Socialist Fight statement on Gilad Atzmon, Devon Nola, Ian Greenhalgh of Veterans Today, anti-communism, racism and antisemitism 25-1-2020
1830/01/2020 by socialistfight
Signed by Gerry Downing, Mick Artur, Paul Humphreys, John Carty (full members), Charlie Walsh, Ella Downing, Gareth Martin (candidate members), Wilhelm Specklin (Holland), Dov Winter (USA), (International sympathisers).
During the Q&A, Atzmon got more specific. He drew up a series of bell curves to illustrate the dominance of what he termed the “Jewish cognitive elite” — an elite created, he said, by 1,500 years of the children of “European rabbinical Jews” and Jewish merchants intermarrying to foster a “society based on mammon and scholarship.”
America, he alleged, was caught in the throes of “cognitive partitioning,” with rich Jews leading us around by the nose.
Cohen threw up his hands and attempted to put a halt to such talk, saying the audience didn’t come to hear “this kind of debate.”
But in fact, many in the crowd did.
“We all agree with freedom of speech and association, but you can’t have that without freedom from association,” chimed in one man sitting in the back.
This man wanted Atzmon to address how “sociopaths like George Soros” and various Israeli charities had somehow aided and abetted the wave of refugees and immigrants washing across Europe.
Couldn’t the “Jewish concept of diaspora” be influencing that, he demanded?
I sat there waiting for Atzmon to refute this man’s absurdly broad, anti-Semitic claim, but Atzmon actually gave it credence: “Your question is spot-on,” he responded. “Soros is supporting a lot of pro-immigration lobbies,” he said, along with the rest of the “Jewish intelligentsia.
“For Jews, it is better to live in a society that is fragmented and sectarian,” Atzmon said. “And yet, Israel is the most anti-immigration country in the world.”
The real conspiracy, he maintained, wasn’t that Jews somehow controlled things like immigration, but that we’re “not allowed to talk about it.”
I looked around to find many of the audience members smiling and shaking their heads in agreement. A guy in back of me started ranting about J.F.K.’s 1965 immigration act, which got rid of country (i.e. racial) quotas for immigration. That, he said, is what “changed everything” in America — for the worse.
The Socialist Fight Statement
Socialist Fight unreservedly condemns as racist and antisemitic Gilad Atzmon, Devon Nola and Ian Greenhalgh of Veterans Today and most of the milieu they attract and those who support them. And Gilad Atzmon notoriously said: “I despise the Jew in me and detest the Jew in you”, clearly indicating he was antisemitic. Socialist Fight rejects the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theories they promulgate and identify them as irreconcilable enemies of Socialist Fight, Trotskyism in general and all who wish to fight for a socialist future. [1]
On 6th September 2019 Devon Nola republished on her Facebook site an extract is from the In Plain Sight blog which contained this paragraph.
“One of the first new laws created by the Jewish Bolsheviks when they took over Russia was to make “antisemitism” punishable by jail or death. Despite its freedoms, the United States is now following in Russia’s footsteps, with Jews like Chuck Schumer leading the charge.” [2]
This is Nazi propaganda. The “Jewish Bolsheviks” did not “take over Russia”. The Bolsheviks led a socialist revolution, the single greatest progressive event in human history, as yet unsurpassed in its human liberation effects worldwide. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Trotsky, naturally outlawed the Tsar’s pogroms against all Jews and stopped the mass indiscriminate slaughter of Jews by the White Armies during the Civil War.
Devon Nola, Gilad Atzmon and others defended this quote in a series of posts on her own Facebook site on 6th September and on Gerry Downing’s on the 8th and 28th of September. Here are some of their published comments which identify them as our irreconcilable enemies. In this endnote are the Facebook sites which contain the debates. We have not corrected the typos. [3]
Devon Nola
Devon Nola wrote on 6th September 2019:
“Pointing out that Bolshevism was a Jewish-led “revolution” isn’t anti-Semitic, it’s fact. And the crimes they carried out were heinous, however, this gets buried in historical narratives.”
And:
“actually, nothing here is propaganda. Bolshevism was a Jewish-led form of government, and we can delve into what caused anti-Jewish sentiment pre-Bolshevism.”
