August 04, 2011

What do Breivik, CounterPunch, David Duke, Stormfront and the Jerusalem Post have in common?

Damn, no Atzmon on the list.  I saw Duke and read Atzmon.  Silly me or am I?  It seems like only yesterday that  neo-nazi David Duke was distributing his Letter to the Courageous Former Israeli Gilad Atzmon.

I ought to say that it is seriously not nice to try to make political capital over the slaughter that took place in Norway just recently though if there are political lessons to be learned then they should be and there are many outpourings on the web and in the mainstream media that are trying to glean lessons from the Norway killings that go beyond mere security issues.  There are also anecdotes arising out of the commentary and I suppose this post just draws on and adds to those.

So, I got the title for this post from a comment under the Louis Proyect blog, The Unrepentant Marxist post headed, "What do Alexander Cockburn and the Norwegian mass murderer have in common?" For openers:



The short answer to that is an affinity for the writings of paleoconservative William S. Lind. If you do a search on “by William S. Lind” on the Counterpunch website, you will come up with 16,500 hits. It should be understood that many of these hits refer to the same article, but clearly we are dealing with someone who was at one point as much of a presence there as fellow paleoconservative Counterpuncher Paul Craig Roberts is today.

Last October Alexander Cockburn defended this orientation to the right in an article that referred to me as an “old Trotskyist lag” in light of my unaccountable inability to appreciate the Tea Party:

Contrary to a thousand contemptuous diatribes by the left, the Tea Party is a genuine political movement, channeling the fury and frustration of a huge slab of white Americans running small businesses – what used to be called the petit-bourgeoisie…
It could be Hilary Clinton campaigning against Obama.

As the thread develops through Cockburn's (and therefore Counterpunch's) flirtations and affairs, the Jerusalem Post's availing of the opportunity provided by the Norway killings to denounce multiculturalism to David Duke's similarities with the Jerusalem Post, a commentator put the following point:
So, it’s kinda boiling down to “what do Breivik, CounterPunch, David Duke, Stormfront and the Jerusalem Post have in common?”
So what's all that got to do with Atzmon. Well nothing really but very few have put a marker down on David Duke's letter to the courageous chap and I thought somebody ought to. Atzmon on line does a curious mix of bragging, hoaxing, sock-puppetry and smears and, of course, he is always welcome at Counterpunch. And now, Duke isn't just running articles by Atzmon, he is heaping praise on the man whilst setting out a racist position that he fears Atzmon may not have fully considered. Now given that Atzmon loves a bit of praise, I am surprised that he hasn't mentioned or responded to Duke's letter, not publicly anyway.

PS: Actually I think this shoah.org site is an Atzmon effort and it is happy to run Duke's letter so I'm guessing the great man is at least fairly pleased with it though even he has enough decency to be embarrassed by it. He shouldn't be embarrassed of course. He has no responsibility for who supports him and the shoah site links to Jews sans frontieres! Naturally I wish it wouldn't do that but it's not my responsibility. It might be my responsibility if I shared a worldview with the site owner or administrator but I don't.

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