Gilad Atzmon is a jazz & world music artist, a novelist and an author focusing on ID politics.
Welcome to Gilad Atzmon's webpage. This site provides information about Gilad's musical and intellectual activity.
Discussing Bibi, Tzipi and Yair
Yesterday, I was asked to debate professor Geoffrey Alderman – an avid Zionist academic. To my great surprise Alderman and I agreed on pretty much everything: we had similar views on Israeli politics, the nature of the Jewish State, Netanyahu's Politics, Netanyahu’s engineered crisis, Jewish Lobby Domination in the West and other topics. Fascinating exchange but hardly a debate.
Read MoreOccasionally Israeli political and military leadership fail to survive Israeli wars. PM Golda Meir and her Chief Of Staff (David "Dado" Elazar) were sent home after the 1973 blunder (Yom Kippur war). PM Menachem Begin lost his sanity after the first Lebanon war (1982). Defense Minister Amir Peretz and his Chief Of Staff’ Dan Halutz’ were treated harshly by the Israeli media following the 2006 defeat in Lebanon. PM Benjamin Netanyahu is now paying a price for the recent Israeli disaster in Gaza and the Palestinian uprising that followed.
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Three years after the publication of The Wandering Who, I discussed with Bill Alford different aspects of Jewish power and controlled opposition. We elaborated on Identity politics and the tribal ideology that drive Zionism as well as the so-called 'anti.'
Read MoreSpeaking at a panel discussion on “Jewish identity politics” in London last October, shortly after the publication of his book, The Wandering Who?, Gilad Atzmon made this observation:
Identity drifts you far away from what you are.
This is the issue. This is one of the most important [issues raised in the book] — I wouldn’t like to call it a revelation because maybe I’m not the one who brought it up — but people who know who they are, they don’t need identity.
Identity is actually a form of identification.
Read MoreBlumenthal has a lot to say about ‘German pathology,’ German people, the colour of German people’s skin and their ‘sickening society’. If anyone still had hope that there was something positive that Progressive Jews could add to the discourse, Blumenthal’s latest interview will end that idea. He exhibits the ultimate form of Jewish racism, goy hatred: in fact, far more insidious than hard-core right wing Zionism.
Read MoreBy Gilad Atzmon
Finally Israel has acknowledged its true Jewish nature. Instead of pretending to be a ‘Jewish Democracy” - a contradiction in terms, the Jewish State admits that it is a theocracy guided by Jewish racial supremacist ideology.
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In this Al Etejah's Panorama program Gilad Atzmon elaborates on the dominance of Jewish lobby in the UK and America and the weak resistance it meets in both Britain and the USA. The activity of the Lobby clearly undermines the notion of Western democracy. We also spoke about the collapse of Left politics and future of Western thinking.
Max Blumenthal, a Jewish pro Palestinian decided to take the battle against Gregor Gysi, the German Left Party’s leader, who framed him as an anti semite, to the toilet. Pretty amusing to witness the level of panic, victimhood and obnoxious intrusiveness.
Let me reassure you that when Blumenthal framed me as an anti semite, i didn't have any plans to join him in the loo.
http://mouqawamahmusic.net/why-do-they-hate-atzmon-and-love-sand/
by Trevor LaBonte (Mouqawamah Music EXCLUSIVE)
Given that Gilad Atzmon and Shlomo Sand are both former Jews who have provided criticism of Jewish identity politics, it may be illuminating to understand why the organized, kosherized, Palestinian “solidarity community” embraces Sand while rejecting and disavowing Atzmon.
Atzmon’s initial reaction to his own “disavowal” was characteristically humorous, with him stating that he has only ever operated as an individual, and cannot be kicked out of any groups because he never belonged to any to begin with.
At any rate, it is well-known and easily observable that the Zionist-controlled solidarity discourse, whose primary mouth-piece is “Electronic Intifada”‘s Ali Abuminah, is deeply compromised and functions as a gatekeeper establishment, i.e. it seeks to censor “politically incorrect” ideas, while simultaneously providing weak, ineffectual criticism which ignores all of the key issues which would actually end the occupation of Palestine. Atzmon, a very successful jazz artist in his own right, as well as is the saxophonist on the latest Pink Floyd album, has remarked that “Electronic Intifada has reduced Palestinian resistance to an electronic board.”
