The Guardian have published a letter from Gilad Atzmon, promoting a lying and superficially sanitised version of his antisemitic thesis.
Atzmon, cunning as ever, has got one over on the Guardian. Check out this quote:
To paraphrase what I say in my book, “An antisemite used to be someone who hates Jews; nowadays an antisemite is someone Jews hate.”
Ah, to paraphrase. Atzmon, the Jazz-magpie, has half-inched that quote. From veteran US antisemite, Joe Sobran.
And why might anybody think Sobran was an antisemite? Possibly quotes like these:
“Enough already. It’s time to face the possibility that Jewish problems are sometimes due to Jewish attitudes and Jewish behavior. My father once remarked to me that the Jews are disliked everywhere they go because of “their crooked ways.” Though, as I later learned, Dad had been an altar boy, he said nothing about Christ-killing; he’d long since left the Church and he didn’t particularly care who had killed Christ. As a matter of fact, he didn’t particularly dislike Jews; but he did think it was their ethics, not their biblical record, that had earned them their low reputation. The popular verb jew would seem to bear him out. So do countless ethnic jokes about Jewish sharp dealing and devious conduct. So, in fact, do Talmudic passages authorizing Jews to relieve gentiles of their property, if they can do it without incurring anger against Jews in general.”
“In truth, the charge of ‘Christ-killing’ is hard to find anywhere, outside of schoolyard taunts.”
“Such non-happenings are a regular feature of Tribal memory, as witness the many testimonies of ‘Holocaust survivors’ that have turned out to be delusions or outright forgeries.”
“Similar bogus memories of victimization surround the state of Israel. Far from facing extinction in 1948, Zionist Jews enjoyed great military superiority to the Arabs and ruthlessly drove the native Palestinians from their homes with liberal applications of terrorism. Since then the Jewish state has behaved according to the harshest Jewish stereotypes, deceitfully, parasitically, and cruelly.”
“Such Jewish ideologies as Marxism and Freudianism are disguised apologias for the Jews, denying the superiority of Western standards. For Marx, capitalism boils down to mere greed; while for Freud, romantic love boils down to mere lust. Both view Western manners as mere hypocrisy, self-deluding airs put on by the goyim.”
“Most gentiles respect Jews for their intelligence and ability, but they have also come to take certain kinds of Jewish misbehavior for granted.”
Or indeed this:
Why on earth is it “anti-Jewish” to conclude from the evidence that the standard numbers of Jews murdered are inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was in many ways, was not, in fact, intent on racial extermination? Surely these are controversial conclusions; but if so, let the controversy rage. There is no danger in permitting it to proceed.
As Tom Breen writes:
[Sobran] is likely to be remembered, if at all, for a crude remark I have seen quoted approvingly by Nazis, left-wing anti-war demonstrators, and Muslims urging the destruction of America: “An anti-Semite is someone who the Jews hate.” No, dude. An anti-Semite is someone who quotes that remark with approval.
What a cesspit.
UPDATE
There is some discussion below as to whether the PCC Code obliges The Guardian to accept a letter from Gilad Atzmon.
This is what it says:
2. Opportunity to reply
A fair opportunity for reply to inaccuracies must be given when reasonably called for.
Atzmon doesn’t appear to be objecting to any specific inaccuracy in Andy Newman’s piece: other than the characterisation of himself as an antisemite. However, that is not an inaccuracy.
However, if the Guardian took the view that this question was a matter for reasonable debate, and that it was arguable that it was untrue, then Atzmon should be offered a right to reply to inaccuracies.
