RosieBell

A Stir in the Suburbs

A question – does pro-Palestinian activism make people barmy or are barmy people attracted to pro-Palestinian activism?

Here’s a case. I live on the western side of Edinburgh, in a suburb called Roseburn, and I follow the Friends of Roseburn Park Facebook page. A post caught my eye. It was advertising a "Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism" event in London.

That’s a change from bulb-planting and mural painting.

I guessed this was Pete Gregson – who Shiraz Socialist has covered here and Tendance Coatesy here. Expelled from the Labour Party, expelled from the GMB for anti-semitism, fired from the Council, a 24/7 activist.

Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism (LAZIR) was summed up here:- 

A new campaign group, “Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism”, or LAZIR, has been set up to support Jeremy Corbyn and campaign for the International Definition of Antisemitism to be dropped and for the Jewish Labour Movement to be thrown out of the Labour Party. The group’s logo is a laser beam smashing the logo of a Jewish Labour group.

The founder appears to be Pete Gregson, who was reportedly expelled by the GMB Union after he claimed that Israel was a “racist endeavour” that “exaggerates” the Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million Jews “for political ends.” According to a post on his Facebook page, Labour Against the Witch Hunt, are seeking to expel him from their group. If he is expelled, Mr Gregson has vowed to hold a launch event for LAZIR outside Labour Headquarters in London.

Interestingly, this is the second time that Labour Against the Witch Hunt has split, the first time being when Gerry Downing was expelled and founded Labour Against the Witch Hunt Within Labour Against the Witch Hunt, both of which met at opposite sides of the same pub at the same time. Mr Downing, who was himself expelled from the Labour Party due to his views on the Holocaust, now appears to be advising Mr Gregson on policy for LAZIR.

Other Friends of Roseburn Park thought the post on Facebook inappropriate and one commented:-

The Friends of Roseburn Park SCIO is a Charity who’s sole purposes are “The provision of recreational facilities, or the organisation of recreational activities, with the object of improving the conditions of life for the persons for whom the facilities or activities are primarily intended". Political statements of any kind have no place here and admin should immediately remove this post in my opinion.

The post was taken down. Gregson is a Friend of Roseburn Park and in fact does some useful work like finding grants for a new play park and a carved seat – as an ex-shop steward he does know how to pull the levers, as I have found with my own special focus of interest.

A word picture. On the western side of Edinburgh is Murrayfield, a leafy conservation area of handsome townhouses and villas, climbing up Corstorphine Hill, above the Water of Leith. On the flat floodplain below are Roseburn and Saughtonhall, not so grand nor so leafy, but pleasant enough. Roseburn is the shopping area. It’s prettily situated by the river, has an eighteenth century bridge and some attractive buildings, and would be totally delightful if not cut through by the A8, the main road from Edinburgh to Glasgow, so it thunders with traffic and wafts with fumes all along the section called Roseburn Terrace.

Visualisation of Roseburn Terrace with cycle route

On this arterial route, Edinburgh Council proposed a cycle way at the end of 2014. I was thrilled by this; many of the residents were not, and I began to attend the Murrayfield Community Council where I observed the Edinburgh high bourgeoisie acting like Celtic supporters after a trouncing by Rangers at the thought of (a) losing a parking place; (b) being swarmed by bicycles; (c) having money being wasted on an unused cycle route. The cycling and planning officers who have had to deal with constant baying and table thumping have remained amazingly civil and patient throughout.

There were years of consultations, opposition, further consultations and furious public meetings. Pete Gregson emerged as the chief organiser, whipping up the traders and getting the local media on the case (he is very good at raising the media) showing pictures of traders with folded rejecting arms and posters of Save our Community. Eventually the route did get through the Council’s Transport and Environment Committee and now there is only a Scottish Government hearing to come. Work should begin at the end of the year.

Gregson though has not been defeated. He produced leaflets of a post-apocalyptic Roseburn with boarded up shops, while he led his dwindling band of traders to call for compensation.

He then found a new front for attack. A local resident, a retiree from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, concluded that the cycle route will push the traffic further to the north side of Roseburn Terrace, and with the air movement, will raise the levels of NO2. Gregson duly produced leaflets of people in gas masks. The last two Murrayfield CC meetings have been filled with a sudden outrage that car pollution is responsible for asthma, dementia, and early deaths. (When I get time I’ll check through the Murrayfield CC minutes to see if the air quality on Roseburn Terrace has ever been an issue of any concern before a cycle route was mooted.)

As well as putting in a cycle route and more pedestrian crossings, the Council is also doing some place-making and general refurbishment. The information boards for a consultation were put on the historic bridge. The night before the officers held a drop-in event these boards were spray-painted quite carefully so the bridge itself was not hurt, and Gregson’s posters stuck over them. At the next Community Council meeting a Police Sergeant gave us a lecture on the selfishness and anti-democratic nature of such an act, and indeed vandalism and anti-social behaviour are usually exclaimed over at community council meetings. Gregson changed the subject to the theft of his bicycle.

Vandalised information boards on Old Colt Bridge

At this meeting, which was a few days ago (14 May) Gregson said he would be holding a demo about the cycle route causing a rise in pollution levels when the Transport and Environment Committee (TEC) met on the Thursday. Someone in the community council stressed very firmly that this was not officially from the Murrayfield CC, but through another one of his organisations, the Roseburn Vision Group.

So on the day of the TEC meeting at the City Chambers, there was a demo of 3 people –Gregson and 2 local traders, one in a gas mask, the other holding a poster saying Save Baby Finn.

