Saturday, October 04, 2008

Fables of Fishel: Gilad Atzmon asks "Credit Crunch or Rather Zio Punch?"

I don't follow Gilad Atzmon's writing closely enough to tell if he has ever been this far down in the anti-Semitic gutter before, but in his latest composition he definitely seems to be getting deeply in touch with his inner Goebbels. One old standard that he riffs on here is the old Nazi claim that Lenin was Jewish. Actually, only Lenin's maternal grandfather was Jewish. That gives him less Jewish ancestry than celebrated non-Jews like John Kerry and Barry Goldwater. Atzmon, despite the fact that he is making a convoluted point, just refers to Lenin as a Jew (like any Nazi slob):
Lenin and Trotzky were Jews, they were ideologists, yet they didn’t operate primarily as Jews.
Another anti-Semitic article of faith is that the Bolsheviks were financed by Jewish bankers. There is actually some evidence of Wall Street financing of the Bolsheviks although most of the figures involved were not Jewish. The lone and Jewish figure of Jacob Schiff is often nominated to appear in the defendant's box for this accusation. What real evidence exists seems to exonerate him, but one of the oldest and moldiest second-hand source citations in the neo-Nazi/conspiracist business often appears in support of statements blaming Schiff. The citation appears in Atzmon's article in its classic form as "New York Journal American 1949. February 3." In a world alien to Atzmon and his ilk, a world where someone citing a source is supposed to have actually seen the source, the citation points to a gossip column. I once did some research on anti-Semitism and I have known this fact for about 15 years. It is doubtful that Atzmon knows it, and he almost certainly lifted the citation from some other hack. At any rate he joins a long tradition of omitting the gossip-column part and thereby passing off the citation as a reference to a normal newspaper article.

The reader may wonder where, according to Atzmon, "Zionists" come into the picture in the current "credit crunch." Some seemingly approving references from Greenspan to the subprime lending seem to be all Atzmon needs to declare that it was all Greenspan's idea. Later Atzmon returns to this idea with added improvisations about what the ultimate aim was:
Alan Greenspan planned to provide his president with an economy boom assuming that prosperous conditions would divert the attention from the war in Iraq. Greenspan is not exactly an amateur economist, he knew what he was doing. He knew very well that as long as Americans were doing well, buying and selling homes, his President would be able pursue implementing the ‘Wolfowitz doctrine’ destroying the ‘bad Arabs’ in the name of ‘democracy’.
Do you think Atzmon knows what he is doing? Or is he just riffing on some old standards?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

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