She really believes the gross reactionary lies of the White armies and the Nazis. She regrets the decisive actions of the Bolsheviks in putting an immediate end to the Tsar’s and then the White armies’ pogroms of the Jews, and regrets the re-imposition of the death penalty for the mass slaughter of Jews during the Civil War, and claims not to know what “what caused anti-Jewish sentiment pre-Bolshevism” – i.e. maybe the Tsar had a point and they deserved it. Hers are antisemitic posts.
Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon wrote on 8th September thread:
“save me and the rest of us of your cosmopolitan working class revolutionary crap”
And
“this localist thing worked everywhere from Libya to China to Venezuela ..and in Russia it also started to work only when cosmopolitanism was defeated … if I ve to chose between your hero (Leon Trotsky) and Stalin I am certainly with that latter .. in fact the only communists I get on with are stalinists…”
And explaining why Stalin was right to begin mass murdering Jews:
“the fact that Stalin turned against the Jews is known to everyone here.. I do believe that Stalin insisted eventually to give Russia back to the Russians and this clearly made some ppl upset … it certainly explains Stalin’s paranoia ,, he knew what he was up against ,.”
And explaining why fascism has nothing to do with imperialism and is really all about equality:
“Fascism is a simple principle that adhere to equality within strict boundaries. It has nothing to do with imperialism or dominance of other people.”
And
“I have no issues with Lenin or the fact that he spoke Yiddish … the question is why Stalin concealed the revelations re Lenin’s partial ethnicity ? 2. Similarly I wonder why questioning the demography of revolution pushes Gerry Joseph Downing to a tantrum…3 . Would Gerry and the other Cosmopolitans would also try to silence the discussion of demography if it was revealed that 70% of the Bolshevists were Shia Muslims or members of a Christian cult? I guess that we know the answer. We are touching upon questions to do with J(ew) privilege in the Left…”
And in his book, The Wandering Who? p179:
“If Iran and Israel fight a nuclear war that kills tens of millions of people, “some may be bold enough to argue that ‘Hitler might have been right after all.’” [4]
Are we bold enough to admire the politics of Adolph Hitler?
What about a white supremacist former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan? Here is David Duke’s letter to Gilad Atzmon in September 2011:
“Dear Gilad,
As usual Gilad, you write such fine articles exposing the evil of Zionism and Jewish supremacism. I do want to clarify a couple of things that I imagine you have already considered.
“… 2. The vast majority of influential Jews who hold real power in media, politics, academia, and finance are hell-bent to promote massive immigration of all types. They receive great pleasure from every degeneration and degradation of the European people. They are exemplified by the Jewish porn kings, who openly boast how they are purposely degrading the Gentile enemy and subverting the ethical values of the European Christian people. [5]
Atzmon returns the complement
«David Duke is a humanist because he says, “I want to celebrate my right and you should celebrate your rights» whether you are Muslim or black or whatever. He believes that all people should celebrate their rights, this is his current philosophy. Avidgor Liberman (arch Zionist) is not a humanist, because he wants to celebrate his rights at the expense of other people.””
So, the lynching of black people does not count for both these white supremacists.
David Landy quotes Atzmon:
“We must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously…American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy.” “Israel’s behaviour throws some light on the persecution of Jews throughout history. (Atzmon 2003-2007)” [6]
Sue Blackwell comments on Israel Shamir and Mary Rizzo:
“The spider in the web is Israel Shamir and what is most dishonest about Rizzo’s article is that not once did he make an appearance in her article. Shamir runs his website (link not allowed on Facebook). His web pages are a veritable gold mine of anti-Semitic calumnies. You would have to plumb the depths of the worst neo-Nazi publications to find a defence of the Easter Blood Libel accusation (that Jews slaughtered non-Jewish children to make the Passover bread at Easter).” [7]
Israel Shamir, in his post, For Whom The Bell Tolls, says:
“The Holocaust concept is just another form of this prayer. They say that even their death is not like the death of anybody else. We must deny the concept of Holocaust without doubt and hesitation, even if every story of Holocaust down to the most fantastic invention of Wiesel were absolutely true.
