Now that's what I call JAZ

Here's the open letter of Jews against Zionism to all true anti-zionists to picket the SWP's Bookmarks bookshop tomorrow night - 17/6/2005 - and demonstrate that anti-semitism and anti-zionism are two very different things, in fact they are opposites.

Dear Comrades,

As many of you know, Jews Against Zionism (JAZ) are organising a picket of Bookmarks this Friday 17th June @ 5.45 p.m at 1 Bloomsbury Street in protest at the decision of a socialist bookshop to stage a talk by Gilad Atzmon.

Mr Atzmon may be a good jazz player, but his political views cannot be described as anything other than deeply racist and anti-Semitic. We are appalled that the SWP leadership have seen fit to persist with this invitation when we and others have pointed out to them that:

Mr Atzmon has distributed Holocaust Denial literature by Paul Eisen (‘The Holocaust Wars’) which clearly supports the view that there was no deliberate extermination of the Jews or anyone else by the Nazis.

His openly stated support for all the trappings of the world Jewish conspiracy theories.

We believe that it is important that those who support the Palestinians and who are opposed to the racism of Zionism and the Israeli State are also seen to be opposing anti-Semitism. Unlike the Zionists we see no contradiction between the two.

We would therefore urge all those who can to attend the picket.

Below are some of the more choice extracts from Gilad Atzmon’s own web site.

Fraternally,

Sue Blackwell, Angela Dale, Mark Elf, Tony Greenstein, Deborah Maccoby, Moshe Machover, Roland Rance, Inbar Tamari

(Bloomsbury Street runs of the side of the British Museum and Great Russell Street – nearest tube Tottenham Court Road).

The Writings of Gilad Atzmon [http://www.gilad.co.uk/]

"we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously…. They (Zionists) are especially annoyed when they are blamed for the death of Jesus…. … 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… I would suggest that perhaps we should face it once and for all: the Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus who, by the way, was himself a Palestinian Jew.’".’’ On Anti-Semitism
‘Now, it looks as if Zionist lobbies control American foreign politics. After so many years of independence, the United States of America is becoming a remote colony of an apparently far greater state, the Jewish state…. Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Verse 2)
"The J’s are the ultimate chameleons, they can be whatever they like as long as it serves as some expedient…. Occasionally it looks as if they are almost there, you can see them running the show, running American political life, running American show business, running the "new middle East", running the Communist revolution but then, as it appears, something always goes wrong." The J word, the J people and the J spot

If only the SWP would listen to our kind of JAZ instead of Gilad Atzmon's.