what he and his groupie Rizzo stand for. In particular they have been rebuffed by Ireland PSC.
The Cork Database bio for Tony Greenstein was defaced by Atzmon supporter Paul de Rooij, a self-styled journalist who produces no copy of consequence. Rooij landed a role as editor of the database which is run by UCC Cork PSC (despite him living in London). As part of Cork PSC which is affiliated to Ireland PSC which was therefore affected by this action.
Earlier this week, the offending comments of Rooij were relegated to well-deserved obscurity being buried within the article alongside critical comments concerning what had happened. Atzmon & Rizzo got the message - that wherever they surface anti-racist and democratic elements would be shining the light on them.
Which is why various right-wing conspiracy sites have taken up the petition, most of them not having a single comment beneath, such is the enthusiasm for this initiative. E-mails have been sent far and wide, which is how we came to learn of this little initiative. And of course it is now the main story on Rizzo’s anti-Semitic PeacePalestine sewer.
The final paragraph of this pathetic ‘petition’ begins ‘We also take the opportunity to condemn the strangling siege that is being imposed over the Gaza Strip…’
And that is what it is about. The siege of Palestine is an afterthought for these people. Solidarity with Atzmon’s ego and his one-man fan club Rizzo is what it’s all about. Those who have put their name to the petition should seriously ask themselves whether they believe that supporting holocaust denial and anti-Semitism is the best way to go about supporting the Palestinians.
Atzmon first came to our attention when defending another open anti-semite and holocaust denier, Israel Shamir or Jermas the Swedish fascist. There is little doubt that Shamir, who has repeatedly lied about his background, is an Israeli state agent. The fact that Atzmon has risked all to support him must raise doubts about
what his real agenda is about.
Those Palestinians who have signed this petition in the belief that they are somehow supporting their sisters and brothers in Palestine should think again. They wouldn’t want to think, in years to come, that what they really signed was a petition in support of Israeli agent(s).
No such justification attaches to Oren Ben-Dor, law lecturer at Southampton University who has knowingly signed an anti-Semitic petition. He is well aware that Atzmon attributes the crimes of Zionism to 'Jewishness' rather than imperialism or colonialism. In so doing Atzmon merely reflects the racism of Zionism which also attributes to Arabs various racial qualities.
INDYMEDIA UPDATE
Minutes have been published of the Indymedia network meeting this weekend in Nottingham.
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/UkNetworkMeeting2008
Although the Saturday meetings and the Sunday morning are reported, the Sunday afternoon meeting minutes are not available. Piecing together things from what is taking place on the web it would appear that there are serious divisions within the moderators and members concerning what to do about Atzmon's anti-semitic 'say no to the Hunters of Goliath'.
The anti-Semites main supporter FTP has been in contact with his mentor, holocaust denier Gilad Atzmon throughout, but it would seem that he hasn't been telling the whole truth. Atzmon's hunters article was originally displayed as 'disputed' then appeared normally and is now a 'disputed' article again with the words 'disputed' all over it.
We welcome this development. It would appear that anti-fascist and anti-racist activists are finally getting a grip on how Indymedia is run. Although the Hunters article is not the worst, the Esther to Aipac one is much nearer to explicit holocaust denial, with its 'daring' of genuine anti-Zionist holocaust historians to engage in a debate with the flat earthers, sorry revisionist historians, it is the Hunters article that has been at the eye of the storm.
What has happened is important. Although we understand the irritation of some of those involved with what the tactics of anti-Zionists and anti-racists, without a persistent intervention it is likely that this issue would have been hidden away and forgotten like similar battles in April and October last year.
We look forward to Indymedia collective declaring an open and overt anti-racist culture which will automatically lead to the hiding if not deletion of racist and anti-Semitic articles. And by this we mean articles which single out Jews AS Jews because of what and who they are rather than what they stand for. We would expect the same for articles that attribute to Palestinians the normal stereotypes common in Israel today. Indeed the glut of Atzmon articles on Indymedia only makes more glaring the lack the scarcity of articles which detail the systematic racism of the Israeli state towards Palestinians.
No to holocaust denial and No to anti-Arab racism
For a Democratic, Secular State of Palestine
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/08/378213.html?s=disputed
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/UkNetworkMeeting2008
Although the Saturday meetings and the Sunday morning are reported, the Sunday afternoon meeting minutes are not available. Piecing together things from what is taking place on the web it would appear that there are serious divisions within the moderators and members concerning what to do about Atzmon's anti-semitic 'say no to the Hunters of Goliath'.
The anti-Semites main supporter FTP has been in contact with his mentor, holocaust denier Gilad Atzmon throughout, but it would seem that he hasn't been telling the whole truth. Atzmon's hunters article was originally displayed as 'disputed' then appeared normally and is now a 'disputed' article again with the words 'disputed' all over it.
We welcome this development. It would appear that anti-fascist and anti-racist activists are finally getting a grip on how Indymedia is run. Although the Hunters article is not the worst, the Esther to Aipac one is much nearer to explicit holocaust denial, with its 'daring' of genuine anti-Zionist holocaust historians to engage in a debate with the flat earthers, sorry revisionist historians, it is the Hunters article that has been at the eye of the storm.
What has happened is important. Although we understand the irritation of some of those involved with what the tactics of anti-Zionists and anti-racists, without a persistent intervention it is likely that this issue would have been hidden away and forgotten like similar battles in April and October last year.
We look forward to Indymedia collective declaring an open and overt anti-racist culture which will automatically lead to the hiding if not deletion of racist and anti-Semitic articles. And by this we mean articles which single out Jews AS Jews because of what and who they are rather than what they stand for. We would expect the same for articles that attribute to Palestinians the normal stereotypes common in Israel today. Indeed the glut of Atzmon articles on Indymedia only makes more glaring the lack the scarcity of articles which detail the systematic racism of the Israeli state towards Palestinians.
No to holocaust denial and No to anti-Arab racism
For a Democratic, Secular State of Palestine
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/08/378213.html?s=disputed
5 February 2008
How Indymedia UK Lost Its Way and became a safe haven for Anti-Semitism
Indymedia UK [IM] boasts that it is ‘a network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.’ http://www.indymedia.org.uk/
When the issue of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism arose in October 2007, IM demonstrated that far from being an alternative, grassroots way of doing things, it behaved in exactly the same undemocratic, manipulative and bureaucratic way of the corporations that it criticises. In its Editorial Guidelines, there is a category ‘Hierarchy’ http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/static/editorial.html which states that ‘The newswire is designed to generate a news resource, not a notice-board for political parties or any other hierarchically structured organizations...’
It echoed the old criticism of anarchism and the tyranny of structurelessness IN Jo Freeman’s famous essay http://struggle.ws/pdfs/tyranny.pdf which originated in a debate in the women’s movement about structures. It aimed to show that every group has structures and hierarchies and those which pretend otherwise simply have informal structures, usually less democratic than those where there is an openly defined structure, where power would move to an elite without any controls or accountability. It is a good way to describe the anarcho-libertarian group IM.