Baby Finn? Well, Ruth Davidson, MSP for this constituency and the Scottish Conservative leader, has her HQ on the north side of Roseburn Terrace. She has a new baby called Finn. Gregson handed out the following press release:-

Edinburgh Council plans to asphyxiate Ruth Davidson’s Baby

Evidence has come to light to suggests Council mandarins seek to prevent the rise of the Conservatives in Scotland by suffocating them at source.

Their scheme requires increasing the levels of nitrogen dioxide at Ruth’s Edinburgh Constituency office on the south side of Roseburn Terrace to deadly levels. They know that Ruth, like most modern mums, will probably take her baby to work if she can. But pollution levels at Ruth’s office are already at their legal max of 40 ug/m3 for toxic nitrogen dioxide and are set to shoot up to around 60/ugm3 if Council plans to pollute Roseburn come to fruition.

I suppose this is supposed to be satirical. I can’t think of any other explanation except that it is the wildest conspiracy theorising.

Gregson was allowed his ten minutes at the TEC meeting. He made a rambling speech, referring to him being sacked by the Council, and repeated the accusation that the Council is trying to suffocate baby Conservatives. Cllr Lesley Macinnes, the Transport and Environment Convener, told him off, saying his press release was “utterly shameful” (applause from the Committee). Gregson shouted, “Let Baby Finn live.” The Committee adjourned and found the standing order which allowed them to tell Gregson to exit. Gregson tried to sit in the public benches, then left waving a gas mask. About 20 minutes later a security guard came in saying he had been listening outside. He was banned from the building. The police were called but were not needed.

As I said, Gregson is very good at getting media attention and this was splashed everywhere. Google it if you will under Pete Gregson Ruth Davidson. His being sacked from the Council (which is thought to be one reason for his unrelenting campaign against a cycle route) was noted, as was his being expelled from the GMB.

He did take exception to being called an anti-cycling campaigner and has now got the media outlets to change this to a “pro-cycling campaigner”. That is, at anti-cycle route demos he wears an ancient cycling helmet while standing on the pavement waving a placard or shouting through a megaphone, and he proposes the worst kind of convoluted back routes with the prefix of Speaking as a Cyclist.

I know these are the days of self-identity, but if you identify as something e.g. a Russian, if no Russian thinks you are Russian you are unlikely to be one. Spiked identifies as being on the left, no leftist agrees. Any Edinburgh cycling campaigner would see Gregson as a vexatious force against decent cycle provision, who is paying off his grudge against the Council by fanning anxiety among the traders and rage from the nimbies who cherish their parking places as their only children

You can see him on the webcast of the meeting at around 1:20.

Highly conservative Murrayfield coming under the influence of an ex-shop steward anti Zionist is certainly full of comedy.

And the question still remains – does anti-Zionist obsession turn people into loons, or are loons attracted to anti-Zionism?

The flippant nihilist

I only know Alexander Cockburn as an editor of the creepy Counterpunch, and his airy dismissals  of anyone who thought Israel Shamir a dodgy piece of work. 

There's a fascinating account of him by Paul Berman.

Cockburn is reminiscent of Christopher Hitchens - the English journalist who lives in America and writes stylishly about American and international affairs. The political framework may be leftwards, the cultural references English literature, quoted with ease to point the moral and adorn the tale.

Berman does explain why Cockburn was so indifferent about Israel Shamir's vile antisemitism:-

How systematically the man had gone after Israel, and how reluctant he was to say a word of criticism about the Soviet Union or the Islamic Republic of Iran or the terrorism of the anti-Zionists. Newfield took note of Cockburn’s hostility to Natan Sharansky, who in those days was a persecuted Jewish dissident in the Soviet Union. 

... In his column he took to sniping in my direction, not always wittily, which other people in the Voice newsroom attributed to his distaste for the Jewish concerns that sometimes cropped up in my writings. He accused me of “pandering” to the Jews by writing about Holocaust denial and Noam Chomsky (a rich theme)

Cockburn shared the Israel (or "Zionism") obsession of the anti-imperialist Left:-

he does attribute 9/11 to “recent Israeli rampages in the Occupied Territories”

Alexander Cockburn woshipped his father, Claud Cockburn, who had lived an adventurous life where history was happening and who in the Spanish Civil War had the mouths of high-ranking Soviet officials in his ear.

Claud Cockburn was, in spite of appearances, a fine man who would never have turned over names to the Soviet police in Spain. But then, proud of his father, Alexander includes within the Wreck a brief memoir by Claud of his Spanish experiences, which leaves the impression that, in regard to the Soviet police activities, Claud was not a reluctant participant. About his friend Guy Burgess and the other Cambridge spies, Claud remarks that idealistic motives were at work, and these were “sensitive and informed” young men. Claud cites his own “experience in the field of espionage, or rather, counter-espionage.” He was “a section leader of the counter-espionage department of the Spanish Republican government dealing with Anglo-Saxon personalities,” which does sound like a job dedicated to informing the police. "

Berman believes that Claud Cockburn was a dark inspiration for George Orwell:-

I have always supposed that, when Orwell laid out the principles of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of his inspirations was Claud Cockburn, British correspondent: a cheerful example of a man willing to say everything and its opposite in the interest of a totalitarian state, committed to the renunciation of truth, to the hatred of free-thinkers, to the cause of persecution, and to the cult of obedience.

In Orwell’s portrait, the totalitarian mentality was never a matter of ideology gone awry, nor a matter of lower-class resentments. The mentality was a contempt for everyday morality and human considerations. It was a flippant nihilism, attached to no cause or principle at all, apart from love of tyranny. And, to be sure, no sooner did the Spanish anti-fascists go down to defeat than Claud Cockburn turned on a dime and set about composing justifications for Stalin’s pact with Hitler.

