A bit of an update on Israel-boycotting violinist Nigel Kennedy. These days he plays with one of Gilad Atzmon’s musical associates Yaron Stavi and has earned himself the support of Paul Eisen*. So when Robert Wyatt mentions Stavi and Kennedy approvingly in the Morning Star directly after a reference to ‘zionazis’, it’s not so much surprising as shameful.
Because it suits Paul Eisen’s politics to cheer for holocaust denial**. Because Gilad Atzmon denies the Holocaust even while nodding along with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Because Wyatt’s ‘zionazi’ isn’t criticism, it’s just a good way to hurt a bunch of people who lost loved ones, homes, futures to the Nazis. Because Yaron Stavi is chummy with all of them. And because the Morning Star hasn’t resembled a genuine communist paper for years.
How is any of this pro-Palestine? Palestine supporters who think that picking on Jews is activism – they always damage their cause. They always end up sending a message that Jews and Israelis should be scared and defensive. Their work is a mockery.
HT Jim
*http://pauleisen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/for-your-enjoyment-and-amazement.html
**http://pauleisen.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/how-i-became-holocaust-denier-by-paul.html
Engage 
January 5, 2014 at 8:09 pm
“How is any of this pro-Palestine? Palestine supporters who think that picking on Jews is activism – they always damage their cause.”
That assertion is based on the assumption that their cause is aiding Palestinian Arabs. I think that there is not much evidence to support that assumption. The most prominent “pro-Palestinian” advocates don’t seem to engage in the kind of critique of PLO policy that critical supporters of Israel (many of whom frequent this site) offer to the Jewish state. When was the last time you heard a prominent “pro-Palestinian” activist counsel moderation and liberalism to the PA in order to achieve a faster settlement? To expect such a thing even feels incongruous.
The “Palestine supporters who think that picking on Jews is activism” are not stupid (well, maybe they are but this isn’t why). It is activism for them because their objective is picking on Jews.
Now, what was the technical name for people like that? It seems to have slipped my mind.
January 6, 2014 at 3:38 pm
When discussing the case of Toronto film maker John Greyson, a gay man who is a prime mover and shaker behind Toronto’s Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, recently released from a Cairo jail where he was detained en route to Gaza, my friend dismissed him as merely a narcissist looking to burnish his reputation by attaching himself to the #1 brand of righteous victim and not an antisemite. I argued that as Greyson’s activism seems pretty much confined to pinkwashing HAMAS’s rule of Gaza is about and opining on CBC Radio that the removal of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government from Egypt was done by the Egyptian army at the behest of Israel and the US (never mind ten million Egyptians out in the street demonstrating against Morsi & Co or that the US promptly cut aid to Egypt because of the military coup), I think Greyson is more than a mere narcissist with shallow “progressive” politics.
January 5, 2014 at 10:41 pm
I don’t understand any of this – the last time I saw him play he was playing Klezmah with an eastern European group looking at the origins of folk/jazz music
January 6, 2014 at 12:15 pm
Good (if depressing) research, Mira
January 6, 2014 at 10:14 pm
“And because the Morning Star hasn’t resembled a genuine communist paper for years.” Did it ever? It danced to Moscow’s tune from the very beginning and now dances to what it imagines or assumes is the tune Stalin would be playing, were he still here.
See, for the arguments and evidence, “Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left” by Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey.