Lib Dem MP David Ward Told the Truth

Ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day,  Liberal Democrats David Ward, MP for Bradford East made a comparison on his website.  He equated the Shoa with the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.  But in Britain 2013, we are not supposed  to think freely, we are advised not to follow our ethical intuitions or even to think historically or critically. The Liberal Democrats  already "condemned"  Ward for his "use of language."

Here is what Ward wrote:

Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.

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Jazzwise -Album Review

"The Band has created perhaps their most enduring ensemble work yet" Andy Robson Jazzwise

Jazzwise - DESERTED CITIES OF THE HEART by ANDY ROBSON

GILAD ATZMON has been a restless presence on the British and international jazz scenes since the early 1990s, with his garrulous playing style that’s as coruscating and as caustic as his provocative political views. Yet his latest work, Songs Of The Metropolis, finds him mellowing, but only a little, says ANDY ROBSON

Jazzwise Feb 2013 Edition

http://www.jazzwisemagazine.com/

They call him the hardest working man in jazz. And Gilad Atzmon has no problem justifying that title. “I’m always busy! As you know, I don’t fill out the forms for the Arts Council. I don’t believe it’s down to the tax payers to pay for me loving music. So for me the only way to survive is to keep working.”

And the fruits of that labour keep coming: we’re here to talk about his new release as leader of The Orient House Ensemble, Songs Of The Metropolis. But straight from here Atzmon’s off for a Blockheads gig; he’s every intention of finishing the production of Blockheads bass hero Norman Watt-Roy’s album in the new year, he’s producing long time associate Sarah Gillespie’s new album and, perhaps most exciting of all, there’s “the most expensive album I’ve ever done. Recorded at Abbey Road, a beautiful project, a double album – four sides of vinyl – it’s a tribute to Serge Gainsbourg!”

The energy, the will to succeed, (and not to mention the eclecticism) seems endless. One stereotype, of course, is that Atzmon’s drive reflects the classic immigrant’s need to work twice as hard, to be twice as good as their host, to build their new life in a new land. After all it’s 16 years since Atzmon left Palestine for Cricklewood’s green and pleasant land. But Atzmon doesn’t do stereotypes. If he identifies with any community, it is not one defined by such limited notions as nationhood or ethnicity. Instead his home is among the community of jazz people striving to find new voices, new ways of expression. And for Atzmon these musicians are free of the trammels of time and place: whether it’s Coltrane in New York, Piazzolla in Buenos Aires or Bird all over the place.

Yet Atzmon’s albums resonate with a sense of time and place: only Atzmon can take us from ‘London To Gaza’ and indeed ‘All The Way To Montenegro’ (The Tide Has Changed); only Atzmon has shepherded us from ‘The Land of Canaan’ (Exile) to ‘Autumn In Baghdad’ and, by delicious irony, ‘Spring In New York’ (Refuge). And now, with Songs Of The Metropolis, Atzmon takes us further into the paradoxical locus of his musical heart.

On one level Songs Of The Metropolis is a concept album, a travelogue of places rich with meaning for Atzmon (and indeed the band, for this is very much a band release). The notion is hardly unique. It’s only a couple of years since the ebullient Hiromi guided us through Place To Be, which celebrated puff pastry in France and crisps in Cape Cod. But travel was always going to be more complex and confectionery-free for Atzmon. Indeed, although Atzmon describes his pieces as ‘love songs’, love for him is as much about loss as it is about consumption and consummation.

“I travel a lot. Every night I fall asleep in a different town. And I fall in love every night. Every town carries a significant colour. It is the sound of language, it is the way the women behave: most towns have their own sounds, their own song.”

And some of the signposts to a city’s signature song are familiar. Atzmon’s ‘Paris’ is redolent with Bechet, accordion chords underwrite its melancholic joie de vivre, Harrison’s piano is broken-hearted yet lyrical.

But as Atzmon is quick to point out, if he has a talent as a composer as well as a philosopher, it is to ‘deconstruct’. He takes the familiar, but places in it a fresh context, breaks a tune mid-bar, shifts a tempo with the merest cue. So ‘Vienna’, hardly surprisingly, is a waltz (and Harrison, the nearest we have to Bill Evans, evokes a ‘Waltz For Debby’). Yet for all its charm, this ‘Vienna’, this paradise of sweet things, could almost be too sickly, scarred as it is with the scrape of Stavi’s bass.

