Satire: Keeping Palestine Solidarity Campaign Anti-Racist!!

by Francis Clark-Lowes

http://www.deliberation.info/

Following a motion adopted at Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s Extraordinary General Meeting on the evening of 7th April 2013 (Yom HaShoah), an Ethics Sub-Committee has been established composed of the following six members: Toni Grimmstein (Chair), Stephen Cohen, Simon Gold, Rick Silverman, Zeb Horowitz and Aaron Levin. The Sub-Committee is charged with ensuring that PSC remains an anti-racist organisation.

This memorandum includes (a) a summary of the events leading up to the EGM, (b) the measures proposed by the Sub-Committee, and (c) a diagram (attached as a PDF) to assist the screening of applicants for membership of PSC.

(a)   A summary of the events leading to the calling of an EGM

Toni Grimmstein had called for the EGM, and explained her reasons at the meeting as follows.

“Following the expulsion of Frances Lowes-Clarke in 2011, he exercised his right of appeal at the 2012 AGM. We never should have included a right of appeal for racists in our constitution because it gave Lowes-Clarke an opportunity to harangue delegates for five minutes with his anti-Semitic filth. That the right of appeal was not removed at that AGM is a matter for profound regret, happily rectified at our AGM last January. But this was too late to prevent another five appeal speeches, all equally obnoxious, being heard at that meeting. Of course, the decision to expel was upheld in all cases, but the process of hearing appeals was undoubtedly damaging to our movement, and some deluded people may have been persuaded of the arguments they heard from appellants.

There was, however, one helpful consequence of this shot in the foot, and that was the revelation that a substantial minority of our membership are racist. 20% voted for Lowes-Clarke in 2012 (although most of those were Stalinists), and between 15% and 30% voted in the cases before us earlier this year. It thus became abundantly clear that we have work to do in ensuring that racism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial have no place within our movement.

To this end I move that an Ethics Sub-Committee be established …”

(b)   Measures proposed by the Ethics Sub-Committee 

  • A programme to screen for racism all written and oral material in the public domain. In particular attention will be paid to articles, books and oral material where the words Jew, Jewish, Jewishness, Jewess, Holocaust denial and revisionism are mentioned. A list of racist authors/speakers will be compiled.
  • Any members found to be on the list of racist writers/speakers should immediately be expelled from both his/her branch and from the national organisation. Branches will be duty-bound to report any incidents of racism, and to provide documentary evidence of it. This duty should override any undertakings of confidentiality within branches.
  • Applications for membership should be checked against the list of racist writers/speakers, and if they are found to be on it, their application should be refused.
Read More

A few comments on recent Norman Finkelstein interview with Frank Barat

By Gilad Atzmon

http://www.deliberation.info/

Arguing the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Campaign with Norman Finkelstein from HuffPoMonitor on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/36854424

Norman Finkelstein has recently bought himself a few enemies within the Palestinian solidarity movement for openly and enthusiastically advocating the Two States Solution. In the last interview it seems as if Finkelstein defends Israel’s right to exist.

From an academic point of view, Finkelstein has a point. He argues that in order to win we have to operate within the parameters set by international  law. However, some points should be made here.

It is far from being clear who sets the parameters of international law. Is it really the international community? Or is it just a few powerful Western countries looking into their own particular expansionist interests.

  1. It is also far from being clear whether the international law is either ethically or sensible. Is it ethical to let the Jewish State celebrates its exceptional symptoms at the expense of the indigenous people of the land i.e. the Palestinians?  Is it sensible to maintain an, aggressive, expansionist, racist, and exclusivist, nuclear Jewish State in Middle East? Is it safe? Is it good for world peace?
  2. It is far from being transparently obvious to me why an American Jewish academic or any other Western solidarity activist should have a say about the way or manner in which Palestinian should live on their land. I, for instance, have never come across a Palestinian academic preaching Britain to divide its island by resurrecting the wall at the Scottish border. The meaning of it is simple, there is something fundamentally pretentious in the solidarity discourse and in resolution discourse in particular. We, for some reason, like to tell others what is right or wrong.
  3. Do we need to discuss resolution for the conflict? Israel is already a one State, it has a single electric grid, one sewage system, one international pre dial number. Yet Israel is dominated politically by an oppressive and racially exclusive Jewish political philosophy. This has to be changed and it will be changed by means of resistance with our solidarity or without it.
Read More

Gilad Atzmon: Tribalism, Racism and Projection – part 1

in , , , , ,

1st part of two – In this paper and the one to follow, I expose the misleading aspect that is, unfortunately, inherent to some 'anti' racist ideologies. I will elaborate on the role of anti racism in maintaing both Zionism and the Left discourse.