You could think this was a total damning of Alexander Cockburn. But Berman pays due attention to his elegant style and his love of anecdote, which at the end made me think I'd enjoy at least flicking through words of the co-editor of Counterpunch - though his constant jeering (in which he sounds like Hunter S Thompson), would get tedious after a while.

Bunkering up with Julian Assange

Andrew O'Hagan tells a fascinating story of what it was like to ghost write Julian Assange's autobiography.  He did this under contract with Canongate Books, a hip publisher based in Edinburgh.

O'Hagan has got hold of a character who could be one of fiction's great monsters with a toddler's grasp of other people's motives and rights.  Assange holed up talking without interruption for 3 hours at a time is strongly reminiscent of Hitler in his table talk and his lashings out at everyone as he sits in one of his bunkers (Ellingham Hall, the Ecuadorian Embassy) has been portrayed in Downfall.  He has real enemies and he has imaginary ones as well.  The many people who fall out with him do so because of envy or malice.

His paranoia has its comic side:-

He appeared to like the notion that he was being pursued and the tendency was only complicated by the fact that there were real pursuers. But the pursuit was never as grave as he wanted it to be. He stuck to his Cold War tropes, where one didn’t deliver a package, but made a ‘drop off’. One day, we were due to meet some of the WikiLeaks staff at a farmhouse out towards Lowestoft. We went in my car. Julian was especially edgy that afternoon, feeling perhaps that the walls were closing in, as we bumped down one of those flat roads covered in muck left by tractors’ tyres. ‘Quick, quick,’ he said, ‘go left. We’re being followed!’ I looked in the rear-view mirror and could see a white Mondeo with a wire sticking out the back.

‘Don’t be daft, Julian,’ I said. ‘That’s a taxi.’

‘No. Listen to me. It’s surveillance. We’re being followed. Quickly go left.’ Just by comical chance, as I was rocking a Sweeney-style handbrake turn, the car behind us suddenly stopped at a farmhouse gate and a little boy jumped out and ran up the path. I looked at the clock as we rolled off in a cloud of dust. It said 3.48.

‘That was a kid being delivered home from school,’ I said. ‘You’re mental.’

There are some good moments with Assange, the expert hacker and courageous activist:-

At the time of the Egyptian uprising, Mubarak tried to close down the country’s mobile phone network, a service that came through Canada. Julian and his gang hacked into Nortel and fought against Mubarak’s official hackers to reverse the process. The revolution continued and Julian was satisfied, sitting back in our remote kitchen eating chocolates.

That is why I didn’t walk out. The story was just too large. What Julian lacked in efficiency or professionalism he made up for in courage. What he lacked in carefulness he made up for in impact.

But on the whole the Wikileaks endeavour suffered from that symptom of the internet age, the short attention span, the hook, the click-bait and the Twitter storm of petty feuds:-

He’s not a details guy. None of them is. What they love is the big picture and the general fight. They love the noise and the glamour, the history, the spectacle, but not the fine print. That is why they released so many cables so quickly: for impact. And there’s a good argument to support that. But, even today, three years later, the cables have never had the dedicated attention they deserve. They made a splash and then were left languishing. I always hoped someone would do a serious editing job, ordering them country by country, contextualising each one, providing a proper introduction, detailing each injustice and each breach, but Julian wanted the next splash and, even more, he wanted to scrap with each critic he found on the internet. As for the book, he kept putting it off.

Assange makes a virtue of scientific journalism, where readers take the raw data and process it for themselves.  But of course we can't do that any more than we can make our laptops from oil, metals and silicon.  We need context and background information to gauge whether a piece of information is significant or trivial.

I thought, if Julian was serious and strategic, that WikiLeaks should not only bale stuff out onto the web, but should then facilitate the editing and presenting of that work in a way that was of permanent historical value. Perry Anderson of Verso Books had the same thought, and I put it to Julian that the WikiLeaks Map of the World should be a series which provided for a proper academic study of what the biggest security leaks in history had revealed, with expert commentary, notes, essays and introductions. It would provide the organisation with a lasting, grown-up legacy, a powerful, orderly continuation of its initial work.

Julian came to lunch at my flat in Belsize Park. Tariq Ali came and so did Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review, as well as an American editor for Verso called Tom Mertes. Anderson’s idea was that Verso would publish a series of books, or one book in which each chapter showed how the US cables released by WikiLeaks had changed the political position of a particular country. A writer who knew, say, Italy, would introduce the chapter and the same would be done for every country and it would be very meticulous and well-made. Julian gave a big speech at the beginning, the middle and the end. He clearly liked Tariq but had no sense of him as someone who knew a lot more about the world than he did. Although the idea for the book had come from Verso, Julian preferred to give a lecture about how most academics were corrupted by their institutions.

.... . Anyone else would have jumped at the chance of the Verso project but as Julian drove off in a taxi I knew he would never call Tariq about this or lay any of the groundwork they’d agreed. Julian was already more concerned about claiming the idea for himself, an idea that he would never see to fruition. The meeting had called for responsible action, when what Julian loved was irresponsible reaction.

Everyone has one rule for themselves and another for  the rest of the world but Assange takes this to the nth degree:-

Julian was getting a lot of flak in the press for making Wiki-employees sign contracts threatening them with a £12 million lawsuit if they disclosed anything about the organisation. It was clear he didn’t see the problem. He has a notion that WikiLeaks floats above other organisations and their rules. He can’t understand why any public body should keep a secret but insists that his own organisation enforce its secrecy with lawsuits. Every time he mentioned legal action against the Guardian or the New York Times, and he did this a lot, I would roll my eyes, but he didn’t see the contradiction. He was increasingly lodged in a jungle of his own making and I told Jamie it was like trying to write a book with Mr Kurtz.

