Friday, January 18, 2008
Gilad Atzmon - "Public Lapidation" round one
Once again, rabid Zionists have united with the so-called 'Jewish anti-Zionists protagonists'. This time, they insist upon believing that I am a Holocaust Denier.It all started when a site that specialises in texts known as “Holocaust Denial” linked to an Iranian paper that reported that the German Lawyer Sylvia Stolz, who acted as attorney for Ernst Zundel and has been sentenced to serve three and a half years in prison for doing so, quoted me in her defence.
According to the Iranian paper "Stolz has reportedly read a newspaper article to the court about the appearance of world renowned Israeli artist, Gilad Atzmon in Bochum." http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=38848§ionid=351020604
In order to set things straight, I have to mention that the newspaper item read by Mrs Stolz was highly misleading. It was not at all representative of what I had said. At the time, this was immediately pointed out by the Festival organiser who invited me and moderated the meeting. Indeed, the organiser felt that the paper misrepresented almost everything possible.
This is the text of the letter he had written to the newspaper.
“Dear editorial staff of Ruhr Nachrichten,
I usually do not write letters to the editors and as an organizer I can live with bad critics. However, as the subject is rather delicate, I felt I had to comment the article containing big mistakes as regards content and strongly falsifying Gilad Atzmon’s political tendency.
Firstly, concerning the big mistakes:
“According to him the true enemy was not Hitler but Stalin”. You have left out an important piece of information, notably whose enemy Stalin had been. Atzmon argued that America’s true enemy had not been Hitler but Stalin. As long as Hitler had communism under control, America did not believe it to be necessary to get involved in the war. Atzmon uses the same argument for all wars led by the USA until the present time. Atzmon also refers to Hitler as a criminal. Atzmon neither denies nor plays down the Holocaust.
The following statement is wrong, too: “[…] the Germans [should] stop feeling guilty and responsible”. In fact, Atzmon encourages the present generation of Germans not to feel guilty any longer but he does not deny the Germans’ responsibility in general. On the contrary, he believes the Germans to be extremely vigilant today concerning any kind of potential racist or fascist tendencies.
Regarding the discussion about the number of murdered Jews during the Holocaust, it is very difficult to resume the contents of this debate with only a few sentences. Atzmon criticises that publicly doubting the number of 6 million is being penalized, while even the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem itself mentions various studies that state numbers of 5.1 million or even 5.29 or 5.5 million. Atzmon emphasises that this abstract number has become a kind of fetish, as if the Holocaust were more harmless if there had been only half of the number of murdered Jews. Atzmon does not accuse Bush, Blair and Sharon of being criminals of war in order to minimise Hitler’s own crimes of war.
Surely, the language barrier posed a problem during the discussion last Sunday. Suddenly, an audience that mainly expected to attend a concert preceded by a reading, was confronted by a political discussion. Had we known this beforehand, we would have organised a professional bilingual interpreter’s service for the evening.
We were aware of the fact that Gilad Atzmon’s novels are provoking and up to a certain extent such a provocation was intended. He criticised harshly Israel’s politics and shows that due to this historical victimhood, the United Nations mostly tolerate Israel’s racist and nationalist action towards the Palestinians and that criticism is nipped in the bud with the allegation of anti-Semitism.
It is true, that the ambiance after the discussion was not very favourable to the concert. We ourselves had several discussions in the lobby of the concert hall with members of the public who wanted to leave the event. Two of the women who had left returned however later and continued to speak with Gilad after the concert in a small group. This discussion was far less controversial than the momentarily heated one before the concert. They all said goodbye heartily and shook hands.
Maybe it would have made sense if Thorsten Hoops had seized the occasion to verify the ideas he got during the discussion. Such delicate subjects demand greater care from journalists than writing about a concert, which one can certainly resume in a competent way even if one does not stay until the very end.”
In the Bochum event I shared with my audience my usual critique of the common WW2 narrative as well as my different reading of the Holocaust as a meaningful event rather than a mere legal account.
