Anti Fascism

Libel News

Occasional Harry’s Place visitor, Tony Greenstein, tells me that the racist crank Gilad Atzmon is suing, erm, Sue Blackwell.

Sue Blackwell is the AUT member who proposed the boycott of Israeli universities in 2005. She was also one of the first on the extreme Left to work out that our favourite jazzman was advocating the views of, and chumming around with, jew haters.

What seems to have upset Gilad so, is that he is included on a page on her website entitled Nazi Alert.

There is kind of a tradition on the Left that disputes are settled by debate, argument, and if necessary, revolution: but not by recourse to the bourgeois courts. It isn’t a protocol which is always observed. The Workers’ Revolutionary Party famously tried to sue Workers’ Liberty founder Sean Matgamna for libel:

“for comparing them to the Moonie sect and the Scientologists, and for reporting that they used systematic emotional, political and physical violence against vulnerable young people. “

That all this was true did not worry Gerry Healy.

And in any case, as Atzmon is politically oriented to the extreme Right, rather than the extreme Left, there is no reason that he should feel bound by the convention of not suing comrades.