Although I was unaware of it at the time, there had been at least 2 trial runs over the issue of anti-Semitism and holocaust denial in March and April 2007. When an Atzmon article ‘From Esther to Aipac’ was posted http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/03/364419.html?c=on it provoked debate amongst the moderators, all of whom seemed unable to see what the fuss was about with Yossarian describing it as a ‘positive contribution’ The article is still there. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-March/thread.html
In April another IM moderator ftp (Roy Bard) defended holocaust denier Kurt Nimmo who had stated that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were ‘discredited’. A fellow moderator, Nim Chimpsky complained that ‘What has been becoming increasingly problematic is that not only are the offending posts allowed to stand, but any complaints will be hidden.’ http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-April/0424-8x.html The whole debate can be seen here http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-April/date.html. And a defence of Nimmo can be seen here.
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-April/0425-ni.html.
Reading through the debates in April 2007 one gets a curious sense of déjà vu. The same use of ‘guidelines’ to ‘hide’ criticism of holocaust deniers and anti-Semites. It works something like this. FTP puts up an anti-Semitic post from Gilad Atzmon, someone complains and their article is hidden because complaints about the actions of Moderators are hidden. This is covered by the rule that ‘Concerns about editorial guidelines or queries about moderation are dealt with on the imc-uk-features list. These issues are not dealt with through the newswire, and newswire posts on these topics will be hidden.’ So if you disagree with the decision to put up a racist article the anti-racist response will always be hidden!!
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/static/editorial.html
But this is very like the way the Police enforce the law. Those laws they like, e.g. ancient bylaws which prevent an EDO camp in Brighton in the summer are enforced. However anti-fox hunting laws, or the Protection from Eviction Act are ignored. In this case the guideline under discrimination which states that posts using language, imagery, or other forms of communication promoting racism, fascism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia or any other form of discrimination’ may be hidden is simply ignored. Repeatedly anti-Semitic and racist articles have been posted on the grounds of ‘free speech’ whereas responses have routinely been hidden.
Through the Atzmon affair, this guideline has never even been referred to by the moderators. I was first alerted to an article on IM by Gilad Atzmon, ‘saying no to the hunters of Goliath’ http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/08/378213.html by an Israeli anti-Zionist, Moshe Machover. In an e-mail of 17.10.07 he wrote that most of Atzmon’s article, about 2006 Lebanon war, was unobjectionable but hardly new either but that::
‘GA… packages it with his usual barely hidden anti-semitism... he tells us that "Within the Judaic worldview, history and ethics are often reduced into a banal single binary opposition principle." This is a typical stereotypical generalization -- as if there is such a thing as a ‘Judaic worldview’, apparently unchanging over centuries. Further; "The tendency to personalise and concretise history is rather common amongst Jews." Really? But a real gem follows: "... the Jewish state and the sons of Israel are at least as unpopular in the Middle East as their grandparents were in Europe just six decades ago. Seemingly, it is the personification of WW2 and the Holocaust that blinded the Israelis and their supporters from internalising the real meaning of the conditions and the events that led towards their destruction in the first place. Would the Zionists understand the real meaning of their Holocaust, the contemporary Israelite may be able to prevent the destruction that may be awaiting them in the future."
Please read this carefully. He is comparing here the – perfectly justified -- present hatred for Israel in the Middle East, with the "unpopularity" (!!!) from which European Jews suffered in the 1940s!
You, I and GA agree that if a destruction awaits Israel in the future, it will be a consequence of its present actions. What he is implying here is that the same is also true of the destruction of European Jewry six decades ago. This is not Holocaust denial; it is rather Holocaust justification! Or, at the very least, partly blaming it on the victims. Like Zionist propaganda, GA conflates anti-Zionism with Jew-baiting. Zionist propaganda does it in order to de-legitimize anti-Zionism; GA does it in order to legitimize his Judeophobia.’
I posted two responses to this article on 18th and 19th October, which unleashed a barrage abuse by Atzmon’s holocaust denier friend Knuckles aka Edna Spennato. The only sane posting was by a Tim Vanhoof: ‘Atzmon is a notorious anti-Semite. It is a mark of utter political confusion to not have deleted this racist crap immediately!’ However that was the last thing that a group of IM moderators, led by ftp wanted.
On 24th October I wrote to the IM collective, forwarding the e-mail from MM. I asked that the post be taken down and commented that whilst ‘On most occasions accusations of anti-Semitism, especially by Zionists against those supporting the Palestinians are a form of defamation. In this case they are unfortunately true.’
I cited an article from Atzmon that Knuckles posted. Atzmon wrote:
‘I clearly identify a line of ugliness that is stretched between Zionism, Neocons, and the Bund, a line of racially orientated discourse that is stretched between Jaz … and ADL . And what is Jewish identity?… it has nothing to do with racial category … but rather with racially-orientated politics.
…
I am suggesting that the only way to internalise the meaning of the Jewish Holocaust is to teach Jews how to start looking in the mirror, to teach Jews to ask themselves why conflicts with others happen to them time after time. Rather than blaming the Goyim, the Germans, the Muslims, the Arabs, it is about time the Jewish subject learns to ask the 6 million $ question: "why do they pick on me?" http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/08/378213.html?c=on#comments
I received no reply and posted a reminder. This triggered off a heated debate among the moderators with others joining in. One mod, Startx, who called for the hiding of Atzmon’s post has now resigned. So has another mod, Yossarian, who a month previously had defended the Esther article as ‘a controversial article, which is somewhat on the edge but seemingly meant as a positive contribution.’ Having now read some of Atzmon’s other writings, not least his Wikipedia entry on Jewish conspiracy, on how it is ‘rational’ to blow up synagogues and how in comparison with the Nazis it is the Israelis who win the championship for ruthlessness, Yossarian did an about-turn and called for his post to be hidden.
However some of the mods, such as Chris Osmond, a Brighton Palestine solidarity activist, demonstrated that they still didn’t understand what racism is. ‘i've had a look at this briefly and it seems like the complaint against this post is more about the writers (Gilad Atzmon's) reputation than the post's content.’
On 30th October ‘freethepeeps’ ftp, entered the fray. ‘There are clear difficulties in calling someone who has served in the Israeli army an anti-semite’ whereas the opposite should surely be the case! And further, ‘I do not believe that Atzmon hates all Jews because they are Jewish.’ Which is certainly reassuring. Phunkee then intervened to say that ‘I don't perceive it as anti-semitic as such, more provocative than anything else, but i'm no expert on these things.’ ftp replied to a further post by startx saying that anti-Semitism is ‘a device to stifle criticism of Israel(1), (and now it seems critics of anti-zionist jews.’ demonstrating a complete confusion between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Replying to ftp’s call for a network meeting, startx said that ‘i do not need a network meeting to call political bullshit what it is.’ Ftp countered by saying I wanted ‘censorship’, even though that is what the guidelines say should happen to racist posts! The irony is that ftp has proved the best censor of all!