In general, the Solidarity movement bears the unmistakable fingerprints of the Jewish left (which operates hand-in-hand with the jewish right), manifesting in a relentless need to convince their faithful but somnambulant following that Zionism has nothing to do with ‘Jews’ and Jewish culture, that these are two completely separate, non-intersecting spheres. The result of this programming is an ideological collective of curiously vociferous people whose top priority, above and beyond Palestinian liberation, is to never offend the Jews. These people can be seen on social media, energetically laying out their talking points to convey the image that “Zionism is the only problem,” Jews and Jewishness are positive and peaceful concepts, and are adamant that Jews and Jewish culture are outside the parameters of what can be considered socially acceptable criticism. They try to set us up to fail to address the real problem, which is Jewish exclusivity and Jewish ethno-centrism, something that has been endemic and definitive of Jewish culture for thousands of years before Zionism was even invented.
The Labour is facing a new challenge, as pro-Israel supporters are increasingly stopping donations to the party.
The Labour’s financial backers say they do not want party leader Ed Miliband in Downing Street. They have described Miliband’s position on Gaza and Palestine as ‘toxic’.
The tension began a few months ago, when Miliband slammed Israel's latest ground incursion into the Gaza Strip which led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians, many for them women and children. Miliband had described the Israeli offensive as ‘wrong and unjustifiable’. He also warned Tel Aviv that it was ‘losing friends in the international community day by day’.
Later, Miliband further enraged Israelis by supporting a vote on the recognition of Palestine in the House of Parliament. The MPs voted by a huge margin of 274-12 in favor of the motion on October 13.
The Labour has been receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in donations from the pro-Israeli lobbies community.
“It is very clear that Ed Miliband and all other Labour party leaders have been heavily supported by the Jewish lobby, Jewish donors in the UK for around 2 decades,” said author and political activist Gilad Atzmon in an interview with Press TV.
Atzmon believes that Miliband’s pro-Palestinian attitude is ‘hardly possible to be taken seriously’.
Some Labour officials argue that the Jewish anger poses a huge challenge complicating the party’s fundraising efforts, making the leaders pass the begging bowl.
Shlomo Sand’s new book, How I Stopped Being a Jew (Verso, 2014), as he says, an extended essay (of just over 100 pages), is something that may come to be seen as very significant in years, maybe even decades to come. This Israeli writer and academic is someone of considerable courage who has braved death threats and opprobrium in Israel, not just for support for the rights of the Palestinian people, but also for his attempts to analyse the history and myths that provide the ideological, and insofar at those ideologies grip people and social classes, material basis for the oppression of the Palestinians.
Sands has written scholarly works that question in historical terms the idea that Jews were seen as in any sense a nation prior to an attempt to create a nation-like mythology for them during the mid-to-late 19th Century. His work The Invention of the Jewish People resurrected from obscurity several facts that are very inconvenient for Zionist ideologues – such as the fact that there was no exile of Jews from Palestine in late Roman times, andthat the so-called Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean, later spreading throughout Europe and the Middle East/North Africa and even wider, was the product of widespread proselytism and conversion, not exile.
He reiterated the long-known, but historically buried understanding that many, if not most, Jews of East and Central European heritage had their ultimate origin, not from the Levant, but rather from Khazaria, an early medieval kingdom and empire of Turkic origin in the far Eastern fringe of Europe, roughly coinciding with today’s Ukraine and Caucasus region, that was converted from above by its monarchy around the 8th Century. He therefore concluded, in a manner that is really very devastating to the entire Zionist project and the racist myths that justify it, that the Palestinians were much more certain to be descendants of the ancient population of Hebrews, whose state Israel claims to be the resurrection of, than the Jewish population whose armed settler movement created Israel. This resurrection of facts at least some of which were once acknowledged by many, including by many early Zionists, turns the entire rationale for Israel upside down.