My detailed take on the issues can be found in the following links:
Rearranging the 20th Century: Allegro Non Troppo
Rearranging the 20th Century: Deceptive Cadence
Interview: It Ain’t Necessarily So
What I find very interesting is to discover how this news made the rounds. It seems that on a few leftist lists and on a rabid settler’s site, this news item based on falsity, bad translation and distortion of facts is the “hot” topic of the day. It seems that a few anti-Zionist Jews and some radicals who steal land from Palestinians are sharing their tactic today. They are circulating the news from a site that specialises in what they call Holocaust Denial. It’s a site I don’t read, and won’t even link to, but they obviously do and have. Yes, the rabid Zionists such as Arutzsheva, Seven Plaut and the Jewish anti-Zionists Tony Greenstein and Shraga Elam count on a denial site when it comes to me. I wonder if they suddenly trust Neo Nazis and Holocaust deniers as serious, trustworthy truth-tellers and legitimate sources of information. I wonder how they feel just having demonstrated what kind of navigation they engage in. Since they take the report in the Holocaust Denial site as correct, truthful and precise, how do they know that this site’s account on other things is categorically false? Where do they draw the line, if they draw one? It is probably just too much to expect Zionists (whether they know themselves to be or not) to be consistent. Once again we happen to learn that intellectual integrity is not a common trait amongst Jewish ethnic activists whether they are settlers or leftist cyber stalkers.
Labels: activism, Atzmon, documents, gatekeeping, hasbara, holocaust, Iran, Israel, jewish identity politics, journalism, settlers, Zionism
Monday, December 10, 2007
Khalid Amayreh - The “Ubermench” and the “Untermench”
Occupied East Jerusalem9 December, 2007
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said in its annual report, released this week, that “racism was so rife in Israel that it was damaging civil liberties and human rights.”
“Israeli society is reaching new heights of racism that damages freedom of expression and privacy,” said author Sami Michael, president of the association.
According to the Hebrew press, the report’s key point includes a 26-percent rise in the number of racist incidents against Arabs and twice as many Jews reporting a feeling of hate toward Arabs.
“We are a society under supervision under a democratic regime whose institutions are being undermined and which confers a different status to residents in the center of the country and in the periphery,” the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz (9 December) quoted Michael as saying.
Some of the most shocking but expected findings of the report include the following: As many as 55% of Israeli Jews support the idea that the state should “encourage” the Arab citizens of Israel to emigrate; up to 78% of Jewish respondents oppose the inclusion of Arab political parties in the government. And according to a Haifa University Study, also cited by Ha’aretz, 74% of Jewish youth in Israel think that Arabs are unclean.
Of course, anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, anti-goyism and other forms of xenophobia have always been rife in Israel. However, these morbid phenomena have of late assumed nearly Nazi proportions as the Israeli Jewish society continues to drift menacingly toward jingoism and fascism.
A few months ago, an Israeli Jewish man invited an Arab tax driver from East Jerusalem to his home north of Tel Aviv for a cup of coffee. And when the Arab cabbie sat down to drink his coffee, the Jewish man and his brother brought in a big knife and murdered the innocent man in cold blood.
Upon interrogation, the murderer, a French immigrant, told the police that “When I killed him, I felt I was killing an animal, not a human being.”
This was by no means an isolated incident. Today, hundreds of thousands of Israeli youngsters receive inherently racist education and indoctrination, whether in their schools or in their synagogues or through the media.
A few days ago, an Israeli talk-show host told this writer during an interview… "Arabs are animals” and that “you should go back to your donkey room.”
More to the point, it is imperative to remember that this racist indoctrination is by no means confined to the rabble and the uneducated class. In truth, the entire Israeli society is based on racism. Racism is Israel’s modus operandi, and human and social equality is markedly incompatible with being Zionist.
In Israel, we have rabbis who teach their yeshiva (religious school) students that non-Jews are non-humans. Three years ago, a Knesset member by the name of Aryeh Eldad protested that “the army was treating human beings as if they were Arabs.”
Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert remarked in the summer of 2006 that “Jewish lives are always worth more.”
Recently, a few days before the ill-fated Annapolis conference in Maryland on 26 November, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni proposed that Israel’s Arab citizens could be forced out of their ancestral homeland into a prospective Palestinian state.
