Born in Israel and grandson to an early Zionist 'freedom fighter', to say that Atzmon's insights about Israel and 'The Jewish Question' have raised a few hackles would be an understatement! Despite receiving support from such high-profile public figures as U.S. academic John Mearsheimer and U.N. Special Rapporteur Richard Falk, Atzmon's book The Wandering Who?: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics has been roundly condemned in Western media.
Accused of being 'anti-semitic' and a 'self-hating Jew', Atzmon counters his critics by continuing to shed light on the strong taboo against questioning Israel or the involvement of high-profile Jewish figures in global 'big power games'.
In this interview Gilad reveals some fascinating information about Jewish political ideology. Don't miss it!
Here's the transcript:
Niall: Hello listeners. Welcome back to SOTT Talk Radio. I'm Niall Bradley. Your co-hosts tonight are Joe Quinn.
Joe: Hi there.
Niall: And Pierre Lescaudron.
Pierre: Hello.
Niall: This week we're delighted to be talking with Gilad Atzmon. Gilad is an internationally acclaimed jazz saxophonist and composer, a member of the Blockheads and he fronts for the Orient House Ensemble. His two novels, A Guide to the Perplexed and My One and Only Love, as well as his political and cultural essays are published widely in many languages. Gilad's non-fiction book The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics is a superb read, it's serious but it's short, insightful, witty, really funny, and it's much needed to dispel some of the myths we're going to be talking about tonight, about Israel, Jewish people and Jewishness in general. Gilad lives in London and he's joining us today on SOTT Talk Radio. Welcome Gilad!
Gilad: Yeah, I'm very happy to be with you. I'm always excited to talk about me!
Niall: That's a great attitude!
Joe: Most people know the most about themselves!
Gilad: No, I enjoy because I really don't understand me so when I talk to other people I learn what I am all about.
Joe: You learn something.
Pierre: So maybe we can talk about you and maybe you can tell us more about how you came to open your eyes about Israel, Jewishness, and Judaism. How did you happen to switch and become, as you say, "a proud self-hating Jew"?
Gilad: Yeah, it wasn't an instant shift. It was a long process. People don't really understand Israel. They regard it as a very horrid, abusive place and it certainly is, but it doesn't look as horrible when you live there. And it doesn't look that abusive because you don't really understand the measures or even the history that is involved with the Jewish existence on a Palestinian land because we don't even regard it as a Palestinian land.
When I was a soldier between '81 and '84 at the time of the Lebanon war, I was shocked to see all those refugee camps in Lebanon and I started to gather that these were basically refugees from the land that I believed to be mine. And I started to look more and more into those issues. It was only in the late '80s and early '90s when people started to talk about the Nakba, which is a very interesting development because the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians really took place in '48. So how is it possible that only in the '90s people really started to talk about it? We can talk about it in reference to revisionism as you probably know and very interested in holocaust revision ism which is basically the revisionism of Zionism is pretty much the same story; the capacity to revise the past which is the real meaning of history.
However, I started to realize that the Israeli existence was a complicated topic and was involved with a breach of some elementary ethical principles and when I was sure that this was the case, in the early '90s, I decided to leave Israel. But when I moved to Britain, I realized that actually the Jewish Diaspora existence, at least politically, is far more complicated. And the more I learned about it, the more I realized that the Jewish left, the Jewish anti-Zionist network, the Jewish so-called progressives, are actually far more dangerous than the Zionist project. And the reason is very simple. When you deal with Zionists, you really know what you are up against. They are very clear in most cases, that they don't argue that it is very ethical, but there was a war, we were stronger as they would call it. We won the war and we claim for our place under the sun. We don't try to justify it ethically, but we promised ourselves at least to be forceful enough to sustain this project.
When it comes to the Jewish left, the Israeli left, for instance, or the Jewish left, which is an oxymoron, the idea of Jewish left is an oxymoron. Jewishness is a tribal identity, in most cases racially driven. As we know, it's not just that Israel is the Jews' only state. All the Jewish organizations like JBP, Jewish Boys for Peace, or IJN, International Jewish Network and so on, they are all racially driven. They may even be able to take money from goyim, i.e., gentiles, or to let them subscribe to the email lists, but I don't see JBP let a Palestinian or a Goy Christian character to become the secretary of the organization.
So all those organizations are actually as racist as Israel and in practice, they operate as a controlled opposition. By the way we can extend the discussion and to start to talk about the civil rights movement, the pro-immigration policies where Jews were very involved. And I am now pretty much convinced that all their politics is tribally driven. They do what they believe to be good for the Jews and it would be true to argue that I'm an opponent of all forms of Jewish politics, left, right, center.
Today I actually just put on my website two hours ago, I don't know if you saw it. There is an organization; in America it is called Jews for Jesus. Have you heard about them?
Joe: Yeah
Gilad: And they just put a video before Easter where you can see Jesus Christ schlepped to Auschwitz with a bunch of Jews and the Nazis send him to a gas chamber. This is what Jews for Jesus gave us for Easter. They basically sent Jesus Christ to a gas chamber. Now the idea what they said was that they basically tried to convert more Jews into Judaism. I don't believe them at all. If Jesus Christ himself is sent to Auschwitz, what is the point of Jews being converted into Christianity (laughing), they were sent as Jews.
The agenda is vicious, manipulative. It is basically an attempt to convert good Christians into followers of the new Jewish religion, i.e. the Holocaust religion.
Pierre: Maybe before we go further, you could define what it is to be a Jew. What is Jewishness? Is it related to ideology, politics, history, culture, or religion?
Gilad: This is a very, very important question. In my work I differentiate the J-word into three categories. We have Judaism. I don't really talk about Judaism for a few reasons. Rabbinical Jews never been involved in any genocidal acts as rabbinical Jews. The problem with Jewish identity really started with the polarization. It is the Bolshevik Jews who were Stalin's willing executioners in the early stages of the revolution. It was them who stood and operated and were the perpetrators of the Holodomor, the mass starvation of millions of Ukraines. It is the Jewish socialists who ran to Spain and ended up killing Catholics and burning their churches in the name of proletars and basically, I already mentioned the Ukrainian Nakba, the Spanish Nakba. And only then we had the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which is the Palestinians Nakba. So I don't talk about Judaism. Judaism has nothing to do with these sinister operations.
Then we have Jews. I also don't talk about Jews. Jews are people who are ethnically identified as Jews and we will talk about it in a second. I don't talk about Jews, the fact that you are born into Jewish parents or you regard yourself as Jewish ethnically, doesn't necessarily make you into a murderer. I talk about Jewishness. Jewishness is Jewish ideology. Jewish ideology, as I define it, is different forms of ethnocentric or racially driven forms of "chosenness", i.e., we are chosen. And you can call it supremacy. We have Jewish left supremacy and we have Jewish right supremacy. It is always ethnocentric. It is almost there to serve the interests of the Jews.
In that respect I don't see it a categorical difference between Alan Dershowitz and Noam Chomsky. They both do what they believe to be good for the Jews. And obviously they don't agree amongst themselves what is good for the Jews. And obviously there is no doubt that Chomsky is a nicer person and obviously more respectful toward truth. I don't doubt it.
But now we get to the next very problematic issue: what does it mean to be identified as a Jew? The people who identify themselves as Jews, who are they? What do they believe? What makes them unique, at least in their own eyes? The first group of people to identify as Jews was people who follow the Torah. This is again an innocent group. I wouldn't try to argue they're all innocent, but ideologically, it's an innocent group. As I mentioned, we didn't advocate of Jewish genocide led by rabbinical culture. This is changing now.
The second group is people who identify themselves as Jews because of their Jewish ancestry, either a Jewish father or even better, Jewish mother. Again, this is an innocent group. The fact that you have a Jewish father or Jewish mother doesn't make you necessarily into a zealot or an ethnic cleanser or a genocidal character.
The third category is the category that I investigate, that I research, that I elaborate on in my book, the third category are those who identify themselves primarily as Jews, politically I mean. So for instance, Zionists clearly identify themselves as Jews because they believe in the existence of the Jewish state as Jews. Chaim Weizmann, the early Zionist leader who later became the first President of Israel said in the early 20th century that there are no American Jews or English Jews or French Jews. They are Jews who live in America, Jews who live in Britain or Jews who live in France. What he really meant by that was that Jewishness is a primary quality.
