Gabriel Ash on Assad

I just stumbled on this little gem by my friend Gabriel Ash on Louis Proyect's marxmail thingy:

The immediate problem is indeed Assad. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Assad has been a stellar prince. He has fully grasped the potential of the current historical moment, the fortuna that opens possibilities for virtù, and acted on that understanding singlemindedly. Bombing one's own country to the stone age and expelling the majority of the people is a very high risk strategy, and few tyrants have survived it. But Assad has grasped where the world is today. He has correctly understood that defeating the threat of expanding democracy, everywhere, but especially in the Middle East, is not only the point of unity of all the world's powers, but even the dominant intellectual and cultural mood, and if he positions himself at that very point, he will be untouchable. He understood that none of his adversaries, not Turkey, nor the US, nor Israel, would risk his downfall if it meant an opening for popular empowerment. And the more he murders, the more he destroys, the more impossible it is it remove him without conceding the revolt. Syria is the 21st century Paris Commune. It is a flash of lightning that illuminates a furious global counter-revolution. Even hundreds of thousands of refugees are unlikely to change that. the EU would much rather build new concentration camps for them than risk inadvertently helping a popular victory against tyranny. About the left, the less one says the better.
Gabriel Ash

Scottish PSC reaffirms commitment to anti-racism while CounterPunch reaffirms commitment to antisemitism

The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign has sent an open letter to the US Campaign to End the Occupation supporting the latter's disassociation from certain white supremacist and antisemitic elements who seek to legitimise themselves by cosying up to the Palestine solidarity movement.

Here's a chunk, indeed the gist of SPSC's letter:

Across the whole range of Palestine solidarity groups and networks in the UK, none could write or appear even once in White supremacist newspapers or social media; it is unthinkable. Any association with any brand of extreme right, racist formations would disgust and repel all those who currently give us active and passive support. It would be madness. 

The back story to the controversy mostly in the US between Palestine solidarity activists who believe the movement must be anti-racist across the board and those who believe that the movement should be so broad as to accommodate racists has become a little complex now but it began with Jewish Voices for Peace writing privately to a fairly high profile antisemite, Alison Weir, stating their disapproval of her approach and her associations.  She went public on the spat and far-rightists seem to have taken the opportunity to try to steer the movement their way.  Here's the take of the US Campaign to End the Occupation.  I'll just provide the intro here:

The following statement, issued by the Steering Committee of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation 

1. summarizes our receipt of a complaint against Alison Weir and the organization If Americans Knew and our subsequent action following that complaint, 

2. provides further discussion of our position on the political issues that this case touches upon,  

3. and provides evidence and documentation that undergirds the decisions that have been made by the organization. 

Among many issues raised regarding Weir was a clearly antisemitic article she had published in CounterPunch where she reran the allegation that Israel hunts people down and kills them specifically to take their internal organs (the kernel of truth being that Israel, in common with several other states including the UK, has indeed taken organs from the dead) and she linked this to the allegation that Jews killed Christians in medieval times to use their blood for ritual purposes.

Support for the far-right came from an unexpected quarter when Louis Proyect, a high profile former leftist published an utterly bogus defence of Alison Weir and an attack on JVP on his blog which he still calls Unrepentant Marxist.  Subsequently he also posted some kind of petition to support Alison Weir that he hasn't actually signed himself as far as I could see last time I looked.

Well I was wondering when CounterPunch would host something in support of their antisemitic occasional (but by no means isolated) guest. I assumed they would come up with something denying the antisemitism but I was wrong.  They've posted something openly antisemitic.  Certainly the article by a Jack Dresser repeats all the lies and glossovers you can see on Louis Proyect's blog and which are ably exposed in US Campaign's statement but Dresser introduces a real howler:

Alison’s politically incorrect policy has been to disseminate salient facts to anyone, anywhere to achieve the broadest possible reach among American citizens, without political discrimination. The expelling organizations undoubtedly fear that the knowledge will feed anti-Semitism. Maybe it will, but the appropriate remedy would be a collective demand by the Jewish diaspora to end the Zionist project, make reparations to its victims, and establish a democratic state, not to withhold information from people who might use it to make Jewish Americans uncomfortable.[emphasis added]

Ok, let's leave aside the guy's ignorance of the fact that many zionists are antisemitic and vice versa but how do Jews issue a collective demand?  Really, unless you believe there is such a thing as a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to which all Jews are party, how can you believe that Jews are capable of issuing a collective demand?