Nowhere is this deconstruction more spectacular than on ‘Scarborough’, at over 10 minutes the epic heart of Songs Of The Metropolis. The saxman loves Scarborough the town, but the incongruence of positioning the sleepy seaside site alongside iconic metropolises like Moscow and Tel Aviv tickles Atzmon’s broad humour. And only he could propel the familiar folkish theme of ‘Scarborough Fair’ to a furious Coltrane-style climax, replete with quotes from ‘My Favorite Things’.

Atzmon’s re-visionings of Bird songs on In Loving Memory Of America prepared us for these deconstructions, these invitations to a dance during which we can never be too sure who is leading, who is calling the tune. And with this awareness comes a realisation that these cities are as imaginary as they are geographically specific. They are, as Cream’s lyricist Pete Brown may have had it, ‘Deserted Cities Of The Heart’.

“Yes, the music is about love, but love of something that is lost. It is about loss, about yearning… yes I am always nostalgic – you remember Nostalgico? (Atzmon’s 2009 release where he reinvented the familiar, like ‘In A Sentimental Mood’, as something new and contemporary). Look at how people yearn for Elvis. You like Elvis, but it’s not because you were with Elvis – it’s because you would’ve liked to be like that. I wasn’t in Paris when it sounded like that, but I wanted to create a sound like I dreamed it would be!” Yet one metropolis is conspicuously absent from this roll call of the world’s most vivid cities. London. Or more specifically, Atzmon’s long time UK residence, Cricklewood. He laughs: “I thought of doing a posh arrangement of ‘New York, New York’, you know, ‘On Cricklewood Broadway’. But maybe only you and me would’ve got the joke.”

Few have tried to celebrate Cricklewood, fewer have succeeded. Alan Coren, perhaps. Ten Years After’s Cricklewood Green spawned the Woodstock monster ‘Love Like A Man’. Doubtless this feature will provoke a rich correspondence about North West London’s finest. Indeed, as a Blockhead, Atzmon is all too aware of Kilburn and its High Road’s heritage. But more pertinently, Atzmon rages against London’s lack of a theme tune, musical or indeed cultural.

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Ian Mann-Songs of the Metropolis

REVIEW

Friday, January 25, 2013

Reviewed by: Ian Mann

http://www.thejazzmann.com

Atzmon has produced his most mature, and in many ways his most diverse, work to date. 

Gilad Atzmon & The Orient House Ensemble

“Songs of the Metropolis”

(World Village Records)

Gilad Atzmon is no stranger to the Jazzmann web pages be it as a multi instrumentalist, composer, author or political activist. So I’ll largely spare you (and myself) the historical spiel with which I normally begin my reviews. Since he moved to London from his native Israel in the late 1990’s the indefatigable Atzmon has become a major figure on the UK jazz scene releasing a series of fine albums with his working group the Orient House Ensemble as well as being a prolific sideman (across a variety of genres from tango to the Blockheads)  and an in demand producer. He’s routinely described as the “hardest working man in jazz” (although Seb Rochford must push him pretty close) and his new OHE album “Songs of the Metropolis” is a reflection of his well travelled lifestyle.

Atzmon has played music all over the globe and the album’s nine compositions are named after some of the world’s great cities- and, er, Scarborough. As Atzmon explained to Andy Robson in the February 2013 edition of “Jazzwise” magazine the album is a step back from the politics of anger that have shaped his music for so long. It’s not that he’s changed his views, he’s merely tired of repeating them (musically at least) and with “Songs of the Metropolis” he’s looking to explore areas of greater emotional and political ambiguity. It’s partly a celebration of Atzmon’s lifestyle - “Every night I fall asleep in a different town and most towns have their own colour, their own sound, their own song”.

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Anti-Slavery Campaign Interview Series. Richard Forer

Richard Forer is a former AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) member with ultra-Orthodox relatives living in Israel. He is the author of Breakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion - A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict, which is available at Amazon. Recently, he was a member of an Inter Faith Peace Builders delegation that visited the Gaza Strip from November 5 to November 11, 2012. To invite Richard for speaking engagements, book signings or interviews, please contact him at rich_forer@yahoo.com. His website is www.richardforer.com