Now when it comes to people like JBP, Jews for Peace, Jews for Justice, Jews for Palestine, they also, like Chaim Weizmann, believe that their Jewishness is a primary quality. And this is a group that I really concentrate on in my research. Now there is something that must be clear. These three categories, i.e., the first category, Judaism, the second category, Jewish heritage, and the third category which is the political primacy of Jewishness, they are not mutually exclusive. Most people who identify as Jews somehow fit into more than just one category. So for instance an American Jewish settler from Brooklyn, he could be usually religious, so he belongs to the first category. He has Jewish ancestry, so he belongs to the second category. And he definitely thinks primarily as a Jew politically, which means that he belongs to the three categories. Look at the so-called atheists who form the Jewish Anti-Zionist league, they don't follow Judaism, but they have Jewish ancestry usually and again clearly, they see themselves primarily as Jews. This is why they're operating within Jewish political cells. So this is the story.
Joe: So Gilad, there are comparisons to that Jewish identity that you've just described in three different ways. Because I'm Irish, I'm thinking of for example, an Irish American who's catholic, who identifies himself as being Irish genetically or ethnically, as a catholic as well and goes to mass every Sunday, and also as maybe part of an Irish kind of American lobby group in the U.S.
Gilad: Totally correct. And it is not surprising at all. What makes a Jewish into a very unique identity is the fact that it is an exilic identity, from exile. We can delve into it but I'm trying to make it very short. And Judaism as, we know it, was founded in Babylon in conditions that were very similar to 19th century Europe. There was assimilation. Judaism, as we know it, was there to stop assimilation, to form an identity that would celebrate its Jewish existence in exile. This is why Jews are in the Diaspora, they always feel that they belong to another place.
Now this unique exilic tradition has been developed for almost 3,000 years now and this is why Jews culturally, tactically, evolutionary, they are pretty much better than anyone else around in terms of exploiting their own culture and utilizing it against others. Now you Irish people, you are not benefited at all, but you are way behind the Jews!
Joe: Yeah.
Gilad: Are you Irish-American or Irish-Irish?
Joe: Irish-Irish.
Gilad: Irish-Irish. This is the thing. I'm asking now because I now learn about Irish slavery in America. So you definitely had very harsh beginning, for instance in America and you were suffering with total abuse.
Joe: Of course. That brings up a good point. Irish people have suffered at the hands of Americans, as you said, but also at the hands of the British before that.
Gilad: I was just about to say that for sure.
Joe: So why haven't the Irish people done the same thing? Why haven't they crafted that into a persecution complex and used it to take over the world? Why do the Jews do that?
Gilad: You know the easiest answer is Guinness (laughter).
Joe: There you go.
Gilad: You know why Jews don't drink? You know why?
Joe: Because they'll end up like the Irish maybe?
Gilad: No, no, almost, because it numbs the pain. Ah, this is a good joke.
Joe: I see.
Gilad: It is very interesting why you didn't develop it and for a reason I started with Judaism. Your religion is largely catholic. And Catholics teach you to celebrate your symptoms wherever you are. Jewish religion is exilic. So wherever you are, you are the other, you are the outsider. You can never really fully assimilate. Even when the Europeans opened the schools, the universities, society to tell the Jews - this is more than 200 years now - they tell European Jews "Listen, be part of us", the Jews go as far as being assimilated Jews, which means that they maintain an element of "otherness". So there are some elements in Jewish culture that are very, very different from Irish culture. And I'll give you another very interesting - I guess a few of you read my book?
Niall: We all did.
Gilad: You all did. So as you probably remember, I speak about the book of Esther, Purim. We have books within the bible that teach us, at least one book by the way, a book that doesn't mention the word "god" even once, it's a book that teaches the Jew how to infiltrate into other nations' administration, how to manipulate the goyim, how to make the goyim - goyim is gentile yeah - how to make the goyim work for you and kill on your behalf, how to make proxy wars. This is Purim. It's the most joyous Jewish festival. And every Jew is aware of it. I don't think that you Irish people have such a festival to teach you how to make other people fight for you.
Joe: No. We just fight for ourselves.
Gilad: I can write you one if you really want. I know all the tricks now.
Joe: Are you saying then that a lot of ordinary Jewish people, either in Israel or elsewhere around the world, actually know about this book and know about these concepts?
Gilad: Every person who identifies as a Jew knows about Purim. It's as I said, one of the most joyous Jewish festivals and it's when you see Jews in the street in costume, every person in New York gets to know about Purim. I wouldn't come and tell you that every Jew on this planet thinks how to make a goyim fight a Jewish war by proxy, because this is the issue. I don't talk about Jews and I don't talk about Judaism. I talk about what it means to be identified politically as a Jew. I talk about political identity. And I think that this is the most interesting issue here.
Joe: Yeah.
Pierre: And in your book actually you show how Jewishness is based on a fundamental psychological subset where actually those people are not able seemingly to develop self-identify through personal objectives, introspection, and conscience somehow, and it's only through the negation of the others...
Gilad: Yeah.
Pierre: ...that they are able to exist. So could you elaborate this point?
Gilad: Yeah. Basically to elaborate on it is to summarize the book, chapter by chapter, because you raised a lot of clear points. And the issue of negation is a very interesting issue in itself. I argue that unlike the orthodox Jew, the rabbinical Jew who identifies as a Jew because he positively knows what he believes in, what he follows. They say "I'm a Jew because I follow the Torah. A Muslim would tell you "I'm a Muslim because I follow the Koran. A black person can tell you "I identify as a black person because I'm black" and obviously a French person can tell you "I identify the French because I'm a French national".
When it comes to the secular Jew, we are dealing with a very unique case. It's like a secular Jew who lives in America or Britain and he says "You see I'm not a Jew because I'm not religious. And I'm not a Zionist because I don't believe in Israel. But I'm not American either because I'm slightly different." And they start to identify with a list of negatives. This is what we call negative dialectic. It is very hard for them to point at the positive aspects. And by the way you will see people like Judy Butler or even Noam Chomsky and they are obviously lying. I have heard Butler saying it and I have heard Chomsky recently call for donations for JBP and he said "We identify with the Jews, with their tradition of humanism". It's nonsense. There is no tradition of Jewish humanism. They're obviously lying. The question of why they lie is very interesting of course. If a Jew is operating as a humanist, it is despite the Jewish tradition, despite the non-humanist Jewish tradition.
And this is very, very interesting. This is why they identify by means of negative dialectic. Now people are entitled to identify by means of negative dialectic. It is not a problem, but the only issue with it is that you always need an enemy, because you are defined by your negation. Now Zionism, funnily enough, I see now early Zionism as the only positive - be ready to be shocked - the only positive Jewish attempt to look in the mirror. They look in the mirror and they say "Oh my god! We are a bunch of ugly people. We are usurers. We are capitalists. We don't produce anything." And their diagnosis was correct. The diagnosis was correct. Their remedy was apparently very problematic. And to be honest, they were doomed to fail. They said "We want to change it. How are we going to change it? We are going to change it by means of settlement." But when they started to deal with the settlement, it was a Jewish settlement that was driven by what they understood to be the Jewish culture. And to a certain extent, I would say that Zionism could be a nice idea, but it was defeated by Jewishness.
Now this is a very unusual point of view, but it means that when we are talking about calling ourselves anti-Zionists, we really don't understand what we are talking about. By the way, it's typical to the left to use an extensive jargon that the left itself doesn't understand at all. As we know the leftists use the word fascism and they don't know what it means. They use the word anti-Semitism and they don't know what it means. It is so bad at the moment that the entire left discourse is actually changed [exchange?] of empty signifiers.
Joe: When you say that it was the Zionists that looked at themselves and saw themselves for what they were, what do you mean by that?
Gilad: Obviously I refer to the first generation of early Zionists. I don't have my book here with me. I can come and get it, but I bring there a few quotes by early Zionists. You can look at [Max] Nordau, [Theodor] Herzl, [Ze'ev] Jabotinsky, and [Ber] Borochov. In the late 19th century, early 20th century, they look at the Jewish condition in the Diaspora. They see a bunch of capitalists. Borochov is speaking about the cultured society built as a pyramid. He says "Every society builds as a pyramid. You have a lot of working class and less of a middle class and very few bourgeoisie on the top, i.e. bankers, land owners and so on and so on and capitalists". He said when you look at the Jewish society in the Diaspora it is basically a pyramid upside down. You maybe have one worker, quite a few middle class, and the rest are capitalist money speculators, traders and so on and so on. And he said "We have to change it to turn the pyramid again in order to create a normal society."