Now I have to say, from what I have seen of CounterPunch over the years this kind of thing is by no means atypical.

I blogged about Elise Hendrick's post titled CounterPunch or Suckerpunch where using samples of posts from CounterPunch she demonstrated that the motivation of the editors appears to be the promotion of some kind of red-brown alliance given the ratio of far-right posts to leftist posts.  All the various supporters of CounterPunch have managed to do so far is quibble over her arithmetic.

The idea that CounterPunch is bona fide leftist publication is no longer tenable (if it ever was) unless essentialising bigotry aka racism is part of the leftist credo.

Louis Learns Lesson

I'm absolutely convinced that Louis Proyect's hosting of a post supporting Alison Weir was such an aberration it must have been a mistake that his ego won't let him admit to. I honestly believe that he hosted the post without having read it.  Just like I used to take Louis too seriously so I took the first series of True Detective too seriously as well until I started seeing negative reviews and a couple of spoofs.  Here's a parody of True Detective that could equally apply to Louis Proyect's ducking, diving and lying his way through a thread on his blog before finally being confronted with what had actually happened. He simply cannot have read what he posted:





Other JSF posts on this here and here and Louis Proyect's post is here.

Louis Proyect remains Unrepentant

I could have called this Here Lies Louis Proyect but he's lied in so many places it would be misleading.

I've already posted on this so just briefly, it all began when I got my subscriber email for Louis Proyect's then latest post titled, The Jewish Voice for Peace Attack on Alison Weir: JVP Loses Its Balance. Following the link to the post I found that it was broken but googling some words I found the post on Louis's Marxmail site. I assumed that Louis had posted the piece in error because whatever else one can say about the post the main point of it was to defend an antisemite, Alison Weir.  Now since I've already posted on this, I will just copy and paste the emails from me to Louis and back and between Louis's guest poster, Amith Gupta and me.  Here goes:

Dear Louis

I was dismayed to see an email of a post from your blog defending Alison Weir and attacking some of her detractors.  I followed the link because I wanted to comment on the piece.  Off the top of my head I was going to mention her organisation, The Council for the National Interest (which your guest poster fails to mention presumably because the name alone should set alarm bells ringing) and I was going to dig up her article in Counterpunch in which she linked Israel's harvesting of Palestinian organs to the blood libel of yore even misrepresenting Israel Shahak to make her point.

I hope you've either deleted the post or decided not to run it because I was just doing a post criticising a David Aaronovitch article where said:

 many left-wingers and sympathisers with the Palestinian cause in this country and elsewhere can no longer tell the difference between progressive thinking and "essentialist" bigotry that used to be the preserve of the anti-democratic and racist right.

I'd hate you of all people to prove Aaronovitch right.

I've been googling for the defence of Alison Weir post and it isn't in the google cache of Unrepentant Marxist but it is on marxmail.  If you have deleted it from UM then perhaps you could also delete it from marxmail.

Regards

And here's how Louis responded:

It was taken down because I have to work on the formatting. You will have an opportunity to comment on it tomorrow. I am cc'ing the author.

Not quite the response I was hoping for so I quickly replied:

I emailed you in good faith assuming you had rectified an honest mistake but if you're knowingly promoting racism further comment is pointless.

but it gets worse.  Here's Louis's guest to me:

There is nothing beyond the pale in the article you cited. Weir discusses a Swedish report of a medical scandal involving Israeli soldiers accused of mutilating the bodies of their victims and engaging in organ trafficking. The Knesset itself investigated some of these charges and admitted that some of them were true: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2009/12/2009122315425789179.html

As far as Toaff and Shahak, the only reason Weir brings them up at all is because the Israeli officials who categorically denied the accusations in the Swedish report cited the blood libel myths against Jews. So Weir cites Toaff's controversial work in which he documented and continues to maintain that in some small, exceptional cases, there may have actually been some small number of unrepresentative deviants who actually engaged in such practices. For this, Toaff was condemned. 

