Gilad Atzmon is a jazz & world music artist, a novelist and an author focusing on ID politics.
Welcome to Gilad Atzmon's webpage. This site provides information about Gilad's musical and intellectual activity.
As much as many of us enjoyed watching the humiliation of Israel and PM Netanyahu in Washington this week, I am reluctant to suggest that the emerging crisis between America and Israel may also be a red light warning for all of us. The current crisis may lead to some devastating consequences as far as Palestine, Iran and the Middle East are concerned.
Last week we read about AIPAC’s assault against President Obama. It was reported that the Jewish Lobby in America took its gloves off. In the open, AIPAC decided to mount pressure on the American leadership and President Obama in particular.
Israeli officials and politicians sharply criticized the intention of the UK government to expel an ‘unnamed’ Israeli ‘diplomat’ in response to its passports being used in the Dubai assassination of Hamas Freedom Fighter Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
MK Aryeh Eldad (Israel National Union) doesn’t show much respect to the Brits whom he compares to dogs: "I think [the] British are behaving hypocritically and I don't want to offend dogs on this issue, since some dogs are utterly loyal," Eldad told Sky News.
Zionism, at least in its early days was premised on the belief that once back in their ‘homeland’, Jews would mature into ethical beings. For early Zionists it was the Diaspora conditions that corrupted the Jews. Ber Borchov blamed it on the difference between ‘the socio-economic structure of the Jewish people’ and other nations (Ber Borochov- The Economic Development of the Jewish People 1917). Max Nordau repelled the “Jewish lack of notion of honour, morality, patriotism and idealism…." (Max Nordau - Address at the 1st Zionist Congress 1897).
It is transparently evident that Zionism failed to erect a modern ethical collective. Considering the Zionist agenda to celebrate a Jewish national aspiration at the expense of the indigenous people of Palestine, it shouldn’t take us by surprise that Zionism evolved into an unethical morbid entity. As we read in a poll in Haaretz today. The Israelis themselves are coming to terms with their non-ethical setting. More than half of the Israelis are convinced that the leadership of their Jewish State is corrupted.
Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to the wonderful word of modern Jewish accessories.
If you want to know what contemporary Jewish identity is, you may like to check out what products are available for Jewish consumption.
They Love it from Behind
Nationalist Jews do love it from behind, at least as far as their cars are concerned.
In a remarkable exposé of the Mossad operation in Dubai, The Times happens to refer to Meir Dagan’s (the Mossad chief) ‘philosophy’. “The tone of Dagan’s directorship is set by a photograph on the wall of his modest office in the Tel Aviv headquarters. It shows an old Jew standing on the edge of a trench. An SS officer is aiming his rifle at the old man’s head. ‘This old Jew was my grandfather’ Dagan tells visitors”. According to The Times, the picture reflects Dagan’s belief: “We should be strong, use our brain, and defend ourselves so that the Holocaust will never be repeated,”
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced plans today to stop the issue of arrest warrants for foreign officials such as Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak and other Israeli war criminals who were forced to cancel planned trips to London after arrest warrants were issued against them. Under Brown’s proposals, the Crown Prosecution Service will take over responsibility for prosecuting war crimes and other violations of international law. Currently magistrates have to consider the case for an arrest warrant to be issued.
The following email was passed to me by a Jewish supporter:
“Re: Holocaust Remembrance Day - May 2,
Please wait 20 Seconds before you close this e-mail.
This message asks you to do one small act to remember the six million
(6,000,000) Jewish lives that were lost during the Holocaust.
Send this message to everyone you know who is Jewish.
Alan Dershowitz on Judge Goldstone: “But now I see him as a traitor… It’s as if they would have taken a Jew to edit the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He uses his Jewish last name to kosher his slander of the Jewish People.”
For those who still cannot make their minds up about Jewish nationalism and the Zionist violent abuse of Western academic culture (tolerance, academic freedom, pluralism etc) Rabbi Shmully Hecht of Yale’s University Jewish society, gives an exemplary opportunity to see it all. Rabbi Hecht confronted Judge Goldstone last week while Goldstone was delivering an address at Yale University. Rabbi Hecht and his supporters held up a sign at the back of the conference room equating the Goldstone report with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Dreyfus affair.
Ramzy Baroud’s “My Father Was A Freedom Fighter” is more than a book, it is actually a masterpiece. In an overwhelmingly evoking personal style Baroud manages to bring to light the history of the Palestinian people and their battle with Israel and Zionism. Through the story of the Baroud’s family the book outlines every event in the history of the conflict and reflects on the way it transformed the Palestinian reality.
