'Obama is not good for the Jews' says Michael...

The first in a series of ads by the Republican Jewish Coalition, highlighting the real stories of real Jewish people who give voice to the nagging Jewish doubts that many in the Jewish community feel about President Obama.

The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics, Jewish political interest, Jewish Lobby and beyond..

The book can be  ordered  on Amazon.com  or Amazon.co.uk

Bigot Vs. Bigot

This is a rare and important debate between infamous ultra-nationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane and the caricature Harvard Prof’ Alan Dershowitz.

In the debate, that took place in 1985, Rabbi Kahane explores a thoroughly coherent and consistent notion of Jewishness derived from self love, Jewish orthodoxy and the Torah. He grasps the true (and rather obvious) supremacist meaning of the Jewish state having to be primarily Jewish. Kahane’s views were not popular in Israel at the time, (he insisted that Arabs and Palestinians had no future in Israel so, he wanted them gone) but today, Kahane’s views are widely accepted in Israel and not at all different from Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liebermann’s political agenda.

But what is really interesting is to watch the role of Alan Dershowitz. Even in 1985, our infamous spin-master could not produce one genuine or truthful statement

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DONOR OPIUM, the impact of international aid to Palestine (MUST WATCH)

For twenty years now the international donor community has financially supported Palestinian institution-building, infrastructure development, the economy, public employees' salaries, health and education, social welfare, the police, electricity production, private credit guarantees, and the bigger part of the civil society organizations with regards to democracy promotion, human rights, tolerance, women rights etc.

Peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state have been the declared goals of all the support. But actual results are the fragmentation and pacification of the Palestinian people.

This documentary film, directed by Mariam Shahin and George Azar, and funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, features Palestinian criticism of this externally funded "development".

Castrating Arabs in the name of the Jewish People (shocking sadism)

Two former Palmach fighters boasting about how they castrated Arabs upon orders from David Ben-Gurion himself.

Unfortunately no English translation yet. This is certainly one of the most devastating documentation of Israeli barbarism.

Dr Anthony Löwstedt on The Wandering Who

In this book Atzmon moves effortlessly between disciplines and perspectives. It is an exhilarating read, from the atemporality of immoral action to the temporality of morals, from Jewish suffering to supremacy and expansionism to the categorical imperative, and from guilt feelings to responsibility. It is most interesting to follow Atzmon's diagnosis of the Israeli-Jewish mental state. He looks for signs of schizophrenia and neurosis and finds them abundantly, as well as a new mental disorder, a form of psychosis, which he names 'pre-traumatic stress syndrome', a consequence of intense elite politics of fear. He also finds it among Zionist and crypto-Zionist Jews in the Diaspora. Atzmon is keenly aware that not only Jews but many other groups of people have developed similar symptoms, e.g. white South Africans and Americans at home, or Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Blair and Bush, or the National Socialists in Germany and elsewhere. They are not essentially unique to Jews, but perhaps to conquerors, people who have conquered other people militarily, and whose mental states are disturbed by their relationship with those people, a relationship of violence, dominance, control, expropriation, exploitation, hatred, and disgust, and, naturally, of indigenous resistance to all of that. Sometimes provocative and emotional, often brash, but funny and always entertaining, Atzmon has a simple, humanistic, and very hopeful message: If you want to feel better, then make peace with justice with those people, with the Palestinians. This whole thing can be started, and perhaps as much as half of it finished, in the course of a single afternoon. 

The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics

The book can be  ordered  on Amazon.com  or Amazon.co.uk

Farewell, Alex, My Friend by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Introduction by Gilad Atzmon: I have learned today that the widely admired Alexander Cockburn, co-editor of the invaluable Counterpunch Magazine, passed away last week. Alex was, no doubt, amongst the leading voices of dissent and Counterpunch, which he founded with Jeffrey St. Clair, has been the prominent English alternative media outlet for more than a decade.

Alex was a great supporter of Palestine, justice and free speech. He was quick to offer support to younger writers, myself included. Alex will missed!

I will use this opportunity to express my deepest condolences to Alex’s family and Counterpunch.

Farewell, Alex, My Friend

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Alexander Cockburn, 1941-2012

Our friend and comrade Alexander Cockburn died last night in Germany, after a fierce two-year long battle against cancer. His daughter Daisy was at his bedside.

Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done. Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever.

In one of Alex’s last emails to me, he patted himself on the back (and deservedly so) for having only missed one column through his incredibly debilitating and painful last few months. Amid the chemo and blood transfusions and painkillers, Alex turned out not only columns for CounterPunch and The Nation and First Post, but he also wrote a small book called Guillotine and finished his memoirs, A Colossal Wreck, both of which CounterPunch plans to publish over the course of the next year.