Always looking for the bright side of things: now the Europeans do not have to worry about the dark prophecy of the Protocols. The rule of the Elders of Zion is already upon us, and egad! — it is not half as bad as we feared. At least, not yet.” [8]
These published remarks put this political current outside the ranks not only of socialism and the workers’ movement but of liberal democratic capitalist society itself.
And here is The Writings of Israel Shamir, Dispute in England around 2006 Tony Greenstein, Charlie Pottins and Sue Blackwell are featured as strong opponents of Atzmon, Shamir, Eisen and Mary Rizzo, (many of the links cited there no longer work, including Gilad Atzmon’s):
“The bottom line of the dispute in England is positive: though the Jewish alliance keeps the whole spectrum from Daily Telegraph to Lenin’s Tomb, they lost Counterpunch and Antiwar, and are retreating into their reservation. Our friends Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen and Mary Rizzo are the shining stars of the battle, and they are doing good by defeating the adversary.” [9]
Gerry Downing personally participated in pickets against David Duke in London in the mid-1990s
Ian Greenhalgh
Veterans Today is a far right website which hosts the ex-British Army, antisemitic, Holocaust denying, conspiracy theory man Ian Greenhalgh. Doctor Kevin Barrett’s site also regularly hosts him and a range of other conspiracy freak heads. [10]
Gilad Atzmon and others whom we recognise have posted there. Socialist Fight utterly condemns the political character of these sites.
In an article on 14 December 2019 entitled U.K. Election Meddling: Where did all the votes go? Ian Greenhalgh wrote:
“Britain was just struck by disaster as Rothschild stooge and compulsive liar Boris Johnson was ‘elected’ Prime Minister is a general election. I use quotes around elected as it seems obvious that the polling result was completely fraudulent.” [11]
Writing Boris Johnson is a “Rothschild stooge” is a standard antisemitic trope. In an article The End Is Near For The United Kingdom? August 30, 2019 he wrote:
“You know who I am talking about, the Zionists of the banking classes, their political lackeys and those who control the great and the good via blackmail. They are the people who killed JFK, who blew up the twin towers, who instigated both world wars, who crushed Russia and Germany; they have the blood of hundreds of millions on their hands and they have no regard for human life.
“At the top are a handful of elite Jewish banking families, names that will be all too familiar. Ezra Pound listed most of them in a radio broadcast back in 1942:
“No Rothschild is English… No Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, Lehman, Warburg, Kuhn, Kahn, Schiff, Sieff or Solomon were ever born Anglo-Saxon. And it is for this filth that you fight. It is for this filth that you murdered your Empire. It is this filth that elects, selects, your politicians.”
Prime among them is the Rothschilds; Boris is a close associate of the London branch of that most infamous family and he serves their interests, not those of the people of the United Kingdom.” [12]
In a post, Holocaust-denying ‘Nazi grandma’ sentenced to 10 months in jail, on May 15, 2016 he wrote:
What sort of nation throws 87 year old women into jail for speaking the truth? Certainly not one that can consider itself to be a functioning free and fair democracy. I present a few pictures of the Auschwitz ‘death camp’ to support Ms. Haverbeck’s position – it was not a death camp, it was a labour camp. [13]
This is vile reactionary racist antisemitic nonsense. Ezra Pound was a Nazi follower and supported Hitler in WWII. [14] Socialist Fight unreservedly condemns it and advises all serious socialist and democrats not to associate with this milieu in any way.
Notes
[1] Gerry Downing 27-9-19, Jewish Bolshevism is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, https://socialistfight.com/2019/09/23/jewish-bolshevism-is-an-anti-communist-and-antisemitic-canard/,
Gerry Downing, 28-9-19, On the anti-communism and anti-Semitism of Devon Nola and Gilad Atzmon, https://socialistfight.com/2019/09/28/on-the-anti-communism-and-anti-semitism-of-devon-nola-and-gilad-atzmon/
Ian Donovan, 30-9-19, Once Again on ‘Anti-Semitism” and all that Jazz, https://socialistfight.com/2019/09/30/once-again-on-anti-semitism-and-all-that-jazz/
[2] In Plain Sight, November 5, 2018 Jewish Senator Introduces Law To Imprison Americans For Criticizing Israel
https://ronabbass.wordpress.com/2018/11/05/jewish-senator-introduces-law-to-imprison-americans-for-criticizing-israel/ This post correctly points out the reactionary character of the bill before writing the vile antisemitic paragraph.