He was in a state of panic at all times that things might get out. But he manages people so poorly, and is such a slave to what he’s not good at, that he forgets he might be making bombs set to explode in his own face. I am sure this is what happens in many of his scrapes: he runs on a high-octane belief in his own rectitude and wisdom, only to find later that other people had their own views – of what is sound journalism or agreeable sex – and the idea that he might be complicit in his own mess baffles him.

He has the common tendency to fight far more bitterly with those who share his world view than those who outright reject it:-

the Guardian was an enemy because he’d ‘given’ them something and they hadn’t toed the line, whereas the Daily Mail was almost respected for finding him entirely abominable. The Guardian tried to soothe him – its editor, Alan Rusbridger, showed concern for his position, as did the then deputy, Ian Katz, and others – but he talked about its journalists in savage terms. The Guardian felt strongly that the secret material ought to be redacted to protect informants or bystanders named in it, and Julian was inconsistent about that. I never believed he wanted to endanger such people, but he chose to interpret the Guardian’s concern as ‘cowardice’.

He's full of repugnant sexism and anti-Semitsm:-

They certainly had transcripts of our interviews, sittings in which he’d uttered, late at night, many casual libels, many sexist or anti-Semitic remarks, and where he spoke freely about every aspect of his life.

As well as wasting time to a heart-breaking degree, those who engage with Assange find themselves out of goodwill and out of pocket. Canongate tried to salvage the autobiography and published what they could.

Canongate Books, the Edinburgh-based publisher, has blamed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's "failure to deliver" the book he was contracted to produce for plunging into operating loss.

Accounts, which have just become available from Companies House, reveal Canongate tumbled to an operating loss of £368,467 in 2011, from a profit of £1.08 million at this level in 2010. Canongate acknowledged this was its worst performance "in many years".

For Andrew O'Hagan it hasn't all been a minus.  He came out with a great story to tell, and that's enough pay off for any writer.

(H/T - HJ) 

The Dieudonnic Plague

David Rich has a very good, and very depressing article on Dieudonne and his kind:-

“Making common cause” between Holocaust deniers, neo-fascists, the pro-Palestinian left, and the revolutionary Islamists of Iran is precisely what Dieudonné has spent the past decade trying to achieve. Originally from the political left, he has moved via anti-Israel rhetoric and the fascist Front National (FN) to the establishment of his own Parti Anti Sioniste (PAS, or Anti-Zionist Party). Alongside him in the PAS is essayist and filmmaker Alain Soral, who underwent a similar journey from the Marxist left to the FN before finding a political home with Dieudonné.

There are not many political movements that can embrace the neo-fascist right, the anti-capitalist left, and Iranian revolutionary Islamism. Dieudonné is close to FN leaders—Jean Marie Le Pen is godfather to one of his children—while also attracting fans who consider themselves to be left-wing radicals. He was a guest in Tehran of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and received Iranian funding for a film project. Historically, movements that successfully pulled off this kind of balancing act have tended to rely on anti-Semitism as their glue, expressed through the lingua franca of conspiracist anti-Zionism, and PAS is no different.

Strikingly, for a party that calls itself anti-Zionist, PAS’s political program makes no direct mention of Israel or Palestine. This is parochial, patriotic anti-Zionism, in which Zionism is portrayed primarily as a subversive, corrupting presence in French society.

Radio 4's The Report had the journalist Helen Grady interviewing Dieudonne's friends and followers.  Sometimes they said "Zionist" where they obviously meant "Jewish" and sometimes they said, "I'm not antisemitic but Jews run everything".  Also, Dieudonne gave them the thrill of saying, or just hinting at, the forbidden. - not just "you don't say that" but "you can't say that" because it's illegal in a state with laws against Holocaust denial. This was interpreted as special treatment for Jews while other minorities are fair game.

I was sorry the reporter didn't ask them to explain who these Zionists are and what are these utterances that are so dammed by the laws - not that I agree with Holocaust denial laws or anti free speech and expression laws in general. In fact I would like to know how much these laws exacerbate the sense of resentment that is one of the emotional bases of Fascism. Certainly breaking them, or hinting that you were, gave the audience a lovely outsider frisson.

Anti-Zionist and Anti-Establishment

Some of these gagged folk came from immigrant communities - their parents from North Africa say - and they had good words to say of the Front National - at least they're honest when the rest are hypocrites.

It was your worst gibbering blog thread taking flesh, with hideous whiffs of the 1930s, in all their bizarre irrationality.

Rich concludes with a warning for those who think It Can't Happen Here:-

. .it would be complacent to assume that Dieudonné’s anti-establishment appeal, expressed through angry, transgressive satire and political stunts, could not find a British audience. The personal followings of Nigel Farage MEP and George Galloway MP demonstrate the appetite in the UK for charismatic, populist anti-politics. .. A Francophone comic with a taste for the surreal is likely to have trouble finding a mass audience in Britain; but his populist anti-politics, carrying a coded anti-Semitism and transmitted via social media, may have better luck in finding an audience..

The anti-establishment comedian who thinks all political institutions are a waste of time is Russell Brand, but to do him justice, he is nothing like as malevolent as Dieudonne, and I can't see him doing Holocaust jokes or chumming up with David Irving.  I can't see him getting in bed with UKIP either, which is the closest thing here to the Front National. However I'm not very up with popular culture, and there may be obvious candidates for the Dieudonne role that I've missed.