He was also the author of a sequel, also highly regarded but perhaps less well-known, titled the Invention of the Land of Israel, as well as a number of shorter essays on similar topics.
The historic importance of his new book, How I Stopped Being a Jew, is that is a part of the crystallisation of a trend among radical intellectuals of Jewish and often Israeli origin that offers the potential to provide an opening whereby the Israel-Palestine conflict can be resolved in a democratic manner. This means as a matter of democratic principle that it has to be resolved through the restoration of the full rights of the Palestinians. Sand represents a part of this broad trend, with some differences, whose most prominent representative up to now has been the Jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, representing people of Jewish origin who have come to recognise that the secular Jewish identity, which was the basis of the Zionist movement that created Israel, and which is still the mainstay of Israel’s ruling class, is empty and self-contradictory, and insofar as it has a political manifestation, harmful.
Third Category
At first sight, the title of Sand’s book seems impossible – no one can ‘stop being’ a person of Jewish origin, any more that someone can stop being black, European, Chinese, or of any other ethnic background. But for Sand, it is not his ethnic origin that he is renouncing, but something else. One weakness of his book is that it is not entirely clear what, if it is not an ethnic origin, Sand is renouncing and ceasing to be.
Fortunately, the theoretical basis of this has already been worked out by Gilad Atzmon in his writings, both before and in his 2011 work The Wandering Who , where he divided people of Jewish origin into three non-mutually exclusive ‘categories': Religious Jews (Category 1), those of Jewish origin who regard themselves as no different to others of whatever origin (Category 2), and finally those who regard their Jewish traits as being more important than any other of their traits (category 3). Individuals in these categories may overlap, but nevertheless it is only the third category that is directly political, and which has the capacity to behave in an oppressive manner to non-Jews, as most obviously demonstrated in Israel. Though Sand does not explicitly say this, obviously what he has ‘stopped being’ in his own concept is a ‘third category’ Jew.
Alimuddin Usmani Interviews Gilad Atzmon
Alimuddin Usmani: Alain Soral recently stated that Jews who are brave and honest enough to delve into Jewish tribalism understand that Soral is far from anti Semitic. Soral said that he is trying to get the Jews to understand that by acting as a racist and brutal community, the Jews will eventually bring disaster on themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlBBZmLYTp4
What is your opinion of Soral’s statement?
Gilad Atzmon: I have no doubt that Soral’s ‘issue’ with ‘the Jew’ has nothing to do with ethnicity or race. Soral is critical of Jewish culture and politics and his thoughts on the subject are both valid and timely.
We’ve been trained to believe in the value of a consistent critique and continual revision of politics and culture. However, it seems that many Jews believe that Jewish politics and culture are beyond criticism. For some bizarre reason, a number of major institutions of the Left agree that Jewish culture and politics are not open to evaluation. I guess this affirms that, at least in the eyes of the Left and the Jews, the chosen people are actually chosen for real.
Alimuddin Usmani: Hezbollah’s military capacity is superior to Hamas. Is the Shia world more efficient in promoting a meritocratic society and in building a cognitive elite?
G: This is interesting. To start with, I do not entirely agree with the premise of your question.
From both a military and a political perspective, Hamas performed extremely well in the last round of violence. It invested in technology and developed the military force and strategy that allowed Hamas to win a decisive victory on the ground. But you are correct as a general matter. The Sunni elite and the traditional Palestinian elite are clannish by nature and dominated by a nepotistic culture. These cultures have a number of prestigious families that pass titles and leadership positions from father to son.
As I recently explored in my Manhattan talk, the Palestinian traditional elite is a subservient elite. This can be understood by reviewing Palestinian history. Palestine has been under occupation for the last two millennia and the its elite served to keep its people in line. This characteristization of the Palestinian aristocracy as a subservient elite may explain the political paralysis that is embedded within the attitude of the western Palestinian elite. It certainly explains why Ramallah has become world’s NGO capital. But I am about to contradict myself.