[3] Devon Nola’s Facebook site, 6 September 2019, https://www.facebook.com/devon.nola/posts/10157467087759481
Gerry Downing’s Facebook site 8 September 2019, https://www.facebook.com/gerdowning/posts/10220730773007134
Gerry Downing’s Facebook site 28 September 2019, https://www.facebook.com/gerdowning/posts/10220933157546621
[4] Gilad Atzmon, Zero Books; 30 Sept. 2011, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics.
[5] David Duke, July 29, 2011 Letter to the Courageous Former Israeli Gilad Atzmon, ttps://davidduke.com/letter-to-the-courageous-former-israeli-gilad-atzmon/
[6] Gilad Atzmon, On Anti-Semitism, originally at his personal web site, December 20, 2003.
[7] The writings of Israel Shamir, http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Eng8.htm
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Contained in his blog is, MUJCA, the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for Truth (formerly the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth), https://kevinbarrett.heresycentral.is/category/ffwn/
[11] Ian Greenhalgh, December 14, U.K. Election Meddling: Where did all the votes go? https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/12/14/election-meddling-where-did-all-the-votes-go/
[12] Ian Greenhalgh, August 30, 2019, The End Is Near For The United Kingdom? https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/12/12/the-end-is-near/
[13] Ian Greenhalgh, May 15, 2016, Holocaust-denying ‘Nazi grandma’ sentenced to 10 months in jail https://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/05/15/holocaust-denying-nazi-grandma-sentenced-to-10-months-in-jail/
[14] Kindley, Evan, The Nation, The Insanity Defense: Coming to terms with Ezra Pound’s politics, https://www.thenation.com/article/coming-to-terms-with-ezra-pounds-politics/
Platform of the Trotskyist Faction
25-1-2020 Ian D + two SF members
This platform is based on the proposition that the politics of Socialist Fight between 2015 and the beginning of 2020 were fundamentally correct, though obviously we cannot claim perfection.
We reject current attempts to fundamentally change them and consider the trend of some in SF to join in the demonisation of Jewish and Israeli-derived critics of the activities of the Zionist-lobby and its Jewish bourgeois material basis, and even more mainstream figures on the Jewish left, to be a capitulation to Zionism and a betrayal of the anti-imperialist programme of SF.
Our platform is Trotskyist and stands on orthodoxy as elaborated in the article ‘The Marxist Theory of the State’ on the concrete nature of post war Stalinism, the need for defence of the degenerated and deformed workers states against imperialism combined with political revolution to bring the proletariat to command of the workers state politically, while opposing counterrevolution. We saw and see today the proletariat as the only force that can defeat the counterrevolution whether emanating from the bureaucracy or elsewhere, with particular regard to the two remaining deformed workers states in Cuba and North Korea.
In common with SF generally we are defenders of semi-colonial countries, including Russia and China, against imperialism. We support the unification of Ireland and a single multi-ethnic state of Palestine, in the context of permanent revolution and in the case of the Middle East, a regional revolution centred on the Arab workers and leading to liberation of the Palestinians from Zionism.
Regarding Zionism and its international manifestation we endorse the 2014 Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism, and note that this was the basis for SF’s activity on this question over the last five years. We think this was fundamentally correct and principled, and is the only materialist explanation for the very visible and powerful role of Zionism in Western imperialist politics. We note that those who seek to junk it do not have an alternative materialist analysis.
We stand for the historic politics of SF on special oppression with regard to oppression based on perceived ‘race’, sex or sexual orientation. We stand for workers defence guards and a workers militia to crush fascist threats to workers and the oppressed, and we advocate that the workers movement take independent armed action to suppress fascist political activity, which is never about persuasion but mobilising for murder, as a matter of physical self-defence.
We reject male chauvinist, homophobic and transphobic ideology and stand for the liberation of women and also oppressed sexual minorities through socialist revolution. We reject both all kinds of sexual abuse of youth, and moral guardianship of youth by bourgeois and reactionary moralists. We reject all state interference in the personal lives of consenting adults.
