Silvia Cattori
Silvia Cattori's Blog

Jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon has a blog where he denounces the policy of his country of origin, Israel. He is not afraid to bluntly tell what he regards to be the truth. He is impervious to the concept of self-censorship. He tells here how little respect he has for the Western press. (*)

Silvia Cattori: Your political analyses, translated into dozen languages [1], reach a wide readership on the web. For whom exactly do you write?

Gilad Atzmon: I write mainly to myself. I try to understand the world around me. A few years ago, I understood that a lot of people out there are interested in the thoughts I indulge myself with, so I started to let other people have access into my boiling destructive mind.

Silvia Cattori: At a time when the press has reached its lowest point ever, are you among those who still continue to read newspapers?

Gilad Atzmon: No, for many years I do not buy newspapers, because I am interested in Middle East, and the mainstream media has very little to offer on that front. Probably the only expert within the British or even English-speaking media press is Robert Fisk. If I want to know what happens in the Middle East I go to “Counterpunch”, “Information Clearing House”, “Veterans Today”, “Rense.com”, “Uprooted Palestinian”, “PalestineTelegraph”, “Palestine Chronicle”, “Dissident Voice”, “Uruknet”, and other great sites. Our websites and blogs are far more informative than the mainstream media. We are the experts. We are becoming the main source of information. I see how many people are coming to visit my site. If there is a crisis in Gaza for instance, they want to see what Gordon Duff, Ramzy Baroud, Alan Hart, Israel Shamir, Alex Cockburn, Ali Abunimah have to say about it. I have zero respect for the mainstream media. And if the mainstream media wishes to survive, it had better move on quickly, otherwise it is finished.

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Israel Shamir
Israel Shamir Net

"Since he will now be brought into Sweden against his will, Ny and Borgstrom will be able to lock Assange up for months until the trial, as Swedish law does not permit bail. Once in custody, Julian can be shipped to the US, or directly to Guantanamo without even returning to Sweden; as a detained foreigner he can be deported at the pleasure of the Swedish government."

The British magistrate court has decided to surrender Julian Assange to the Nordic Amazons who were hunting for his head – pending appeal. Thus the long Saga of the Broken Condom, or whatever name by which it will become known to posterity, took a definite turn for the worse. The judge decided to honor the European Arrest Warrant issued by man-eating Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny. Julian has appealed to the High Court, ensuring that the saga will go on as a side divertissement to the main story, Cablegate.

We shall not delve again into what happened between Julian and the two women; this has already been covered in previous installments. Today we turn to the dramatic events that occurred immediately afterwards. We live in an age of leaks, and this story is no exception. The Swedish police papers pertaining to Assange case have surfaced on the web – and there are some shocking revelations. One revelation concerns the investigative editor of The Guardian, David Leigh and his accomplice Nick Davies. They were given the leaked police papers well before they were made public, and Davies constructed a story that revealed his special “unauthorised access”. Now the original documents (in Swedish) have been published on the site flashback.org, and the English version is now available on Rixstep.com with this touching foreword from the translator:

“The truth will out, the truth wins out. Let no journalist ever again speculate into what the protocols say. Six months of digging and the people at Flashback have the actual documents. The sleaze printed by rags such as the Daily Mail, Sweden's Aftonbladet and Expressen, and perhaps above all the toxic Nick Davies of The Guardian, can stand no more. Yet more: these documents are an indictment of the 'news organisations' who've printed deliberate inaccuracies all along or even worse: refused to print anything at all. Nick Davies' account of the protocols was maliciously skewed; both Aftonbladet and Expressen had copies early on and printed nothing. Bloggers had copies but arrogantly kept the information to their Smeagol selves.”

Once again we can compare the raw data with the official story, and once again we can confirm that Leigh and his partners are brazen, busy little cooks. They cooked the Embassy Cables, as we reported in CounterPunch, and now we can see exactly how they cooked the Assange police papers too. Leigh and his supporters have loudly proclaimed that his deletions and redactions were due to British libel laws. In this story, he proves how empty was his rhetoric. Every damaging accusation against Assange was given a place of prominence; the true and disturbing picture has remained buried until now.

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Silvia Cattori
Silvia Cattori's Blog

Gilad Atzmon is an outstandingly charming man. He is often described by music critics as one of the finest contemporary jazz saxophonists. But Atzmon is more than just a musician: for those who follow events in the Middle East, he is considered to be one of the most credible voices amongst Israeli opponents. In the last decade he has relentlessly exposed and denounced barbarian Israeli policies. Just before his departure on a European Spring Tour, “The Tide Has Changed“, with his band the Orient House Ensemble, he spoke to Silvia Cattori.