Yago: Recently you spoke at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) about your book, Breakthrough. Transforming Fear into Compassion – A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict. You shared your personal transformation towards a new understanding of your identity and of the Israel-Palestine conflict. This blog aims to deconstruct the energy of enslavement that penetrates today’s world in many dimensions. In your witnessing, you expressed openly how we can become enslaved by rigid ideologies, wrong perceptions of the world and the illusion of being separated from the world. The energy of enslavement can destroy the beautiful gift of our humanity. Listening to you, Martin Luther King Jr.’s words resonated deep within me: “As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery.” I would like very much to welcome your own journey in this blog. My first question is related to the very origins of your life and how the “indoctrination” took place. What do you remember from your childhood that began shaping your mind and identity in a clear dualistic way? What role did the collective unconscious of the Jewish people play?
Rich Forer: Children are more receptive than adults, more innocent. As children, we take on the beliefs of our parents and teachers, our collective of ethnic and/or religious groups, and our society. Although much of our learning is taught to us directly, many of the ideas we incorporate are taught to us indirectly. For example, we absorb beliefs that are expressed, subtly or not so subtly, through feeling, especially the feelings of our parents or other caregivers. Just as we unconsciously model our speech and physical patterns on these caregivers, our view of the world is likewise influenced by these models. We begin to develop an internal logic, a way of seeing the world that is influenced by the people and institutions around us. This logic has a quality that is unique to each individual. It also has a quality that is unique to the society or collective each individual grows up in. For example, when I was a kid I attended Sunday school. I remember seeing, probably in my first-grade classroom, photographs of David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann. Ben-Gurion was Israel’s first Prime Minister and Weizmann its first President. At that time, about nine years after the end of the Holocaust, the atrocities perpetrated upon the Jewish people were very present in the minds of Jews. Most of the Jewish adults I knew had relatives or friends who were killed in the Holocaust. I absorbed their ideas, their knowledge of the terrible suffering of the Jewish people, their horror that human beings are capable of such acts of hatred. When I would look at the photographs of these great men, who had created the one safe haven for the Jewish people, I saw men who wanted to protect and save life, not men who wanted to destroy it. These were the leaders of our people and they were making sure that another Holocaust would never again happen. Along with this thinking, this way of interpreting the information that I, a kid, had available, there seamlessly arose the view that Jews would never do to others the shocking things that Adolf Hitler and others had done to Jews. After all, it never occurred to me to want to do such things. And the Jews I knew were basically caring people, so it obviously had never occurred to them to do such things. They were ipso facto incapable of committing such crimes. What they were capable of was planting millions of trees and turning an arid desert into a land of milk and honey.  With a childlike faith in the goodness of my people, it was a natural progression in thinking to presume that the non-Jewish world, much of which had remained silent while Jews were being murdered, was different than the Jewish world. In other words, for some inexplicable reason, or perhaps because we were special, Jews were more humane than non-Jews. When I looked at Israel, it was obvious that Jewish soldiers were merely defending their land from the irrational hatred of those who, like Hitler, wanted to harm us. Our internal logic colors the way we see the world. It leads us to interpret the world in ways that reinforce our mind’s conception of reality. The logic of my youth continued basically intact into my adult life. So, when I heard that Israeli soldiers had killed children and other civilians, I automatically responded with skepticism if not outright denial. My “logical” mind explained what really must have occurred, which is that these children and civilians were killed because Hamas or Hezbollah, whoever the enemy was, embedded their soldiers within civilian populations. Children were killed not because of Israeli bullets but because these organizations were so filled with hatred they were willing to sacrifice their own children in order to murder Jews. This is how the unexamined mind projects its content onto the world and creates the way the world is constituted.

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Shtetls, Walls and Eruvs

By Ariadna Theokopoulos

http://www.boldfacenews.com/

The Jewish identity politics, brilliantly dissected by Gilad Atzmon in The Wandering Who? as well as in several other of his writings includes the propensity to aggregate into “Jews only” enclaves, a phenomenon visible in activism for human rights.

If the formation of ethnically exclusive cells, separate from non-members of the tribe, while in their midst, is a conscious political strategy to influence and ultimately control any activity that touches upon Israel, it is also more than that. It could also be seen as a group psychological reflex.
I propose applying to it the analytic method of a revered Jewish thinker, the great psychoanalytic mythologizer Sigmund Freud and explore its subsconscious symbolism.

What can shtetls, walls (great and small) and eruvs represent?

What would Freud’s dream interpretation method say they symbolize?

Freud might well have seen this reflex as a neurotic nostalgia for the lost paradise of the intra-uterine life.
Everything ex utero is seen as potentially inimical, untrustworthy, unknown and alien. The lost uterine paradise meant being safe from the hostile world, protected, effortlessly nourished, immune and even able to kick with impunity.

