Gilad Atzmon is quickly becoming persona non grata in many circles, even amongst the extremists that once supported him. Writing on an anti-Israel website, a group of activists and academics including Ali Abunimah, Naseer Aruri, Omar Barghouti, Hatem Bazian, Andrew Dalack, Haidar Eid, Monadel Herzallah and Joseph Massad have signed onto a statement "Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon".
Why did it take them so long to notice that association with a man who calls the burning of synagogues a "rational act" might be construed as aiding and abetting anti-semitism and hate speech? Even so, many of the signatories of this statement have not disavowed their association with the Global March to Jerusalem, which has heavily relied on Atzmon for fundraising. Atzmon appeared at a fundraiser for the Global march last month, and his music also appears on a CD released by March organizers.
From our friends at CIFWatch
"Signatory Hatem Bazian has endorsed the GMJ and his name appears on the same website as advertisements for Atzmon-related fundraising.
Signatory Hanna Kawas is chair of the Canada Palestine Organisation and co-host at ‘Voice of Palestine’. Both these organisations appear on the GMJ-NA website as endorsers.
Jamal Juma – a colleague of signatories Omar Barghouti and Rafeef Ziadeh at the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) – is a member of the GMJ International Central Committee. In late January, Omar Barghouti gave the keynote speech at the AGM of the UK’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign – also a GMJ endorser with its director Sarah Colborne sitting on both the GMJ International Executive Committee and International Central Committee.
Signatory Haidar Eid is both an endorser of (along with co-signatories Ali Abunimah, Nadia Hijab and Omar Barghouti) and activist with the ‘Gaza Freedom March’ organization which is promoting the Global March to Jerusalem on its website.
Signatory Nada Elia is a member of the organizing committee of the US Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel, alongside Joe Catron of the ISM (a GMJ organizer) and Al Awda (a GMJ endorser).
Signatory Adam Haniyeh is also a member of two GMJ endorsing organisations: Al Awda and the ‘Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid’.
Signatory Mostafa Henway’s ‘Tadamon!’ promoted singer Shadia Mansour as recently as February 29th 2012. Mansour has collaborated widely with Atzmon in the past and appears with him on the fundraising album for the Global March to Jerusalem.
Signatory Abir Kobty (also Kopty) from Nazareth is a member of the board of the Coalition of Women for Peace which is an endorser of the ‘Free Gaza’ campaign – represented among the GMJ organisers by European Preparatory Committee member Mikalis Lukianos from ‘Ship to Gaza-Greece‘, Huweida Arraf and Feroze Mithiborwala (FGM International Co-ordinator in India).
Kobty also takes part in demonstrations organized by the ‘Popular Resistance Committees’ in places such as Nebi Saleh, Bil’in and Qalandiya. It can therefore be assumed that she is familiar with both many of the Palestinian organisations supporting the GMJ as well as individual members of the GMJ International Central Committee such as Saeed Yaqeen of ‘Stop the Wall’ or Salah al Khawaja of the Nil’in Popular Resistance Committee."
Just how bad is Atzmon?
In his latest essay "Is it an Israeli False Flag Again?" (No, I won't link to whack-doddles and anti-Semites), he writes
"I won’t rule out the possibility that Merah was actually trained by Israeli forces. Marah may have conducted a false flag operation. By way of deception is, after all, the Mossad’s motto."
(No, Gilad, actually the Mossad motto is from Proverbs 11:14 "Where there is no guidance, a nation falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety." )
Yes, this deeply disturbed man is using the murders of 4 innocents to advance his hateful political agenda. Its time for all people of conscience to distance themselves completely and thoroughly , not just in word, but in deed, from this despicable human being.
Showing posts with label Gilad Atzmom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gilad Atzmom. Show all posts
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
The Great Gilad Atzmon Paperchase
Respectfully submitted by the Makabit, notes on the events befalling the Bay Area Zionists on the evening of February 25, Oakland, California:
Gilad Atzmon can be described in a variety of ways. You could describe him, as his adoring fans do, as a 'prolific performer, composer, author and activist'. You could describe him as nearly everyone else does, as a unhinged hater whose writings drip with classical anti-Semitism and a poisonous hatred of Jews and Judaism. Or, you could describe him, as a lady of my acquaintance does, simply as 'someone who makes a living being a self-hating saxophonist'.