Silvia Cattori: As a jazz musician, what brought you to use your pen as a weapon against the country where you were born and against your people?

Gilad Atzmon: For many years my music and writings were not integrated at all. I became a musician when I was seventeen and I took it up as a profession when I was twenty four. Though I was not involved with, or interested in politics when I lived in Israel, I was very much against Israel’s imperial wars. I identified somehow with the left, but later, when I started to grasp what the Israeli left was all about, I could not find myself in agreement with anything it claimed to believe in, and that is when I realised the crime that was taking place in Palestine.

For me the Oslo Accord was the end of it because I realised that Israel was not aiming towards reconciliation, or even integration in the region, and that it completely dismissed the Palestinian cause. I understood then that I had to leave Israel. It wasn’t even a political decision — I just didn’t want to be part of the Israeli crime anymore. In 1994 I moved to the UK and I studied philosophy.

In 2001, at the time of the second Intifada, I began to understand that Israel was the ultimate aggressor and was also the biggest threat to world peace. I realised the extent of the involvement and the role of world Jewry as I analysed the relationships between Israel and the Jewish State, between Israel and the Jewish people around the world, and between Jews and Jewishness.

I then realised that the Jewish “left” was not very different at all from the Israeli “left”. I should make it clear here that I differentiate between “Left ideology”— a concept that is inspired by universal ethics and a genuine vision of equality – and the “Jewish Left”, a tendency or grouping that is there solely to maintain tribal interests that have very little, if anything, to do with universalism, tolerance and equality.

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Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

I have spent the last ten years elaborating on Jewish national ideology and tribal politics. During my journey of grasping what Zionism and Israel stand for, I came to realize that it is actually the Jewish left -- and Jewish Marxists in particular -- that provide us with an adequate glimpse into contemporary Jewish identity, tribal supremacy, marginal politics and tribalism.

‘Jewish left’ is basically an oxymoron. It is a contradiction in terms, because ‘Jewishness’ is a tribal ideology, whilst ‘the left’ are traditionally understood as aspiring to universalism.

On the face of it, the ‘Jewish left’ is, at least categorically, no different from Israel or Zionism: after all, it is an attempt to form yet another ‘Jews only political club’. And as far as the Palestinian solidarity movement is concerned, its role is subject to a growing debate -- For on the one hand, one can see the political benefit of pointing at a very few ‘good Jews’, and emphasizing that there are Jews who ‘oppose Zionism as Jews’. Yet on the other hand, however, accepting the legitimacy of such a racially orientated political affair, is in itself, an acceptance of yet another form, or manifestation of Zionism, for Zionism claims that Jews are primarily Jewish, and had better operate politically as Jews[1].

To a certain extent then, it is clear that Jewish anti Zionism, is, in itself, still just another form of Zionism.

‘Jewish dissidence’ has two main roles: First, it attempts to depict and bolster a positive image of Jews in general [2]. Second, it is there to silence and obscure any attempts on the part of the outsider to grasp the meaning of Jewish identity and Jewish politics within the machinations of the Jewish state. It is also there to stop elements in this movement from elaborating on the crucial role of Jewish lobbying.

The Jewish Left is there then, to mute any possible criticism of Jewish politics within the wider Left movements. It is there to stop the Goyim from looking into Jewish affairs.

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Henry Makow
Henry Makow's Blog

(Given the current attempt to frame Edgar Steele, a reader asked for my take on him. Here it is, in an article originally entitled "Why Jewish bankers Love Anti-Semites," written exactly five years ago. I believe Steele is sincere but misguided. I hope he gets help to beat this rap.)

Jewish bankers love anti-Semites because they transform a legitimate political and economic grievance into a racial one that easily can be dismissed as "hatred."

Racists ensure that Jews conform to the bankers' agenda and non-Jews remain divided.

One of their favorite anti-Semites is Edgar Steele, a lawyer and racist activist whose "nickel rants" appear on his web site Conspiracypenpal.com.

Steele portrays himself and his followers as ordinary Americans concerned about their children, jobs and country. This is true. America has been subverted and much of Steele's criticism is sound and courageous.

But instead of correctly identifying the culprit, he leads his followers into a dead end: a racist animosity against all Jews and Blacks.

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Israel Shamir & Paul Bennett
Israel Shamir Net

The Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo takes a decided turn for the worse.

