Gilad Atzmon

GA: The following is my book review of Shlomo Sand's latest book. It was published a year ago. Following the publication of the English edition of How I Stopped Being A Jew last week, I decided to post it again.

Sand’s latest book, How I Stopped Being A Jew, is a tragic testimony made by a morally awakened Israeli Jew who comes to realise that his spiritual, cultural and political existence is contaminated with Judeo-centric exclusivism and is fuelled by ethno-centric racism. Shlomo Sand decides to stop being a Jew – but has he succeeded?

Sand, as we all know, is a wonderful writer; witty, innovative, poetic and fluent, his voice is personal, at times funny, occasionally sarcastic and always genuinely pessimistic.

Sand’s writing is scholarly, deep, reflective and imaginative; however, his scholarship is pretty much limited to French liberal thinking and early post-modernist theory. The outcome is disappointing at times. How I Stopped To Be A Jew is a ‘politically correct’ text, saturated with endless caveats inserted to disassociate the author from any possible affiliation with anyone who may be viewed as an opponent of Jewish power, critical of Jewish identity politics or a challenger of the mainstream historicity of the Holocaust.

“I don’t write for anti-Semites, I regard them as totally ignorant or people who suffer from an incurable disease,” (p. 21/Hebrew edition) writes the author who claims to be humanist, universalist and far removed from Jewish exclusivism.[*] It all sounds very Jewish to me. When it comes to the Holocaust, Sand uses the same tactic and somehow manages to lose all wit and scholarly fashion. The Nazis are “beasts”, their rise to power metaphorically described as a “beast awakening from its lair.” I would expect a leading historian and ex-Jew to have moved on beyond these kinds of banal clichés.

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Stephen Lendman

Demagogic doublespeak dots his rhetoric. So do mumbo jumbo Big Lies. They systematically drown out truth. It's consistent Obama policy. He mocks democratic values. Justifying the unjustifiable. Defending the indefensible. Supporting the unthinkable. Believing militarism is the be all and end all. Waging permanent wars on humanity. It may not survive on his watch.

Removing him is a moral imperative. An urgent necessity. He presides over a police state apparatus. He institutionalized tyranny. It's headed toward full-blown. He's advancing America's imperium ruthlessly. He's a war criminal multiple times over. He's guilty of high crimes against peace. He risks WW III.

On October 11, he spoke in San Francisco. At a scripted DNC event. Selected guests alone were invited. He repeated one Big Lie after another. "(N)ews lately has been dominated by what's taking place overseas," he said. He bears full responsibility for what he called "scary to people, and understandably so."

His Afghan war continues. It's America's longest conflict. Responsible for millions of deaths. No end in sight looms. He made Libya a cauldron of violence. A dystopian wasteland. North Africa's most developed country no longer exists. He's waging Iraq War III. Without Security Council or congressional authorization. All US wars are illegal. Aggressive. Premeditated. Ones of choice.

Obama bears full responsibility for Syria's war. In March 2011, he launched it. Using imported proxy death squads. Radicalized Islamists. US special forces and CIA operatives arm, fund, train and direct them. Deploy them against Assad. Wanting pro-Western stooge governance replacing him. Bombing since late September. Headed for deploying US troops. Hundreds infest Iraq already. Perhaps many more covertly.

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