We stand as did Trotsky for the renewal of trade unions through rank-and-file activity and the advancement of new militant leaders against the bureaucracy, and the sensitive, tactically intelligent use of the transitional programme and the transitional method to build a revolutionary opposition in the trade unions.
Likewise we endorse the Trotskyist approach to bourgeois workers parties and class independence embodied in the approach of the Trotskyist movement, as maintained in the practice of SF and the material we published and republished rejecting the anti-Marxist, sectarian distortions of the Spartacist tradition.
We condemn Brexit as fundamentally anti-immigrant and we stand for the abolition of all anti-immigrant laws and controls. We endorse Trotsky’s 1923 essay calling for a United States of Europe and seek to apply this transitional approach to the current situation.
We also endorse the corrective on the question of the right of public criticism put forward by SF, to the errors of the 3rd and 4th internationals regarding such criticism, which ultimately led to phenomena like Healyism, ie. to sects and cults which disgrace the name of Trotskyism, to its fragmentation and degeneration.
On this and on all other outstanding questions which cannot be addressed in full here, we stand on the politics of Marxism, Leninism and Trotskyism, which we consider to be the same movement. We therefore defend the programme of SF as was against the revisionism and unprincipled blocs now engaged in by comrade Downing, who we hope will come to his senses.
Socialist Fight 
This is not an SF statement but the statement of a faction of SF that is not a majority. John Carty is not a member as he lapsed a long time ago. And Gerry Downing is a fraudster.
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John Carty is a full member and that was agreed at the meeting on 17 January.
Re John Carty’s membership of Socialist Fight
Dear Comrades,
Comrade John Carty came around to my house yesterday, asserted that he regarded himself as a member of Socialist Fight and gave me £20 membership subscription.
He explained he was struggling, he had been blacklisted since early summer because he had recruited 25 building worker to the Unite trade union. He was behind with rent and had not worked for three weeks, and so could not sustain a standing order. Having paid £80 to the group in 2019 and £240 in 2018 and having participated in many SF events he felt aggrieved that Ian was now trying to deny him membership. ”Am I now too poor to be a communist?” he asked.
Gerry
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Just as there are noses which can’t detect certain scents, there are those on the left who simply lose their ability to detect antisemitism the instant that antisemitism is given even the lightest dusting of the language of anti-imperialism, anti-globalisation, or anti-capitalism.
Circa 2002, Gilad Atzmon, along with “Israel Shamir” and Paul Eisen — all associated with Deir Yassin Remembered — intentionally aimed for an audience in this camp, taking the usual imagery and ideology of antisemitism and cloaking it in “anti-imperialist” garb, promoting a position that was openly pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist, but also anti-Jew, with only the most furtive and perfunctory layer of plausible deniability draped over it.
By the time of, say, the 2012 PSC AGM it was clear that they’d been sussed and the left said goodbye to its promoters of Holocaust denial — “Shamir,” Eisen, Clark-Lowes, and Atzmon. Deir Yassin Remembered was effectively kaput from the moment in 2005 its leader, Paul Eisen, openly embraced Holocaust denial.
Almost a decade later — a decade in which Atzmon has denounced the left as a mental disease, strengthened his ties to the alt-right, and found a home in the Holocaust denial movement whose leaders he lionises — Ian Donovan is apparently still casting about for pretexts under which to continue to celebrate Atzmon’s grotesquely antisemitic rants as if they held value as anything other than examples of grotesquely antisemitic rants.
Like a self-described astronomer who insists that he has proven the moon is cheese and who won’t give up no matter the weighty onslaught of mere actual fact, Ian has shown he will insistently ride his hobby horse to not merely the margins but the margins of the margins.
And then he will keep riding.
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Svengali eh? Well I’ve been opposing the Atzmon witchhunt since 2005, not 2011. Of course one thing that your comment does not say is that Atzmon, Eisen and Shamir are Jewish, though Eisen is not Israeli. They are an organic Jewish reaction to the genocidal crimes of the Israeli state.