A brief primer on Gilad Atzmon for those of you who may have blissfully erased him from your memory banks since the last time he popped up. Atzmon is on record as saying:
“There is no such thing as anti-Semitism”
“I wanted to be an ordinary human being, which is very unusual for a Jew.”
He is most recently the author of a book entitled The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, described by Walter Russell Mead as "a genuinely anti-Semitic book by a deeply twisted anti-Semite — who happens also to be Jewish." The book, among other things, speculates about the truth of the blood libel, and points out in Hitler's defense that American Jews were persecuting him by boycotting German goods. Atzmon also adds, of the Shoah: I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start to ask the necessary questions. We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws.
I won't even get into what he says about Israel, a nation that had the misfortune to count Gilad Atzmon as a citizen until he renounced his connections to Israel, Judaism, and sanity. (He now lives in Britain, which deserves better.) So you get the idea: proudly self-loathing, comfortable with the tropes of Holocaust denial, and reviving the ugliest smears of classical anti-Semitism.
This charming fellow is much beloved by people who hate Israel, and are pleased by the vicious image that Atzmon creates of Jews and Israelis. Which is why he is repeatedly invited to star at various 'fundraisers' for various anti-Israel activities. Most recently, this led to his being invited to Oakland, CA, on the evening of Saturday, February 25, for an evening of music and anti-Semitism, to raise funds for the Global March to Jerusalem. For reasons that will follow shortly, I do not believe that they can have possibly raised enough money to cover the cost of flying Mr. Atzmon out from England. In fact, one of the most consistent things about Atzmon's fundraising endeavors is that they never seem to raise much in the way of funds. But that is a consideration for another day.
Of course, if we was gonna be there, we were gonna be there. The Zionist activists and proud Jews of the Bay Area revved up. We took old signs out of storage, and painted new ones. There was no way Atzmon was going to speak anywhere in the Bay Area without us standing by and telling the world the truth about his vile shtick. We were a little nervous, after the peaceful organizers of this event contacted anarchists at Occupy Oakland for 'security', soliciting the response "Who do you want us to beat up?" But we went anyway. We were determined to speak truth to...whatever it is Gilad Atzmon is.
Things got complicated after that, though, because rather than face being called out for being a purveyor of hate speech, racism, and vile lies, Gilad Atzmon went on the run.
We arrived at the designated location, only to find that the only people stirring around the building were young and fashionable--not exactly the typical Atzmon fans. Several of the girls were wearing wigs teased into big Afros. It was, as we later learned, the Seventh Annual Say it Loud 70's Fashion Show.
We admired the young people's retro ensembles. But where was Atzmon? We found this notice taped to the inside of a nearby door.
As you'll note, they didn't leave an address or phone number, which is customary when a piece of theater has a change of venue, but then again, the point of the change of venue may simply have been to shake off pursuit. While a forlorn pair of Atzmon fans called several numbers, trying to find out where the event had gotten to, the Zionists surveyed the scene, and shrugged. The field was ours, and we were on the point of declaring victory and going out to dinner. We even took a few photographs.
Fortunately or unfortunately, we then found out where Atzmon was hiding. (It was cold and bleak and dark, and I was actually looking forward to dinner.) However, one of the organizers showed up to discreetly hand out flyers with the new address, and armed with one of these, we leaped back in our assorted conveyances and headed out to find Atzmon's new hide-out.
The new location was on a residential street, and as we rolled down it looking for street numbers, we came to the conclusion that the new location was probably someone's living room. But we were wrong. Oh, how wrong we were.
Atzmon's new venue turned out to be the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California, and I confess that when I saw the sign, I actually shrieked a little, and our driver was so discombobulated that she accidentally parked in the cultural center's parking lot. This later turned out to be something of a problem, but we were, to put it mildly, startled.
I do not know how Gilad Atzmon managed to find shelter from the storm at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California, seeing as he is neither a Muslim, nor particularly cultured, aside from his saxophone playing, which is apparently pretty decent. I can only assume that he was seriously mischaracterized to the poor soul in charge of scheduling, who therefore made the disturbing mistake of letting a man who thinks burning a synagogue is a 'rational act' into a building which serves as a mosque.
We all spilled out of our cars, and lined up along the fence in front of the ICC parking lot. We had signs, and a banner, and a flag, and we all made ourselves fairly comfortable. (It was cold, it was dark, and we were protesting a nasty bigot in front of a local Cultural Center, but other than that, we were comfortable.)