The discussion continued into November. On November 2nd ftp demonstrated where his sympathies lay. Referring Atzmon’s essay ‘on anti-Semitism’ about how Jews control the US foreign policy, ftp stated that Atzmon ‘does back up his claims about control of foreign policy’ citing a list of Jews the Clinton government. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1102-3f.html Demonstrating his own total confusion, peeps asks rhetorically, concering Atzmon’s definition of 3 categories of Jew that ‘the 3 conclusions that you highlight, are conclusions about Zionism, not about Jews. I am sure it is not your claim that zionism is an embodiement of Jewishness. Atzmon most certainly is not.’
But this is exactly Atzmon’s argument. To fail to understand it is to fail to understand why Atzmon is anti-Semitic. He believes that any declaration that one is Jewish means that one is automatically a Zionist and this especially applies to anti-Zionist Jews. But the Zionists also argue that to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic because they consider being Jewish and Zionist is one and the same. For all his long-winded sophistry, Atzmon is merely repeating the arguments that Zionists make when accusing their opponents of anti-Semitism.
If ftp had read the essay, Not in my name he would learn that Atzmon make no distinction between anti-Zionist and Zionist Jews, apart from orthodox Jews and ex-Jews like himself. He makes this explicitly clear in other essays such as Dialectic of the Negation , and The 3rd Category and the Palestinian Solidarity Movement:
'it is actually the sporadic rebels who criticise Zionism in the name of their Jewish secular identity who affirm the Zionist ‘totalitarian’ agenda…. Bizarrely enough, it is the Jewish Left which turns Zionism into the official voice of the Jewish people. … by fighting Zionism in the name of their Jewish identity they approve Zionism…. To resist Zionism as a secular Jew involves an acceptance of basic Zionist terminology, that is to say, a surrendering to Jewish racist and nationalist philosophy…. Jews cannot criticise Zionism in the name of their ethnic belonging because such an act is in itself an approval of Zionism… It is the ‘self-hater’ who serves as an inside enemy. It is he who will convert (to Zionism) in the next anti-Semitic wave.
It couldn’t be clearer. Atzmon asks ‘Why is this issue a major concern?’ And he answers his own question thus:
I frequently hear complaints that it is the Jewish Left which dominates the ‘Palestinian solidarity campaign’. …. A few days ago I attended a Palestinian solidarity event in London. It was pretty depressing to find that Hebrew was the most noticeable language in the theatre…. I learn from Palestinians and other supporters of the Palestinian cause that it is the Jewish and Israeli Left which defines the boundaries of the discussion. It is Jewish Left which decides what is right and what is wrong…. Jews and Zionists do not constitute a binary opposition. If anything they are complimentary categories. If left-wing Jews are genuine in their fight against Zionism, they should completely avoid the usage of Jewish identity as the pillar of their arguments. If they remain hidden behind their Jewish identity we must then suspect their call to be a form of a mild left-wing Zionism.
For Atzmon being Jewish is to be a Zionist and the more anti-Zionist one is the more Zionist one becomes! Yossarian replied that ‘Like I said, I find it creepy that this guy recapitulated every classic anti-semitic slur’ and others like Guidoreport agreed, writing that
'Much of the the stuff being banded around in this discussion could have been directly drawn from "Mind Benders" a book written by Nick Griffen a few years ago.’ Mish raised ftp’s threat to ‘block’ the majority of other moderators who cleaerly disagreed with his position.
Ftp, as the leading opponent of hiding Atzmon’s articles moved nearer to an explicitly anti-Semitic position. He describes Jeff Blankfort, the US Director of the Deir Yassin Remembered organisation, a small anti-Semitic organisation within the Palestine solidarity movement that the PSC Executive has proscribed, as ‘an anti-zionist who argues that the left's tendency to ignore the power of the Israel lobby, is one of the reasons for the failure of the anti-war movement’ http://www.sott.net/signs/editorials/signs_TheChomskyBlankfortPolemic.php –
'Perhaps it is doe to the awful gatekeeping around this issue, that the views of progressives such as Blankfort are not more widely known.'
Jeff Blankfort however is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist of the first rank. In an e-mail to me of 17.6.05., he tells me that
'What kept me from examining the history of the Holocaust as I would any other period of history… was that I considered those challenging the official narrative as loathsome creatures, classic anti-semites who, in their efforts to whitewash Hitler and the 3rd Reich, were denying one of the most enormous crimes in human history.
It wasn't until about four or five years ago… that I started reading the writings of Robert Faurisson, one of those loathsome creatures, on the internet, and found, to my displeasure, that some of the issues he raised had some merit or at least warranted discussion and further investigation, such as whether "The Final Solution" to the Jewish problem was mass extermination of the Jews. Had this, in fact, been the plan, it seemed, there would have been few, if any survivors, and as we know, there were many.
However, if one is only measuring the Holocaust by whether the Germans were successful in carrying out their plans, if those were indeed their plans… it would have to be explained why, according to an Israeli government report in 1997, there were between 834,000 and 960,000 survivors still alive.
Which is one of the classic arguments of holocaust deniers. When Yossarian replied asking Ftp a question he has consistently avoided, viz. ‘Are you endorsing the existence of a global Zionist conspiracy for world domination as posited by Atzmon (among others)? Or not? You do tend to ignore questions like this one, so please answer it straight.’ ftp of course ignored the question. Instead he announced that he was prepared to block the majority to protect Atzmon. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1103-fm.html
Despite the support of other moderators such as Ana, Guidoreports, Mick Fuzz and Ulla ftp was able to impose a block until the balance among the mods changed. Yoss meanwhile resigned. On November 8th I posted a response to Atzmon and Ftp, the great opponent of censorship, promptly hid it! http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1109-74.html
On 13th November, after his monkey Rizzo had posted to no good effect, the organ grinder himself posted. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1113-7c.html Atzmon lost no time in explaining where he stood:
I think that you are now having a close range opportunity to learn about the world of aggressive Zionist lobbying. You are a subject to some major assault led by ethnic campaigner Mr. Tony Greenstein….
They did it to Jeff Blankfort, one of the prominent American Palestinian Solidarity activists,.. they did it to Paul Eisen and Israel Shamir, these people have managed to crush DYR, probably the most successful Palestinian gathering in this country. These people had tried to divert the Palestinian solidarity movement and to turn it into a Judeo centric witch-hunt crusade.’
