Bay Area Women in Black-- They Hate Zionism, but Holocaust Deniers are OK : Cleveland IMC (((i)))

Bay Area Women in Black is known in the San Francisco area for its frequent anti-Israel protests, either on their own or in support of the racist International ANSWER. Despite its self-styled image as a peace group, they have consistently refused to take a position against Palestinian terrorism while they sponsor speakers who call for the destruction of Israel. Now they have sunk to depths previously unplumbed, in their open association with the Holocaust denier community.

BAWIB is, along with the terrorist support network International Solidarity Movement, sponsoring fundraising concerts in Berkeley and Palo Alto by saxophonist Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon is a former Israeli Jew who has renounced his membership in the Jewish people and now supports the far right where it meets up with the extreme left-- at the intersection of paranoid schizophrenia and Jew-hatred known as Holocaust denial.

It's not enough that Atzmon has come up with his own gems such as “American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy” ; “There is no such thing as anti-Semitism”; and
“Why is it that the Jews who repeatedly demand that the Christian world should apologize for its involvement in previous persecutions, have never thought that it is about time that they apologized for killing Jesus?” He also is a strong supporter of the Swedish fascist who goes by the pen name of Israel Shamir. Shamir has written that “we need the voices of David Duke…and Pat Buchanan”, and has claimed that Jews have indeed slaughtered Christian children for their blood (the infamous “blood libel” now being vigorously promoted in some Arab countries), and claimed that “Auschwitz was an internment facility, attended by the Red Cross”. Shamir is so toxic that even extremist Israel-haters such as Ali Abuminah, Sue Blackwell and Jeff Halper dissociate themselves from him in their embarrassment at sharing the same agenda. But Atzmon consistently defends Shamir and calls him "a unique and advanced thinker".

Atzmon is also a fan of one Paul Eisen, a far right ideologue in the UK who wrote an article promoting the Holocaust denial revisionism of Ernst Zundel. Atzmon circulated and promoted the article. Atzmon defended his decision on his own website as follows (T is Tony Greenstein, a Marxist anti-Zionist from the UK-- Atzmon is also too far off the grid for him):

"T: By your own admission you are distributing Eisen’s holocaust denial text.
G: Holocaust Denial is in itself a Zionist terminology and I refuse to accept it or to use it.
T: I understand that you have been distributing Paul Eisen's most recent The Holocaust Wars which denies, in the course of defending Ernest Zundel, that there ever was a holocaust or extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis.
G: Mr Greenstein, True, I circulated Paul Eisen's paper. I do believe that argumentative texts must be circulated as widely as possible."

It's bad enough that BAWIB endorses and participates in ANSWER's rallies, which feature overt anti-Semitism. Regarding BAWIB using Atzmon to raise funds for its own efforts to rewrite history, the only phrase that comes to mind is the one which with attorney Joseph Welch challenged the demagoguery and bullying on Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954: "Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Cleveland Indy Media Center