Anil Prasad has an interview up with drummer Asaf Sirkis, whose recent recordings The Song Within and The Monk I can vouch for as unique and well worth hearing. Sirkis also happens to be a musical associate of Gilad Atzmon, a saxophonist and political blowhard with a straightforwardly antisemitic paper trail that has come up frequently on this blog. In defense of his colleague, Sirkis offers:
… [I]n Israeli/Jewish culture, you can be a lefty, right wing, orthodox, or whatever you like, but there are a few things that you’re not supposed to question, so to speak, and that could make things difficult for people like Gilad Atzmon with whom I worked. Gilad, who is very outspoken about his pro-Palestinian views, had to deal with situations when at his gigs members of the audience—mostly Jewish/Israeli, of course—left the hall because of something he said. As far as I know he is in constant debate with different Jewish lobbies.
Let’s be clear about Atzmon’s political record, for he is not merely outspoken about his pro-Palestinian views. He is equally outspoken about his anti-Jewish views, which are in many respects indistinguishable from the views of the racist far right. “One of the things that happened to us was that stupidly we interpreted the Nazi defeat as a vindication of the Jewish ideology and the Jewish people,” Atzmon wrote recently, leaving one to wonder about the meaning of “us” and “we” in the sentence. The notion that only “Jewish/Israeli” audience members would find such a statement disgusting is almost as offensive as the statement itself.
Also consider Atzmon’s record of
Holocaust denial and
apologetics for the Third Reich. It’s not for nothing that Atzmon’s work is greeted warmly on David Duke’s website, Stormfront chat boards and other white supremacist outlets.
Asaf Sirkis might have noted that even many of the UK’s most outspoken anti-Zionist activists will have nothing to do with Atzmon. One can be sure there are Palestinians who feel the same way and have no use for Atzmon’s “pro-Palestinian” advocacy. But all one has to do these days is invoke the dreaded “Jewish lobbies” and the discussion is over. After all, anyone “in constant debate with different Jewish lobbies” must be a pretty good guy.