Not only are we christ-killers but witch-hunters too. But his tribute to the holy trinity of Blankfort, Eisen and Shamir speaks volumes. Eisen is a clear and open holocaust denier. He has written that:
‘'the evidence for the use of homicidal gas-chambers is not good at all. The evidence against it is much, much stronger.' http://www.haloscan.com/comments/thecutter/117192641046077827/
and ‘In Clear Sight of Yad Vashem’ article makes his position explicitly clear:
‘Over the last fifty years, revisionist scholars have amassed a formidable body of substantial evidence, which runs in direct opposition to the traditional Holocaust narrative. "Where is the evidence," they say, "for this alleged gargantuan mass-murder? Where are the documents? Where are the traces and remains? Where are the weapons of murder?"
Shamir too makes it clear what his views of Auschwitz are:
The camp was an internment facility, attended by the Red Cross (as opposed to the US internment centre in Guantanamo).… This idea of "bombing Auschwitz" makes sense only if one accepts the vision of "industrial extermination factory", and it was formed only well after the war. Who Needs Holocaust? http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shamireaders/message/687
These are Atzmon’s anti-Zionists!
Only Jackslusid agreed with ftp: http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1113-jp.html ‘I am in agreement with and in awe of the words of GA et al.’
But those moderators who were opposed to Atzmon were overwhelmed by the whole debate and the fact that ftp was by now part of the Rizzo/Atzmon anti-Semitic block and thus more organised and determined than them. Tiring of the debate the others agreed to shunt the whole debate onto a 'wiki' page where it would be allowed to die. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1118-os.html
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/UkModerationAtzmon
In response I wrote an article There are no gatekeepers – just anti-racists citing Atzmon’s belief that ‘all Jewish left activity is in practice not more than a form of left Zionism.’ http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/Dialectic.htm I remarked that it ‘is a strange argument that says if Jewish people stand up and say they oppose Zionism, because they are Jews, they are actually Zionists!’ I also noted the contradiction with what Atzmon had himself written in viz. that
If Israel is the state of the Jewish people and the Jewish people themselves do not stand up collectively against the crimes that are committed on their behalf, then every Jewish person, Jewish symbol and Jewish object becomes an Israeli interest and a potential terrorist target. It is up to the Jewish people to take a stand against their Jewish state and to disassociate themselves from their zealous national movement.
http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/onanti.html
If you stand up as a Jew to oppose Zionism that proves you are a Zionist but if Jews didn’t ‘disassociate themselves from their zealous national movement’ then you were a legitimate target for attack. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t! Atzmon’s whole argument about ‘racial, ethnic activists’ is not only illogical and incoherent it says, that Jews are Zionists whatever they may feel and say, just as the Nazis held that Christians with two Jewish grandparents were racially Jewish.
IM set up a couple of blogs, where the anti-Atzmon http://geniza.wordpress.com/topic-index case and the pro-Atzmon case, run by ftp http://freethepeeps.wordpress.com/ are situated. The purpose of this was in essence to allow the rest of the moderators, who were unable to implement what was previously a nigh unanimous concensus to hide Atzmon’s articles, to evade further discussion of the issue.
In January the debate briefly flared up again on the threads http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2008-January/0122-gm.html when ftp, now clearly having outmanouvred or got rid of those moderators who disagreed with him hid an article I had written exposing Atzmon as a full-blown holocaust denier http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/01/389837.html . His pretexts changed continuously: the article was a repeat (as were Atzmon’s of course, being posted to numerous conspiracy sites), that it was ‘inaccurate’, and ftp is the judge of accuracy, and it linked to far-right sites.
The latter involved a wonderful piece of Orwellian logic, almost kafkaesque. If in proving that Atzmon is a holocaust denier one refers to what fascists say about him on their sites then the article will be banned for linking to far-right sites! But hiding Atzmon would be outrageous censorship. But given the low political consciousness and demoralisation of his fellow mods and the fact that they have run the white flag up, ftp is now able to get away with the most outrageous positions without being challenged.
So we now have a situation on IM that whereas someone who is openly anti-Semitic and a holocaust denier is able to post articles without let or hindrance, if you should deign to criticise what he argues for then whatever you post will be censored!!
This is not the place to go into the reason for this state of affairs. Ten or fifteen years ago there was a higher level of political consciousness and very few of those who considered themselves on the left couldn’t distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It is also a product of the lack of theory among anarchists and libertarians generally. But above all it is a tribute to the Zionist movement. For years Zionists have gone around labelling anyone they disagreed with as anti-Semitic. This has had the effect as Antony Lerman, of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research said, of ‘draining anti-Semitism of all meaning’. http://www.axt.org.uk/essays/Lerman.htm
Even grassroots, direct-action type anarcho sites like IM are increasingly falling for anti-Semitic and similar conspiracy theories. Of course if you reject a Marxist or socialist analysis of society then sooner or later you end up with the idea that small groups of people, hidden away and sharing certain common charactertistics like their Jewishness, are responsible for the ills of society. They used to say that anti-Semitism was the socialism of fools. Today it is the anti-capitalism of idiots.
Tony Greenstein
When the issue of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism arose in October 2007, IM demonstrated that far from being an alternative, grassroots way of doing things, it behaved in exactly the same undemocratic, manipulative and bureaucratic way of the corporations that it criticises. In its Editorial Guidelines, there is a category ‘Hierarchy’ http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/static/editorial.html which states that ‘The newswire is designed to generate a news resource, not a notice-board for political parties or any other hierarchically structured organizations...’
It echoed the old criticism of anarchism and the tyranny of structurelessness IN Jo Freeman’s famous essay http://struggle.ws/pdfs/tyranny.pdf which originated in a debate in the women’s movement about structures. It aimed to show that every group has structures and hierarchies and those which pretend otherwise simply have informal structures, usually less democratic than those where there is an openly defined structure, where power would move to an elite without any controls or accountability. It is a good way to describe the anarcho-libertarian group IM.
Although I was unaware of it at the time, there had been at least 2 trial runs over the issue of anti-Semitism and holocaust denial in March and April 2007. When an Atzmon article ‘From Esther to Aipac’ was posted http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/03/364419.html?c=on it provoked debate amongst the moderators, all of whom seemed unable to see what the fuss was about with Yossarian describing it as a ‘positive contribution’ The article is still there. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-March/thread.html
In April another IM moderator ftp (Roy Bard) defended holocaust denier Kurt Nimmo who had stated that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were ‘discredited’. A fellow moderator, Nim Chimpsky complained that ‘What has been becoming increasingly problematic is that not only are the offending posts allowed to stand, but any complaints will be hidden.’ http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-April/0424-8x.html The whole debate can be seen here http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-April/date.html. And a defence of Nimmo can be seen here.
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-April/0425-ni.html.