Alex lived a huge life and he lived it his way. He hated compromise in politics and he didn’t tolerate it in his own life. Alex was my pal, my mentor, my comrade. We joked, gossiped, argued and worked together nearly every day for the last twenty years. He leaves a huge void in our lives. But he taught at least two generations how to think, how to look at the world, how to live a life of joyful and creative resistance. So, the struggle continues and we’re going to remain engaged. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

In the coming days and weeks, CounterPunch will publish many tributes to Alex from his friends and colleagues. But for this day, let us remember him through a few images taken by our friend Tao Ruspoli.

Alex and Jasper. Photo: Tao Ruspoli

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On Palestinian Kindness

Oy-Limpics (very funny)

A War Israel is Just Begging for an Excuse to Start

By Gilad Atzmon

Just hours after the attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Ehud Barak were quick to announce that Iran and the Hezbollah were behind the attack. In fact, it didn’t take the Israeli PM more than two hours to blame another country for committing an act of war on Israeli citizens in a third country’s territory. Of course, Netanyahu didn’t provide any evidence to support his thesis. In fact, even today, three days after the attack, no clear leads suggesting any Iranian or Hezbollah's connection are available.

What was it then that made Netanyahu so determined? Is it because he himself was privy to the knowledge that Israeli agents have been murdering Iranian scientists for years? Did Netanyahu react the way he did because he thought to himself that considering Mossad’s assassinations in Tehran, Israel may well have brought on itself an Iranian retaliation? Was Bibi projecting?

I obviously do not have access to Netanyahu or Barak’s minds, but Israel has certainly by now made it clear that its desperation to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, even if such an attack would escalate into a global nuclear conflict. In order to grasp such morbidity we have to bear in mind that collective self-annihilation is inherent to Israeli culture. As it happens, the story of Masada and Samson, both heroic suicidal narratives, are cherished in Israel. Yet, as much as Netanyahu and Barak are keen to launch a world war, it is far from being clear whether the Israeli masses are quite as keen to sacrifice themselves on the Jewish national altar.

I guess that both Barak and Netanyahu’s rush to blame Iran must be seen as an indication of their clear eagerness to attack the country. By now, the two Israeli leaders have managed to rid themselves of any significant voices against such an attack. The former head of Mossad Meir Dagan and IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Askenazi, both of whom opposed military action against Iran, are now excluded from any decision-making process. Veteran Major-General Shaul Mofaz, the leader of the Kadima party, who also opposed an attack on Iran, left Netanyahu’s coalition last week. It seems as if no one within the Israeli cabinet is there to stop Barak and Netanyahu’s genocidal enthusiasms.

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Gilad and All That Jazz - Great Film Review by Selwyn Harris/Jazzwise

http://www.jazzwisemagazine.com/

SELWYN HARRIS explains how Iranian filmmaker Golriz Kolahi’s new bio-pic Gilad and All That Jazz reveals the humour, passion and politics of Gilad Atmon, a musician and writer on a mission to tell it like it is, whatever the cost

Gilad and All That Jazz Trailer from David Alamouti on Vimeo.

There is a good deal of live music footage throughout revealing the different sides to Atzmon’s music: appearing with the Blockhead Ian Dury on Jools Holland’s Later, with Robbie Williams at a later tribute to Dury right through to his own projects: The Orient House Ensemble with Nigel Kennedy at Chelsea’s 606 club, and on a concert stage with his fairly recent Parker and

Larger than life characters are the lifeblood of the jazz documentary. One such release that was featured here just recently Sounds and Silence sheds some light on the intensely private, arcane world of the German ECM label head Manfred Eicher. Mystery though isn’t a word you’d associate with Gilad Atzmon, the subject of a new documentary by the Iranian filmmaker Golriz Kolahi. The expat London-based Israeli reedsman is a working jazz musician with a story to tell. Selected for screening at this year’s London International Documentary Festival, Gilad and All That Jazz emerged from an idea Kolahi had for a series of documentaries about artists who use their art as a political platform. Atzmon is one of a kind. In jazz terms, his allegiances spread across the mainstream of bop, R&B and Coltrane spiritualism. But they are often given a subversive, sometimes humorous cabaret-ish twist when infused primarily with the roots music of the Middle East, but also north Africa, eastern Europe and the Jewish diaspora. In his own words he “likes to take Jewish music and Palestinian-ise it.” Atzmon’s political activity isn’t just connected to his music making. He’s also proved an increasingly outspoken and controversial essayist, blogger and author, but humour is never far away.

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