When it comes to comments like this it is often difficult to tell if the author is a Zionist or not. Its deliberately left ambiguous. But whatever. Wittingly or not, those who promote smears against leftists and anti-imperialists for defending Israel’s Anti-Deutsch equivalents are part of a well-oiled propaganda machine to protect the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois lobby/caste, which is one of the most important components of the machine driving for genocide against the Palestinian people. In that sense they are like freelancers working for Goebells’ Ministry of Propaganda.
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Oh dear.
Holocaust denial is an ideology that sprang from the racist, white-supremacist extreme right six decades ago, grown from their keenness to defend Hitler and attack Jews, and it has generally remained a feature of the extreme antisemitic right, despite efforts of those like Atzmon and Paul Eisen who have tried to tart it up for consumption on the left.
It is not a coincidence that from the start Holocaust deniers routinely adopted the Nazi habit of condemning “Judeobolshevism.”
It is not a coincidence that the Institute for Historical Review, the US’s largest Holocaust denial organisation, not only declares itself against “Judeobolshevism” but was co-founded by a “send ’em back to Africa, I’ll even buy the plane tickets” type named Willis Carto. And it’s not a coincidence that the other cofounder was the BNP’s David McCalden.
It is not a coincidence that the organisation’s current leader, Mark Weber, is the former editor of the white-supremacist magazine “National Vanguard,” the party organ of the whites-only party National Alliance, founded by William Pierce, who pseudonymously wrote one of the defining texts of the white separatist movement in the US, “The Turner Diaries.”
It is not a coincidence that the Institute for Historical Review, on 1 October 2016, hosted an event with three speakers, one of them Weber, another of them Kevin B. MacDonald, a discredited racist academic who was scheduled as a keynote speaker at the infamous alt-right Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally and who was also the only person to *voluntarily* testify on David Irving’s behalf in the famous trial.
And it is not a coincidence that the third speaker at that 1 October 2016 event was Gilad Atzmon.
Why is it not a coincidence? Because anyone paying attention knows that Atzmon routinely lionises Holocaust deniers. He’s got a positive fetish for them.
– Paul Eisen? Atzmon lionises him, does YouTube videos with him, calls him “my dear friend,” and has done fundraisers for Eisen’s organisation.
– David Irving? Atzmon lionises him.
– The late Ernst Zündel? Atzmon lionises him.
– The late Robert Faurisson? Atzmon not only lionises him, he went out his way to make an hour-long softball YouTube interview with him a few years before his death, and the interview of course lionises him.
– Alison Chabloz? Atzmon lionises her.
If you’re keeping score, that’s three of three of the UK’s headline-making Holocaust deniers (Irving, Chabloz, Eisen), and three of three of the world’s most infamous Holocaust deniers (Irving, Z¸ndel, Faurisson). What do they have in common? Atzmon has lionised them all, praised them all, celebrated them all, defended them all.
And he defends them on the actual content. That is, Atzmon’s position isn’t “they’re wrong, but people have the right to be loud antisemitic crackpots.” It’s “There’s a good chance these intellectual giants are right to say the Holocaust really *is* a big international Jewish hoax.”
No wonder Atzmon found the atmosphere at the neo-fash Holocaust denial organisation Institute for Historical Review to his liking. They’re in the same groove.
So much to his liking, in fact, that he went back again a year later, at 6 May 2017, to give another talk. In the same groove.
Not a coincidence.
But Ian Donovan has the textbook case of cognitive dissonance — as an antiracist supporting Atzmon’s gleeful racism — and is trying to avoid it by burying it in desperation under a colossal, fluffy meringue of well-whipped buzzwords.
So let us ask directly.
Ian, Holocaust denial is unabashedly and unequivocally an extreme-right fantasy of Jewish evil, racist nonsense right to the brim of its tinfoil hat. Not even you can deny that.
Gilad Atzmon promotes and praises leading Holocaust deniers uncritically, and considers Holocaust denial a defensible intellectual position despite its transparently extremist, far-right racist nature. Not even you can deny that.
How are you okay with that?
Can you answer that directly and in an on-topic way — that is, without retreating to tactical nebulosity cynically deployed, more heaps of verbal meringue, or hiding behind desperate whataboutery?