Reading through the debates in April 2007 one gets a curious sense of déjà vu. The same use of ‘guidelines’ to ‘hide’ criticism of holocaust deniers and anti-Semites. It works something like this. FTP puts up an anti-Semitic post from Gilad Atzmon, someone complains and their article is hidden because complaints about the actions of Moderators are hidden. This is covered by the rule that ‘Concerns about editorial guidelines or queries about moderation are dealt with on the imc-uk-features list. These issues are not dealt with through the newswire, and newswire posts on these topics will be hidden.’ So if you disagree with the decision to put up a racist article the anti-racist response will always be hidden!!
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/static/editorial.html
But this is very like the way the Police enforce the law. Those laws they like, e.g. ancient bylaws which prevent an EDO camp in Brighton in the summer are enforced. However anti-fox hunting laws, or the Protection from Eviction Act are ignored. In this case the guideline under discrimination which states that posts using language, imagery, or other forms of communication promoting racism, fascism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia or any other form of discrimination’ may be hidden is simply ignored. Repeatedly anti-Semitic and racist articles have been posted on the grounds of ‘free speech’ whereas responses have routinely been hidden.
Through the Atzmon affair, this guideline has never even been referred to by the moderators. I was first alerted to an article on IM by Gilad Atzmon, ‘saying no to the hunters of Goliath’ http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/08/378213.html by an Israeli anti-Zionist, Moshe Machover. In an e-mail of 17.10.07 he wrote that most of Atzmon’s article, about 2006 Lebanon war, was unobjectionable but hardly new either but that::
‘GA… packages it with his usual barely hidden anti-semitism... he tells us that "Within the Judaic worldview, history and ethics are often reduced into a banal single binary opposition principle." This is a typical stereotypical generalization -- as if there is such a thing as a ‘Judaic worldview’, apparently unchanging over centuries. Further; "The tendency to personalise and concretise history is rather common amongst Jews." Really? But a real gem follows: "... the Jewish state and the sons of Israel are at least as unpopular in the Middle East as their grandparents were in Europe just six decades ago. Seemingly, it is the personification of WW2 and the Holocaust that blinded the Israelis and their supporters from internalising the real meaning of the conditions and the events that led towards their destruction in the first place. Would the Zionists understand the real meaning of their Holocaust, the contemporary Israelite may be able to prevent the destruction that may be awaiting them in the future."
Please read this carefully. He is comparing here the – perfectly justified -- present hatred for Israel in the Middle East, with the "unpopularity" (!!!) from which European Jews suffered in the 1940s!
You, I and GA agree that if a destruction awaits Israel in the future, it will be a consequence of its present actions. What he is implying here is that the same is also true of the destruction of European Jewry six decades ago. This is not Holocaust denial; it is rather Holocaust justification! Or, at the very least, partly blaming it on the victims. Like Zionist propaganda, GA conflates anti-Zionism with Jew-baiting. Zionist propaganda does it in order to de-legitimize anti-Zionism; GA does it in order to legitimize his Judeophobia.’
I posted two responses to this article on 18th and 19th October, which unleashed a barrage abuse by Atzmon’s holocaust denier friend Knuckles aka Edna Spennato. The only sane posting was by a Tim Vanhoof: ‘Atzmon is a notorious anti-Semite. It is a mark of utter political confusion to not have deleted this racist crap immediately!’ However that was the last thing that a group of IM moderators, led by ftp wanted.
On 24th October I wrote to the IM collective, forwarding the e-mail from MM. I asked that the post be taken down and commented that whilst ‘On most occasions accusations of anti-Semitism, especially by Zionists against those supporting the Palestinians are a form of defamation. In this case they are unfortunately true.’
I cited an article from Atzmon that Knuckles posted. Atzmon wrote:
‘I clearly identify a line of ugliness that is stretched between Zionism, Neocons, and the Bund, a line of racially orientated discourse that is stretched between Jaz … and ADL . And what is Jewish identity?… it has nothing to do with racial category … but rather with racially-orientated politics.
…
I am suggesting that the only way to internalise the meaning of the Jewish Holocaust is to teach Jews how to start looking in the mirror, to teach Jews to ask themselves why conflicts with others happen to them time after time. Rather than blaming the Goyim, the Germans, the Muslims, the Arabs, it is about time the Jewish subject learns to ask the 6 million $ question: "why do they pick on me?" http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/08/378213.html?c=on#comments
I received no reply and posted a reminder. This triggered off a heated debate among the moderators with others joining in. One mod, Startx, who called for the hiding of Atzmon’s post has now resigned. So has another mod, Yossarian, who a month previously had defended the Esther article as ‘a controversial article, which is somewhat on the edge but seemingly meant as a positive contribution.’ Having now read some of Atzmon’s other writings, not least his Wikipedia entry on Jewish conspiracy, on how it is ‘rational’ to blow up synagogues and how in comparison with the Nazis it is the Israelis who win the championship for ruthlessness, Yossarian did an about-turn and called for his post to be hidden.
However some of the mods, such as Chris Osmond, a Brighton Palestine solidarity activist, demonstrated that they still didn’t understand what racism is. ‘i've had a look at this briefly and it seems like the complaint against this post is more about the writers (Gilad Atzmon's) reputation than the post's content.’
On 30th October ‘freethepeeps’ ftp, entered the fray. ‘There are clear difficulties in calling someone who has served in the Israeli army an anti-semite’ whereas the opposite should surely be the case! And further, ‘I do not believe that Atzmon hates all Jews because they are Jewish.’ Which is certainly reassuring. Phunkee then intervened to say that ‘I don't perceive it as anti-semitic as such, more provocative than anything else, but i'm no expert on these things.’ ftp replied to a further post by startx saying that anti-Semitism is ‘a device to stifle criticism of Israel(1), (and now it seems critics of anti-zionist jews.’ demonstrating a complete confusion between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Replying to ftp’s call for a network meeting, startx said that ‘i do not need a network meeting to call political bullshit what it is.’ Ftp countered by saying I wanted ‘censorship’, even though that is what the guidelines say should happen to racist posts! The irony is that ftp has proved the best censor of all!
The discussion continued into November. On November 2nd ftp demonstrated where his sympathies lay. Referring Atzmon’s essay ‘on anti-Semitism’ about how Jews control the US foreign policy, ftp stated that Atzmon ‘does back up his claims about control of foreign policy’ citing a list of Jews the Clinton government. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1102-3f.html Demonstrating his own total confusion, peeps asks rhetorically, concering Atzmon’s definition of 3 categories of Jew that ‘the 3 conclusions that you highlight, are conclusions about Zionism, not about Jews. I am sure it is not your claim that zionism is an embodiement of Jewishness. Atzmon most certainly is not.’
But this is exactly Atzmon’s argument. To fail to understand it is to fail to understand why Atzmon is anti-Semitic. He believes that any declaration that one is Jewish means that one is automatically a Zionist and this especially applies to anti-Zionist Jews. But the Zionists also argue that to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic because they consider being Jewish and Zionist is one and the same. For all his long-winded sophistry, Atzmon is merely repeating the arguments that Zionists make when accusing their opponents of anti-Semitism.