I do not see how this can be seen by anyone as an attempt by Toaff or Weir for that matter to validate the blood libel. Only to show how accusations of blood libel can be used mask and defend deviant behavior, in this case, a serious war crime by Israeli troops. 

I do not know why you think any of this somehow validates Aaronovitch's claim. In my experience, to the extent that it is true, it is that lefties do not take the dignity of Arabs and Muslims seriously.

It was clear to me that I was dealing with a racist and I had only written to Louis to help him spare his blushes but here's me back to Gupta:

The reason Weir mentions Toaff and misrepresents Shahak is not to say that shit happens but to make out that such things have been done by Jews since time immemorial as part and parcel of the Jewish identity.  It's true that zionists use the blood libel libel (sic) as a smokescreen but Weir uses it as "evidence".

Your last paragraph is utterly nonsensical. I had no idea you or Alison Weir were claiming to speak for Arabs and/or Muslims and if you're not a leftist yourself, Aaronovitch wasn't referring to you.  He could certainly have a lot of fun using Louis Proyect's stupidity and lack of integrity against the whole of the left in future, only in future he won't have to make anything up.

I notice you haven't mentioned Weir's leadership of the Council for the National Interest presumably because if you did you might find yourself owning up to the fact that Alison Weir doesn't seem to take Arabs and Muslims particularly seriously unless they serve what she sees as the national interest.

Anyway, I told Louis Proyect that I emailed him in good faith because I assumed he had made an honest mistake. It appears I was wrong.  I never assumed you were being honest in the first place and on that, I was right.

I hope this correspondence is over now.

But back comes this Gupta chap again:

Hi,

That is not why she cited Toaff at all. The rest of your strange criticisms, including Arab/Muslim representation are addressed in the original piece.

Are you the only person behind JSF? I have always liked that blog. Never meet your heroes, they say.

As it turned out I did spend more time than is good for a person trying to reason with Louis on twitter, on his blog and here on JSF but to no avail. He got worse and worse and was happy to get the support of a couple of trolls supporting the racist post though, like Louis, neither seemed to have read it or the thread properly.  I actually think Louis probably did make a mistake in the first instance and that my email to him made him realise he couldn't simply walk away from it. He'd dug a hole for himself and decided to keep digging.  So here, there and in lots of other places lies Louis Proyect but he remains unrepentant.

Knowing the difference between Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism

David Aaronovitch had an article in The Jewish Chronicle a few weeks ago where he commends Sarah Annes Brown for spotting the antisemitism of one of the organisers of the recently postponed Southampton University conference on Israel.  It's a quirky piece but, typically, it ends up taking a swipe at the anti-zionist left.

Let's see how he starts:

What with one thing and another, I followed the spring furore over the "Israel" symposium at Southampton University only rather loosely.....

What I hadn't realised is how far gone some of the conference's animating spirits are in what I can only call the New Judeophobia. The gap in my education was filled this week with the latest edition of the magazine Fathom and an article by Professor Sarah Brown, anatomising the thinking of the Southampton academic and symposium organiser Oren Ben-Dor.

See that?  Maybe you didn't notice but Aaro only followed loosely what had been appearing all over The JC, for which he writes, for weeks before and after the event was postponed and the JC article he linked to no longer appears on the JC site but he snapped up and eagerly devoured the latest edition of the mouthpiece of Israel lobby group, BICOM, for which he doesn't yet write. Strange for a self-styled "non-Zionist" but let's read on:

One of the more unwelcome phenomena of recent life in the broad diaspora has been the appearance of a certain kind of Israeli exile who insists on telling us how bad Jews are.

See that?  In the previous paragraph he hadn't known about what in the next paragraph he describes as "phenomena of recent life".  Fast learner this guy.

And the next paragraph is a flat contradiction of the "recent life" one which, as we've seen contradicted the one before that.

until last week I had imagined that Mr Atzmon was more or less unique

So "recent life" began last week.

But for all that nonsense I think Aaro's understanding of what Sarah Annes Brown wrote was fair and in turn her understanding of Oren Ben-Dor was fair too.  And here is Aaro's take:

his article is entitled "Occupied Minds: Philosophical Reflections on Zionism, Anti-Zionism and the Jewish Prison..... it argues that Zionist and most anti-Zionist Jews are captives of the same primeval Jewish mindset, and that it is this mindset that, in effect, provoked antisemitic reaction, right down to the Holocaust itself.