Reported by Gilad Atzmon
Natali Cohen Vaxberg, Israel’s leading kaka artist, Faces Charges After Pooping on the Israeli Flag
NBC reports today that “A left-wing artist who posted a video of herself defecating on an Israeli flag to protest the country’s treatment of Palestinians appeared in court on Monday facing charges of desecrating a national symbol.” In fact this uniquely revolting young woman spread her crap on the flags of every possible country. As we know, cosmopolitan Jews do not approve of national belonging. The video entitled “S*** instead of blood” was posted on Natali Cohen Vaxberg’s Facebook page on July 18 - and provoked outrage in Israel.
I wish one day, a Zionist with a brain finds the guts to debate me, for smashing the repetitive Kaplan is no fun at all...
From Press TV website:
"A declaration of war" that's how Mahmoud Abbas' spokesman reacted to Israel's closure of the al-Aqsa mosque to worshippers in reaction to the shooting of an Israeli rabbi.
While the UN Security Council proves its inability to hold Israel accountable for illegal settlement building, anger is rising in the capitals of Israel’s allies about its actions and more pressure that Tel Aviv is putting on Palestinian officials.
This edition of ‘The Debate’ interviews Gilad Atzmon, writer & political commentator from London, and Lee Kaplan, investigative journalist from San Francisco, to ask has the world reached a crossroads in how it deals with Israel, and which way will it go?
"The Palestinians are devastated, but the Israelis are the big losers following the bombardment of Gaza".
We spoke about 'solidarity', controlled opposition, political paralysis and activists' impotence. I also spoke about the structures and the building of cognitive elite. I attempted to explain the difference between Palestinian subservient elite (Ramallah) and combatant one (Gaza).
GA: The following is my book review of Shlomo Sand's latest book. It was published a year ago. Following the publication of the English edition of How I Stopped Being A Jew last week, I decided to post it again.
By Gilad Atzmon
Sand’s latest book, How I Stopped Being A Jew, is a tragic testimony made by a morally awakened Israeli Jew who comes to realise that his spiritual, cultural and political existence is contaminated with Judeo-centric exclusivism and is fuelled by ethno-centric racism. Shlomo Sand decides to stop being a Jew – but has he succeeded?
Sand, as we all know, is a wonderful writer; witty, innovative, poetic and fluent, his voice is personal, at times funny, occasionally sarcastic and always genuinely pessimistic.
Sand’s writing is scholarly, deep, reflective and imaginative; however, his scholarship is pretty much limited to French liberal thinking and early post-modernist theory. The outcome is disappointing at times. How I Stopped To Be A Jew is a ‘politically correct’ text, saturated with endless caveats inserted to disassociate the author from any possible affiliation with anyone who may be viewed as an opponent of Jewish power, critical of Jewish identity politics or a challenger of the mainstream historicity of the Holocaust.
“I don’t write for anti-Semites, I regard them as totally ignorant or people who suffer from an incurable disease,” (p. 21/Hebrew edition) writes the author who claims to be humanist, universalist and far removed from Jewish exclusivism.* It all sounds very Jewish to me. When it comes to the Holocaust, Sand uses the same tactic and somehow manages to lose all wit and scholarly fashion. The Nazis are “beasts”, their rise to power metaphorically described as a “beast awakening from its lair.” I would expect a leading historian and ex-Jew to have moved on beyond these kinds of banal clichés.
Sand writes about identity politics and is certainly sensitive to the complexities of this subject. He argues forcefully that nationalism is an ‘invention’, yet, for some reason he attributes some forensic qualities to identity and the politics involved. Perhaps Sand fails to realise that identity politics is actually a form of identification – it is there to replace authenticity. For example, Zionism was born as an attempt to replace Judaic authentic orientation with an imaginary sense of national belonging – Israeli identity is a collection of signifiers set to make the Jew believe that he or she has a past, present and future. Identity is basically a set of symbolic identifiers that evoke a sense of collectivism. If you pierce your right ear, you become a club member, if you sport a kaffiyeh you become a solidarity activist, if you manage to utter a few Israeli sound-bites you may become a Zionist. All these identities lack any authentic depth.