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” ― Anaïs Nin 

It doesn’t take a genius to see that people who are identified as Zionist and Jews are, somehow, over represented in many blunders in today’s world affairs. The pro-war, Neocon think-tanks were overwhelmingly saturated with Zionist Jews, and the ‘moral interventionist’ advocates within the media are also largely Zionist Jews. The ‘brains’ behind the so-called Bush doctrine i.e. The ‘War Against Terror’, were Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, and if that were not enough, at the heart of the financial turmoil we also find Jewish persons, and financial institutions that are clearly recognizable as Jewish – such as the Lehman Brother, Goldman Sachs, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, and many others.

Here one must ask an obvious question – why should any Jew anywhere in the world be concerned in any way with these facts? Why should any Jewish person be concerned with actions or ideas that he or she probably has nothing to do with? Why should my Jewish neighbour, also subject to the financial turmoil and with no connection whatsoever with Madoff, Wolfowitz, David Aaronovitch or Lord ‘cash point’ Levy, be at all concerned  with current financial or imperial blunders for which he has no responsibility? Why should my Jewish musician friends who have no ties to Israel, AIPAC, CFI, CST, Nick Cohen or Alan Greenspan feel guilty for crimes or actions taken by others just because they also happen to be Jewish? Would a Frenchman or an Irishman in America feel threatened or potentially discriminated against because of revelations that a few of their expatriates had been involved in a major colossal scandal?

So, the question I raise here is a simple one: why should any Jew feel guilty for crimes that are committed by other people – people he or she does not know and is not affiliated with? And the answer is equally simple – Jewish individuals have no reason to assume responsibility for actions committed by other Jews. But the truth of the matter is, that many Jews are extremely concerned about the current blunders: some feel guilty, and many – potentially at least – feel threatened. I would say that such a reaction merits our attention.

Amongst my other sins, I regularly monitor the Jewish media, and it is obvious to me that Jewish institutions are put on alert by any scandal that is even mildly associated with Jewish protagonists or institutions. Jewish media outlets give the impression that every blunder associated with a Jew is highly likely to turn itself into a wave of vile anti-semitism.

We are left to wonder then whether the Jewish fear of anti-Semitism is actually justified, or whether it is simply driven by a ‘fantasy of destruction’.

Read More

Alan Dershowitz in a nutshell

Omar Baddar: I've been perplexed by Alan Dershowitz's ability to maintain his respectable status in spite of his extensive record of intellectual dishonesty, so I decided to create this video based on my original research into two of Dershowitz's books to expose him for the dishonest "intellectual" he is. I will add more info to this description later on.

P.S.C. Members Read “BANNED” Book

by Laura Stuart

http://www.deliberation.info/p-s-c-members-read-banned-book/

O.K. I admit I mislead readers with that headline, of course Gilad’s book is not banned, what it should have read was P.S.C. members who read books “we” don’t like should be banned.

Wait a minute, let me put that more clearly; the book should be banned, the people who read it should be banned and probably the P.S.C. should be banned as well.

This is “the word” according to Anthony Cooper.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign members are holding a book reading circle in Brighton. This seemingly innocent and gentle pastime is causing outrage to Anthony Cooper someone whom I know little about except that he appears to be some kind of Gestapo inspired thought police, he certainly spends a lot of time cyber stalking P.S.C. members and what they do in their spare time.

The P.S.C. made a huge error of judgement when they started trying to appease Zionist and so called Anti Zionist bullies, who knows where this McCarthy like hunt for  alleged anti Semites (people that Jews don’t like) might end.

So long as its members are happy to join Holocaust deniers to study racist books, the PSC shouldn’t expect reasonable people to take their words seriously.