Livni, whose venomous views are likely to reflect the prevailing discourse in Israel, seems to harbor the same malice and ill-will toward Israel’s Arab citizens very much like Nazi Germany’s did toward its untermench.
But unlike Hitler and his cohorts, who were brashly honest about what to do with Nazi Germany’s untermench (a German word meaning an inferior class of people), Livni is prevaricating about what she really wants.
Some Israeli political leaders are franker and more honest about their respective mindsets than others. For example, Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman openly calls for the transfer of Arabs from Israel. (Transfer is nothing short of a euphemism for genocide, at least a partial genocide).
Similarly, Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu has been proposing ways and means to check the comparatively high birth rates among Israel’s non-Jewish citizens while boosting birth rates among Jews. And then there are the gurus of messianic Zionism, the Gush Emunim people, who openly call for “a Jewish solution” and are still relating to non-Jews in Israel in terms of “water carriers” and “wood hewers.”
Do people in Europe and North America understand what is being implied by a Jewish solution? A few years ago, I pressed a Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful) Zionist rabbi to explain his concept of the Jewish solution. The rabbi uttered three words: enslavement, expulsion or annihilation.
It is absolutely wrong to think that these Nazi-minded people represent a small minority in Israel. In fact, I can dare say that they represent the majority trend among Israeli Jews.
Today in Israel, if any politician wants to get elected or increase his popularity, he or she will have to demonstrate in ample manner his hatred of and sullen hostility toward the Palestinians and Islam.
Indeed, as nefarious anti-Semitism was the ultimate certificate of good conduct that guaranteed passage through the Nazi hierarchy, hostility to Islam, Arabs and Palestinians is now the surest way to seize the hearts and minds of Jews in Israel.
Finally, it is equally misleading to think that racism in Israel is a passing phenomenon.
Last year, I asked a veteran Israeli journalist what would become of Israel and the world if and when the fanatics of Gush Emunim reached power in Israel, either through the ballot box or by way of a coup of some kind?
The man told me the following: “For the time being, our nuclear arsenal is in safe hands, but who knows what could happen ten years from now?”
I am invoking these ominous prospects because Gush Emunim and other messianic Zionist Jews are guided by a nearly genocidal doomsday ideology which teaches that the Jewish messiah or redeemer won’t appear until and unless there is violence and bloodshed on a uniquely large scale.
Hence, it is conceivable that these religious fanatics, in cooperation with their secular fascist colleagues, would use Israel’s nuclear weapons to trigger the return of the Mashiah. Now is this the authentic Judaism that Moses taught?
Again these people are not a small minority in Israel. According to Israeli sources, more than 50% of high-ranking officers in the Israeli army hail from the “religious Zionist community.”
These are the same people who murder Palestinian civilians, including children, on a daily basis without the slightest feeling of guilt. These are the same people that bomb Palestinian homes, where women and children are asleep, from high altitudes without a whiff of compunction.
And, Yes these are the same people who wouldn’t hesitate to embark on the unthinkable to effect and expedite their sick whims which can be summarized in one sound-bite: “hashmada” or annihilation.
Labels: "transfer", Israel, Israeli politicians, settlers
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Israeli settlers attack girls' school in Hebron
[Ma'anImages]Date: 26 / 11 / 2007 Time: 10:14 Hebron
Ma'an Right wing Israeli settlers broke into the courtyard of the Qurtuba school for girls in the West Bank city of Hebron and attempted to set fire to the school building on Monday morning.
The school's principal, Reem Ash-Shareef, told Ma'an that Israelis from the nearby Beit Hadassah outpost also attempted to rip the doors off the building and succeeded in knocking over walls, trampling flower beds, and blocking the path to the school with rocks.
She said she watched as a group of children, armed with axes, attempted to break the water pipes that supply the school. They were urged on by their teacher.
Israeli settlers have attacked the school and its students frequently. International human rights workers accompany Palestinian children on their way to school to protect them from settler violence.
Ash-Shareef said all requests that each time the school has been attacked, she has complained to the Israeli authorities, but to no avail. She said settlers attempted to burn the school down in August, and their harassment and assaults on the girls has been ongoing.
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=26478
Labels: absolute madness, human rights violations, Israel, settlers
