Gilad the performing elephant

There's an elephant in the living room and no one wants to draw attention to it. The elephant in the living room on this occassion is the fact that Gilad Atzmon is on the list to appear at the SWP's annual event, Marxism 2005 and he is to give a talk at the SWP's bookshop, Bookmarks on Friday 17/6/2005. I shouldn't really say that no one wants to draw attention to it. I didn't want to because I was sure the invites were sent out by people (or even just one person) who don't know that Atzmon veers from rambling buffoonery to outright anti-semitism and that his presence on a leftist platform is entirely inappropriate. Tony Greenstein has written to the SWP to get them to rescind their invites to Atzmon and the replies have been so curt as to be wilfully insulting. Much correspondence between Atzmon and Greenstein has been posted to the Just Peace e-list and the UK Left Network. Well now Gilad Atzmon has posted the whole of their correspondence on to his own site while the Peace Palestine blog has an abridged version. There are a couple of other sites where the Atzmon at Marxism issue has been aired after a fashion but these tend to be sites where the SWP and other anti-zionists are routinely accused of anti-semitism. These are not on very firm ground. They can hardly admit that they have been lying about the SWP and anti-zionism for years and that now they have stumbled on something that makes their bogus allegations ring true.

But there are well meaning people who are opposed to Atzmon's presence at leftist events. Apparently Moshe Machover has threatened to pull out of Marxism 2005 and Michael Rosen has said that he will denounce Atzmon from his own slot at the event.

Meanwhile Roland Rance posted a useful comment to an earlier post post of mine on Atzmon. In a quote I use from Atzmon he complains that the Jews have the rest of humanity so bamboozled over what one can or cannot say that "basically you can never win. But neither can they." "But neither can they"? I nearly cut that last sentence because I didn't understand it. Maybe now I do:

Atzmon is not merely doing a book signing at Bookmarks; he is speaking on "The Deconstruction of the Zionist Identity". This from a man who has written: ""Even though the Jews only make up 2.9 per cent of the country's population, an astounding 56 per cent of Clinton's appointees were Jews. A coincidence? I don't think so. . . we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously. . . American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. . . the Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus".

Regarding a threat by Jews against Zionism to picket the Bookmarks event

Of course, this will not impress Atzmon, who has written "to act as a Jew against Zionism is just a silly mistake that leads nowhere". On the other hand, he has also written "If Israel is the state of the Jewish people and the Jewish people themselves do not stand up collectively against the crimes that are committed on their behalf, then every Jewish person, Jewish symbol and Jewish object becomes an Israeli interest and a potential terrorist target. It is up to the Jewish people to take a stand against their Jewish state and to disassociate themselves from their zealous national movement".

So there you are - damned if we do, and damned if we don't. There's no satisfying some people.

Or to put it another way, "basically you can never win. But neither can they."