Two items.
First of all, Gilad Atzmon appeared this week at Exeter University – where else? – to promote his racist book. He was met by a picket of young anti-racists.
It goes without saying that Atzmon employed his customary bullying and blustering style against one of the women protesting against him. She replies, calling him a “cowardly antisemite”: a description of him which is both true and fair.
You can see the video below.
There will be more, much more to say about this event in the days to come.
But instead, I’d like to turn to Professor Richard Falk’s reply to Professor Alan Dershowitz’s comprehensive indictment of Atzmon’s antisemitism, in a recent New Republic article. Dershowitz says:
These endorsements represent a dangerous step toward legitimizing anti-Semitic rhetoric on university campuses. If respected professors endorse the views contained in Atzmon’s book as “brilliant,” “fascinating,” “absorbing,” and “moving,” these views—which include Jewish domination of the world, doubting the Holocaust, blaming “the Jews” for being so hated, and attributing the current economic troubles to a “Zio-punch”—risk becoming acceptable among their students. These endorsements of Atzmon’s book are the best evidence yet that academic discourse is beginning to cross a red line, and that the crossing of this line must be exposed, rebutted, and rejected in the marketplace of ideas and in the academy. (Another evidence of this academic trend in Europe appeared recently on Atzmon’s website, where he brags that he has been invited to “give a talk on ethics at the Trondheim University” in Norway. This is the same university whose faculty refused to invite me to speak about the Arab-Israel conflict.)
Accordingly, I hereby challenge Professors Mearsheimer and Falk to a public debate about why they have endorsed and said such positive things about so hateful and anti-Semitic a book by so bigoted and dishonest a writer.
And here is Professor Richard Falk’s reply.
Before reading it, remember that Falk is an 81 year old Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He is also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
This is what he has to say for himself.
On declining Alan Dershowitz’s challenge to debate my endorsement of Gilad Atzmon’s autobiographical The Wandering Who? (my few lines are an echo of a poem by ee cummings that I recall reading many years ago). Dershowitz’s defamatory polemic can be found in the Huffington Post, but why it was considered publishable remains for me a dark mystery. Gilad Atzmon’s response can be found on his blog for those sufficiently interested.
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A SHITSLINGER’S LAMENT
There is
some
I
will not
sling
What a fucking clown.