[Imc-uk-features] Re a letter allegedly sent to me which was posted instead to Rizzo's anti-Semitic PEPA site

[ilyan]

Greenstein uses a lot of words to advocate censorship. Does that mean he 
cannot answer whatever platform Atzmon is presenting. Or is he wanting 
to see something he does not understand hidden.

The way some people use the term anti-semitic discredits all Jews. It 
must specifically include Arabs, or it becomes a lie hatched up by some 
Academic over a century ago.

Is 'Fascism' really to be 'the only answer' for the survival of Israel?

Ilyan


tony greenstein wrote:
>   I’m not sure where this debate is going since ftp says, and I assume that it is true, that he can ‘block’ any proposal to remove Atzmon’s article anyway. This is no different from the tradition at London gentleman’s clubs of ‘blackballing’ someone, whereby one veto was enough to prevent someone becoming a member.
>    
>   Atzmon states that he has ‘no problem whatsoever with a Marxist who happens to be a Jew’. Strange because that is exactly how I would describe myself, as would others that he addressed the ‘protocols of the learned elder of london to’. But since he can’t decide whether the Protocols, the most infamous anti-Semitic document, a product of the Czarist secret police are or are not genuine, it’s not surprising that he gets so confused.
>   Atzmon’s categories are arbitrary and absurd. He has no problem with Judaism, yet many of the most virulently racist settlers are racist, in the name of the bible. That was what Rabbi Meir Kahane espoused and it was what the late Prof. Israel Shahak, a childhood survivor of Belsen and the Warsaw Ghetto exposed in painstaking detail in ‘Jewish History, Jewish Religion’ and ‘Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel’. 
>    
>   The other category, Jewish people, is equally problematic because the fundamental difference between Zionism and the rest was precisely that Jews were members of all peoples and nations – British Jews, French Jews, etc. Those who argued there were one people were arguing that there was a Jewish race. That was why anti-Semites fell over themselves to express their admiration for the Zionists and that is why, despite his absurd pretensions to the contrary, Race runs like a thread throughout all Atzmon’s writings. Likewise there is no one Jewish ideology or politics and the suggestion that there is is another facet of Jewish conspiracies. Why should one talk of Jewishness any more than Catholicness or Protestantness or Muslimness etc? 
>    
>   Far from examining Jewish identity, indeed a fertile area for discussion, Atzmon essentialises it and reifies it. There is one Jewish identity, it is conspiratorial, synonymous with Zionism etc.
>    
>   Ftp’s description of Atzmon’s second ‘category’ of Jews, viz. ‘those who regard themselves as human beings that happen to be of Jewish origin.’ is a good example of the core of this racist nonsense. Actually all Jews regard themselves as human beings. So do all other people, Jewish or others. Talk of people not being human is the core of racist beliefs. Africans in the slave trade were not human, that was how this evil trade was justified. Likewise the butchery of the Armenians, the Mountain Turks (Kurds) and many other groups, Jews included. And then no doubt Atzmon, who has used exactly this expression, will proclaim that he abhors racism!
>    
>   ftp also seems to believe that ‘(Jeff) Blankfort is 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’ and that he ‘specifically rebuts Chomsky's line on the lobby. Perhaps it is doe to the awful gatekeeping around this issue, that the views of progressives such as Blankfort are not more widely known.’
>    
>   I’m sorry that ftp has now bought even into the language of these people. Gatekeeping was a term in Atzmon’s ‘Palestinian Solidarity Discourse and Zionist Hegemony. It compared Jews in the Palestine solidarity movement to German fifth columnists during the war. In other words they are outsiders, strangers. It’s difficult to know whether there could be a better example of anti-Semitism. 
>    
>   Blankfort is not quite the left-winger that ftp believes. He has sent me a no. of e-mails stating that there was no deliberate intent of the Nazis to murder or exterminate their victims. He has long since bought into a wide range of conspiracy theories and that is why Noam Chomsky, who is not an anti-Zionist, refuses to touch him with a bargepole.
>    
>   ftp cites Atzmon’s The 3rd Category and the Palestinian Solidarity Movement as somehow representing Jewishness. This is another example of racial politics. Weizmann was describing why Jews were not part of the nations they lived in but a separate nation/race. He was articulating a key concept of Zionism, yet Atzmon chooses to call it ‘Jewishness’ as if it was an eternal and hereditary characteristic, which he backs up with later quotations from Shylock. But Zionism was a political manifestation of the late 19th century. Atzmon rejects this and suggests that ‘Jewishness’ is something innate and what is involved is not a question of politics. That is why, for all his obscurantism and self-aggrandisement, Atzmon falls back on the Zionist definition of what it is to be Jewish, ignoring groups like the Bund or Jewish participation in revolutionary movements. He is an anti-Marxist and it is a sad commentary on the SWP that they seek to defend him.
>    
>   As to the article in question ‘Goliath etc.’ It is entirely Indymedia’s decision whether or not to keep it up. As Atzmon says, there are plenty of sites displaying it (though I doubt that too many are left-wing or socialist). But there should be no doubt as to the fact that it justifies the holocaust.
>    
>   It argues that ‘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.’
>    
>   Leave aside the curious reference to Israelites, as if this is some ancient tribal custom, rather than Israelis. The ‘real meaning’ of the Nazi holocaust is the unpopularity of the grandfathers of the Jewish state. Apart from the historical illiteracy (those murdered were not the grandfathers of the Jewish state) and ignorance (the Nazis had to try and work very hard to make Jews unpoplar and never succeeded – try reading Ian kershaw’s The Hitler Myth) what it is saying is that racism and genocide can be explained by the characteristics (unpopularity) of the victim. Maybe the same is true of the gypsies and gays? And Poles? And slavs if Nazi Germany had not been defeated? This is facile. If e.g. gays were unpopular that was the result of other factors which led to murder, not the cause. Likewise with Jews, Poles etc. Racism is not caused by ‘unpopularity’ but by material and social factors. That is why this essay is an apology for racism and it is entirely to Indymedia’s
>  discredit if it stays up.
>    
>   The most absurd argument for keeping a racist and anti-Semitic article posted is that Atzmon’s ‘ultimate concern is one of justice for the Palestinians.’ I doubt it because leaping to the defence of holocaust deniers in Deir yassin Remembered, which is what the PSC debate earlier this year was about, doesn’t seem to have a great deal to do with justice for the Palestinians. But even were it true and Atzmons’ main concern was for justice for the Palestines, does that mean that any racist nonsense should therefore be allowed? The idea that you support justice for the Palestinians by becoming a racist or supporting racism is a strange logic. I’m surprised that Chris buys into this nonsense.
>    
>   Tony Greenstein
>
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