And this is where they stopped. They moved to Palestine and all those kind of middle class Jews like the lawyers and doctors, part of them are my family you know, they come to Palestine with the hope to become workers. This is when they formed the Kibbutzim. They buy land and so on, and it is very successful. They work hard for at least two weeks and then they found out that the Palestinians were cheaper and this was the end of Zionism (laughter).
Joe: So you're saying those early Zionists, that they weren't necessarily motivated by a desire for a Jewish homeland based on persecutions, etc.
Gilad: I think they were. Herzl didn't come to me for a consultation.
Joe: No.
Gilad: So I can only judge by what I read. Their argument was coherent and consistent. Some of them realized that they were actually going towards disaster. You can read their writing there a bit later, but by Gershom Scholem and Buber, who understood that for instance, making Hebrew the language of god, yeah?, into the language of the new Israeli, is a very dangerous move that can lead to a sinister empowerment of the Jews. The Jews will start to think that he or she are god and will behave with impunity. And by the way, this is something that we see in Israel and the early Israeli politics.
Pierre: And that's something we see in the Holocaust religion. So what is the Holocaust religion?
Gilad: The Holocaust religion according to Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who is probably the most interesting Israeli philosopher, he is not with us anymore, is the new Jewish religion. Here's something that people have to understand. Judaism is only one Jewish religion among many. Judaism was popular for many years. The unique thing about Jewish culture, they can manage to turn any ideology into a religion. For many Jews, Bolshevism was a nice religion and they killed in the name of their Bolshevism. They starved in the name of their Bolshevism. They invaded countries in the name of their Bolshevism.
Another new Jewish religion is human rights. And as we know the neo-conservatives, and you are in France so you know BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy), we kill in the name of human rights. We destroy nations in the name of human rights. We invade countries in the name of gay rights and so on and so on. Holocaust is such a religion. It has all the main structure of a religion. It has an institution. It has a church. We have buildings in every American city. We have a Holocaust church where we can take people to those museums and teach them about the primacy of Jewish suffering. We have people like Elie Wiesel and Abe Foxman. And we also have a god, the new Holocaust god, the Jew himself or the Jewish self. Look at this. These people, these gods were under such an immense attack, it was basically annihilated and look what he or she managed to achieve. They're now running the west. They dominate American policy. They manage to get a state on the expense of the Palestinian people. We are dealing with an omni-potent power.
So this is kind of what the Holocaust religion is if you sum it up. But it becomes very, very depressing when you ask yourself what this religion promised. And this is very, very devastating. It is a religion that promised vengeance, revenge! We want to kill in the name of our suffering and for many of us, this suffering is imaginary. I was born in '63.
And let me tell you something about Holocaust survivors. I grew up in Israel and I was surrounded by Holocaust survivors. I had many family members with numbers tattooed on their arms. And I have never been abused by these people. They never asked us to go to fight or to kill in the name of their suffering. This is something that people have to understand. Holocaust survivors in Israel - I'm married to a daughter of a Holocaust survivor. I didn't know her father, but I knew her mother. She was a very peaceful human being and if anything, she wouldn't like anyone to die in the name of her suffering, quite the opposite.
I don't say that Holocaust survivors were left-wing, not at all. They just dealt with their misery. The Holocaust religion, as we know it, developed by the second and the third, and now the fourth generation, people who are tormented by the fantasy of destruction. And this is why I developed, I think, my most important psychoanalytical tool that helps us to understand Jewish collective psychosis. And this is what I define as the pre-traumatic stress. In the case of the Jews, of Jewish culture, yes, not the Jews Moshe Chaim, Joseph Shava, in the case of the Jew, of Jewish culture, we are dealing with a pre-traumatic stress as opposed to post-traumatic stress. And this is very easy to explain.
The Jews are always tormented by a phantasmic imaginary disaster in the future and this trauma shapes their operation or behavior in the present and consequently, they really bring this disaster on themselves.
Joe: But that's not normal.
Gilad: It's not normal.
Joe: It's not.
Gilad: By the way, I actually think that it may as well be normal. I don't think the Jews are the only people who are dealing with this, but I will give you an example. For instance, the fantasy of new Iranian holocaust, the fantasy that the Iranians are going to destroy Israel shapes their operation. They end up mounting pressure on Britain, France, America, with their very extensive lobbies. And the consequences - I think that we have managed to stop them, I hope - but it would easily bring into a colossal disaster, World War III, and if this would happen, how do you think a German or Austrian or French would react once a nuclear radioactive cloud is approaching Europe? What would they say then about the Jews? I leave it to your imagination.
Joe: But surely this collective fear of a future trauma or disaster is being pushed onto its people and they're being manipulated via that fear, by their leaders.
Gilad: I don't think this is very easy always for us to blame action on leaders. I don't think that this is the case, definitely not in the case of the Jews because we are dealing with a very solid culture that is evolving all the time. One of the first things that I say in my book, that it is not clear at all who dominates the Jewish culture. Where is the brain? Is it the Knesset? Is it Bibi Netanyahu? Is it Shimon Perez who is actually the President? Or maybe it's the ADL or maybe it's Bernie Madoff in Wall Street. And recently we have learned that actually a lot of Israeli wars are there to support the military in the streets, so it's maybe some tycoon within the military in the streets that pushes Israel or the Jewish war forward. It is not very clear and we don't have an answer. But what we can really see is that there is a pretty forceful orchestrated attempt that is there to sustain tribal existence.
And this is why I came up with my organismus theory. I argue that when you look at the person who ended up murdering another person, who hits the trigger? Is it the finger? Is it the arm? Is it the spine that delivers the order from the brain? It is very hard. Similarly, when an Israeli pilot drops a bomb on a Hamas headquarters and he really honestly thinks that he's going to kill a militant because he believes that he is a militant. He doesn't see Hamas as a liberating resistance operation - I won't get into that now - but there was a bit of wind and this bomb hit a very populated neighborhood and killed, god forbid, 20 kids. He may even feel sorry, but the day after there is some uprising in France and some Muslims they attack a school and there is a massive wave of immigration of French Jews to Israel. And you know it's a snowball. And this is operating as an organismus.
At the same time Israel is throwing bombs on Palestinians. We have Jews who dominate the Palestinian solidarity movement while saying "Oy, it's not the Jews. We're actually nice. Look at us. We are nice Jews!" And you are looking at this and you are confused and you say "is it the Jews or maybe it's not the Jews?" Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is the organismous.
Now the good Jews in America don't do it because they want to help Israel. They may even hate Israel. They do it because it's very important for them to make sure that the tribe identity prevails. And this is something very unique that the Irish people, with all due respect to our Irish friends, and the French people, and the Palestinian people and all other people on this planet, do not have. It's a very strong and forceful tribal identity.
Joe: When did it start?
Gilad: As I said, I think that it started in Babylon and it has been evolving ever since. In 3,000 years of cultural evolution is a lot of time. So to make it short, it would take Edward Said. Edward Said is not with us, yeah? Edward Said was a very clever guy. He said "Oh, I'm an Arab, a Palestinian. I also want to have political correctness for me that would take care of my interests and make sure that nobody abuses me." What did he achieve? Not a lot.
Joe: No.
Gilad: Why, because he was young. His Jewish competitors went into this battle with 3,000 years of experience, which means 3,000 years of tricks. So if the Palestinians want to get it right, they've two options: either to start to learn Gilad Atzmon, or to wait 3,000 years.
Joe: That's interesting because I didn't really think that it went back so far, particularly because of what Shlomo Sand says that there was no Jewish people essentially and what you say...
Gilad: I agree with Shlomo Sand and you know that there are a lot of elements in his work that I follow and actually I dedicated a chapter for instance. But there is one thing that Shlomo Sand doesn't do and it's very simple. And by the way, no one does. If Jews were invented, their history - and he's right - 100 years ago, how is it possible that they were so successful in it? That they've managed to invent themselves and to get the land on the expense of the Palestinians and other people and so on? This is not because they invented themselves 100 years ago. This is because they had the culture that was developed for 3,000 years that allowed them to move forward in such a profound manner.