If ftp had read the essay, Not in my name he would learn that Atzmon make no distinction between anti-Zionist and Zionist Jews, apart from orthodox Jews and ex-Jews like himself. He makes this explicitly clear in other essays such as Dialectic of the Negation , and The 3rd Category and the Palestinian Solidarity Movement:
'it is actually the sporadic rebels who criticise Zionism in the name of their Jewish secular identity who affirm the Zionist ‘totalitarian’ agenda…. Bizarrely enough, it is the Jewish Left which turns Zionism into the official voice of the Jewish people. … by fighting Zionism in the name of their Jewish identity they approve Zionism…. To resist Zionism as a secular Jew involves an acceptance of basic Zionist terminology, that is to say, a surrendering to Jewish racist and nationalist philosophy…. Jews cannot criticise Zionism in the name of their ethnic belonging because such an act is in itself an approval of Zionism… It is the ‘self-hater’ who serves as an inside enemy. It is he who will convert (to Zionism) in the next anti-Semitic wave.
It couldn’t be clearer. Atzmon asks ‘Why is this issue a major concern?’ And he answers his own question thus:
I frequently hear complaints that it is the Jewish Left which dominates the ‘Palestinian solidarity campaign’. …. A few days ago I attended a Palestinian solidarity event in London. It was pretty depressing to find that Hebrew was the most noticeable language in the theatre…. I learn from Palestinians and other supporters of the Palestinian cause that it is the Jewish and Israeli Left which defines the boundaries of the discussion. It is Jewish Left which decides what is right and what is wrong…. Jews and Zionists do not constitute a binary opposition. If anything they are complimentary categories. If left-wing Jews are genuine in their fight against Zionism, they should completely avoid the usage of Jewish identity as the pillar of their arguments. If they remain hidden behind their Jewish identity we must then suspect their call to be a form of a mild left-wing Zionism.
For Atzmon being Jewish is to be a Zionist and the more anti-Zionist one is the more Zionist one becomes! Yossarian replied that ‘Like I said, I find it creepy that this guy recapitulated every classic anti-semitic slur’ and others like Guidoreport agreed, writing that
'Much of the the stuff being banded around in this discussion could have been directly drawn from "Mind Benders" a book written by Nick Griffen a few years ago.’ Mish raised ftp’s threat to ‘block’ the majority of other moderators who cleaerly disagreed with his position.
Ftp, as the leading opponent of hiding Atzmon’s articles moved nearer to an explicitly anti-Semitic position. He describes Jeff Blankfort, the US Director of the Deir Yassin Remembered organisation, a small anti-Semitic organisation within the Palestine solidarity movement that the PSC Executive has proscribed, as ‘an anti-zionist who argues that the left's tendency to ignore the power of the Israel lobby, is one of the reasons for the failure of the anti-war movement’ http://www.sott.net/signs/editorials/signs_TheChomskyBlankfortPolemic.php –
'Perhaps it is doe to the awful gatekeeping around this issue, that the views of progressives such as Blankfort are not more widely known.'
Jeff Blankfort however is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist of the first rank. In an e-mail to me of 17.6.05., he tells me that
'What kept me from examining the history of the Holocaust as I would any other period of history… was that I considered those challenging the official narrative as loathsome creatures, classic anti-semites who, in their efforts to whitewash Hitler and the 3rd Reich, were denying one of the most enormous crimes in human history.
It wasn't until about four or five years ago… that I started reading the writings of Robert Faurisson, one of those loathsome creatures, on the internet, and found, to my displeasure, that some of the issues he raised had some merit or at least warranted discussion and further investigation, such as whether "The Final Solution" to the Jewish problem was mass extermination of the Jews. Had this, in fact, been the plan, it seemed, there would have been few, if any survivors, and as we know, there were many.
However, if one is only measuring the Holocaust by whether the Germans were successful in carrying out their plans, if those were indeed their plans… it would have to be explained why, according to an Israeli government report in 1997, there were between 834,000 and 960,000 survivors still alive.
Which is one of the classic arguments of holocaust deniers. When Yossarian replied asking Ftp a question he has consistently avoided, viz. ‘Are you endorsing the existence of a global Zionist conspiracy for world domination as posited by Atzmon (among others)? Or not? You do tend to ignore questions like this one, so please answer it straight.’ ftp of course ignored the question. Instead he announced that he was prepared to block the majority to protect Atzmon. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1103-fm.html
Despite the support of other moderators such as Ana, Guidoreports, Mick Fuzz and Ulla ftp was able to impose a block until the balance among the mods changed. Yoss meanwhile resigned. On November 8th I posted a response to Atzmon and Ftp, the great opponent of censorship, promptly hid it! http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1109-74.html
On 13th November, after his monkey Rizzo had posted to no good effect, the organ grinder himself posted. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1113-7c.html Atzmon lost no time in explaining where he stood:
I think that you are now having a close range opportunity to learn about the world of aggressive Zionist lobbying. You are a subject to some major assault led by ethnic campaigner Mr. Tony Greenstein….
They did it to Jeff Blankfort, one of the prominent American Palestinian Solidarity activists,.. they did it to Paul Eisen and Israel Shamir, these people have managed to crush DYR, probably the most successful Palestinian gathering in this country. These people had tried to divert the Palestinian solidarity movement and to turn it into a Judeo centric witch-hunt crusade.’
Not only are we christ-killers but witch-hunters too. But his tribute to the holy trinity of Blankfort, Eisen and Shamir speaks volumes. Eisen is a clear and open holocaust denier. He has written that:
‘'the evidence for the use of homicidal gas-chambers is not good at all. The evidence against it is much, much stronger.' http://www.haloscan.com/comments/thecutter/117192641046077827/
and ‘In Clear Sight of Yad Vashem’ article makes his position explicitly clear:
‘Over the last fifty years, revisionist scholars have amassed a formidable body of substantial evidence, which runs in direct opposition to the traditional Holocaust narrative. "Where is the evidence," they say, "for this alleged gargantuan mass-murder? Where are the documents? Where are the traces and remains? Where are the weapons of murder?"
Shamir too makes it clear what his views of Auschwitz are:
The camp was an internment facility, attended by the Red Cross (as opposed to the US internment centre in Guantanamo).… This idea of "bombing Auschwitz" makes sense only if one accepts the vision of "industrial extermination factory", and it was formed only well after the war. Who Needs Holocaust? http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shamireaders/message/687
These are Atzmon’s anti-Zionists!
Only Jackslusid agreed with ftp: http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1113-jp.html ‘I am in agreement with and in awe of the words of GA et al.’
