Gilad Atzmon is a Brit-based saxophonist and “loudmouthed antisemitic demagogue” (per Oliver Kamm) that I’ve touched upon here and here. Now Kamm points us toward this rant, in which Atzmon praises Holocaust deniers such as David Irving for “establishing a rational, dynamic, lucid empirically grounded narrative based on forensic evidence.”
And via Judeosphere, a link to Atzmon’s encomium to Hamas.
This is particularly interesting in light of David Remnick’s superb New Yorker piece on Hamas’s electoral victory. (Not online, but interview with Remnick available here.) One of the things Remnick notes is a Hamas poster “that yoked together portraits of Sheikh Yassin, Shamil Basayev, a Chechen rebel leader, and Osama bin Laden.” Remnick discussed this poster with Aziz al-Dweik, who will soon be speaker of the Palestinian parliament:
If Hamas was going to present itself as a rational political group, I said, why was it linking itself to Al Qaeda? [Not to mention Basayev, who led the infamous school siege at Beslan — DA]
“Bin Laden is a fighter for the cause of Islam, and this man has his way of serving God,” Dweik said. “He has offered the West a truce many times, saying that he will put down his arms if the West stops interfering in our affairs. We have no right to hate bin Laden. We respect him. Hiding this fact does not serve the truth.”
Indeed, it does not. It is no surprise that Gilad Atzmon supports Hamas, for their conspiracist worldview is largely his own. But those of us who endorse the Palestinians’ right to statehood ought to keep Hamas’s alliances clear in our minds in the coming months.
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