Al-Jazeerah has just published an op-ed entitled To Sit in the Dark by the jazz musician and former Israeli reservist Gilad Atzmon. It conforms to the man’s previous record, for he maintains that Jews bang on about the Holocaust because they want to maintain their power, privilege and dominion:
The victim strategy is the latest and most sophisticated form of Jewish supremacist segregation.... You can take from the Jew his religion, you can take away the chicken soup you can even put ‘sea fruit’ on his plate but once you take away the victim tendency, the Jew isn’t a Jew anymore. Once you lift the colossal threat of Hitler then the Jew becomes an ordinary boring being. Let me tell you, this is not going to happen.
It’s foul, foul stuff. But as regular readers will know, it fits with Atzmon’s insistence that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately depicts the Jewish conspiracy that seeks world domination:
[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously. It is beyond doubt that Zionists, the most radical, racist and nationalistic Jews around, have already managed to turn America into an Israeli mission force. The world's number one super power is there to support the Jewish state's wealth and security matters. The one-sided pro-Zionist take on the Israeli¬ Palestinian conflict, the American veto against every 'anti-Israeli' UN resolution, the war against Iraq and now the militant intentions against Syria, all prove beyond doubt that it is Zionist interests that America is serving. American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least. Whether the Americans enjoy the deterioration of their state's affairs will no doubt be revealed soon.
Who could possibly take this fevered antisemitic crank seriously? Again as regular readers will know, the answer is the Socialist Workers’ Party, the controlling organisation behind the Stop the War Coalition and the Respect ‘Coalition’ – and it does no harm to remind ourselves of the fact every time Atzmon opens his mouth. Atzmon was an invited speaker at the SWP’s ‘Marxism 2004’ jamboree last summer, and was the recipient of this puff piece by Socialist Worker in advance. According to the paper, Atzmon’s unabashed anti-Jewish bigotry is best described as:
... Gilad’s fearless tirades against Zionism.
Unsurprisingly, the regard is shared on the other side. Atzmon declared in an earlier interview with the paper:
I love Socialist Worker. It is the only newspaper in Britain which campaigns against Israel.
Taken literally, the second sentence in this quotation is patently absurd, but it needs to be considered in the context of the first sentence. Evidently what Atzmon means is that Socialist Worker is the only newspaper in Britain that campaigns against Israel in terms that he would recognise as ideologically congenial. Count me unsurprised.