But those moderators who were opposed to Atzmon were overwhelmed by the whole debate and the fact that ftp was by now part of the Rizzo/Atzmon anti-Semitic block and thus more organised and determined than them. Tiring of the debate the others agreed to shunt the whole debate onto a 'wiki' page where it would be allowed to die. http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2007-November/1118-os.html
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/UkModerationAtzmon
In response I wrote an article There are no gatekeepers – just anti-racists citing Atzmon’s belief that ‘all Jewish left activity is in practice not more than a form of left Zionism.’ http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/Dialectic.htm I remarked that it ‘is a strange argument that says if Jewish people stand up and say they oppose Zionism, because they are Jews, they are actually Zionists!’ I also noted the contradiction with what Atzmon had himself written in viz. that
If Israel is the state of the Jewish people and the Jewish people themselves do not stand up collectively against the crimes that are committed on their behalf, then every Jewish person, Jewish symbol and Jewish object becomes an Israeli interest and a potential terrorist target. It is up to the Jewish people to take a stand against their Jewish state and to disassociate themselves from their zealous national movement.
http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/onanti.html
If you stand up as a Jew to oppose Zionism that proves you are a Zionist but if Jews didn’t ‘disassociate themselves from their zealous national movement’ then you were a legitimate target for attack. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t! Atzmon’s whole argument about ‘racial, ethnic activists’ is not only illogical and incoherent it says, that Jews are Zionists whatever they may feel and say, just as the Nazis held that Christians with two Jewish grandparents were racially Jewish.
IM set up a couple of blogs, where the anti-Atzmon http://geniza.wordpress.com/topic-index case and the pro-Atzmon case, run by ftp http://freethepeeps.wordpress.com/ are situated. The purpose of this was in essence to allow the rest of the moderators, who were unable to implement what was previously a nigh unanimous concensus to hide Atzmon’s articles, to evade further discussion of the issue.
In January the debate briefly flared up again on the threads http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2008-January/0122-gm.html when ftp, now clearly having outmanouvred or got rid of those moderators who disagreed with him hid an article I had written exposing Atzmon as a full-blown holocaust denier http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/01/389837.html . His pretexts changed continuously: the article was a repeat (as were Atzmon’s of course, being posted to numerous conspiracy sites), that it was ‘inaccurate’, and ftp is the judge of accuracy, and it linked to far-right sites.
The latter involved a wonderful piece of Orwellian logic, almost kafkaesque. If in proving that Atzmon is a holocaust denier one refers to what fascists say about him on their sites then the article will be banned for linking to far-right sites! But hiding Atzmon would be outrageous censorship. But given the low political consciousness and demoralisation of his fellow mods and the fact that they have run the white flag up, ftp is now able to get away with the most outrageous positions without being challenged.
So we now have a situation on IM that whereas someone who is openly anti-Semitic and a holocaust denier is able to post articles without let or hindrance, if you should deign to criticise what he argues for then whatever you post will be censored!!
This is not the place to go into the reason for this state of affairs. Ten or fifteen years ago there was a higher level of political consciousness and very few of those who considered themselves on the left couldn’t distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It is also a product of the lack of theory among anarchists and libertarians generally. But above all it is a tribute to the Zionist movement. For years Zionists have gone around labelling anyone they disagreed with as anti-Semitic. This has had the effect as Antony Lerman, of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research said, of ‘draining anti-Semitism of all meaning’. http://www.axt.org.uk/essays/Lerman.htm
Even grassroots, direct-action type anarcho sites like IM are increasingly falling for anti-Semitic and similar conspiracy theories. Of course if you reject a Marxist or socialist analysis of society then sooner or later you end up with the idea that small groups of people, hidden away and sharing certain common charactertistics like their Jewishness, are responsible for the ills of society. They used to say that anti-Semitism was the socialism of fools. Today it is the anti-capitalism of idiots.
Tony Greenstein
4 February 2008
University College Cork PSC Database - Edited by Paul Rooij, apologist for holocaust deniers and anti-semites
An anti-Zionist comrade, Roland Rance, informed me on the 6th January that what he described as ‘the usually-reliable Cork PSC database’ http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/home.php contained a hostile comment on my bio. page from one Paul de Rooij. http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/authors.php?auid=367 I confess I had never heard of Mr Rooij before, though he appears to be a freelance journalist writing mainly for Counterpunch.
The database states that it is maintained by members of the UCC Palestine Solidarity Campaign who are staff and students at University College Cork. UCC PSC is part of the Cork Palestine Solidarity Campaign and, through that, is affiliated with the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
It is a database of articles by different authors, including myself, and includes both Zionists and anti-Zionists. Its editor is Jim Bowen, a computer science professor at the university. Clearly it is a valuable resource for anti-Zionists and those involved in Palestine solidarity work.
I complained about what amounted to the vandalising and defacing of the page, on which some articles I have written are located, by one Paul de Rooij. Underneath a short introduction the following allegation appeared:
1. Tony Greenstein is not an anti-Zionist any longer since he is ‘more concerned about conducting offensive vendettas against anti-zionists’ and in particular waging ‘a vile campaign against Gilad Atzmon and Paul Eisen labelling them "Nazis", "anti-semites", and so on.’
2. Today Tony Greenstein is ‘shifting the emphasis on Palestine solidarity onto his obsessive crusade against "anti-semitism". Greenstein is today closer to the infamous Engage crowd than to anything that purports to be solidarity with the Palestinians.’
Quite serious charges if true, but no source material was provided to back up these wild assertions.
I therefore wrote to James Bowen on 7th and 8th January stating I would not enter into correspondence with de Rooij. I attached a document explaining why Paul Eisen was a holocaust denier e.g. his comments that ‘'the evidence for the use of homicidal gas-chambers is not good at all. The evidence against it is much, much stronger.' http://www.haloscan.com/comments/thecutter/117192641046077827/ and also a similar comment from his ‘In Clear Sight of Yad Vashem’ article on the Deir Yassin Remembered web site which states that
‘Over the last fifty years, revisionist scholars have amassed a formidable body of substantial evidence, which runs in direct opposition to the traditional Holocaust narrative. "Where is the evidence," they say, "for this alleged gargantuan mass-murder? Where are the documents? Where are the traces and remains? Where are the weapons of murder?"
There cannot be much room for doubt as to what Paul Eisen thinks about the ‘Holocaust narrative’. The fact that this is on a site supposedly dedicated to the memory of the victims of Irgun butchery in the villiage of Deir Yassin, a Nazi-style murder of over 100 Palestinian villagers, demonstrates the priorities of Eisen.
I also made it clear to Bowen that I was of course an anti-Zionist and that I had played a significant role in the campaign in my own union UNISON to boycott the Israeli state, one of only two unions to have pro-boycott policy, not something that ‘crypto-Zionists’ to use Atzmon’s phrase usually do.
Bowen’s response was to state that he had read the article by two Palestinians about a friend of Atzmon, Israel Shamir, by Ali Abunimah & Hussein Ibish, entitled Serious Concerns About Israel Shamir in April 2001 http://www.abunimah.org/features/010416shamir.html and that ‘I decided that I did not want to get into this kind of controversy.’ In other words, if neo-Nazi or anti-Semitic views rear their head in the Palestine solidarity movement then Bowen would prefer to remain undisturbed and uninformed. Bowen also stated that he hadn’t seen Rooij’s comments before they went up.