But there is another thing. I'm not the first one to talk about it, but I'm the first one to talk about it openly. I think that this is the way forward. And I'm giving talks about it all over the world at the moment. I talked about it last week in Costa Rica, two weeks ago in Switzerland, and next week I'm going to give a talk about it in Istanbul. And in a way I'm delving now into evolutionary psychology and it is something that Oren Uriev touched lately and a few other Israelis talk about. I think that the most important thinker, big into this topic, is Kevin MacDonald, who many people in the left treat very, very badly. And when I came across his name for the first time, when I read the review, I myself, like an idiotic Jew, called him a white supremacist without realizing that I was actually exploring what is left of my own Jewish symptom. And I then was asked to read him and I published my apology. And actually I met him and he's the nicest person on this planet.
Joe: Yeah.
Gilad: But the Jewish progressive left terror is something that they're really there to make sure that we don't read the most important books. Okay, this was a long introduction. I hope that it's worth it.
For 1,500 years there was a massive eugenic project within the European Jewish community. They had a proxy where the merchant married his daughter to the sage, to the boy that is destined to become the next Rabbi. For 1,500 years the Jews in the ghetto basically married scholarship with money. Now there was nothing sinister about it. They were living in ghettos. They wanted to make sure that the leadership is clever and can look after the community. It was actually a nice thing. What really happened is that they created, mainly in Western Europe, in Germany, a very small elite that was definitely more advanced intellectually than most people around them. Now our Irish friend can tell you what they did in Ireland. Every time they found a clever boy, they took him to the church and they told him definitely women are not going to happen, maybe with boys.
Niall: Yeah, you would join the priesthood.
Gilad: Yeah, exactly. So while the Catholics around them were actually doing the opposite of a eugenic project, the Jews became more and more clever. Not the Jews, sorry, just a very small elite. Now there is another thing that you have to understand. The more clever the elite became the more stupid the ordinary Jews became as well because they basically robbed all the very best male genes and integrated them into these elite. These elite centralized in Germany, Austria and the Jews in the East were what the Jews themselves called - I say it in Hebrew in case you have some Hebrew speakers listening to us - what they called 55:11 (Hebrew ) which means woodcutters and water drawers, people who are only capable of manual work.
Now, once you understand that this is the demography of the Jewish people in Europe, you can understand what happened in the 19th century. Once the ghetto walls were removed, these people started to integrate into European culture. And they did incredibly well because they were slightly more clever than most people around them. And within 10 years they took over culture, banking, medical schools, and politics. They became the most influential group of people in Europe.
Niall: Yeah, you see that in science as well. I think something like 80% of Russia's top physicists are all Jewish.
Gilad: Look what happened in Russia once the Soviet bloc collapsed. Seven out of the ten biggest oligarchs were Jews, for a reason. And they were all scientists. This is very important because those amongst you who visited university, you know we have this kind of an impression of professors being slightly clumsy or unorganized.
Joe: Absent-minded.
Gilad: Yeah, and actually pretty limited people. But when it comes to Jews, they're not just very clever; they're also very good in marketing. Look at Marx. There were two. There were Marx and Engels. Who is Engels? What did he say? Nobody knows because Marx was very good in marketing. Freud and Jung: Jung was definitely far more interesting, but Freud was way better in marketing. Look at Einstein. Look at Chomsky. Try to think has Chomsky ever said anything really, really clever? No! Everybody knows that he's clever but nobody really knows what is so clever about him.
Joe: Could what you're saying be basically about the Jews and the way they essentially genetically organized themselves as a tribe so that they would excel in society, could that be an explanation for why at certain periods of time, the local population turned against them, or the nationals, for example in Russia?
Gilad: For sure, for sure. There is no doubt that when you have a bunch of arrogant, very clever people who live in proximity to you and look down on you, it's only natural that you wouldn't like them. But again, you make sure we don't talk about the Jews. We are talking about a very small group, a tiny group within the Jewish society. But and then go now on the internet and try to find out how many Rothschilds died in the Holocaust and actually none. The only Rothschilds you can find in the Holocaust was a Rothschild female who was actually Christian and stayed in Europe and her Jewish husband managed to run away. So in a way, it is the Jewish elite that are responsible for a lot of the problems. If there would be a problem tomorrow in France, god forbid, I can promise you that BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy) will be one of the first to run away.
Pierre: That's for sure. And he would be the first one to pour oil on the fire and the first one to escape and to be delighted when seeing the other Jews being slaughtered.
Gilad: Exactly. Now you know this is why I don't talk about "the Jews". I talk about the identity and I try to identify what are the elements within Jewish culture, within the Jewish society and Jewish politics that are moving things. For instance, Norman Finkelstein, whom I respect and I don't think that it's mutual, argues in his latest books that actually a lot of Jews in America are moving away from Zionism. Now he may be right. He may be wrong. There are a lot of statistics that actually contradicts his findings. But this is not the issue. It doesn't matter if Moshe, Chaim, Yosef, Itzhak, Sarah and Miriam are moving away from Zionism because the people who push America and dominate American foreign policy, let's say AIPAC, are just a very few Jews. They are very few Jews. There is one Jew for instace, in a world progressive network. His name is George Soros. George Soros, you go on the Open Society Institute website and you find out they even fund every NGO in Palestine. They even fund the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions). At the time he also funded J Street which is a liberal Zionist organization that opposes BDS.
Joe: That's marketing.
1:01:32Gilad: It's marketing. And by the way, genius marketing because if you really want to get something cheaply, put your money on the left, because they are cheap. If you really want to buy kind of a government, a military officer, an academic, it can cost a lot of money because they risk their reputation. But the union leaders or Palestinian Diaspora like Ali Abunimah, what does it cost to buy him? Nothing, you just put him in Holiday Inn.
Joe: Yeah.
Gilad: For one night.
Joe: Yeah for one night, with breakfast.
Gilad: No, without breakfast!
Joe: Do you have any evidence for what you've just said, about the way that the Jewish society or groups were essentially bred during the...
Gilad: The eugenic project?
Joe: Yes.
Gilad: Yes, for sure. It is called in Hebrew [inaudible]. If you want I can send you links to it in the Jewish encyclopedia.
Joe: Okay. That would be good, yeah. Because that's pretty amazing because what you've described, if it really happened, really does explain an awful lot. And it blows all of the conspiracy theories out of water.
Gilad: No, no, no. Listen. I just gave you the Hebrew name for it. I'm looking. I can find it on Kindle. But in Jewish encyclopedia they speak about it recently. We have Neri, who wrote about it briefly because there were a lot of issues with the recent Nobel Prize. They wanted to understand why so many Jews managed to get to the top. And this (Hebrew), their race improvement was discussed. But as I say in my book, there is no such thing as Jewish conspiracy.
Joe: But it kind of suggests the idea that the Jews are special. It suggests that that's true, if only for a small percentage because of this eugenics project.
Gilad: By the way, this is something that I totally approve. The Jews are special. Do you know any other people who come to a land after 2,000 years and say "Listen, you have to move, I've been here before."
Joe: Yeah, exactly. They're special in many different ways.
Gilad: Let's take an Irish. They're not special, they're f_cking special!
Joe: But even to come up with that idea suggests...
Gilad: Exactly.
Joe: ...a kind of a superior intelligence, even before you start your eugenics project, to come up with the idea of let's make...
Gilad: They are special. And my job, as an intellectual, is to delve into their specialness. And the level of aggression that they face, whether it is Dershowitz or Sabbath Goy, there is a guy called Steve Rendall, that stalk me on a daily basis, but they don't manage to produce a single argument. Everything that I'm saying in the book is mainstream news. How is it possible that BHL in France goes on TV and says "I did what I did in Libya, I liberated the people of Libya as a Jew"?
Pierre: It's quite sad actually because it's sad to see that this specialness, all those talents, this intelligence, instead of being used for creative purposes, is used mostly for self-interest and destruction.
