Atzmon, Mosley and Respect

After his recent pronouncement that we need more Holocaust deniers, the jazz musician and antisemitic crank Gilad Atzmon has outdone himself. In an interview published last week, he expounds again his mission "to expose the hypocritical nature of Jewish and Israeli culture and mindset". This requires personal courage on his part, for "by doing that I touched a Jewish nerve. I learn to live with it, they rather prefer to crucify me. This was always their method, nothing changed."

Crucifixion, indeed, was always "their" method. As Matthew's Gospel (27:22-5) puts it, in the most historically catastrophic passage in Christian scripture (emphasis added):

[22] Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified. [23] And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified. [24] When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. [25] Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

Not content with alluding to ancient antisemitic libels, Atzmon throws in more recent ones too. I've noted before that he contends that the notorious Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately depicts the state of modern America, whatever its status as history. Here he is saying it again: "I argue ... that with the current state of Jewish (political and economical [sic]) power, the debate concerning the truthfulness of the protocols is meaningless." He seriously believes that the historicity of this document is an open question!

For good measure, Atzmon pays gracious tribute to the pseudonymous bigot Israel Shamir as an "intellectually crucial and genuine voice", an accolade he also bestows on a distributor of Holocaust-denial tracts called Paul Eisen. Their opponents among Jews on the Left are easily diagnosed as suffering from "a Talmudic intellectual obsession".

This is crude and foul, and from that source also predictable. I mention it once more because it is relevant information in the campaign for effective labelling in politics. Atzmon is, after all, a twice-invited speaker to the annual 'Marxism' jamboree of the Socialist Workers' Party, whose newspaper describes his rants not in the way I have just done, but as 'fearless tirades against Zionism'. The SWP is, of course, the controlling organisation behind the Respect 'Coalition'.

Respect's latest campaign is to liken Condoleezza Rice, who is visiting the UK this week, to - get this - the wartime fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. There is, I suppose, the merest tangential and chronological connection between the two. When Mosley was conducting a demagogic racist campaign in West London in 1958 against the background of the Notting Hill riots, Ms Rice was experiencing racism at first hand as a small child in segregated Alabama. It would be easy to say that Respect lacks a sense of history and decency, but that would be too kind. Look closely at the organisation, its methods and propaganda, and you find what is, alongside the British National Party, the most prominent racist and fascist organisation in Britain today.