In other words, Jews have been asking for it throughout history, and in fact quite like it when they get it.

Actually he misses the bit where Ben-Dor says that the nazis had to become like Jews themselves in order to carry out the holocaust but I suppose that's relatively small beer against the central thesis. Actually to give Sarah more credit than Aaro does, she refers to Ben-Dor's methodology such as it is by mentioning his penchant for "dark suggestion" over hard evidence, or indeed any evidence. But anyway, where does Aaro go with all this?

What is depressing about Ben-Dor is that many left-wingers and sympathisers with the Palestinian cause in this country and elsewhere can no longer tell the difference between progressive thinking and "essentialist" bigotry that used to be the preserve of the anti-democratic and racist right.

Now that was the bit that had me sending an email to the JC as follows:

Dear Sir

If nothing else the now "postponed" University of Southampton conference on the legitimacy or not of the State of Israel has raised the profile of one of its organisers, Oren Ben-Dor.

Ben-Dor's antisemitism was noticed and blogged by anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein back in 2008 whereas David Aaronovitch has only just noticed it.

In fairness, that doesn't tell us anything about David Aaronovitch's perception of antisemitism. The Board of Deputies knew nothing of Ben-Dor's warped world view when it lobbied the University of Southampton to cancel the conference using "two lines of attack...legal and health and safety".  Note, not antisemitism.

Zionists John Strawson and Geoffrey Alderman were going to address the conference. Neither of them raised any issue about Ben-Dor.

Even on the Israel advocacy and self-styled anti-antisemitism blog Engage, Zionist academic and racism expert Ben Gidley failed to mention any issue with Ben-Dor.  Engage's Dr David Hirsh simply said that Ben-Dor "has come to the defence of an open antisemite", not that he is antisemitic himself.

Given his low profile, Oren Ben-Dor has flown below the radar of most activists, both Zionist and anti-Zionist.  So why does David Aaronovitch berate the left and Palestine solidarity supporters over a failure to "tell the difference between progressive thinking and "essentialist" bigotry"?

It might even be that in defence of the State of Israel, Zionists have made so many bad faith allegations of antisemitism they can no longer differentiate between the crying of "wolf" and the wolf itself.

Yours faithfully

Now as luck would have it the JC didn't publish my letter.  I say it's lucky because one usually incisive blogger, Louis Proyect, the Unrepentant Marxist, has decided to prove Aaro at least partly correct by publishing a lengthy and tedious defence of quite a high profile American antisemite by the name of Alison Weir.

Now Louis Proyect's take on the various antisemites rearing their heads mostly on the internet has ranged from dismissive (Atzmon) to disgusted (Moon of Alabama & MRZine).  He's never been supportive before and I haven't noticed him being evasive when challenged before now.  Anyway, here's his post, which as I said is a guest post.  When asked why he was defending Weir he asked the questioner to elaborate. I reckon evasion is all Louis Proyect has when challenged over this post but I'll update if anything changes or maybe even if nothing does.

UPDATE 3/7/2015 09:51 - I'm being told by supporters of MRZine that Louis Proyect was smearing by association when he denounced them here.  I really don't know enough of what he was talking about to comment on that - though others may wish to.  What I have noticed in Louis Proyect's post titled, MRZine regular circulates anti-Semitic filth, is the logic he employs could easily apply to his own decision to publish support for an antisemite and a promotion of engagement with white supremacists.

See this from the post itself:

It doesn’t really matter if Chandan did not write this filth himself. He made the decision to publish the article by Muhammad Nasr, a long-time anti-Semite who writes for http://freearabvoice.org/.

And here's Louis in the comments:

I don’t think that MRZine is “promoting” these views, only that one of their favorite bloggers is too stupid to have noticed that an article he put on his blog was garbage.

