Note:

I should make it clear that I do not support the views of Israel Shamir (or Atzmon), who, in many ways, seems to be a provocateur. And I don’t endorse his (and Atzmon’s) negative view of “Jewishness.”  For a critique of Walberg that sees him as embodying a dangerous fraternizing between radical Islamicists and the antiwar left, see here.

In my view, it is precisely because Zionism has replaced Jewishness that it is a problem.

In other words, I do not find anything objectionable per se in “Jewishness” or even chosenness, minus the imperial/expansionist element in Zionism.

Nonetheless, I don’t support the demonizing and ostracizing of this important speech, which now, more than ever, clarifies the political debate over capitalism and empire. I believe, that many on the left, like Atzmon and Shamir, are deliberately invoking the ghost of real anti-Semitism (Holocaust denial)

[Lila: added on November 6, 2015. Rereading this, I want to correct the term “real anti-Semitism”. I do not any more think that disputing numbers or revising a historical record means that someone endorses violence against an entire group.]

in order to form a “popular front” against Zionism.  As anyone can see, this is a very dangerous strategy.

ORIGINAL POST:

Eric Walberg on the wide-spread censorship of important political opinion in the free world:

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Russian-Israeli author Israel Shamir told Al-Ahram Weekly. “There are thousands of people sentenced and imprisoned for similar ‘crimes’, mainly in Germany and Austria, more than all the dissidents ever imprisoned in Soviet Russia. The majority of these cases never reach public awareness.”

That a lowly sous-prefet became the subject of the interior minister’s personal intervention for stating the above is astounding, just one example of the heavy hand of the Israeli lobby in Europe. Bruno Guigue’s real “crime”, it’s quite clear, was to criticise the state of Israel.

Though not a “Holocaust denier”, Guigue is suffering a similar fate as his fellow anti-Zionists who are prosecuted under the anti-Holocaust denial laws, currently on the books in 12 European countries. The most notorious victims of these laws are writers David Irving and Ernst Zundel, who were jailed for questioning the extent of the death toll of Jews during WWII and the insistence that the Nazis had a plan to kill all Jews (Roma, homosexuals and Communists are forgotten in the brouhaha) as opposed to ethnically cleansing Europe.

Though an essential weapon in Israel’s political arsenal, according to Shamir, these laws are not usually invoked; they are intended more as a warning. Rather, writers and their publishers are sued under broader libel laws, as was Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, and his French publisher Aden Brussels in 2004, when he was accused of Holocaust revisionism and incitement to antisemitism. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Liaison Shimon Samuels testified: “Finkelstein’s thesis is an extremist attack on Jews in general, and American Jews in particular, accusing them of exploiting the suffering of the Shoah as a ‘pretext for their crimes in the context of the Middle-East conflict’. This thesis constitutes the principal credo of modern antisemitism. He exploits his own Jewish antecedents in order to attack as ‘racist’ specific Jewish leaders, their organisations and the Jewish people. I am convinced that only a judicial penalty will contain the damage wreaked by this particularly offensive libel.”

Samuels compared Finkelstein to Roger Garaudy, a respected Marxist philosopher who himself spent three years in a concentration camp in WWII, who was convicted in France under the Gayssot Law in 1996, which he argued “restores the law, abolished after Vichy, that defines questioning of official truth as a criminal offence.

It restores discrimination against anybody who does not submit to one-track thought and to the cult of politically correct taboos imposed by American leaders and their Western mercenaries, especially the Israelis.”