Gilad: By the way, I wouldn't go there because a lot of it is used peacefully. It took me some time to realize that I myself am half aristocratic in that sense. And I'm surrounded with a few clever Jews who belong to that unique sect. And they all use it as writers and musicians and a lot of Jews use it creatively and don't use it tribally or politically. But we have to understand that when they use it tribally or even politically and even when they think that it is universally, the outcome can be pretty devastating. I'm now working a lot on Frankfurt school, people who believed that the right thing to do is to dismantle the west as we know it. And they declared a war against the patriarchal family and against the church and against the education systems. And they basically managed, they were very successful, the peak of their work was the '68 revolution. And they've managed to destroy the west. They've managed to destroy the west , and they managed also to destroy the left as opposed to the unionist left that was quite productive in looking after the interests of the people and a division of society.
We are living nowadays in a society that is into marginal groups which is basically something like 25 or 30 synagogues; the synagogues of the gays, the synagogues of the Muslims, the synagogues of the black. This is identity politics. The synagogues of I-don't-know-what and all those sectarian groups are engaged in sectarian wars. And all that time nobody looks after education, after manufacturing, after health. We only take care of idiotic wars about gay marriage.
Now gay marriage may be important per se, but it's not national issue. And national issue is the fact that we don't have manufacturing, which means that whether you are gay or heterosexual, you don't have a reason to wake up in the morning and to go to work because there are no jobs. You understand what I mean?
Joe: Yeah.
Gilad: This is how they destroyed the left. And I came, in the last few days, to the conclusion that all those very clever Jews like Adorno and Marcuse and Kissinger, they're really kind of social scientists who believe that this planet is their small laboratory and they make experiments with humanity. And the outcome is always devastating and by doing that they actually, in the long run, bring total disaster on the Jews as well as everyone else.
Joe: Yeah, as well as everyone else. You can't exactly say that the Jewish political leaders in Israel, for example, and also in the Israel lobby in the U.S., the ADF, Foxman and people like that, they're not very well intentioned. They don't seem to have a lot of empathy. When they push their policies, they must know that it's going to end up with the death of, for example, Palestinians or other Arabs.
Gilad: As if they care.
Joe: Exactly. We've just had a question. We have a chat room going and someone has just asked "How's your knowledge on psychopathy and would it be possible to ask you if the eugenics program that you talked about was basically a marriage of intelligence with psychopathy and power".
Gilad: By the way, and I'm sure that at a certain stage in the book I use it, but I definitely used it in the past and brought enough evidence to support it. When Israel, for instance, faced a conflict, we have enough evidence to argue that their behavior provides some evidence of collective psychosis. We can see very clear elements of psychopathy. For instance the level of violence, the fact that 94% of the Israeli population supported carpet bombardment, the IDF measures at the time of the Operation Cast Lead, this is unusual in a democratic society that 94% of the people support genocidal measures. So definitely we have enough grounds to talk about it.
Joe: It strikes me that the whole tribalism and keeping your genes together as a result of this eugenic experiment that's been going on for centuries, that ultimately if people's empathy gets watered down over the centuries through their drive to attain more and more power, etc., that that would essentially through the genetic inbreeding essentially, that it would select for more psychopathic individuals.
Gilad: I don't have enough grounds to argue that the dwindling empathic that are very noticeable can be traced with Jewish DNA or Ashkenazi DNA, but when I look into these issues I simply argue that the identity that is based on chosenness. Chosenness - this is what they are - is used by the dismissal of otherness.
Joe: Yeah.
Gilad: So we don't need the genes in order to explain it, but if somebody is a genetic expert and wants to deal with these issues, I would definitely welcome it. And this is the difference between myself and the left because as we've seen, it is Jewish progressives who actually oppose evolutionary research while they themselves, the Jewish people, are the only people within the west who think racially, who are ethnically ethnocentric driven, and operate as an evolutionary cult while stopping everyone else from looking into evolution. And by the way, I'm not talking about Jewish race here. I'm not a racist. It's an Ashkenazi project and as we know, the Ashkenazi are not even Jews. At large they are Khazarian.
Pierre: Yes. So claiming a land that was...
Gilad: Yeah. Their region is somewhere kind of 9th century Armenia, Turkmenistan. Not far from Ukraine actually (laughing).
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: You brought up Ukraine. What do you think is going on there? We are hearing day-to-day the current propaganda going back and forth is that people in the east of Ukraine, pro-Russians, have declared that the Jews are not welcome. What's going on there?
Gilad: I don't think that we know exactly. I wrote about it yesterday. I tried to follow it and it's not clear who said what and it may be a hoax. But one thing is noticeable. Nobody in the west knows about the Holodomor. In the '30s there was a Soviet policy imposed on the Ukrainian people that led to the starvation and the deaths of millions of Ukrainians. Some people say as many as 10 million. It was a clear attempt to annihilate the Kulak, which was the peasant class in Ukraine.
Joe: They were imposing collectivization.
Gilad: This project was perpetrated largely by Jewish Bolsheviks led by Lazar Kaganovich who was a Bolshevist murderer, Jewish murderer. Now I don't have any doubt that the rightwing Ukrainian party is anti-Russian a lot because of this chapter in their history. And in the west we really tried to wipe put this historical chapter, that is very significant for the understanding of the pro and the anti-Russian feelings that are involved in this conflict. Now I grew up like you, maybe I'm older. I'm starting to get old now. Some people in jazz still call me "Young Gilad". I'm 50 you know. I grew up in a world where BBC is the news. Even CNN or whatever, it is now slightly pathetic because every person who is even slightly knowledgeable about the conflict knows very well that the picture that is depicted by our news outlets in the west, are totally misleading. And you know what? And then I myself watch closely in the past and often enough with Russia Today. So I started "Okay, I'll go for Russia Today". But they also don't attempt to give a genuine picture.
Joe: No.
Gilad: So the meaning of it is that we really have to look for alternative media. And I guess that this is the reason that my website and my writings are so popular. And it's not because I'm clever. The Holodomor is the biggest crime against humanity in the 20th century. Not the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the murder that was perpetrated by Stalin's willing executioners. This is how by the way, Yuri Slezkine, a top American historian as well as a Jew, identified them.
Joe: And do you link those people who are responsible for the Holodomor to them being Jews?
Gilad: Definitely! They were Jews but they were definitely not rabbinical Jews. They were atheist Marxist, Bolshevik Jews.
Joe: What is it about their Jewishness that would lead them to carry out such an atrocity?
Gilad: This is the most important question, for instance maybe the fact that they transformed their Jewish chosenness, which is actually a nice thing, into an ultimate form of righteousness? I argue that progressiveness is the ultimate form of Judaism. What is progressive? It means that somebody else is reactionary. This is exactly the true meaning of chosenness, isn't it?
Joe: Being reactionary?
Gilad: No, no, being progressive.
Joe: Being progressive.
Gilad: If I'm progressive, it means that you are reactionary. You see what I mean?
Joe: Yeah.
Gilad: This is exactly what chosenness is all about.
Niall: Yeah. It's kind of this constant appeal to the higher moral ground, or to the better ideology.
Gilad: Exactly.
Niall: And in fact it's something you make very clear in your book, that on the surface it's an appeal to universalism, to humanism.
Gilad: Yes.
Niall: And it's manifest in many ideologies. We see it still today in agitating different ethnicities to self-determine, to rise up and free yourselves from your oppressor.
Gilad: And human rights are exactly the same thing. It's the image of righteousness, of moral high ground, and look what we do with it. We've already killed in just the last 10 years.
Joe: They would ascribe to the rather colloquial expression of 'to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs'. So in terms of putting their grand plan for the human race into operation there has to be some suffering and some upset and some chaos. And they probably couch it in those terms.
Niall: And here's the thing Joe, is there a grand plan?
Joe: No.
Niall: As Gilad's talked about, I understand that there's no such thing.
Joe: Well just in their progressiveness. That they have an idea...
Gilad: You're right. I'm not sure. Maybe people like Kevin MacDonald won't agree with me here, I don't think that Adorno and Marcuse and Horkheimer thought that we'd end up where we are now, without manufacturing, with society being broken and not even image of justice on the horizon and so on. I think that they have small ideas, they are obviously not as clever as they believed themselves to be, and we end up with total chaos.
Joe: Yeah, that's what I mean. In terms of having a plan, their grand plan for any particular situation, for Africa, or for an African country, or for an Asian country, or for the Vietnam War, the planning behind those individual events is very grandiose. It's 'rulers of the world' type of attitude. And sure, they have the power and the means to make...