After that, things went fairly smoothly. An event organizer hovered outside, glaring at us, and denouncing our flyer as a pack of lies. A few young men, wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night, were produced from somewhere, and stood around, nominally protecting the entrance to the ICC. I believe they were intended to look menacing, but they seemed more intrigued by us than anything else.
Meanwhile, no actual ticket-holders seemed to be showing up. We gathered, from hurried conversations between the organizers, that things were being delayed, while everyone was apprised of the new location. That was OK. We waited. Meanwhile, people kept exiting the ICC, many of them with young children, apparently leaving some other event inside. I felt rather awkward as they walked past me. It seemed like mere politeness to scream a warning. "Your cultural center has Gilad Atzmon in it!" I mean, I would want to know. But I wasn't sure of the etiquette for this situation. I settled for smiling politely.
The organizer-in-chief threatened to call the police, so we tried to be helpful and called them ourselves. They showed up several minutes later, and chatted with our representative and that of the Atzmon fans, familiarizing themselves with the situation.
They also turned out to be useful because, as I may have mentioned, we had parked in the ICC's parking lot, and getting out was now starting to seem somewhat perilous. I'm trying to make this whole outing as lighthearted as possible, but the truth of the matter is that any fan of Gilad Atzmon's is pretty much automatically a pretty special kind of hater, and these people scare the heck out of me. Luckily, one of the police officers, apprised of the situation, agreed to escort our car and driver out of the parking lot.
After that, we stood around and held our signs and got very cold, while the Atzmon people engaged in their favorite pastime, filming Zionists. One of them attached to one of our activists and kept him talking for the entire hour and a half we were there, filming the whole thing. A young woman smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and wearing an "I Heart Gaza" t-shirt filmed the rest of us.
Oh, yes, the actual event? Well, fewer than twenty-five people attended in the end. A trickling handful arrived and were ushered into the parking lot as we stood there. There may have been more activists outside than suckers inside.
We were freezing outside, and in the dubious company of Gilad Atzmon's fans. We were still doing better than those inside, who were listening to Gilad Atzmon. Transcript of the hideous speech that transpired inside coming up in the next post.
Gilad Atzmon can be described in a variety of ways. You could describe him, as his adoring fans do, as a 'prolific performer, composer, author and activist'. You could describe him as nearly everyone else does, as a unhinged hater whose writings drip with classical anti-Semitism and a poisonous hatred of Jews and Judaism. Or, you could describe him, as a lady of my acquaintance does, simply as 'someone who makes a living being a self-hating saxophonist'.
A brief primer on Gilad Atzmon for those of you who may have blissfully erased him from your memory banks since the last time he popped up. Atzmon is on record as saying:
“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.”
“American Jews do try and control the world by proxy”
“There is no such thing as anti-Semitism”
“Why is it that the Jews who repeatedly demand that the Christian world should apologize for its involvement in previous persecutions, have never thought that it is about time that they apologized for killing Jesus?"
“I wanted to be an ordinary human being, which is very unusual for a Jew.”
He is most recently the author of a book entitled The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, described by Walter Russell Mead as "a genuinely anti-Semitic book by a deeply twisted anti-Semite — who happens also to be Jewish." The book, among other things, speculates about the truth of the blood libel, and points out in Hitler's defense that American Jews were persecuting him by boycotting German goods. Atzmon also adds, of the Shoah: I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start to ask the necessary questions. We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws.
I won't even get into what he says about Israel, a nation that had the misfortune to count Gilad Atzmon as a citizen until he renounced his connections to Israel, Judaism, and sanity. (He now lives in Britain, which deserves better.) So you get the idea: proudly self-loathing, comfortable with the tropes of Holocaust denial, and reviving the ugliest smears of classical anti-Semitism.
This charming fellow is much beloved by people who hate Israel, and are pleased by the vicious image that Atzmon creates of Jews and Israelis. Which is why he is repeatedly invited to star at various 'fundraisers' for various anti-Israel activities. Most recently, this led to his being invited to Oakland, CA, on the evening of Saturday, February 25, for an evening of music and anti-Semitism, to raise funds for the Global March to Jerusalem. For reasons that will follow shortly, I do not believe that they can have possibly raised enough money to cover the cost of flying Mr. Atzmon out from England. In fact, one of the most consistent things about Atzmon's fundraising endeavors is that they never seem to raise much in the way of funds. But that is a consideration for another day.