I don’t think you can. You haven’t resolved the cognitive dissonance at the root of this because there is no way to do so that doesn’t involve rejecting either the antisemite Atzmon or anti-racism as a principle. You clearly want your square circle — antisemite Atzmon *and* anti-racism — and all it’s doing is driving you ever farther into incoherence.
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So Mahmood Abbas, Ahmedinjehad, Gamal Abdul Nasser, and many other Middle Eastern figures who doubt(ed) and/or denied the Nazi holocaust, were all part of the Western far right, were they?
You can believe that if you like. It means your Israeli state bears no responsibility for casting doubt on the Nazi genocide in many Middle Eastern eyes and giving the old far right a hearing in the Middle East among Arabs and some Jews.
Either that is true or it is not. Zionists can complain about it until blue in the face. They are the cause of this phenomenon.
When the revolutionary left is able to deliver real solidarity with the Palestinian in such a way as to make a real material difference to the plight of the Palestinian people then this phenomenon will just melt away.
It’s your fault, dumb-ass.
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See, what I like about asking you direct questions directly is that you’re incapable of answering them directly. And when you inevitably explode in a flaming orange fireball of misdirection and whataboutery as your chosen forms of evasion you demonstrate to the reader just how fundamentally dishonest a man you actually are.
Anyone with eyes can see that I asked you about Gilad Atzmon, directly, and in detail.
Who’s entirely missing from your answer?
Gilad Atzmon.
Why?
Because you’re a very dishonest man protecting an antisemitic racist and champion of Holocaust deniers, because you can’t quite bring yourself to publicly disagree with his racism. But at the same time, Atzmon’s antisemitism is so easily established, and so impossible to deny, that your only escape route is to … do what you did, which is to evade the topic entirely, taking to the rhetorical hills.
So zero points. Try again. This time direct the topic of your answer to the topic of the question, which is — as you apparently need reminding — Gilad Atzmon, and his wretched, racist little habit of bigging up every major Holocaust denier there is.
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Revolutionary Leninism is for the total defeat of imperialism; it is therefore for the total ending of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, called “Israel” by Western colonialism, and for Palestinian revolutionary victory and the formation of a revolutionary Palestinian state. This does not have to be a workers state (although it may well be one by the time the overall Arab/Palestinian/Egyptian revolution wins).
Furthermore, since even according to the Board of Deputies, “Israel is central to the Jewish identity” (which is true), Leninism also cannot see any difference between talking about people as being “Jewish” or talking about them as being “Zionist” since the vast, vast majority of Jews defend the “state of Israel” even when they (rarely) weep over the savage war crimes, torture and child killing that this Nazi colonial land-theft necessitates.
The only Jew who is not a Zionist is one who openly campaigns for the destruction of “Israel” and the total victory of the Palestinian revolution and who makes no claim of any kind about “fair sharing” of the land. Try finding one!!
So Sven and Ian – where do you stand on these matters?
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And Gerry.
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Let’s see if Ian can actually — directly — answer my question about Atzmon’s fetish for Holocaust deniers first, or whether he will use your question as a pretext to dishonestly evade mine. By which I mean, dishonestly envade mine AGAIN.
Because he seems to really, really, really not want people to know what he actually thinks about Atzmon’s fetish for Holocaust deniers.
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And Ian has apparently gone into hiding on this. He can’t bear the possibility that he might actually have to say what he thinks about Gilad Atzmon’s promotion of Holocaust denial. He knows on some level that there’s a painful hole in his dialectic, and that it’s left antisemitic bilge flooding unchecked into the cargo hold of his scholar-ship. But he doesn’t know what to do about it, because he cannot bear to denounce the antisemite at the source of it. So the flood continues unabated.
Gilad Atzmon’s stance is that the following is an intellectually defensible position and not a hallucinatory belch from fulminating Jew-haters: that Jewish organisations, in a consolidated and unified way, with astonishing levels of global coordination from day one, have created and promugated a myth made from whole cloth that a third of the world’s Jews had been murdered, have apparently cobbled up vast forged evidence to this effect, have promulgated this myth exclusively for greedy gain, and in the process have apparently gotten all six million missing Jews to agree to stay missing so as not to derail the gravy train, and have also apparently gotten to every academic historian in the world and made each and every one of them an offer he or she couldn’t refuse — and who was it who cracked this case wide open? Sheer geniuses like Ernst Zündel, author and publisher of “The Hitler We Loved and Why.”