Niall: Yeah.
Gilad: But you know - let me interject - maybe they cannot see the grand plan and maybe they don't even have a grand plan, but they are not interested in grand plans. You know what they think? Maybe they just think of a small plan for the Jews. I'll give you an example now. It's devastating and I'm going to upset a lot of people, which is something that I'm really good at.
Joe: Good. Fire away.
Pierre: Go on.
Gilad: The civil rights movement. As you all know, the Jews were highly involved in this movement. They are very proud about it.
Niall: You mean in America, in the '50s?
Gilad: Yes. Now let us try to examine - and I write this in my new book - what happened to the black people in America? Okay, so we have the change of legislation. So now they throw them into jail without even seeing the cause. Fifty percent of the people who are in prison in America are black. And this is not just the south. This is all over. So at the end of the day, it is very hard to say whether the civil rights movement really made a change in America. But look what it did to the Jews. They became the ultimate instance and authority on the issues to do with race alright? So maybe there was no grand plan there. There was a limited plan for the Jews.
Joe: And it worked.
Gilad: And it worked, definitely, until the next Holocaust (laughter). And when there is a next Holocaust, the American elite will be very quick to see it coming and they'll disappear and a lot of innocent Jews will pay the price for the idiotic behavior of their Abele Foxman and Dershowitz.
Pierre: Talking about the growing pressure, you certainly know about the situation in France, the escalation, this growing pressure between Alain Soral, Dieudonné, the humorist and the French pro-Zionist zealots. What's your take on the current situation in France?
Gilad: I think that what we see in France is obviously a large symptom of awakening of the public to the devastating bond between Jewish intelligentsia and the so-called French left. And the success and the popularity of Dieudonné and Soral is clear evidence of this unique moment of collective epiphany in France. I take some responsibility for it, as you probably know, I am published by Soral and I know how popular my book is in France. And I'm very happy that it happened. I hope that the Jews in France would be clever enough to understand that they are in a bad way and to correct whatever they can correct. But I also know their Jewishness is to a certain extent, a form of blindness. And this is a big tragedy. This is a bit tragedy. Instead of understanding that they are in an open conflict with the French working class, they put more and more pressure, and they actually contribute to the annihilation of the French left.
Pierre: Yeah, and the pressure has reached such a point in France where only Jews can speak the truth about Jewishness. That's why voices like yours are very important. Otherwise non-Jews like Soral or Dieudonné who dare tell the truth about Jewishness became literally harassed by all the idiots in the country.
Gilad: By the way, let me share some of my new writing with you. What is political correctness? Political correctness is politics that doesn't allow political opposition. This is actually also the definition of dictatorship. But dictatorship is quite nice because you know with the dictators, you can meet in the room, just the two of you and a friend and say "Oy, I really don't like Hitler", you know, "I really don't like Pinochet". But with political correctness, you cannot even meet anyone, because it is you who self-censorship yourself. And this is an operation that has been progressing for the last 30 or 40 years. In fact George Orwell was the first to identify it. This is the Big Brother. The Big Brother is imposing Newspeak on us and we end up buying it or following it.
But there is no doubt that the Jewish lobby, Jewish intelligentsia, Jewish pressure groups, were leading this move in our society and what we see now is a universal attempt to protest against it and obviously we are getting to the point where we identify the culprits of this move. For instance, here in Britain it's The Guardian. And I started to call them the Guardian of Judea and I can see how popular it is. It gives me so much fun. I come to a place and everybody speaks about the Guardian of Judea and I know that I should get wealthy for it and because I'm not a Jew anymore I say "No, it's okay, it's okay (laughter), never mind."
Niall: That one's free.
Gilad: Contribution for this jargon.
Pierre: Gilad, you talked about the Newspeak and today one of the major sins in this worldwide holocaust religion is anti-Semitism. Before anti-Semitism was defining someone who hates Jews. But today anti-Semitism is the name that is given to someone who is hated by Jews. Totally reversed.
Gilad: Yeah, you read it (laughing).
Pierre: Yeah I did. And I liked it.
Gilad: Yeah, this is how pathetic it is. You have basically the left, and I mention it. You know I speak with you and I didn't know where you're standing politically, so I was afraid I'm upsetting you.
Joe: No.
Gilad: Not that I mind to upset you, but I mentioned it. In the left-dominated discourse - when I say left-dominated it's basically kosher discourse - we don't really negotiate with reality. We don't care about arguments. We adopted a Talmudic kosher philosophy that is basically a binary world of yes and no, good and bad. And we use a lot of negative tags that are supposed to eliminate people who fall into these categories, to eliminate them from the discourse. So the kosher left, the left is always kosher, to be a lefty is to be Jew by proxy basically. They have this anti-Semitism, white supremacy, Holocaust denier, Nazi, fascist, all those words, while they don't even understand what anti-Semitism or white supremacy or all those notions mean because they've developed a kind of a discourse and exchange that is based on diffusion of empty signifiers. They will exchange anti-Semitism for white supremacy. "Oh, he's not an anti-Semitist, he's a white supremacist" and they don't understand any of those terms. In fact, there is not a single anti-Semite on this planet. I'm going as far to say people who hate Jews for being Jews. Nobody hates Jews for being Jews. This has been defeated in World War II. People have problems with Jewish politics, with Jewish identity politics, with Zionism, with anti-Zionist deceit, with George Soros, with controlled opposition. They have problems with it and it's legitimate. Because Jews are involved in politics and every form of politics should be subject to criticism.
Joe: Absolutely.
Gilad: In fact the Jews don't want to be criticized for their politics, only approved that they're supremacist chosen. They want to be special. Not a single person who is tagged by the left as a white supremacist is a white supremacist. Look into a character that they really hate, David Duke.
David Duke is not a white supremacist. David Duke actually argues, if I understand him correctly and I'm prone to make mistakes, David Duke actually argues, and I read his articles about it because I was asked about it and he's an interesting character, he actually is a white rights campaigner and in his writings, and I can find it again, he actually argues that every people have the right to celebrate their cultural heritage, including Jews. But he thinks that as a white man who loves his culture, and by the way, there are a lot of things to love in white culture, I'm a musician. What about Bach, Beethoven? And I'm also a philosopher. What about Kant, Schopenhauer and Heidegger? I'm sorry that they're all German. I don't know. There are a lot of things that are precious for us. So if I have the right to celebrate my symptom, let's say as a Muslim or as a Jew, he also has the same right. Now this doesn't make him into a white supremacist. And if he is a white supremacist, so every person is a kind of a supremacist. So it's not bad.
And the left is not hateable and it's tragic. I don't know about you, but most of the people I know were lefties at a certain stage because we believed in ethics and we believed that the left was motivated by ethical thought and I really don't find any form of reasoning and ethical thinking in the left anymore. It's very sad for me. I blame, by the way Frankfurt School.
Joe: Yes.
Gilad: This is something very interesting and just think about it for a second, in the old left, I allow myself to say we grew up with but I don't know about you but myself and others, it didn't matter if you are a gay, if you are a black, if you are a Jew, if you are a Muslim, the only thing that mattered was your role within the production chain. So if you were a worker, you were my brother. In the new left, we are divided into men, women, gays, heterosexual, Jews, blacks...
Joe: Animal rights.
Gilad: We are differentiated by biology. Actually the new left adopted the most biological determinist philosophy that is the most radical form of Nazism, which is actually not Nazism, its Hitlerism. And they don't even understand this because they are not engaging in exchange. They build themselves these departments in universities where they have gay studies, women studies, study, study, study, study, studies and then negotiate within themselves. If somebody tries to suggest a critical argument, they immediately rather than extending they will tag him as a white supremacist or an anti-Semite so they can continue a male chauvinist, they have reached the tag, so they can continue this endless party that made them totally irrelevant to the world we are living in.
Joe: Yeah. Gilad, we might have a call here. I'm just going to check to see if we've got a call. Do we have a caller on the line?
Caller: Yes.
Joe: Hi, what's your name and where are you calling from?
Caller: My name is Jamar and I'm calling from Tacoma.
Joe: Hi Jamar. Do you have a question or a comment for Gilad?