Respect was a party that pulled in some of the political groups that are attracted to Dieudonne:- the pro-Palestinian Left and Islamists, and no doubt Holocaust deniers would pop up in such a crowd. Gilad Atzmon would be the obvious entertainer, but he's not a man of any great charisma or the popular touch. However, it's hard to think of the neo-Fascist right finding a home there, and Respect is now mostly a fantasy in Galloway's head.

Ethnic cleansing

There's only a short time left to hear this programme, The Last Jews of Iraq,  a story of ethnic cleansing, very moving and frightening.  It's presented by Alan Yentob, the BBC grandee and himself the son of Iraqi Jews. 

The Jewish population of Iraq  had existed by the waters of Babylon since 597BC and in 1917 made up one third of the population of Baghdad.   

They had their golden years in the 1920s and 1930s, living a comfortable and integrated life among their Arab neighbours.   When the state of Iraq was created, they regarded themselves as both Iraqis and Jews. 

In 1936 Hitler's Mein Kampf was translated into Arabic and published in Baghdad.   Ideological hatreds began to arise and with growing Zionism in the Middle East Jews began to be regarded as aliens and were  attacked in the streets.



Mein Kampf - the Arab translation on sale in Syria

In June 1941, a Nazi sympathiser, General Rashid Ali al-Kailani seized power in a military coup.   A plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Iraq was formed.  The mayor of Baghdad (a Muslim) intervened, General Rashid Ali fled the city, but there was a 2 day pogrom.  180 Jews were killed.

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, 98% of the Iraqi Jews left.  Those who remained behind lived under suspicion and official persecution, culminating in public hangings which the government celebrated with a national holiday. 

Any of these stories - Bosnia,  Rwanda, the Sunni-Shi-ite conflict in Iraq - will tell how different communities who had co-existed well enough turned into hostile tribes.  Suddenly your fellow citizens in all their different shadings become one kind of person or another - the person who denounces, pursues, even murders or the person who shelters and protect. 

In 1947 there were 118,000 Jews in Baghdad.  There are now only seven left.

Lifemanship

In his series Lifemanship Stephen Potter invented a reviewer called Hope-Tipping who, in order to make a splash, would take a writer to task for not doing something he was famous for,  e.g. accuse D H Lawrence of showing  a neglect of "the consciousness of sexual relationship, the male and female element in life”.   So Hope-Tipping would be severely disappointed with Irving Welsh's lack of interest in Edinburgh's low life and he would castigate Dick Francis for not drawing on his knowledge of horses and horse-racing. 

Gilad Atzmon has evidently picked up this trick of drawing attention to himself:-

Mein Kampf is an interesting read, a very important document, I could hardly find anything about the Jews – only 2 and a half pages out of 400  about the Jews.

It's one way to get noticed.  

Warm Endorsement

As everyone in the blogosphere knows, Gilad Atzmon has written a book, The Wandering Who, published by Zero Books and with a blurb of warm endorsement  from Professor Mearsheimer - "fascinating and provocative .  . Should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.'  This has caused a storm.  Professor Mearsheimer defends himself here, and in his comments thread he is in turn warmly endorsed by every Nazi nutter and Holocaust denier in town. 

I haven't read Atzmon's book, and as I wouldn't buy it or ask the library to get it, I suppose I never shall.  But I did check out Atzmon's warm endorsement of his own book (here) which has  put "the entire Zionist network is in a total panic" (according to him).  Atzmon has also photoshopped pictures of the heads of his critics onto naked bodies.  Somehow I don't think he and the Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago are in the same intellectual milieu. 

Atzmon's account of the controversy:-

". . .the Islamophobic agent-provocateur “Harry’s place” [Atzmon doesn't know what an "agent provocateur is, evidently] – who never miss a chance to muddy the water – joined in, intimidating and harassing  a London academic  just because she tweeted that she likes Atzmon’s book

Just before London Tea Time, America woke up. Within the hour, her Zionist stooges were ready to join the campaign. EX- IDF concentration camp guard Jeffrey Goldberg had a clear plan to chew Professor John J. Mearsheimer circulating the same banal and unsubstantiated accusations.

At that stage, it appeared to be a campaign that was run by hundreds of Zionist enthusiasts – but if one scratches the surface, it was actually an orchestrated move of barely more than five Jewish bloggers, [Richard Seymour? Andy Newman?] who have managed to mobilise another twenty or so book burners or shall we call them ‘wandering  sockpuppets’ that habitually attack in different areas of the net and the press, co-coordinating to harass, bully and intimidate, with the same dull, repetitive, accusations, ‘arguments’ and smears.

By Sunday night the Guardian published an appalling piece by one Andy Newman of Swindon, who, according to one of his “Socialist Unity” editors, attacked Atzmon simply to appease the relentlessly Islamophobic “Harry’s Place” public.

[Now since when did Socialist Unity "appease" Harry's Place?  They have just put up a very rude piece about them  - or is this merely a cunning Zionist smokescreen?]
.  . .

In a final desperate attempt to jeopardize the publication of the book and to silence its author. Richard Seymour AKA ‘Lenin Thumb’,  authored a new anti Atzmon manifesto. 

I read Richard ‘Lenin’ Seymour’s text with interest and found out that for some reason, both ‘avant-garde revolutionary’  Seymour’s text, and Guardian’s ‘socialist’  Andy Newman’s drivel are suspiciously far too similar to the unforgettable ‘Aaronovitch Reading Atzmon’ performance at the Oxford Literature Festival.  [This reading is of the choice bits of antisemitism in Atzmon's work.  Why Seymour, Newman and Aaronovitch should quote the same choice pieces of antisemitism is moronically obvious.]

.......................

One may wonder how come Seymour, an alleged revolutionary radical Marxist, Andy Newman, a mediocre socialist  and Neocon pro war Aaronovitch are caught together naked holding ideological  hands. [Yes, how would a far left anti-Zionist like Seymour pick up with the liberal Aaronovitch?]

