Green Party fights antisemitism

This time it is not an April fool post. But it is not in the UK either.

“Inge Höger’s wild conspiracy theory is pure speculation, without any concrete factual basis,” Volker Beck, a leading German Green Party MP and spokesman for the party on human rights, said last week.

“She employs the centuries-old image of the perfidiously murderous Jews. After the terrible murder of Vittorio Arrigoni in the Gaza Strip, only one thing is apparently clear to the Left Party: Israel is guilty. And should the opposite be proven, a lingering doubt will remain,” he said.

Read the rest of the Jerusalem Post piece here.

Green councillor and candidate Rupert Read pushes Gilad Atzmon

Rupert Read, Councillor and Parliamentary candidate for the Green Party in Norwich, asserts:

“I abhor violence and I abhor racism and discrimination in all its forms.”

and

“I reserve my right to criticise the foreign policy of the state of Israel without being smeared as ‘anti-Semitic’.”

That is certainly his right. Criticism of Israel isn’t antisemitic. Neither should we allow antisemitism to pass for criticism of Israel.

Gilad Atzmon is a jazz saxophonist and racist campaigner who has repeated (http://bit.ly/4EuvyN) the old libel that “the Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus”. He talks about a “Jewish lobby” and calls for Britain to “de-Zionise” itself. He calls for “de-judaisation”. He is frankly and comfortably antisemitic, and fights for anti-Jewish politics in the Palestine solidarity movement.

He is critical of those who compare the current Israel with Nazi Germany because he says Israel is a more radical evil: “Israel is nothing but evilness for the sake of evilness. It is wickedness with no comparison.”

Gilad Atzmon pushes classic anti-semitic Jewish conspiracy libel (http://bit.ly/4EuvyN):

“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 (in fact Zionists) do control the world.”

Rupert Read says:

“Like all Greens I am wholly aware of the particular suffering of the Jewish people through hundreds of years of European history and their being subject to a myriad of lies and prejudices culminating in the Holocaust. Anti-semitism is as a result an especially vile attitude, and one which I have absolutely no truck with whatsoever.”

On setting fire to synagogues, Gilad Atzmon:

“I’m not going to say whether it is right or not to burn down a synagogue, I can see that it is a rational act.”

Atzmon also calls for more Holocaust deniers.

Confidently and purposefully, Gilad Atzmon syllogises Jews, Israelis and Zionists. When he calls for “de-judaification” (http://bit.ly/2z5iDV), he wants precisely that – Israel without Jews, a Palestine solidarity movement without Jews – a world without Jews. And when, in this latest piece (http://bit.ly/48Mt9y) he calls for de-Zionisation, you can look in vain for a distinction between Zionists and Jews.

Instead of standing against Gilad Atzmon’s anti-Jewish campaign, Rupert Read twitters to his followers to read Atzmon’s latest piece, repeating Atzmon’s call for Britain to de-Zionise itself (November 17th 2009, http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/britain-must-de-zionise-itself-immediately-by-gilad-atzmon.html).

Frankly, this is horrifying. How much more is the Green Party going to stand for?

Mira Vogel and Raphael Levy

Update: in the comments below, Rupert Read apologises, and has removed the tweet. He tells us he didn’t realise that Gilad Atzmon was a fellow-traveller with Holocaust deniers. This is welcome.

But Atzmon’s piece was characteristic of his project, in that he conflated Jews and Zionists and called for de-Zionisation. It refreshed many antisemitic tropes which have historically attached to Jews – the conspiracy, the manipulation of power, the social damage – and attached them to Zionists. So his flirtations with Holocaust denial are a relevant part of a bigger problem: the piece Rupert Read linked to was clearly part of an anti-Jewish campaign. Yet he still thought it an “interesting” and worthwhile read. Why?

Update 2. There are a number of lucid comments from Green Party members and campaigners against antisemitism over on Engage, from where I linked to this piece.

Update 3. Gilad Atzmon now an open Holocaust denier, says one of his anti-Zionist antagonists.

Important – Howard Jacobson in The Independent

This Independent piece from Howard Jacobson sums up comprehensively what ‘criticism of Israel’ has come to be characterised as today.

“And Israel? Well, speaking on BBC television at the height of the fighting, Richard Kemp, former commander of British Troops in Afghanistan and a senior military adviser to the British government, said the following: “I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare where any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of civilians than the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) is doing today in Gaza.” A judgement I can no more corroborate than those who think very differently can disprove.

Right or wrong, it was a contribution to the argument from someone who is more informed on military matters than most of us, but did it make a blind bit of difference to the tone of popular execration? It did not. When it comes to Israel we hear no good, see no good, speak no good. We turn our backsides to what we do not want to know about and bury it in distaste, like our own ordure. We did it and go on doing it with all official contestation of the mortality figures provided by Hamas. We do it with Hamas’s own private executions and their policy of deploying human shields. We do it with the sotto voce admission by the UN that “a clerical error” caused it to mis-describe the bombing of that UN school which at the time was all the proof we needed of Israel’s savagery. It now turns out that Israel did not bomb the school at all. But there’s no emotional mileage in a correction. The libel sticks, the retraction goes unnoticed.

But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism. It is criticism of Israel, pure and simple.

…

But my argument is not with the Palestinians or even with Hamas. People in the thick of it pursue their own agenda as best they can. But what’s our agenda? What do we, in the cosy safety of tolerant old England, think we are doing when we call the Israelis Nazis and liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto? Do those who blithely make these comparisons know anything whereof they speak?“

Read it all.

David Aaronovitch suffers

David Aaronovitch writes in the JC on the new polite antisemitism:

“By minor serendipity these two things happened on Tuesday of last week. First there was the laconic posting in the comments section accompanying my column in the online edition of The Times. I’d written about the row over the oath. Anyway, in amongst the “I am British and they’ll have to force me to take an oath over my cold, dead body” stuff, was this from “Edward” of Lincoln. Repeating a line that I’d used, Edward simply appended: “Ah the international people. Don’t you just love them?”
…
“On the same evening as Edward slithered around the taste-and-decency guards, I attended a dinner at the Commons held to discuss “antisemitic discourse”, and comprising of a number of MPs, a gaggle of journalists — including two from the BBC — a writer or two and several folk from the community. The event was governed by a convention known as Chatham House Rules, whereby I can tell you what was said, but not who said it. And no, I can’t leave tantalising hints so that people can work it out. What do you take me for?”

Things went badly – read on at the JC.

HT: Tristan