January 30, 2007

Gatekeeper Gilad's gagging gamble update

We have a winner! Someone in the comments has guessed that the woman who Gilad Atzmon is threatening to sue has the initials S.B.

I already gave the clue that she is not Palestinian but she is a doyen of the Palestine solidarity movement.

So who is Gilad trying to gag and why?

Well she is none other than Sue Blackwell. Seasoned Palestine solidarity capaigners will know that Sue has been a tireless campaigner for the Palestinian cause for many years. She really does take the view, as all principled anti-zionists do, that Palestinians are the priority. She doesn't just use that slogan as a way of installing neo-nazis and other antisemites in the heart of the anti-zionist movement as, for example, Gilad Atzmon and some of his friends have done. For this reason her work against antisemitism and neo-nazism may have gone unnoticed. Gilad Atzmon has got a firm of solicitors to threaten her with an aktion unless she removes his name from a web page headed "Nazi alert."

This is very strange given the fact that Atzmon has given such vocal, some would say shrill, support to neo-nazis like Israel Shamir and Paul Eisen. It was his support (I think he called it "love") for Israel Shamir that had him attacking various anti-zionist Jews as "under-cover" zionists and it was his belief that Paul Eisen was acting in the finest "Talmudic" traditions when he claimed to only have "slight" differences with an article titled "Holocaust Wars" that expressed fulsome praise for Ernst Zundel's work in claiming that the holocaust is largely a myth. Now some people may support Atzmon in that but that doesn't mean that it's not fair comment to include him in a "nazi alert."

In fairness I should point out that, for all his writing, Gilad isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. It could be that he isn't objecting to Sue including him on a page headed "nazi." It might be the word "alert" he thinks is defamatory. Given his support for Shamir and Eisen, his attacks on their detractors, his antisemitism and his grotesque false propaganda against Jews, he might actually think that nazi is a compliment. It certainly gives him the recognition he deserves.

This isn't the first time that Gilad Atzmon has threatened legal aktion. He's threatened Tony Greenstein but then backed down. He got a friend of his, a Sarah Gillespie, to make the most ludicrous threat against me in the comments box here and I heard no more about when I called him on it. So I expect this threat to be equally hollow. In other words I assume that Gilad "Palestinians are the priority" Atzmon is lying yet again.

Palestinians are the priority
so get behind them Gilad and stop being a buffoon!

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