http://dissidentvoice.org

What is an intellectual? Some say it is the educated lot in the ivory towers of academia. Sure, many of those professors are intellectuals, but many of them are also challenged outside their field. Intellectuality is a concept that transcends university degrees.

So how to define an intellectual? An intellectual is someone who thinks beyond the strictures imposed by upbringing, education, societal norms, dominant media, etc. to arrive in agreement with other conclusions or to form one’s own conclusions. It is more than simply thinking outside a box or applying critical thinking to issues and challenges because intellectuality also demands honesty and integrity.

Gilad Atzmon is someone who encompasses what it means to be an intellectual. He is someone seemingly unbound by a specific group or milieu. Atzmon turned away from the Zionism of his father and the – what he calls — Nazism of his fellow Jews in Israel. Atzmon recalls the plight of captured Palestinian freedom fighters at the Ansar internment camp during his time in the Israeli military: “The place was a concentration camp. The inmates were the ‘Jews’, and I was nothing but a ‘Nazi’.” He has discarded the scoundrel’s refuge of patriotism. He has rejected what is morally anathema inculcation, propaganda, mendacious narrative, and supremacism of Jewish “culture.” Atzmon realizes that we all are human beings; we all possess 23 pairs of chromosomes.