The plot thickens as our favorite hero of the Matrix; our own “Captain Neo” Julian Assange, faces danger yet again. When we last parted company with the legendary founder of WikiLeaks, he was breathing a sigh of relief after dodging spurious double-rape charges. The complaints were dropped, and our hero was free to roam the globe once again. But soap opera plots are repetitive; the story was quickly recycled and now our brave captain is again under threat of being castrated on Stockholm’s Stora Torget, or whatever the latest craven penalty is for molesting sacred Nordic virgins in a land where Vikings once ruled.

In other words, the farcical rape charges have once again been leveled against the Pentagon’s Public Enemy Number One. Julian Assange now stands accused of: (1) not calling a young woman the day after he had enjoyed a night with her, (2) asking her to pay for his bus ticket, (3) having unsafe sex, and (4) participating in two brief affairs in the course of one week. These four minor charges, worthy of Leopold Bloom’s mock trial in the Nightown chapter in Ulysses, have been shaken and fermented until they were able to cook up a half-baked rape case! Step down Iran; Sweden takes the cake! While Iran is notorious for unyielding conservative sentences against adulterers, Sweden shows us what the liberal side of the coin looks like as she invents criminal charges for failing to telephone and for careless use of preservatives in consensual acts of affection. Worse, they are purposely conflating consensual sex with rape for political purposes. In this, Sweden makes a mockery of the very real crime of violent rape.

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Israel Shamir & Paul Bennett
Israel Shamir Net

Enough of boring stuff of Afghan stiffs and Pentagon staffs! Not a minute too early, when we were about to succumb to boredom of approaching rainy autumn, we were hit by the new release of...

"The Amazing adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde-land"

...as no doubt the story of Julian Assange’s escapades in Sweden will be known once it inevitably makes its way into the hands of one of the goofier Hollywood directors – say Robert Zemeckis or Mel Brooks, or perhaps Stephen Herek of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. It would do better in the hands of Andy Wachowski, where he might do for Julian Assange what he once did for Keanu Reeves.

Who could ask for a more beautiful set-up? It’s a story fit for a tabloid, yet it might be transformed into something an intellectual could read without embarrassment. This latest adventure is the stuff of pulp fiction, and chock full of Langley spies, computer hackers, crazy feminists, flatfooted cops and sleazy rags in the female kingdom of Sweden!

Julian Assange is a character that might have been ripped from the celluloid frames of the Matrix: flaxen and lanky, he moves through cyberspace like a superman. When, on those rare occasions that he does emerge into the real world, it is to perform Kung Fu exercises. He hardly ever eats or drinks. His corporeal body can normally be found sitting in front of a MacPro or two, while his digital alter ego commutes and computes, battling the odds and the system in fantastic virtual combat. Like Neo, he is a natural-born hacker who hacked just for the heck of it until he discovered the Matrix. He had hundreds of remarkable hacking achievements to his name when in 1992 he pleaded guilty to twenty-two of them. I like to think that someday, after he has passed on in the fullness of time, he will become a kind of guardian angel for hackers, or perhaps the Greek God of Cyberspace with His Golden Board, forever surfing the web.

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Israel Shamir

WikiLeaks Афганистаны дайны тухай маш нууц материалуудыг
ил гаргав, by AagiiNxS [A tentative translation from Mongolian:
A spokesman for the Afghan military reported that a suspected
car bomb belonging to insurgents was neutralized.]

After the tremendous coup of Wikileaks, this semi-clandestine site and organisation, which had recently brought to public knowledge so many government crimes through so many hundreds of thousands of documents (with even more of the way), has predictably come under attack. Not only from Pentagon hacks, but also from various bodies we would expect to back them rather than knife them in the back.

Reporters Without Borders accused Wikileaks of being irresponsible, for having published the names of US agents in Afghanistan. This accusation reveals the true nature of these Reporters. They do not care about freedom of the press, they care about protecting American interests and American spies. Whoever is old enough to remember the revelations of Philip Agee will recognise the pattern: All of a sudden these guys, who normally do not mind murdering others, recognise their own mortality and vulnerability. This is very good. Spies and agents should be outed: it will cause them to behave responsibly.

So much for the pro-establishment line. What a pity that some of our friends in the blogosphere joined in the chorus of detractors. Theirs are familiar and respected names of the free web: F. William Engdahl, Gordon Duff, Zahir Ebrahim. Psychologically, one understands them. Could it be that all of a sudden we got such a windfall? Is it not a bit like those emails from Nigeria offering us millions for the simple information about our bank account? A diffident man is likely to get cold feet when a beautiful girl smiles back and proposes having a drink in a pub. The Wikileaks-deniers created an elaborate conspiracy theory: these hundreds of thousands of real documents were fabricated by the CIA and offered to an innocent public.

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