Sympathy for the Devil

Paul Eisen has finally come out as, or at least gone over to, supporting a full-blown neo-nazi take on Hitler and the holocaust. I met Paul Eisen at the home of some Palestinian friends a bit over two years ago and he persuaded me to go to a Deir Yassin Remembered event addressed by, among others, Marc Ellis and entertained by a band called Anatolia. I remember George Galloway and Simon Louvish were there. There were a group of reform rabbis there as well and the event and the group has support from, in particular, reform rabbis in both the US and the UK. Many rabbis have written to the Jewish Chronicle supporting Deir Yassin Remembered and they have been roundly denounced by zionists for doing so, mostly because zionists either deny what happened or seek to play down its significance, or, of course they say, you shouldn't be looking.

My first issue with DYR was last year when a card depicted Jesus on the cross looking away from holocaust corpses and looking horrified towards a ravine containing the victims of the Deir Yassin massacre (I'm going from memory, it was something like that). I emailed Paul Eisen to say that the imagery was unsound and he claimed not to understand my problem with it. No one else openly objected though I suspect that many people believed it to be an innocent mistake in the quest for striking imagery. Next up Paul Eisen published an essay titled "Jewish Power". The article was clearly anti-semitic and was critiqued and denounced as such by many people, though still many people took the view that Paul Eisen was being naive or clumsy in his use of language. More recently I heard that the anti-semitic Israel Shamir was on the board of Deir Yassin Remembered, presumably at the invitation of Paul Eisen. Well now, no doubt can remain about where Paul Eisen stands on the political spectrum. His latest offering is a rambling apologia for holocaust deniers and even for Hitler himself and the nazis. I won't even include a block quote here as some zionists have a nasty habit of attributing quotes directly to the quoter. You will have to click on the red headline above, read the whole article, and weep for Deir Yassin Remembered which is going to be as buried as Deir Yassin itself if Israel Shamir and Paul Eisen have their way.

Something that emerges from this to my mind is the fact that I believe the zionist movement itself has a lot to answer for in terms of publicising holocaust denial which could and should have gone the way of flat earth societies. I have tended to the view that the zionists like a bit of holocaust denial so that they can do a lot of holocaust memorialising, often to distract people from what Israel is and does. They even asked a wilfully misleading question to have about 22% (or thereabouts) of New Yorkers suggesting that "it's possible" that the holocaust didn't happen. I think this led to the making of Schindler's List with its happy ending in a glorious technicolor Israel in an otherwise black and white film. Anway, this latest offering by Paul Eisen taints all who carry on business with him. He needs to be denounced and isolated.

As an aside, the zionists don't seem to have cottoned on to Paul Eisen just yet. This follows a familiar pattern. When Israel Shamir delivered an openly anti-semitic speech at the House of Lords a few months back, it was 7 weeks before the Jewish Chronicle (the UK's leading zionist newspaper) noticed it. Shamir seems to take the view that Jews should renounce being Jewish or forever take the rap for killing Jesus. Jazz saxophonist, Gilad Atzmon, takes the view that if you do not renounce being Jewish then you are a crypto- or under-cover zionist. All I have ever seen in the JC about Atzmon is that he has said unpleasant things about his country, ie, his anti-zionism was condemned but not his anti-semitism. He too started in what many believed was the naive school of inadvertent anti-semitism, but his denunciations of anti-zionist Jews, like Roland Rance and Tony Greenstein, make this position untenable. And now Paul Eisen is openly expressing sympathy, if not directly with Hitler, then certainly for his supporters. And the zionist movement seems not to have noticed. In earlier posts about these Jewish jew-haters I said "enough already!" Well now it's gone beyond enough.

Meanwhile some clumsy clot at the SWP seems to have copied and pasted from last year's invitations to Marxism 2004 and invited Gilad Atzmon to Marxism 2005. I remember a handful of SWP members commenting here that it was a mistake and that he was a disgrace. I hope the organisers spot this and rescind the invite and soon.