Jamar: A comment and a question. A question to the guy because he brought up David Duke, and it could be my emotions and I'm young, but David Duke might have been a little bit of a racist, but I can be wrong, and maybe he can correct me on the philosophy of David Duke. I got a little bad feeling about him because I've read some things and things that he's said and also like Laura says, it doesn't matter the color you are, just the soul that occupies the body. So that stuff kind of gets me a little bit when I hear certain things that's racial because things about the Jews and stuff, we know that but then when you read the book 9/11: The Ultimate Truth, at the end you get the big pay-off as in "the Jews are really the ones that are being took in." And then the people who accuse you guys of doing certain things or being anti-Semitic or something, they didn't read that last chapter in that book, evidently. So I would just get into that. And also the other thing I want to say is Vladimir Putin is really, really doing his thing for the last month or two. He's doing a great job. He's making everybody look dumb, whose inept and psychopathic people in positions of power. And greed is a sickness and you can tell that they're being greedy and they're making many mistakes. And the people are aligning with each other. And sooner or later people agree to get along with each other and go against the bully. And I think the United States right now is the bully and it's Germany all over again. So that's all.
Joe: Okay Jamar. Thanks for your comments.
Niall: Thanks Jamar. So Gilad...
Gilad: Yeah, I will just concentrate on the first two questions or comments. I'm not working for David Duke and I think that he is clever enough to represent his case. It is known that David Duke as a youngster was involved with the Ku Klux Klan and he was actually a leader as far as I know. But I want to remind your listeners that at the same age, I myself was an IDF soldier and I was participating in a war, as a soldier. And the army I was involved with killed more than 20,000 civilians and got away with it. And I actually volunteered to be in this army and in the unit I was in. And still everybody forgives me. And we were racists. And we were murderers. So this is very interesting.
And the next question, why everybody forgives me, because I was a Jew? So we are special. Now I don't know enough about David Duke and his politics and I'm not really interested in his politics. What is interesting for me, I'm an intellectual, so I read Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, the second book, and I learned a lot. And I read The Bell Curve again this week and I learned a lot. And I read Kevin MacDonald and I learned a lot. And why I learned a lot, because David Duke is not afraid to think about himself in racial terms. I was shocked to find out that David Duke, who's definitely not a Jew and doesn't look like a Jew and doesn't operate as a Jew, he has nothing to do with the Jews, knows about the Jews more than me and I'm a scholar and definitely know more than most Jews. And the reason is very simple, because I wasn't allowed to think about myself as a racist. I was a racist but I wasn't allowed to think about myself as such. And because he's allowing himself to think in racial terms, he actually understands the Jews better than the Jews. And this is why the Jews are so worried about him and his thoughts.
Joe: Yeah.
Gilad: So it's very, very interesting.
Joe: Well that is kind of interesting because, just mentioning David Duke, you know about the academic boycott of Israel, right?
Gilad: Yes.
Joe: And the whole University and College [London] union stuff that's been going on in the UK for a long time where basically British universities are launching an academic boycott. But in 2008, the boycott that year where they tally the votes for whether or not they're going to boycott every year. There's a scandal every year over it, but in 2008 there was a scandal because there was a member of the University College union, her name was Janet Deliech, I think, and she passed around amongst members of the union on her email list, she passed around an article that I wrote called 'Racism, Not Defense at the Heart of Israeli Politics'. And she passed that around and she got totally slammed and the whole anti-academic boycott gang, the Jewish lobby essentially in the UK, jumped on this and said that she was passing around 'anti-Semitic material'. But the main argument they had with it was that David Duke had taken that article that I wrote and posted it on his website.
Gilad: (laughing)
Joe: And they used that as evidence. They weren't really attacking me. They were attacking her because she had taken it supposedly from David Duke's website.
Gilad: Let me tell you something. Boycott is actually a Jewish trick.
Joe: It is?
Gilad: We call it herem in Hebrew and it's part of the Jewish culture. We did it to Spinoza. We did it to Uriel Da Costa. And we did it all through our history. This is what Jews are good at, doing boycotts. And now they even manage to make the Palestinians into Jews. And you know what? The Palestinians are not even involved anymore. They just told the Jews "Okay, you take care of the boycott." This Palestinian in Ramallah, his name is Omar Barghouti, he is kind of the coordinator of the boycott. And he himself went to study in Tel Aviv University.
Joe: Why would the Jews be boycotting themselves?
Gilad: Because it gives the impression that they are ethically-driven. And by the way, I'm not against the boycott. But as you say, they boycott Norman Finkelstein who is very eloquent, the best speaker for Palestine in English, whether we agree with him or not, it doesn't matter. They boycott Greta Berlin. They boycott George Galloway. They boycott basically the most important thinkers in this movement. Can you think of any Israeli whom they boycotted? Not really. So basically they work for the Jews and they do what the Jews believe to be good for the...?
Joe and Niall: Jews?
Gilad: That's it! So this is the boycott. And David Duke is indeed very frightening for some Jews because he understands a few things that they would really prefer to shove under the carpet. So I cannot really defend his past. It's really none of my business, you know. I by the way, cannot defend my past either (laughing). It's very embarrassing, but I can't. I do what I can to deal with it, but I can't justify it. And still I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot from him. And as I said, I learned a lot from most of them, the books that they really insist we don't read.
Pierre: Gilad, allow me to go back to the Frankfurt school. I have a comment here. I might be wrong. There seems to be a growing effort to destroy the sources of our reference of our culture, destruction of the nation states, destruction of the family, destruction of art, all what contributes, what helps us to define ourselves as human beings, what shapes our conscience. It's as if those individuals that you define as lacking this conscience, this self-identity backbone, are creating a world where human beings with a conscience would be forced because of suppression of those cultural references, to lose our conscience. So are we on to something here?
Gilad: I think that you defined it very well. I think that those Jewish thinkers thought to destroy the west and every characteristic of the west, and as you had mentioned, it is our history, our culture, our education, our patriarchal family, our church, our religion, everything would contribute to a better society. This is one option. This is the grand narrative. What was very clear is that they believed that it would be good for the Jews because if you don't have culture and if you don't have heritage and if you don't have art and if you don't have patriarchal family and the church is gone, so the Jew is like everyone else. We've reduced the entire society into uprooted tabula rasa. And this is exactly where we are. We have managed to destroy the intelligentsia. And now we are basically all equally stupid. But you know what the problem with this is? When there are people who are genuinely clever, they don't even remember how to silence them. And I'm laughing at this. I see the campaign to silence me.
Joe: And they can't, yeah.
Gilad: And I'm way ahead of them.
Joe: Yeah. We have another call on the line here, Gilad....
Hi, do we have a caller?
Caller: Yeah. It's Ken from West Virginia. And you were talking about the boycott program and divestment programs, the BDS they call it. I've thought for quite some time now that actually if the United States would just declare support for Israel unconstitutional because - it being a Jewish state - we have a clause in our constitution that forbids the establishment of religion. And if there ever was a case where a religion was established, that is it. And it's being done for a small section of the American population. And I know Gilad probably knows some people in the United States that maybe could pursue that. It's simply unconstitutional to support a religious state for a group of Americans, even if it is outside the country. So I just wanted to pass that idea on to him and see if maybe he could advance it with some of his friends.
Joe: Okay.
Gilad: It's a very, very, very, very, very, very good point because what is BDS? BDS is Boycott Divestment and Sanctions. Now boycott doesn't mean anything really. As I mentioned, they've managed to boycott every good person that supports the Palestinians, but we cannot even think up a single Israeli who was boycotted by you in the last one, two or three years. Divestment is not an issue because nobody understands what it means. Even English people, American people have to look in a dictionary and it doesn't help. The most important issue is sanctions. With sanctions you can destroy countries. Iraq was destroyed by the sanctions. Iran was destroyed by sanctions. But when it comes to Israel, the BDS doesn't do a thing to push for sanctions. And why, because the Jews that dominate this movement don't really want to destroy Israel. They want to give the impression that "we have some nice Jews that don't agree with Israel". And that's it. And it is not a coincidence that we have the Palestinians struggling for 100 years. For the first 78 years we saw kind of a struggle and the last 10 to15 years since the Jews basically took over, the "good Jews" so-called, we call them the A-Z-Z, the anti-Zionist Zionists, took over, it's basically finito de la commedia, that's it. It's over.