Of course, if we was gonna be there, we were gonna be there. The Zionist activists and proud Jews of the Bay Area revved up. We took old signs out of storage, and painted new ones. There was no way Atzmon was going to speak anywhere in the Bay Area without us standing by and telling the world the truth about his vile shtick. We were a little nervous, after the peaceful organizers of this event contacted anarchists at Occupy Oakland for 'security', soliciting the response "Who do you want us to beat up?" But we went anyway. We were determined to speak truth to...whatever it is Gilad Atzmon is.
Things got complicated after that, though, because rather than face being called out for being a purveyor of hate speech, racism, and vile lies, Gilad Atzmon went on the run.
We arrived at the designated location, only to find that the only people stirring around the building were young and fashionable--not exactly the typical Atzmon fans. Several of the girls were wearing wigs teased into big Afros. It was, as we later learned, the Seventh Annual Say it Loud 70's Fashion Show.
As you'll note, they didn't leave an address or phone number, which is customary when a piece of theater has a change of venue, but then again, the point of the change of venue may simply have been to shake off pursuit. While a forlorn pair of Atzmon fans called several numbers, trying to find out where the event had gotten to, the Zionists surveyed the scene, and shrugged. The field was ours, and we were on the point of declaring victory and going out to dinner. We even took a few photographs.
Fortunately or unfortunately, we then found out where Atzmon was hiding. (It was cold and bleak and dark, and I was actually looking forward to dinner.) However, one of the organizers showed up to discreetly hand out flyers with the new address, and armed with one of these, we leaped back in our assorted conveyances and headed out to find Atzmon's new hide-out.
The new location was on a residential street, and as we rolled down it looking for street numbers, we came to the conclusion that the new location was probably someone's living room. But we were wrong. Oh, how wrong we were.
Atzmon's new venue turned out to be the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California, and I confess that when I saw the sign, I actually shrieked a little, and our driver was so discombobulated that she accidentally parked in the cultural center's parking lot. This later turned out to be something of a problem, but we were, to put it mildly, startled.
I do not know how Gilad Atzmon managed to find shelter from the storm at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California, seeing as he is neither a Muslim, nor particularly cultured, aside from his saxophone playing, which is apparently pretty decent. I can only assume that he was seriously mischaracterized to the poor soul in charge of scheduling, who therefore made the disturbing mistake of letting a man who thinks burning a synagogue is a 'rational act' into a building which serves as a mosque.
We all spilled out of our cars, and lined up along the fence in front of the ICC parking lot. We had signs, and a banner, and a flag, and we all made ourselves fairly comfortable. (It was cold, it was dark, and we were protesting a nasty bigot in front of a local Cultural Center, but other than that, we were comfortable.)
After that, things went fairly smoothly. An event organizer hovered outside, glaring at us, and denouncing our flyer as a pack of lies. A few young men, wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night, were produced from somewhere, and stood around, nominally protecting the entrance to the ICC. I believe they were intended to look menacing, but they seemed more intrigued by us than anything else.
Meanwhile, no actual ticket-holders seemed to be showing up. We gathered, from hurried conversations between the organizers, that things were being delayed, while everyone was apprised of the new location. That was OK. We waited. Meanwhile, people kept exiting the ICC, many of them with young children, apparently leaving some other event inside. I felt rather awkward as they walked past me. It seemed like mere politeness to scream a warning. "Your cultural center has Gilad Atzmon in it!" I mean, I would want to know. But I wasn't sure of the etiquette for this situation. I settled for smiling politely.
The organizer-in-chief threatened to call the police, so we tried to be helpful and called them ourselves. They showed up several minutes later, and chatted with our representative and that of the Atzmon fans, familiarizing themselves with the situation.
They also turned out to be useful because, as I may have mentioned, we had parked in the ICC's parking lot, and getting out was now starting to seem somewhat perilous. I'm trying to make this whole outing as lighthearted as possible, but the truth of the matter is that any fan of Gilad Atzmon's is pretty much automatically a pretty special kind of hater, and these people scare the heck out of me. Luckily, one of the police officers, apprised of the situation, agreed to escort our car and driver out of the parking lot.
After that, we stood around and held our signs and got very cold, while the Atzmon people engaged in their favorite pastime, filming Zionists. One of them attached to one of our activists and kept him talking for the entire hour and a half we were there, filming the whole thing. A young woman smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and wearing an "I Heart Gaza" t-shirt filmed the rest of us.