The book is a heart breaking depressing story of the Baroud family’s journey from paradise to hell. It is a flight that starts in Beit Daras, a small pictorial village in the south of Palestine. It ends in a Gaza refugee camp. It is a tragic journey of a rural self-sufficient population that is driven into total dispossession, humiliation and absolute poverty. And yet, there is a beam of light along the book namely resistance: Ramzy’s father Mohammed, was a freedom fighter. He didn’t win a single war, not even a battle, yet, against all odds, in spite of his poverty and illness, he managed to educate his children and to plant hope in their young souls, to fuel Ramzy with fierceness, which along the years transformed the young man into a monumental inspirational writer and an icon of intellectual resistance.
I urge every person on this planet to watch Yoav Shamir’s Defamation, a documentary about anti Semitism.
To watch the entire film (UK only):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P512xaLDVdk
Or here
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/defamation/4od - 3022029
To watch some selceted highlights (around the world):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5jsiLWXGYQ
The film is an astonishing exposure of the morbid conditions that entangle contemporary Jewish secular identity. It explores and ridicules the current notion of anti Semitism and the lobbies that are engaged in disseminating such a fear. It also exposes those Jewish ethnic campaigners who, for some reason, insist on shaping their identity around the phantasmic idea of being ‘racially’ chased, defamed or hated.
Avatar may well be the biggest anti War film of all time. It stands against everything the West is identified with. It is against greed and capitalism, it is against interventionalism, it is against colonialism and imperialism, it is against technological orientation, it is against America and Britain. It puts Wolfowitz, Blair and Bush on trial without even mentioning their names. It enlightens the true meaning of ethics as a dynamic judgmental process rather than fixed moral guidelines (such as the Ten Commandments or the 1948 Human Right Declaration). It throws a very dark light on our murderous tendencies towards other people, their belief and rituals. But it doesn’t just stop there. In the same breath, very much like German Leben philosophers (1), it praises the power of nature and the attempt to bond in harmony with soil, the forest and the wildlife. It advises us all to integrate with our surrounding reality rather than impose ourselves on it. Very much like German Idealists and early Romanticists, it raises questions to do with essence, existence and the absolute. It celebrates the true meaning of life and livelihood.
It is pretty astonishing and cheering to discover Hollywood paving the way to the victorious return of German philosophical thought.
It is pretty embarrassing to discover that not a single Western film critic is courageous enough to tell us what the latest Coen Brother’s film is all about. Those who reviewed A Serious Man inform us that this film is the Coen Brother’s most autobiographical to date, drawing on their upbringing. They assert that A Serious Man is the film many Jewish fans of the Coen brothers have always wanted them to make. One film critic also maintains that the film is deftly balancing bright comedy and bitter darkness. Some critics are genuine enough to confess that it is slightly anti Semitic but for some reason, they all fail to tell us what the film is about. What is the ideology, philosophy and symbolism behind it? They are shy of analysing the film’s metaphysics, they refrain from touching its meaning and cowardly avoid pointing to its message.
To watch the Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FYtprwg1As&feature=fvst
A Serious Man is a cinematic allegory of Jewish cultural detachment from nature. It is a masterpiece that elaborates on the abnormalities of the Jewish tribal existence.
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz , Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz will demand between 450 million to 1 billion euros in reparations from Germany on behalf of Jews forced into slave labor during the Holocaust, it emerged on Sunday.
Regardless of the question of what qualifies an Israeli minister to demand money on ”behalf of Jews” or even Israeli Jews, I wonder whether it is symbolic that this happens in the same week as Auschwitz’ entrance sign was stolen.
For those who fail to remember, the Auschwitz sign says ‘Work Liberates’ (Arbeit macht frei). Clearly, as far as Minister Steinitz is concerned, it is actually Schnor * that sets him free.
*To schnor- to beg (Yiddish)
To see the First Part, click (below) to read more
Don’t Blame the Messenger
Critics of Larry David say he has gone further than any other Jewish comic or intellectual in insulting Christianity and Christian values.
In an episode of the highly popular HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which caricatures David’s true personal life, David accidentally splashes a drop of urine on a framed picture of Jesus that is hanging in his devout secretary’s bathroom.
“Why would any writer make up stories about the Holocaust?” asks Melissa Katsoulis on mainstream British media outlet The Independent (1).
Katsoulis has recently published a book about the history of literary hoaxes. She is interested in particular in a unique fictional genre; namely ‘the Holocaust hoaxers’.
On the one hand, she confesses that “special privilege must be given to those increasingly few witness-writers who survived the Second World War in Europe.” She is even willing to accept Elie Wiesel’s peculiar take on ‘truth and fiction’, that "some stories are true that never happened."