Now, that position — well, it’s nuttier than a crate of Toblerone, wouldn’t you agree, Ian? Not merely antisemitic, but bulging-eyed psychotic, wouldn’t you agree, Ian? Yet Atzmon celebrates people who hold this position, and calls them brilliant and keen-minded intellectuals for holding this position. And again, his praise goes beyond “aren’t they brave for saying this” and into “you know, I think they might be right, and that’s why for the last fifteen years I have dodged every single opportunity I was offered to say they’re even slightly wrong.”
Now, this is why it’s a brass tacks question, and why it’s so important for you, Ian, to either prove you can answer it face on or else demonstrate (again) to the membership of Socialist Fight that it’s a point beyond your moral capacity to handle coherently.
Here it is again.
Direct question coming up.
Almost here.
Here it is!
Do you agree with Atzmon, Ian, that the Holocaust denial position — as laid out above and easily shown to be nuttier than a crate of Toblerone — is intellectually defensible, and not, oh, say, just rewarmed neo-Nazi bullshit given a light little spritz of anti-imperialist perfume to entice the easily fooled Ian Donovans of the world to swallow it whole?
If it’s not intellectually defensible, and clearly it’s not, what does that tell you about Atzmon’s tolerance of and promotion of antisemitism? And your tolerance of Atzmon’s tolerance of and promotion of antisemitism?
Hint: “but but but something something Zionism” is not actually an answer. It’s a dishonest deflection.
Answer the direct question directly or be seen, fully observed — by the members of Socialist Fight who don’t believe antisemitism is a socialist value — as you once again melt into a puddle of deflection, whataboutery, buzzword soup and … your ongoing defense of antisemitism.
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[…] Socialist Fight statement on Gilad Atzmon, Devon Nola, Ian Greenhalgh of Veterans Today, anti-commun… […]
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Ian is looking weak. No answer to Sven
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Worse than that — sven was “answered” by being Donovan tacitly blocking me from posting.
He has no answer except censorship.
He has failed.
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Once again: there is no such thing as “left-wing Anti-semitism” – there is only right-wing anti-Semitism as exemplified by the Hitler lovers who haven’t completely moved over to a pro-Zionist, pro-“Israel” position. And the fascists who back “Israel” and live and breathe nothing but anti-communism are trampling at will all over the bourgeois Labour party.
As I mentioned previously, the Holocaust was hugely assisted by the Zionist movement which helped Hitler get the mass of Jews on to trains to the death camps. The Holocaust for Palestinians was initiated at the same time, and has worsened ever since.
Defeat for imperialism and fascist Zionism. Victory to the Palestinian national liberation struggle.
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I see there will be a David Baddiel documentary on BBC on Monday about the Holocaust. And this stuff certainly is a BOGUS industry – to pretend that Zionists were hostile to the Holocaust at the time (they weren’t because it meant that alert elite Jews jumped ship to Palestine or elsewhere if they could) and give buckets of special pleading for the Jewish cause of exterminating the Palestinians from their own Arab homeland.
The documentary will correctly show that British imperialist anti-Semitism saw the British intelligence services and media of the 1940s deliberately play down or even cover up the Nazi extermination of ordinary Jews in the death camps because it might stimulate more communist revolutionary hatred of ALL imperialism.
But the biggest point of such pro-Zionist documentaries is to protect the “state of Israel” and the UK Jewish communities’ support for this Nazi-colonial abomination.
When will there be an once of sympathy on the BBC for the MILLIONS of people killed by US imperialist blitzkrieg in the Middle East???
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Who liberated Auschwitz, by the way?? The Red Army.
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[…] [5] Socialist Fight statement on Gilad Atzmon, Devon Nola, Ian Greenhalgh of Veterans Today, anti-communism, racism and antisemitism 25-1-2020, https://socialistfight.com/2020/01/30/socialist-fight-statement-on-gilad-atzmon-devon-nola-ian-green… […]
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