How is it that the three try  to prevent myself and others from criticising Jewish political lobbying. For some reason they also don’t want us to look closely into the events that led to the financial turmoil. [Jews' fault of course] How is it possible that a hard core Zionist and ultra radical leftists are not only employing the same ideological argument but also performing the exact same tactics?  Clearly, there is an obvious ideological and political continuum between Aaronovitch, Newman and Seymour. The Wandering Who? scrutinizes this very continuum.

Zionism clearly maintains and sustains  its ‘radical left opposition’ and the logos behind such a tactic is simple- ‘revolutionary’ left is totally irrelevant to both the conflict and its resolution. Hence, Zionists cannot dream of an easier opposition to handle. When the Zionists detect a dangerous rising intellect [Atzmon of course - he tells it like it is] who aims at the truth, they obviously utilize and mobilize the Jewish left together with the few willing Sabbath Goyim executioners to gatekeep the emerging danger. Seymour, Newman and a just few others are always happy to slay the emerging intellect.  [Atzmon again - in case you didn't get the first time who this "intellect" is].

Indeed they were effective for years. From an intellectual perspective our movement is pretty much a desert. Every deep thinker we have ever had [Atzmon for instance]  has been targeted and destroyed by the Jewish Left and their Sabbath Goyim.  But for some reason, they somehow failed with me. My views on Palestine and Israel are now circulated on most dissident journals [bringing them into discredit] and my book The Wandering Who is endorsed by the most important people scholars and activists in our discourse. [please - list of names besides Professor Mearsheimer's?]

So far, all efforts to stop the book have fallen apart. There is no sign of anyone pulling the book out but there are clear signs that the Hasbara orchestrated campaign has backfired. No one surrendered to the Zionist campaign and its stooges. As they said in Tahrir Square, ‘we have lost our fear.’ [ Oh who do you think you are!]   The Wandering Who is now a best seller for more than a week (as far as Amazon ranking can tell). On the Jewish best seller list, it is even more popular than the Babylonian Talmud and the Torah. I guess that this is indeed a great concern for Zionists and  their stooges, but there is nothing they can do about it.

The sheer dreadfulness of this writing passes description. How could a distinguished academic like Professor Mearsheimer read such self-important, bragging crap and pat its author on the back?  OK, this is not Atzmon's book - but if this is how the guy writes - its juvenile abuse, its total idiocy on how left and liberal writers in the UK operate, its paranoia, so that if people criticise him they must be in some kind of "Zionist" conspiracy, its general craziness - now, how could Professor Mearsheimer read anything from a writer like that and endorse it? What was he on?

Hearsay, pure and simple

Here’s John Pilger really pissed off with the liberal press:-

On 3 March, the Guardian announced that Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks would be making "an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President's Men out of its book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. I asked David Leigh, who wrote the book with Luke Harding, how much DreamWorks had paid the Guardian for the screen rights and what he expected to make personally. "No idea," was the puzzling reply of the Guardian's "investigations editor". The paper paid WikiLeaks nothing for its treasure trove of leaks. Assange and WikiLeaks - not Leigh or Harding - were responsible for what the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, has called "one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years".

[To do these parasites justice, they did have to read masses of fragmentary documentation and make some kind of sense of it.]

The Guardian has made it clear that it has no further use for Assange. He is a loose cannon who did not fit Guardianworld, who proved a tough, unclubbable negotiator. And brave. In the Guardian's self-regarding book, Assange's extraordinary bravery is excised. He becomes a figure of petty bemusement, an "unusual Australian" with a "frizzy-haired" mother; he is gratuitously abused as "callous" and a "damaged personality" who was "on the autistic spectrum". How will Spielberg deal with this childish character assassination?

[Actually, the book says a lot about Assange’s courage, brilliant brain and indifference to comfort and material possessions.  When I’d finished reading it I admired Assange more than I had before.]

On the BBC's Panorama, Leigh indulged hearsay that Assange did not care about the lives of those named in the leaks.

Assange‘s indifference to the lives of those named in the link turns up on p111 of the book.  The Afghan war logs in Wikileaks’ possession mentioned “names of informants or those who had collaborated with US troops. . ."

I [Declan Walsh, one of the Guardian team sifting through the leaks] told David Leigh I was worried about the repercussions of publishing these names, who could easily be killed by the Taliban or other militant groups if identified. David agreed it was a concern and said he’d raised the issue with Julian, but he didn’t seem concerned. That night, we went out to a Moorish restaurant, Moro, with the two German reporters. David broached the problem again with Julian. The response floored me. ‘Well, they’re informants,’ he said. ‘So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’ There was, for a moment, silence around the table. I think everyone was struck by what a callous thing that was to say.

In the event the names were redacted.

As some commenters in the thread point out, Pilger misuses the word “hearsay“.  David Leigh heard these remarks of Assange with his own ears.   It wasn’t reported to him by someone else, which is what “hearsay” means.  There were three other witnesses there who heard this as well, and in the thread David Leigh names them.  However Pilger has been indulging in “hearsay” himself since he presumably is going by what Assange has told him what was said at this dinner. 

As always with Assange and Wikileaks, there is a lovely irony in this.   The creed of St Julian says “We believe in raw data, unmediated and unchannelled.  Cover us with data, oh Lord, so we can save our souls.”   In this instance Leigh is the man who holds the raw data bleeding and dripping in his hands, Pilger has had it cooked and processed.

Pilger also says:-

As for the claim that he had complained of a "Jewish conspiracy", which followed a torrent of internet nonsense that he was an evil agent of Mossad, Assange rejected this as "completely false, in spirit and word".