Now looking at it from a completely different perspective, maybe this is good for the Palestinians, at least in Israel, or maybe even in the West Bank. Maybe the fact that the Palestinians are now defeated, and this is how it looks, maybe it is better for them rather than engaging in their suicidal attempts. But this gentleman who just called is correct. It's unconstitutional. It should have been quite easy to deal with it legally and constitutionally, but the people who are dominating this discourse don't do it. By the way, last month I went and listened to a professor, Richard Falk, talking about human rights in the context of the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict, and he also said it's quite peculiar that the Palestinians don't pursue the Hague and International Court of Justice now that they have kind of managed to gain the status of a state because they definitely have the legal, international law on their side. And they don't. And they don't because their discourse and their operation is dominated by people who are, so-to-say, presenting or working for Jewish interests. And as I mentioned, the fact that George Soros, a liberal Zionist, funds every NGO in Palestine, has something to do with it.
Joe: Is that it Ken?
Ken: Yeah, that's it. Thank you.
Joe: Alright. Thanks for the call.
Niall: Thank you for calling.
Ken: Thank you.
Niall: I want to go back to the second point our last caller made. He said he was thrilled with how Vladimir Putin was doing. I suppose the question for you Gilad is what today is going on here? Is Israel's relationship with Russia changing because Russia is clearly sticking two fingers up to the west every which way it can?
Gilad: Yeah.
Niall: By definition then, it is sticking its fingers up at very powerful Zionists as well?
Gilad: Yeah, for various obvious reasons, as you probably know, a lot of Russian wealth would channel [audio cuts out].
[...]
Joe: I think we're back online. Sorry about that folks. We got booted off for some reason. We're trying to get Gilad back right now.
Pierre: It shouldn't take long.
Joe: Reconnect with him.
Pierre: And we are talking about Russia and right when Gilad was going to talk about Putin and what was going on in Russia but we got interrupted. It's a conspiracy!
Joe: I was just going to ask him a question one of our listeners had posted in the chat room about the negative effects on him or from negative press he's gotten. The negative response he's had. He's had a lot of negative responses from just about everybody and the surprising thing is, across the board in terms of anti-Zionists, they've all accused him of anti-Semitism and spreading anti-Semitism. And it's kind of hilarious.
Niall: They called him a 'self-hating Jew'. These are smart, intellectual people. In fact they themselves will have suffered that stupid accusation in the past, yet they will turn around and use it on Gilad!
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: The classic example is Max Blumenthal. I hold him in pretty high regard. He's always the one to be an ultra-liberal, super progressive, American journalist. He goes after both U.S. and Israeli imperialism, their crimes of aggression. He himself knows what it's like to be called a self-hating Jew. And he turns around and he calls Gilad all these things. What is going on there?
Joe: Yeah, and it's also all of the pro-Palestinian groups, people from the guy who owns the Electronic Intifada and stuff like that, Ali Abunimah, I think Gilad mentioned him. All the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli groups, very high-profile kind of bloggers and stuff and various Palestinian websites, all have attacked him. And even the company that published his book The Wandering Who, that also published a book by other anti-Zionist authors, they all signed a letter condemning him and condemning the company for publishing his book. So it's just crazy.
Gilad: Hi again!
Joe: Okay, Gilad's back. Are you there Gilad?
Gilad: Yeah, this is my best network at home.
Joe: Okay. So we were just discussing there, in the last minute or two since we came back, about all of the people who surprisingly have come out and criticized you and condemned you. There are very few people, even amongst all of the anti-Zionist pro-Palestinian groups who had a good word to say. There's very few who had a good word to say about your book, The Wandering Who.
Gilad: Yeah, this is clear. I've never seen an argument against my work. They basically say "We don't want you to say it". It's not going to work. I'll say it and I'll use the opposition against me to prove that some people, both Palestinians, and not a lot of Palestinians, you know, 20 Palestinians and only two or three of them are known figures. I'm very happy to be chased. My big theory is that one day they give up...
Joe: And stop talking about you? Well I think you mentioned Richard Falk, and I think he is the one who actually probably summed up you and your work the best. He said "You are a de-Zionized patriot of humanity". Is that true?
Gilad: I would say if it is, it would make me into a righteous Jew!
Joe: Oh-oh (laughter). You can't say anything about yourself, good or bad.
Gilad: Exactly. I think that I'm basically a philosopher and I'm really very good in refining questions. And I do believe that once you refine the question, you understand what the question is, you can come up with good answers. And actually some questions have more than one answer. So it is very possible if a Jew would understand for the first time, what is the Jewish question, he or she would be able to come with a good answer. And if this guy or a girl is a Zionist, it would come with one answer. And if he's an anti-Zionist or a humanist, he may come with a different question. I spent the last week with an Israeli leftist and it was very easy for me to confront him and eventually prove to him that he is in a cognitive dissonance. You know when you speak to Israelis, you know they always like the Palestinians and they like to help and once a week they go to Bilin and they walk with the Arabs, but at the end of the day, they don't want the Arabs to come to take their home in Palestine, which is basically Tel Aviv and Haifa. So they're involved in this kind of endless righteous spiel with the hope that the Palestinians would fade away. And I confronted him. I said "What kind of ethics do you think that you try to sell?" And then he eventually admitted "Listen, if I could, if I was younger I would do what you did. I would run away" which was very interesting because he couldn't really present an argument, but at least for the first time in his life, he admitted to himself that he is basically masturbating. Now I don't need a third party to make me aware of the fact that I'm masturbating. I know when I'm doing it!
Joe: Some people do though.
Gilad: I'm not doing it now. Don't worry.
Joe: Well I read your book and I think it's an excellent book and it's a unique book that no one else has written, the kind of things you have written and explained. It's essentially a very well explicated and reasoned anthropological study of the Jewish people. Nobody else goes there.
Gilad: Thanks so much. And you know what I realize now? It took me some time to admit it to myself, but when I presented the book to a friend of mine he told me "Listen Gilad, this book is going to make history." And it already did. But I understand now that my book is going to stay there as long as the Jews are there. In 300, 400 years, when you want to understand the Jews, you'll read Bernard Lazare and Gilad Atzmon. All the others like Shlomo Sand he is nice but he's kind of particular to a chapter in history. Ilan Pappé, is another chapter, 1968 Jewish. They are afraid to take onboard the greater question. And if you asked me what I did to the Jews, I turned them into a philosophical question.
Joe: That's what it is. That's what they are.
Gilad: This is what I did and I'm very proud about it. And the more proud I am, the more upset they are.
Joe: You said you're writing another book. Is that right?
Gilad: My next book is much more devastating.
Joe: Excellent.
Gilad: I'm going to do the same thing to the left. To their obsessions, I am going to expose the left as a Jewdified discourse, Talmudically oriented, and I'll show how their obsession with racism is because they are fundamentally and inherently racist. If they are clever, left is listening to us now, I suggest that you jump into the water because (laughter) I'm going to...
Joe: You've got them in your sights.
Gilad: Yeah. Jump into the water now. It's safer.
Joe: Alright Gilad. It's been really great talking to you.
Gilad: Same here.
Joe: And maybe we'll do it again once your new book's out.
Gilad: Don't wait. I'm writing about it. The thing is that I thought if I finished it and the more I dig, you know, that's the way it is. So I hope that it won't take me another 10 years now. But let me tell you that I read The Bell Curve. You know about the bell curve?
Joe: Which bell curve?
Gilad: It's the name of the book.
Joe: Oh yeah.
Gilad: And I was shocked. I really recommend to anyone I can to read this book. It's an incredible scientific work. And what is shocking about it, it was published in '94 and it is prophetic and describes exactly where America is now, segregation and cognitive partitioning. And when you realize that this book was demolished, burned by the left makes it clear that it is actually the left that should be seen as complicit in the social disaster that we see and were directly responsible for the social disaster that we see in the west, in America, in Britain, in France and so on.
Joe: Okay, well we're going to leave it there. So thanks again.
Gilad: Thank you so much.
Joe: Best of luck with everything you do. And just watch out for...
Gilad: I'm big! If they want to attack me they have to bring more than one.
Joe: More than one Mossad agent!
Pierre: Gilad, it was a pleasure speaking with you.
Joe: Okay. Alright folks, we are ending it there. Back next week with another interview.
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