In fact even “g-d” — whose “chosen” ones Jews are –is harsh and tyrannically demanding. Luckily “g-d” is easily duped by a smart Jew, as when the Jew hides behind an eruv. Simple: just string a wire from lampposts around your neighborhood and it becomes “home.”

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Patrick Henningsen, catches up with Gilad Atzmon,

This 21st Century program appeared yesterday.  We spoke about Jewish Power and Jewish progressive spin in particular.  We elaborated on the role of beauty and art and politicians impotence in that regard. 

The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics  and Sabbath Goyim's spin in particular  Amazon.com  or Amazon.co.uk

Israeli Election: Time to bin Left and Right Terminologies

By Gilad Atzmon

Most commentators on Israeli politics fail to see that notions of Left and Right are pretty much irrelevant to the understanding of Israeli politics. Israel defines itself as the Jewish State and, as the years pass, Israel does indeed become more and more Jewish. Naftali Bennett, who, for a while, appeared to be the rising star of the current election, realised this all too well. He re-invented Jewish Home, a political party that celebrates the Israeli aspiration to fulfill his or her true Jewish destiny – He promised his followers that they can live as chosen’s in their Jew-only state, regardless of ethical or moral concerns.

But then most, if not all, Jewish participants in the Israeli political game are committed to the ‘Jewish State’ dream. Of course they differ on some minor practical and pragmatic issues, but on the basics, they clearly agree. Here is an old Israeli joke: ‘an Israeli settler suggests to his lefty friend “Next summer we should put all Arabs on buses and get them out of our land”. Lefty: “Okay, but make sure the buses are air-conditioned.”

In Israel there are no hawks or doves. Instead, all we have is a mild debate between a few interpretations of Jewish tribalism, nationalism and supremacy. Some Jews want to be surrounded by towering ghetto walls – they like it, it’s cosy, it feels safe – others prefer to rely on the IDF power of deterrence. Some would support the excessive use White Phosphorous, others would like to see Iran wiped.

The assumption that there is political division in Israel is just a myth that the goyim are happy to buy into because it gives the impression of the possibility of political change and even spiritual transformation. But the grave truth is that, when it comes to the real fundamentals, Israelis are pretty much united: Labour leader Shelly Yachimovich and war criminal Tzipi Livni were both among those who rushed to support Netanyahu’s Operation Pillar of Cloud. Yair Lapid, the leader of the second biggest Israeli party, also identified as a centrist left, wouldn’t refuse a ministerial job by Benjamin Netanyahu. Meretz which, though a Zionist party, is the only Jewish party in Israel that has even a trace of ethical, universal thinking and values of equality, still comprises a mere 6 Knesset members out of 110 Jewish MKs.

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Judaization = Racism? Really?

By Paul Larudee

Artwork by Carlos Latuff, all rights reserved.

On Sunday, January 20, 2013, the “progressive” Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a short editorial titled “‘Judaization’ is racism”.[i]

Before you get your hopes up, let me tell you that the editorial is a criticism of Shimon Gapso, the Jewish mayor of Upper Nazareth, a community intended to diminish the Arab character of Nazareth, the largest Palestinian Arab city inside what most of the world recognizes as Israel.

Founded in 1957, Upper Nazareth was given priority for development and expansion as part of a campaign by Yitzhak Rabin.  The impetus was a trip that Rabin made to the Galilee in 1975.  At one point he found himself in the Carmel valley.  Looking around, he saw nothing but Palestinian farms and villages.  “Am I in Israel or in Syria?” he uttered, whereupon he lent his weight to the mission to “judaize the Galilee”.  Upper Nazareth is one of the Jewish communities that became an important of that mission.  It was intended to limit the growth of Nazareth and ultimately marginalize or displace it.

Ironically, however, the “Jewish character” of Upper Nazareth is itself being compromised, as Palestinians from Nazareth find that there is no longer enough room in the older city to accommodate their growing population.  In response, the mayor of Upper Nazareth has tried to make the city as unfriendly as possible to its non-Jewish residents, including opposition to Arabic language schools in the town and a much-publicized ban on Christmas trees.  (Most of the Palestinians in Upper Nazareth are Christian.)  The Haaretz editorial is a criticism of the “benighted racist position that sees the presence of Arabs in the Galilee or anywhere else as a national threat.”

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What Really Happens In Palestine... MUST WATCH!