[Pilger, once a courageous reporter who would travel  to war zones, evidently hasn’t been around the internet much.  It’s perfectly possible that you will be attacked as an evil agent of Mossad because your leaks don’t deal much with the insanity-inducing obsession, Israel, while you agree with a view that has a fairly broad consensus, that the world is ruled by a Zionist entity via its partner, the USA.]

Pilger does not address the most damning charge against Asange’s political and moral judgement in the Panorama programme,  his dealings with the obsessive anti-semite and general loon, Israel Shamir.  A useful summary of this association can be found here by Nathalie Rothschild, though no doubt many will find her surname suspect.

The words “Julian Assange” are as reliable a nutter magnet as “Israel and Palestine“.  In the Liberal Conspiracy thread on Private Eye’s revelations about Assange’s belief in a Jewish media conspiracy people turn up to say that (a) Private Eye must have been hoaxed or is telling lies; (b) Assange was only saying what’s true anyway.  The same calibre of commenter turns up at John Pilger‘s thread saying (a) David Leigh was telling lies; (b) what’s wrong with killing informants anyway?  

A Permanent Chill

John Gross died recently and I wrote about his Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters here.  The best way I had to “celebrate his life” as they say at funerals these days was to read another one of his books.  So I picked up Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (published 1992).  It’s a biography of The Merchant of Venice - its source material, how it was seen by contemporaries and later interpreted by actors and critics.  As I would expect from anything by Gross, the book is humane, sensible and witty.

At the Cambridge Festival Theatre production in 1926 . . , audiences were given a taste of what a director could do when he set out to be original at all costs.  Shylock made one of his entrances grinding away at a barrel-organ; as soon as Portia launched into “The quality of mercy”, the Duke started playing with a yo-yo.  The director responsible, Terence Gray, dreamed up many similar gimmicks during the years in which he ran the Festival Theatre (1926-1933) - a Twelfth Night, for instance, with Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek waltzing around on roller-sakes.   Gray is a forgotten figure today; but his work was a portent.

P170

The portent is to the productions that strain against the text to offer interpretations that are “challenging” ie flattering to modern sensibilities.

According to Gross The Merchant was a favourite school text, and I remember doing it when  I was 15 or so.  I was sorry I wasn’t chosen to read Shylock -  no doubt a million actors have felt like that since.  It’s a  juicy part.  During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the play was the most performed of any of Shakespeare’s plays, more so than Hamlet or Macbeth, which I I found surprising.

Anyway, it was so long since I had read the play that I read it again while watching Jonathan Miller’s 1973 production.   This is done in Victorian dress, which portrays Bassanio as a young man about town in a checked jacket, while Antonio is a Victorian gentleman merchant but then that makes Antonio’s spitting at Shylock unlikely.  Hatreds by then had become more reticent.  Portia is played by Joan Plowright who is about twenty years too old for the part, and suddenly turns from a warm, charming woman into a brusque, rude bitch who keeps on forgetting Jessica’s name (there’s nothing in the text to suggest that).  Jonathan Miller stresses the Jessica aspect - her estrangement from her father and her religion and nation - and at the end he leaves her isolated, snubbed by this Christian and aristocratic set she has married into, while the soundtrack plays Khaddish. 

John Gross gives this production a total going over in his book, calling it a “burlesque” and says that to make Shylock more sympathetic the Christian characters “were portrayed as corrupt, cold-hearted frauds”.

I did see the play about a decade or so ago done, I think, by the Royal Shakespeare Company.  At the end of the trial scene they showed Shylock’s total humiliation with him falling over, trying to get up, and falling again and again, slipping on coins scattered on the floor.  I found it unbearable. 

Antonio, Portia, Bassano, Lorenzo - they speak poetry and noble sentiments, they represent love, friendship, music.  That makes their unthinking arrogance to Shylock even harder to take.  He is the Jewish money-lender who is either an ugly menace or a figure of fun.  When he gets a chance to bite them, they pull out his teeth.  It is horrible, just as everyone calling him “Jew“ in conversation is.  My modern sensibility can’t see it any other way.  Shakespeare’s audience, the one he knew and wrote for, would not have thought Shylock's comeuppance horrible but just.  And - here’s a modern sensibility, verging on the Madeleine Bunting blather about jihadist bombing being a “critique” of British foreign policy - I don’t find Shylock’s attempted murder of Antonio disproportionate.  Shylock has been abused and ridiculed because of his racial origins.  My modern sensibility allows him any reaction to this, in drama at least.  The forced conversion is vile.  (Actually the revulsion against him is more religious than racial as we would understand it.)    Antonio is impossible to portray - he is a melancholy soul of generosity who is given to behaving like someone in the BNP.  No-one smacks the jeering thug Gratiano - Portia is quite happy to have him marry her companion Nerissa and welcomes him into her gracious palace.

Gross writes about the ironists coming to rescue Shylock from being seen as the villain:-

“we have been increasingly asked to think of The Merchant as a play which cannot possibly mean what it appears to say, a play which constantly subverts its own surface-values and throws doubt on the purported motives of its characters.. . Shakespeare appears to join in the general scapegoating of Shylock, but he is constantly sending out signals that in reality he condemns it.”

Gross does not believe in an ironic Merchant though he does believe that it is not a simple tale of Jewish evil:-

“Shylock is meant to be a villain.  There can be arguments about his motives and his personality, but there can be no serious argument about his behaviour.  Given the opportunity - an opportunity which he himself has created - he attempts to commit legalised murder.