Read More

‘Wandering Who?’ Reading Group

by Francis Clark-Lowes

www.deliberation.info

wandering atzmon

On 7th February 2012 Ben Mullins, Brenda Brown, Francis Clark-Lowes, Penny and Jim Porter and Valerie Phillips (Phil) gathered in Brighton, UK, to discuss the Foreword and Chapter 1 of The Wandering Who? (Winchester and Washington DC, Zero Books, 2011).

According to your point of view, this work is either ‘a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world’ (John J. Meersheimer, review quoted at the beginning of the book) or ‘On Jewish identity Atzmon has nothing new to say’ (Tony Greenstein)

Before we started to look at the book, we had a discussion about how our meetings would be organised and what our purpose would be. There was some difference between those who simply wanted to study the text and those who believed our aim should be to draw conclusions about campaigning. We resolved this by agreeing that everyone should take what they wanted from the meetings, but that our focus should initially be on the ideas expressed in the book.

We will be meeting monthly for a year, looking at a couple of sections of the text each time, facilitated in rotation by one of the group. Participants are asked to read the relevant chapters for the next meeting in advance, so that we can concentrate on a couple of key elements at the meetings without them being taken out of context.

This time we started on the phrase: ‘… tribalism can never live in peace with humanism and universalism’ (p. 1). There was some discomfort with this polarity, dualism, dichotomy or whatever else you might call it. Are universalism and humanism as identities entirely credible, and is tribalism necessarily a bad thing? Phil had spent some time in Namibia where she had seen the beneficial side of tribalism. Indeed we wondered if Jewish tribalism was necessarily a problem? We would be returning to this subject as it was clearly central to Atzmon’s view of the world.

Read More

Kosher Terrorists to be Delisted

By Gilad Atzmon

NBC reported two days ago that Israel teams with terror group to kill Iran's nuclear scientists

The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.

Both Iranian, Israeli and Western commentators tend to believe that Israel and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, known as the MEK are behind the terror campaign.

In 1997, the State Department listed the MEK as a terrorist group, justifying it with an unclassified 40-page summary of the organization’s  activities going back more than 25 years. 

But in the last few weeks the Jewish Lobby in the USA is going out of its way to support the terrorist MEK.

Watch Zionist Alan Dershowitz advocating the immediate delisting of an active terror organisation.  

 

Read More

Making Business like a Rothschild

By Gilad Atzmon

www.deliberation.info

Nathaniel Rothschild - 'Puppet Master'BBC reported yesterday that Financier Nathaniel Rothschild has lost his libel case against the Daily Mail following a 2010 story which he said portrayed him as a “puppet-master”.

The paper said  Rothschild set up a meeting between then EU Trade Commissioner Lord Mandelson and Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska on the eve of a major trade deal.

Mr Rothschild, 40, had sought substantial damages over what he described as

“sustained and unjustified attacks”

by the Daily Mail in the piece published in May 2010.

Read More

Review: Gilad Atzmon @ Ronnie Scott's

http://londonjazz.blogspot.com

Gilad Atzmon at CBSO Centre, January 2011
Photo: Russ Escritt/ Birmingham Jazz


Gilad Atzmon with Strings
(Ronnie Scott's, 8th February 2012. Review by Chris Parker)

In his latest book, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (Zero Books), Gilad Atzmon attributes his Damascene conversion from 'Jewish nationalist' to 'ordinary human being' who had 'left Chosen-ness behind' to his sudden exposure, as a teenage conscript, to the music of Charlie Parker, specifically the great alto player's Bird with Strings album, described by Atzmon as 'an intense, libidinal extravaganza of wit and energy'.

Thirty-odd years on, the Israeli-born saxophonist/clarinettist documented his devotion to Parker, bop and his consequent idealised picture of the country that spawned them in an album, the title of which reveals the depth of his subsequent disillusionment: In Loving Memory of America. The music on this recording takes the jazz-soloist-with-strings format and explores its possibilities, partly via the Parker route (standards in which searing alto improvisations blaze like so many comets across a lush backdrop of shimmering strings) and partly via original compositions ranging from smart tangos to intense personal meditations.

