[softy54534]

http://hurryupharry.org/2011/10/06/o...-antisemitism/
From news article:
As is often, and rightly said, criticism of Israel and its policies does not constitute antisemitism. However, it has become increasingly clear that antisemitism has permeated “Palestinian Solidarity” politics, and that very little has been done either to recognise or to challenge it.

There are two consequences to this state of affairs. Antisemitism has been normalised in a section of Palestinian Solidarity advocacy, which now argues that combating antisemitism is “anti-Palestinian”. As a consequence, the impression has been created that pro-Palestinian activism is part and parcel of the promotion of antisemitism.

Antisemitic rhetoric was traditionally quite rare within British Palestinian solidarity politics. Although you can argue that the denial of the right of Jews, uniquely, to self-determine is antisemitic, and conspiracism about “Zionist power” often echoes ancient racist tropes about Jews, explicit and undisguised antisemitism was usually opposed, and entryist Nazis shown the door.

All this is changing. First, a tolerance of antisemitism within Palestinian solidarity politics has arisen as a consequence of the decision to support Hamas, whose founding Covenant is a diatribe of racist invective, and whose officials repeatedly make genocidal threats against Jews. If Hamas is to be supported, it is necessary for Palestinian Solidarity activists to deny antisemitism, and indeed to paint Hamas’ critics as racists and fanatics. Secondly, I believe that a more terrible realisation has dawned on some Palestinian solidarity campaigners. While some fear that the association of the Palestinian cause with antisemitism will harm their movement, others have discovered that tapping into age-old hatreds of the scheming, controlling, corrupting Jew actually helps to attract passionate support.

[radikal]

From news article:
Did you know that the Jews declared war on Germany well before the Nazis adopted anti-Jewish policies?

I have to confess that despite my Ph.D. in contemporary history, I was completely ignorant of this “fact” – but that’s because this particular spin of the Jewish anti-Nazi boycott of late March 1933 is of course a favorite among people who think the Nazis were right about the Jews.

Just like how Joseph Goebbels, the notorious Nazi Minister of “Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,” felt that there was “intrinsic” truth to the antisemitic forgery known as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” there are still people who see “prophetic qualities” in this forgery, which reads to them like an accurate description of “the political reality in which we live.”

Such views are not restricted to the far-right fringes and neo-Nazi groups, but are also held by supposedly leftist “anti-Zionists.”

Among the latter type is the Israeli-British jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon, who apparently has a lot of spare time that he devotes to expressing his disdain and hatred for all things Israeli and Jewish.

Indeed, a Guardian profile of him noted that it “is Atzmon’s blunt anti-Zionism rather than his music that has given him an international profile, particularly in the Arab world, where his essays are widely read.”

Notable among Atzmon’s admirers is Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, who approvingly quoted Atzmon in his dramatic outburst when he attacked Israel’s President Shimon Peres during an event in Davos in 2009.

However, the Guardian’s description of Atzmon’s views as “blunt anti-Zionism” is simply an attempt to whitewash Atzmon’s rabid antisemitism. It is plainly not anti-Zionism when somebody rejects comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel by hysterically claiming that such a comparison is really unfair to Nazi Germany because “Israel is nothing but evilness for the sake of evilness. It is wickedness with no comparison.”

Indeed, in fall 2006, the Guardian itself published a piece by David Hirsh, an expert on antisemitism, who made the case that Atzmon’s views represented a “new strain of openly anti-semitic anti-Zionism.”