Little Britain, a BBC comedy show, provides us with an invaluable insight into this. Daffyd Thomas (The Only Gay in the Village) exhibits a wide range of gay symbolic identifiers without ever once being engaged in a single homosexual intercourse. So Daffyd, while identifying as gay – politically, socially and culturally – saves himself of the elementary authentic experience as a homosexual.
Sand understands that Jewish identity politics is hollow, but he may fail to grasp that all identity politics are hollow. On the contrary, nationalism, which he clearly despises — the bond with one’s soil, heritage, culture, language, landscape, poetry is actually a cathartic experience. Though nationalism may well be an invention as Sand and others insist, it is still an intrinsically authentic fulfilling experience. As we all know, patriotic national feelings are often suicidal – and there’s a reason for this – because just sometimes it manages to integrate man, soil and sacrifice into a state of spiritual unification.
By Gilad Atzmon
Jews and philosophy have had a pretty troubled relationship. The collision between ‘the tribal’ and ‘the universal’ or, more accurately, between Athens and Jerusalem, is inevitable. The few great Jewish thinkers who transcended the tribal, such as Spinoza or Otto Weininger, have been harassed and labelled by the rabbis as ‘self haters’ and enemies of the Jews.
Some contemporary Zionist merchants insist upon wrapping their Judeo centrism in crypto philosophical arguments. Bernard-Henri Levy, for instance, advocates his Zionist warmongering using a pseudo ‘moralist’ terminology.
Today I came across a uniquely banal rant by Asa Kasher, a Jewish ‘philosopher’ at Tel Aviv University. Kasher, who also authored the ‘IDF ethical code,’defended Israel’s military conduct in the recent Gaza campaign in an article published in the Jewish Review of Books.
Kasher wrote, “Hamas unscrupulously violates every norm in the book.” And I wonder, what book? I would like to find out, at a minimum, what ‘book’ grants the Jewish State the right to uproot an entire nation in the name of a Jewish homecoming? Is there a book that permits the Jews to turn a city into an open-air prison? Is there a book that legitimates reducing Gaza into a pile of rubble? I am afraid that the answer is affirmative. There is more than one such book. But these books aren’t exactly philosophical texts. These books are the prime Judaic texts. The Talmud and The Old Testament are suffocated by Goy hatred and stories of Jews and their God pouring their ‘wrath on the Goyim.’ Rabbinical Judaism has historically been very careful in the way it treated some of those vile and barbaric Judaic verses and teachings. But Israel and Zionism draw inspiration from those genocidal verses, and the outcome is evident in the shattered urban landscape of Gaza.
Unlike the very few Jews who actually contributed to humanity by means of self-reflection (such as Jesus, Spinoza and Marx), Kasher prefers pointing at Hamas. He denounces Palestinian militants for indiscriminately rocketing Israeli cities. I wonder if the same ‘Kosher Aristotle’ would go out of his way to denounce Jewish militants in Auschwitz if they had possessed the ballistic capability to rocket Berlin and had acted upon it? I doubt it.
Back in the 18th century, in a remarkable attempt to formulate an anthropocentric, ethical requirement that was justified by means of reason, Immanuel Kant presented the Categorical Imperative: “act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”
Let’s examine Kasher’s thoughts in the light of Kant’s imperative. If the IDF operated ethically in Gaza, as Kasher foolishly suggests, then every military force should be expected to follow the ‘IDF universal law:’ flatten entire cities, uproot nations, murder innocent civilians and so on. Perhaps a Zionist Jew can follow such awkward reasoning.
Kasher further asks, “Does the presence of large numbers of non-combatants in the vicinity of a building that is directly involved in terrorist assaults on Israelis render that building immune to Israeli attack?” Kasher continues, “The answer is, and must be, no. Israel cannot forfeit its ability to protect its citizens against attacks simply because terrorists hide behind non-combatants. If it did so, it would be giving up any right to self-defense.”
Consciously or not, the banal Israeli so-called ‘philosopher’ evinces the complete opposite of philosophical, ethical or universal principled thinking. Instead, he provides a glimpse into Jewish tribal ethno-centrism in which ‘goodness’ is defined solely by Jewish interests.