I still don't know much about this but Louis has certainly published garbage on his blog with the guest post from this Amith Gupta.  He might not have realised what he was posting when he first posted it but when it was brought to his attention that Alison Weir has plenty of form for antisemitism in her own right without getting into her "repeat and friendly" associations with white supremacists he went into denial, blocked critics on twitter, started hurling insults around and ended up simply lying.  I also noticed that in spite of the post being about antisemitism and definitely not about Palestine, he has tagged it to Palestine and not to antisemitism.  It suggests to me that he does have the good sense to want the post buried and forgotten eventually and certainly he doesn't want it compared and contrasted with his usual position on antisemitism.  But given his ducking, diving, insulting, lying and blocking I don't suppose we'll ever know why he hosted a guest post by someone who wants antisemites to enjoy credibility in the Palestine solidarity movement.

All in all I have been shocked by Louis Proyect's sheer lack of integrity. The guest post was at best disingenuous and Louis's defences of it, such as they were, have been worse. I know that many bloggers let their egos get in the way of their integrity but what is genuinely sad is that Louis Proyect has shown such appalling judgement in all this

Where was I when Hitchens died?

Nope, I don't remember where I was or what I was doing when I heard that Christopher Hitchens died but I did remember him on the telly once, back in the 1990s, saying something like, "I shall never forget where I was standing and what I was doing on the day [Kennedy] nearly killed me." I was worried that, as with so much pre-internet stuff, I wouldn't be able to find the quote, but he obviously liked the point so much he dusted it off for his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22. The New York Post liked it too. And so did I.

I remember seeing him at a London Review of Books discussion with Tariq Ali et al after the former had nailed his flag to the mast of the neo-con "war of terror" and managed to show himself to be quite a nasty racist in response to one member of the audience.

Q[uestioner]. Tariq Ali was the only one I think who mentioned that the United States is the sole global power that we have now and what we are seeing is the dawn of a new imperialism. So why is it that we are so – we, meaning the global community – why are we so content at letting America have its say regardless of what the rest of the world thinks of it. It has committed a whole host of crimes on a vast scale in international law. It is suspending civil rights as far as the al-Qaida prisoners are concerned. It is actually riding roughshod over all norms of international law and why – where is Russia, where is Japan, where are all these countries?
........
C[hristopher] H[itchens]. ....I will not reject the challenge from the comrade, who I would say was from the Subcontinent. I would ask him this. He wanted to know why a country that – I think I have you right, sir – was indifferent to the norms of international law, was not more opposed by Russia and China, was that how you had it? Where was Russia, you said, where is China, why do they lie down under this lawlessness? I think your question answers itself: I think you had a real nerve asking it actually, or shall I say Chechnya or Cambodia or North Korea or Tibet or Kurdistan? It wouldn’t make any difference to you – would it? – any more than if I asked you how many people are currently flooding to the borders and ports of your country to immigrate to it – or to Russia or to China. Ask yourself that. One of the greatest problems that the United States has at the present moment is that everyone wants to come and live there: they’re wondering now how generous they can be. We should all have such problems; you will never have a problem like that, and nor will your ideology

Another time, I remember him saying that the war on Afghanistan should continue unabated through Ramadan and that "I always crank up my anti-zionism at Yom Kippur", though I don't remember hearing or reading his anti-zionism, cranked up or otherwise. I can't find that one on the net. Nor can find any evidence of his anti-zionism on the net now.

What else do I remember? Yes, I remember thinking he was quite a good egg when he was on the telly with Shere Hite but also I remember wincing when he referred to her as Mademoiselle Hite, as if the Mademoiselle bit might detract from her credibility. This too was pre-net, and he can't have been as proud of that one as he was of the Kennedy remark because I can't find the Hite stuff anywhere.

So, there's a lot on the net now about "Hitch", most of which is flipping ludicrous. I suppose that's quite fitting. He was obviously quite proud of his flipping but he didn't seem to be aware of his ludicrousness. The fact that there were at least three obituaries for Hitchens in the Daily Mail show both the extent to which he had flipped and how ludicrous he had become by the time he died, though, to be fair, one of the tributes was from his brother, Peter.  Many of the obits mention George Galloway's put down of Hitchens as a "a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay". Hitchens had turned up to support some House UnAmerican Activities Committee or other against Galloway.  The Mail didn't mention that Galloway dispatched Hitchens with even greater ease than he did the committee itself and I haven't seen any of the obits mentioning the "grapple in the Apple" debate between Hitchens and Galloway courtesy of Democracy Now. Woops, that's not true. There was one which I can't place right now. It said something about the debate generating more heat than light but I am fairly sure Galloway said that himself at the end of the debate.

