The controversy is not going away. Joseph W. directly takes on Mearsheimer’s charge that one couldn’t infer anti-Semitism from the specific Atzmon book he blurbed by pulling a great number of absolutely horrific quotes from it. Among them:
“The Holocaust religion is, obviously, Judeo-centric to the bone. It defines the Jewish raison d’etre. For Zionist Jews, it signifies a total fatigue of the Diaspora, and regards the goy as a potential irrational murderer. This new Jewish religion preaches revenge. It could well be the most sinister religion known to man, for in the name of Jewish suffering, it issues licences to kill, to flatten, to nuke, to annihilate, to loot, to ethnically cleanse. It has made vengeance into an acceptable Western value.”
Then this excrescence:
65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should be able to ask – why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people stand up against their neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in their troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early Zionist claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should also ask what purpose Holocaust denial laws serve? What is the Holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask questions, we will be subjected to Zionist lobbies and their plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We will maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes.
David Bernstein attacks Mearsheimer’s broader defense of Atzmon’s views. The man in question, meanwhile, takes up blog-cudgels in his own defense:
To be honest, it is somewhat amusing that an ex concentration camp guard like Goldberg should label me a ‘Hitler apologist’ or a ‘Holocaust denier’: after all, since Goldberg is an ardent pro-war Zionist who openly and enthusiastically supports a Jews-only, racist, expansionist state, it is clear that he is actually the one who is an advocate of a distinctly Nazi-like ideology and practice.
Ugh. He follows up here. Ron Kampeas can’t get particularly energized about a debate over a blurb. So allow me. I still haven’t read the book but the excerpts are so vile and the mind behind them so patently warped and hateful, I really don’t care to. Why would anyone blurb a book like this? I’m all for airing a variety of views, and provocative theories. That doesn’t mean you have to endorse poisonous, wounding hate.
The Dish 