Read More

Alan Dershowitz on Tuba

in , , , , , , , ,

By Gilad Atzmon

“Dershowitz is not only a remarkable liar and slanderer, but also an extreme opponent of elementary civil rights” Noam Chomsky

The following is an analytical yet amusing glimpse into the deceitful and psychological  nature of  Zionist propaganda as manifested by arch Zionist Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz wrote last week, “in a recent post, Atzmon said that he would be willing to play alongside David Duke. What a duet!”

This little insignificant anecdote brought a smile to my face because in my text I was actually positively considering joining a new healing musical adventure along together with Alan Dershowitz on tuba and David Duke on trumpet.

Here are my words, “I really do not understand why Alan Dershowitz believes himself to be morally superior to Duke.  Dershowitz is a Zionist Jewish supremacist, he is a world leading advocate of a racist and expansionist ideology, namely Zionism. And yet, I wouldn’t say NO to an invitation for a musical gathering along together with Dershowitz on tuba and Duke playing the trumpet, just because I believe that music brings people together.”

The text is plainly clear. There is no room for misinterpretation. It was not a ‘duet’ which I was willing to join but actually a ‘trio’ that would include Alan Dershowitz alongside David Duke. Dershowitz lied again. Instead of just politely declining and admitting that he is ‘no good’ on tuba, he followed once again his falsehearted tactics-first he put words in my mouth and then interpreted the words he himself invented.  “But that's exactly where Atzmon belongs,” wrote Dershowitz  - “in the company of neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, homophobes, misogynists, sexists and other bigots.”

If Dershowitz was an intellectual, which he isn’t or an artist which he certainly isn’t, one could have argued that this kind of behaviour suggests that the elder Zionist may live in a cute phantasmic solipsistic universe. If Dershowitz wasn’t aware of his deceitful actions, he could have been classified as a psychopath. But I actually, tend to believe that there is a certain level of awareness behind Dershowitz actions. And the conclusion is, indeed, very concerning, we are dealing with an inherently dishonest person, a ‘remarkable liar’, as Noam Chomsky describes him along together many other intellectual and humanists who have reached the same conclusion.

But why is he lying? Why is he doing it so often? Can he get away with it? Clearly not anymore, yet he wouldn’t stop. At this stage he cannot stop.

Read More

Rich Siegel-The Way to Peace (check him out!!!)

The Way to Peace (feat. Gilad Atzmon, Eugene Moye, Gary Ciuci, Cameron Brown & Anthony Pinciotti)The Way to Peace is Rich Siegel’s brilliant debut album. Rich is a NYC pianist, singer  and song writer. But Rich is also a dedicated Palestinian solidarity activist who devotes most of his time and energy to the Palestinian cause.  

Rich was brought up as a Zionist but in the last decade he has been reawakening to the Palestinian plight. Like a few other Israeli and Jewish artists, he decided to transform guilt into responsibility.

This album is his way to peace

The album features Rich’s warm voice and brilliant piano playing. It also features Eugene Moye, Gary Ciuci, Cameron Brown, Anthony Pinciotti and myself on sax and clarinet.

 

Buy Rich’s album and support his Journey:
itunes.apple.com/

Amazon.co.uk/

Amazon.com

www.cdbaby.com

Palestine Online Store

“Have You No Sense of Decency,” Mr. Dershowitz?

By Nicholas Urie

http://www.nicholasurie.com/

The publication of Alan Dershowitz’s latest article, A Victory Over Bigotry at Friends Seminary, from The Algemeiner on February 2 has me frothing with confusion once again over the charge that New York’s Quaker Friends Seminary is a harbor of anti-Semitism and bigotry. This time, the article is dedicated to Dershowitz’s conquest of the school, a kind of published victory lap reminding everyone of the undeniable power of ‘The Dersh.’

My confusion comes from the sheer amount of spin and misinformation present in all of Mr. Dershowitz’s writings on the concert at the Quaker Meetinghouse. As someone intimately involved in the production of the concert, I just don’t quite know What Dershowitz is getting on about and why the school is in the middle. It seems like the Dershiverse is capable of bending any fact into a tool to manipulate and injure the Friends Seminary.

Read More