I responded by saying that it wasn’t a question of censorship but being able to ‘exercise some judgement viz. that anti-Semitism and holocaust denial is unacceptable in the Palestine solidarity movement.’ and that it ‘does nothing to increase support for the Palestinians and is a free gift to the Zionists. That is a political judgement.’
Bowen offered ‘the possibility of inserting your own comments in response to Paul de Rooij's’. Although I sent a response to Rooij’s comments, I made it clear that I would prefer the whole page to be taken down rather than having what is effectively an introduction written by a supporter of holocaust deniers and anti-Semites.
Rooij had previously written to me on 8th January. His justification for remarks about being ‘closer to the Engage group’ was that ‘I didn't say that you were an integrant of the "Engage" group, but that your tactics certainly had descended to that level’. In other words he was unable to justify his allegation.
But Rooij then demonstrates why he is a journalist that noone seems to have heard of. He offers this advice:
‘Please realize that the zionist propagandists have exploited anti-semitism, and the holocaust for their political/propaganda ends; in essence, they have appropriated them. … Now, from what I have read, much of GiladA's work exposes and attacks these pernicious uses of the terms that you hold so dear,…’
He suggests that
‘Maybe it is a case that you should turn your attention to those who have wrapped themselves in the flag of the holocaust, anti-semitsm, etc., for hypocritical/cynical reasons. I just searched the PIWP database for any such articles that you may have written, but I find there are none, zero, zip, nada.’
I responded by saying that I wasn’t interested in a dialogue with an Atzmonite who engages in puerile abuse and was unable to read the database of which he was apparently an editor.
On 12th January I wrote to Bowen asking:
‘What kind of editor is it who is unable to search his own database or even the page he is commenting on? Perhaps he is new to all of this and what Atzmon is writing is a bit of a revelation but I’ve been writing and speaking on exactly these themes for 20+ years. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to read the articles in question. They are also listed on my page!’
I gave as examples of the articles that are in the Cork PSC database the article I wrote for the Guardian’s Comment is Free on 12th July 2007, A war on rationality criticising Littlejohn’s programme War on Britain’s Jews in which I was the only anti-Zionist interviewed. I also suggested that if Rooij had read my CIF articles Stop conflating anti-Zionism and anti-semitism on 12th April 2007 and Vetting in practice on 31st May 2007 or Holocaust Analogies: Repaying the Mortgage in Return 2 of March 1999 and a letter in the Jewish Chronicle of 29th June 2007 even he couldn’t have come out with this rubbish..
I was then sent an email on 12th January by de Rooij entitled ‘sorted’. This amounted to an amendment of the charges. Now my ‘vile’ accusations against Atzmon and Eisen were accusing them of being [1], "Nazis" [2], "holocaust denier" [3], Jewish-conspiracy theorist [4], defender of holocaust deniers [5], and so on… Five ‘footnotes’ have been added plus another comment from de Rooij on 14th January. Of course all of the latter are indeed ‘vile’. The question is whether they are true or not. Five ‘footnotes’ have been added plus another comment from de Rooij on 14th January.
It is of course true that I have accused Atzmon of being an anti-Semite and a supporter of holocaust deniers. Indeed I would argue that he has now crossed the rubicon (see Gilad Atzmon – Now an Open Holocaust Denier). Likewise I have accused Paul Eisen of being a holocaust denier but I did deny calling either of them ‘nazis’. Rooij’s response is truly pathetic:
‘Sue Blackwell is Greenstein's comrade, and together they have waged their vendetta against Atzmon, et al. Blackwell's website for some time carried a section on "Nazis" and Gilad Atzmon featured in that page.’ So I am guilty of something because Sue Blackwell, my comrade, has posted something about Atzmon on a page called ‘nazi alert’!
Whether she was right to do so is a matter for her, but to say that I am therefore responsible is an indication of the quality of Rooij’s editorship and journalism.
Naturally there was, of course no justification for the absurd argument that the Engage anti-boycott Zionists and I share anything at all politically. Which is probably as well, as I was one of 250 signatories to the Independent Jewish Voices advert in The Times on 30th January 2008 entitled ‘End the Siege’. http://zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2008/02/independent-jewish-voices-anti-zionist.html On 2nd February the Israeli paper ‘Ha'aretz’ printed a critical article ‘British Jewish group sparks new outrage with condemnation of Gaza blockade’ quoting various Zionists and making the observation that ‘One of its signatories, Tony Greenstein is a trade unionist who has publicly called for a boycott of Israeli goods and is also a member of "Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods." Clearly the enemy isn’t so stupid as some of the Palestinian’s so-called supporters.
IJV itself has no position on the Boycott campaign although it is probably fair to say that the majority of signatories are opposed to it. But as is well known, I am to the left of most signatories, an anti-Zionist and supporter of Boycott. But according to Rooij, I am nonetheless close to Engage! Engage also comments briefly on the Ha’aretz article, and none too favourably!
It is somewhat ironic that the person Rooij chooses to defend, Gilad Atzmon, is opposed to the academic boycott because it is a form of ‘book burning’. By any logical definition, if anyone is closer to Engage it is Atzmon and those who defend him – like Mr Rooij!
Bowen takes his stand on ‘censorship’. This is an old straw-man. Fascists and anti-Semites have cried long and hard about ‘freedom of speech’ ‘censorship’ etc. But those of us with some experience of them know that when they have the ability to do so, they have no hesitation in physically attacking meetings they disapprove of, as well as Blacks, gay people and other minorities. Rooij has already published his comments on the anti-Semitic web site of Mary Rizzo . The question is whether or not he should be allowed to publicise his sympathies with holocaust deniers on Cork PSC’s database and thereby associate Ireland’s PSC with those views, since he is described as an editor of the Cork PSC database. How does this advance support for the Palestinians? Does Rooij’s support for anti-Semitism in the Palestine solidarity movement help or hinder the struggle of the Palestinians?
I contacted the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign directly for some answers, sending an e-mail on 17th January. On 18th January their Secretary, David Landy, wrote saying he fully understood my concerns and would contact Jim Bowen about it. On 30th January he wrote again saying that Bowen was ‘frustratingly uncontactable’. I have no doubt that officers of Ireland PSC are not happy, to say the least, that Rooij uses the UCC Cork Database to attack a Jewish anti-Zionist for waging a ‘vendetta against Atzmon’. His calls for me to ‘to do so in an open and civil manner’ (i.e. say nothing) are deeply embarrassing because all they do is to offer succour and comfort not only to anti-Semites but those who are, at this moment, laying siege to Gaza.
Tony Greenstein 4.2.08.
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