In a total dismissal of international conventions and of ethical judgment, Kasher blurs the crucial distinction between ‘civilians’ and ‘combatants’ and between the innocent and the actor.
The verdict is obvious. That Israel repeatedly behaves unethically goes without saying, but reading Kasher reveals that the Jewish State also lacks the notion of an ethical horizon. Even its academic authority on the subject is totally incompetent.
This is disturbing but not surprising.
The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity politics and Jewish Power in particular - available on Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk
I love to be interviewed by the great Munir Muhammad. I have now improved the sound and put it on youtube. We spoke about: ISIS, Jewish power, Israeli brutality, Jewishness, the Zionisfication of America, Expansionist Wars, Palestine vs. Solidarity, George Soros and the Left being a Controlled opposition apparatus.. Very interesting..
By Gilad Atzmon
Is the fact that half of the Scots want to split from Britain and the news that hundreds of young Muslim Brits are fighting with Jihadi militant groups in Syria connected?
Of course they are. These two social phenomena are intrinsically linked, yet in the intellectual desert in which we live, no one dares to address the subject. The boundaries of our curiosity are limited by our deference to political correctness and Zionist sensitivities.
From a political perspective, Jihadi enthusiasm amongst young Western Muslims is an outcome of the emergence of tribalism in the West; but isn’t the call for Scottish independence driven by a similar tribal urge? From both a philosophical and dialectic perspective, Jihadi identification and the Scottish call for independence are the antithesis of the New Left and its corrosive Identity (ID) politics that have been spread in our midst for too long.
By Gilad Atzmon
I am amused that as the Zionist smear campaign against me and my work has faded, the so called Jewish ‘anti’ Zionists, A.K.A AZZ (anti Zionist Zionists), are ever more infuriated by my thoughts. They are desperate to silence me. They don’t have a chance, but, let’s face it, they have some really good reasons.
The recent events in Palestine have proved beyond any doubt my interpretation of Jewish nationalism and Jewish identity politics. It is not a coincidence that I was the only one to predict the Israeli defeat even before the first Israeli soldier entered Gaza. Since Israel defines itself as the Jewish State, its actions and atrocities must be understood within the context of Jewish culture and heritage. This is my line of thought and this is what I am known for.
Leading commentator, Jeff Blankfort, argued recently that the Jewish Left is not the solution, it is actually a continuation of the problem. I believe that the Jewish Left is not merely a continuation of the problem, it is actually at the heart of the problem. Jewish power, as I see it, is the capacity to silence criticism of Jewish power. In that regard, AIPAC and the Jewish Lobby are not ‘Jewish power,’ they are symptoms of Jewish power. The institutional attempt to silence any debate about Jewish power is provided by the Jewish Left and the so called Jewish anti Zionist network (JVP, Mondowiess, Chomsky, Blumenthal, etc.). It is the Jewish Left that attempts to set the boundaries of the discussion and dictates what can and cannot be said.
For instance, we may talk about Zionism and Israel but we must never elaborate on the Jewishness of the Jewish state. Israel defines itself as the Jewish State, it attests to its affinity to Jewish history, and it draws its vile inception from the Old Testament, yet, the Jewish pro Palestinian outlet Mondoweiss, changed its comment policy to ban discussion of Jewish culture in the context of criticizing Israel. To sum it all up, I am not just an anti Zionist, I am actually critical of all forms of Jewish politics, both Zionist and Anti. I contend that all forms of Jewish politics are ethno-centric and to a certain extent, racially driven. And in my latest book The Wandering Who I substantiate this point and yet to see any attempt to prove me wrong.
In the last few days I have came across several attempts to defame me. I am cheered by each of them. I tend to see these attempts as an acknowledgment of the importance of my contribution to the discourse.
Earlier today I read a clumsy diatribe written by Nick Cooper, a Jewish ethnic campaigner as well as a Klezmer artist from Texas. In his article, Why Other Critics of Israel Won’t Work With Gilad Atzmon Anymore, Klezmer Cooper engages in a Dershowitz like cherry-picking exercise but, instead of exposing me, he conveniently provides us with an example of morbid Jewish Left ideology and tactics.