But there have been some very entertaining posts on the passing of Hitchens my personal fave is from Flying Rodent of the Between the Hammer and the Anvil blog. See this:

Evasion, retrenchment, misdirection, ad hominem assaults.  These were his weapons in his Great Intellectual Struggle, a cause in which he clearly regarded himself as an intellectual Field Marshall, sending his fellow word-warriors into combat.  

Pick your Iraq-related controversy, and Hitchens had a highly-conditional, deeply duplicitous argument ready for deployment.  When a survey revealed a massive death toll resulting from the war, Hitchens invoked a nebulous "some percentage" of the bodycount who were maybe, probably murderous baddies.  

What percentage?  Hitchens neither knew nor cared.  All that mattered was reducing the damage to the war effort, to allow it to continue unimpeded in all it's righteous violence.
On the torture, rape and murder of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: Bad, but not Guernica and anyway, not as bad as Saddam.  

Cindy Sheehan, a woman with some wacky opinions who also happened to be the mother of a dead US soldier?  Not so much an exploited, grieving woman as a moral blackmailer, said his angry hatchet job.  

When he was embarrassingly suckered by the obvious fraudster Ahmad Chalabi - Other candidates would be worse.  

On Iraq's horrifying civil war, a situation resulting entirely from the decision to invade in the first place - your problem, you fucking deal with it if you want to end the war so much...  Or, in one of his favourite gambits - Al Qaeda ate my homework. 

Louis Proyect's immediate obituary was more about Alex Cockburn's obituary and more about Cockburn himself than about Hitchens but his subsequent pointer to Reading the maps was welcome, though I don't agree that it was "the best Hitchens obit". It does provide some useful links including Proyect's own obit and Finkestein's Hitchens obituary which appeared about 9 years before Hitchens actually died:

In the early years of the Iraq war Hitchens was regularly excoriated by left-wing commentators, but few of his old opponents have felt the need to renew their fury in the aftermath of his death. The blogger Louis Proyect was one of Hitchens' most ferocious and persistent critics, but his obituary for his old enemy is surprisingly measured. Alex Callinicos, whose Socialist Workers Party was often condemned as an ally of 'Islamofascism' by Hitchens, has also refrained from denunciations............

Hitchens' advertisements for Bush's war were written in haste, and without great regard for either facts or logic. Reviewing The Long Short War, a collection of twenty-two pro-war articles penned in late 2002 and early 2003, Norman Finkelstein noted how often Hitchens contradicted himself, even within the confines of a single article. Finkelstein found Hitchens claiming that the war had nothing to do with oil, then stating on his very next page that 'of course it's about oil'. He saw Hitchens arguing that Saddam's regime was on the brink of 'implosion', then asserting a page later than 'only the force of American arms' could bring regime change in Iraq. 

As it happens, all these years down the line, it is worth revisiting Finkelstein's piece:

an apostate is usually astute enough to understand that, in order to catch the public eye and reap the attendant benefits, merely registering this or that doubt about one's prior convictions, or nuanced disagreements with former comrades (which, after all, is how a reasoned change of heart would normally evolve), won't suffice.  For, incremental change, or fundamental change by accretion, doesn't get the buzz going: there must be a dramatic rupture with one's past.  Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.  A rite of passage for apostates peculiar to U.S. political culture is bashing Noam Chomsky.  It's the political equivalent of a bar mitzvah, a ritual signaling that one has "grown up" - i.e., grown out of one's "childish" past.  It's hard to pick up an article or book by ex-radicals - Gitlin's Letters to a Young Activist, Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism… - that doesn't include a hysterical attack on him.  Behind this venom there's also a transparent psychological factor at play.  Chomsky mirrors their idealistic past as well as sordid present, an obstinate reminder that they once had principles but no longer do, that they sold out but he didn't.  Hating to be reminded, they keep trying to shatter the glass.  He's the demon from the past that, after recantation, no amount of incantation can exorcise.  

And as recently as May this year Hitchens was still attacking his former comrade, Chomsky, conveniently forgetting that his journey to the neo-con right didn't begin quite as immediately after 9/11 as he would have liked people to believe.

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.