(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Aside on Antisemitism on the Left [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-11-09 This time around I decided to put a little more narrative into my narrative. I’m still going to do a diary about anti-Soviet anti-Zionist antisemitism, as I’ve been promising, but let’s get a little more personal. It’s about a betrayal. It’s about a segment of the progressive left betraying their own self-proclaimed principles. It’s 1995, and this thing falls into my life called the internet. Now, my dark sense of humor finds a certain fascination in pseudoscholastic cranks. The guys who insist they’re sooper-dooper scientific and with all possible seriousness they must enlighten us to the fact that the earth is flat. Or Darwin got it all wrong. Or NASA faked Apollo 11. There’s something I find delightfully Emperor’s New Clothes about these guys wearing a very serious jacket and very serious tie yet still very seriously showing their ass. Then, still around 1995, I came across one that wasn’t so funny: Holocaust denial. Same serious suit, same serious tie, same seriously showing their ass, but there was something fundamentally different here. Flat-eartherdom is stupid and wrong. Holocaust denial is stupid, racist, and wrong. If you know me at all — me and my inner H*A*R*L*A*N E*L*L*I*S*O*N — you wouldn’t be surprised that I got to know these sons of bitches real well. Who they are, who their audience is, what they say, why it’s dumber than goat shit on whole wheat toast, and why — despite their best efforts — they can’t disguise the fundamental antisemitism of their claims. So when the “Denial” trial of 2000 rolled around, in which Holocaust denier David Irving made a five-star hero out of Deborah Lipstadt, I had a very solid understanding of the field. I don’t know if there’s an event in all my life I watched more closely but didn’t involve childbirth. Irving was demolished, and with him the suit-and-tie generation of Holocaust denial drew to a close. The coming of the internet helped; you can’t make a living selling books and videos people can download for free, so the grifters wandered off to find other grifts. And the Holocaust denial movement, per se, got handed over to 4chan and the like. Still, sometimes, you saw some shadow of suit-and-tie Holocaust denial. One was Mahmoud Ahma-Got-One-Gonad and the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran that humiliated him in the face of the whole world in 2006. This is not antisemitism, he insisted, this is anti-Zionism! And that declaration was as full of horseshit as he was in general. The other place it cropped up, though, was a little weirder, and — well, you’ll see where it leads. There is an anti-Zionist organization in London called Deir Yassin Remembered. And in 2005, its executive director, a Jewish guy named Paul Eisen, came out of the Holocaust denial closet. And his good friend and fund-raising pal, the Israeli expat jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon, went along with it, saying more or less “oh I couldn’t possibly say whether Eisen is right, oh is soooo difficult, but boy oh boy what a brave and brilliant man that Eisen is, and how mad he makes the Orwellian Zionist Censors Who Are So Afraid Of The Truth.” Atzmon played the part of righteous ex-Zionist with everything he had, and there’s nothing the anti-Zionists love more than the Man Who Saw The Light. The problem is, Atzmon is an antisemite. But when called out, he played the “help, help, Zionist censors are trying to silence me” bit, and got quite a few people who should have known better to defend him. Well, most people on the left don’t want to hang around Holocaust deniers, so Deir Yassin Remembered basically crashed, reduced to a website and an occasional program. But Atzmon and Eisen still had their defenders on the anti-Zionist left, and in my dialogue with them they taught me a lesson I’ll never forget. If you accuse an anti-Zionist of antisemitism, even when they’re promoting Holocaust denial, if you’ve dared use the word “antisemitism” against a self-proclaimed “anti-Zionist,” there is a segment of the left that will instantly and robotically conclude, in microseconds: you’re the real villain you’re lying you’re a right-wing freak you love Likud you want to kill Palestinian babies (not exaggerating on that) whoever you’re attacking must be a really wonderful hero Even when you’ve called out a guy for demonstrable Holocaust denial. They will see you, not the Holocaust denier, as the bad guy. These guys were certain they were the purest of the pure, the most anti-racist of the anti-racists. And yet they defended Holocaust deniers in the name of anti-racism. That was the lesson: self-declared anti-racists can be racists. Joyous rambunctious racists. As long as it’s about the Jews. And it’s a hard thing to accept. When someone says “I’m not antisemitic, I’m just anti-Zionist,” well, that’s exactly what I heard from the guys defending Holocaust deniers, and that’s why it carries zero weight with me. When someone says “it’s just criticism of Israel” when pointing to Holocaust denial, well, sorry cupcake, but you need to get your head out of your ass. Anyway, Atzmon published a book in 2011, and (a) got blurbs from some famous anti-Zionists like John Mearsheimer, and (b) all these anti-Zionist blurbers had to wipe the shit from their mouths when they found out Atzmon is a Holocaust denier. Atzmon, his career on the left ended, went alt-right, where he started hanging out with people like Jim Fetzer, the whackadoodle who convinced Alex jones that Sandy Hook was a false-flag op. (Fetzer’s the trifecta: Apollo 11, 9/11, *and* the Holocaust are all fake. And ask him about Paul McCartney. I mean “the alleged Paul McCartney.”) So every now and then I’d google the name Paul Eisen, to see whether he’d found a new grift or a new audience. Usually it would be a hit from obscure blogs indicating he was still clinging to the wreck of Deir Yassin Remembered. But nobody was dumb enough to go to their programs anymore. Well, in 2015 we found out that wasn’t quite true. There was someone dumb enough to go his programs, apparently as late as 2013. Worse, he was a member of Parliament. Worse still, he was running for leader of the Labour Party. And that, folks, is how I first learned the name Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Fucking Corbyn. The face of left-wing antisemitism. Who, in the long disaster his brobdingnagian fucking ineptitude poured onto the Labour Party and the Jewish community of the UK, proved my point at colossal scale: self-declared anti-racists can be joyous and rambunctious racists, as Jeremy’s gang demonstrated over and over and over, as long as it was about the Jews. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/9/2203337/-Aside-on-Antisemitism-on-the-Left?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/