Oh, yes, the actual event? Well, fewer than twenty-five people attended in the end. A trickling handful arrived and were ushered into the parking lot as we stood there. There may have been more activists outside than suckers inside.
We were freezing outside, and in the dubious company of Gilad Atzmon's fans. We were still doing better than those inside, who were listening to Gilad Atzmon. Transcript of the hideous speech that transpired inside coming up in the next post.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Lake Merritt United Methodist Church Hosts Hate speech
Today the Lake Merritt United Methodist Church in Oakland is hosting a talk by Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon is an ex-Israeli who now resides in the UK; he has renounced not only being Israeli, but his membership in the Jewish people and now writes and promotes classically anti-Semitic remarks. Gilad was invited as part of a fundraiser for the Free Gaza Movement, to help raise funds for a US boat to Gaza.
Atzmon has left a long slime trail of hate across the web. He has been documented saying:
"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.'"
"It is about time we internalise the fact that Israel and Zionism are the ultimate Evil with no comparison."
"To regard Hitler as the ultimate evil is nothing but surrendering to the Zio-centric discourse. To regard Hitler as the wickedest man and the Third Reich as the embodiment of evilness is to let Israel off the hook."
""Throughout the centuries, Jewish bankers bought for themselves some real reputations of backers and financers of wars, and even one communist revolution. Though rich Jews had been happily financing wars using their assets, Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, found a far more sophisticated way to finance the wars perpetrated by his ideological brothers Libby and Wolfowitz."
" The 'Elders of Zion' syndrome: Zionists complain that Jews continue to be associated with a conspiracy to rule the world via political lobbies, media and money. Is the suggestion of conspiracy really an empty accusation?
The following list is presented with pride in several Jewish American websites.
Jews in Bush's Administration (a list of some 30 names follows¦)
Let me assure you, in Clinton's administration the situation was even worse. Even though the Jews only make up 1.9 per cent of the country's population, an astounding 56 per cent of Clinton's appointees were Jews. A coincidence? I don't think so."
"I would suggest that perhaps we should face it once and for all: the Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus who, by the way, was himself a Palestinian Jew....Why is it that the Jews who repeatedly demand that the Christian world should apologise for its involvement in previous persecutions, have never thought that it is about time that they apologised for killing Jesus?"
San Francisco Voice for Israel will hold a vigil outside the church from 4-5. Please join them in solidarity, to remind Oakland that there should be zero toreance to anti-Semitism in our community
Please give the Church a call. (510) 465-4793, or send them an email pastor@lakemerrittumc.org Remind them that virulent anti-Semitism is unacceptable regardless of one's position on the Israel/Palestine issue.
Atzmon has left a long slime trail of hate across the web. He has been documented saying:
"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.'"
"It is about time we internalise the fact that Israel and Zionism are the ultimate Evil with no comparison."
"To regard Hitler as the ultimate evil is nothing but surrendering to the Zio-centric discourse. To regard Hitler as the wickedest man and the Third Reich as the embodiment of evilness is to let Israel off the hook."
""Throughout the centuries, Jewish bankers bought for themselves some real reputations of backers and financers of wars, and even one communist revolution. Though rich Jews had been happily financing wars using their assets, Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, found a far more sophisticated way to finance the wars perpetrated by his ideological brothers Libby and Wolfowitz."
" The 'Elders of Zion' syndrome: Zionists complain that Jews continue to be associated with a conspiracy to rule the world via political lobbies, media and money. Is the suggestion of conspiracy really an empty accusation?
The following list is presented with pride in several Jewish American websites.
Jews in Bush's Administration (a list of some 30 names follows¦)
Let me assure you, in Clinton's administration the situation was even worse. Even though the Jews only make up 1.9 per cent of the country's population, an astounding 56 per cent of Clinton's appointees were Jews. A coincidence? I don't think so."
"I would suggest that perhaps we should face it once and for all: the Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus who, by the way, was himself a Palestinian Jew....Why is it that the Jews who repeatedly demand that the Christian world should apologise for its involvement in previous persecutions, have never thought that it is about time that they apologised for killing Jesus?"
San Francisco Voice for Israel will hold a vigil outside the church from 4-5. Please join them in solidarity, to remind Oakland that there should be zero toreance to anti-Semitism in our community
Please give the Church a call. (510) 465-4793, or send them an email pastor@lakemerrittumc.org Remind them that virulent anti-Semitism is unacceptable regardless of one's position on the Israel/Palestine issue.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)