He is also a Jewish villain.  He did not have to be: Christians were moneylenders too, and the story would have worked perfectly well with a Christian villain. . .Jewishness is one of his primary characteristics: he emphasises it himself, and it is emphasised for him by everyone with whom he has dealings.

His Jewish villainies, moreover, are strictly traditional.  He is a usurer; he is cunning and cruel; he pursues a vendetta against Christians. .

Invested with Shakespearean power and, in time, with Shakespearean prestige, Shylock the Jewish villain became part of world mythology.  He may not have added anything to existing stereotypes, but as the most famous Jewish character in literature he helped to spread them and to keep them vigorously alive4.  He belongs, inescapably, to the history of anti-Semitism.

Yet Shakespeare, though he may often have started out with stereotypes, seldom ended up with them.  He individualised Shylock; he provided him with motives - not pseudo-motives, but motives that anyone can understand; he equipped him with a private life, with compelling powers of self-expression, with senses, affections, passions.. . [H]e is a big character like Falstaff- someone who bursts the bounds of the play in which he appears.

. .We know that in real life Shakespeare was a shrewd and successful businessman, and it is perfectly possible that he had a lurking sympathy with Shylock’s economic realism.  Antonio’s altruism may have been preferable in principle, but that was not the way the world worked.

One thing we can be sure of:  he was not a secret twentieth-century liberal, animated by programmatic opposition to racial prejudice. . . He simply tried to imagine, within the confines of his plot, and within the limits that his culture set him, what it would like to be a Jew.  But dramatic imagination, when it is pitched at the Shakespearean level, becomes a moral quality, a form of humanism, and . . It was a greater step for him to have created Shylock in the sixteenth century than for George Eliot to have written Daniel Deronda in the nineteenth century.   . . Actors who have portrayed a tragic or sorely misused Shylock may have often have gone too far, but it is Shakespeare himself who gave them their opening.

Gross finishes by saying that post-Holocaust there is a permanent chill on the play.

Coda to a death fugue

Further to a post on Shiraz Socialist re Primo Levi:-

Primo Levi always said his experience was utterly untypical.   He survived whereas millions of others didn’t.  It was also untypical in that he was in the concentration camp part of Auschwitz and was starving and labouring under brutal supervision instead of being shot or gassed immediately. 

The first images I saw of the Holocaust were still photos of the piled bodies but what we see mostly in  films, or read in books like Levi’s are narratives, where you follow the journey of those who got through, and leave the bones and ash behind.  It’s the view of Noah’s Ark.  You forget the many drowned and concentrate on the few saved. 

I’ve been reading Bloodlands:-

The Germans began the mass killings of Jews in summer 1941 in the occupied Soviet Union, by gunfire over pits, far from a concentration camp system that had already being in operation for eight years.  In a matter of a given few days in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews in the east than they had inmates in all of their concentration camps.  The gas chambers were not developed for concentration camps but for the medical killing facilities of the “euthanasia” program.  Then came the mobile gas vans used to kill Jews in the Soviet east, then the parked gas van at Chelmno used to kill Polish Jews in lands annexed to Germany, then the permanent gassing facilities at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka in the General Government.  The gas chambers allowed the policy pursed in the occupied Soviet Union, the mass killing of Jews, to be continued west of the Molotov-Rippentrop line.  The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.

The image of the German concentration camps as the worst element of National Socialism is an illusion, a dark mirage over the unknown desert.  In the early months of 1945, the chiefly non-Jewish prisoners in the SS concentration camp system were dying in large numbers. . . Some of the starving victims were captured on film by the British and the Americans.  These images led west Europeans and Americans towards erroneous conclusions about the German system.  The concentration camps did kill hundred of thousands of people at the end of the war, but they were not (in contrast to the death facilities) designed for mass killing./ Although some Jews were sentenced to concentration camps as political prisoners and others were dispatched to them as laborers, the concentration camps were not chiefly for Jews.  Jews who were sent to concentration camps were among the Jews who survived.  This is another reason the concentration camps are familiar; they were described by survivors, people who would have been worked to death eventually, but who were liberated at war’s end.  The German policy to kill all the Jews of Europe was implemented not in the concentration camps but over pits, in gas vans, and at the death facilities at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz.

. . Auschwitz was an unusual combination of an industrial camp complex and a killing facility.  It stands as a symbol of both concentration and extermination, which creates a certain confusion.. . The literature of Auschwitz [was] written by its survivors, Tadeussz Borowski, or Primo Levi, or Elie Wiesel.  But this sequence is exceptional.  It does not capture the usual course of the Holocaust, event at Auschwitz.  Most of the Jews who died at Auschwitz were gassed upon arrival, never having spent time inside a camp.  The journey of Jews from the camp to the gas-chambers was a minor part of the history of  the Auschwitz complex, and is misleading as a guide to the Holocaust or to mass killing generally.

Auschwitz was indeed a a major site of the Holocaust: about one in six murdered Jews perished there.  But though the death factory was Auschwitz was the last killing facility to function, it was not the height of the technology of death: the most efficient shooting squads killed faster, the starvation sites killed faster, and Treblinka killed faster. . . By the time the gas chamber and crematoria completed at Birkenau came on line in spring 1943, more than three quarters of the Jews who would be killed in the Holocaust were already dead.  For that matter, the tremendous majority of all the people who would be deliberately killed by the Soviet and the Nazi regimes, well over ninety percent, had already been killed by the time those gas chambers at Birkenau began their deadly work.  Auschwitz is the coda to the death fugue.

Bloodlands p 382-383.

I haven’t got If This is a Man to hand, but I remember when they arrive at Auschwitz he says of most of the people with him - men, women and children - that “they were swallowed up by the night”.  Those must have been the great majority who were killed immediately.