Trouble in left-wing paradise

An anti-Semitic British journalist has revealed a rift in the anti-Israel movement that is pitting anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers against traditional socialists who are opposed to Israel but uncomfortable with extreme Jew hatred.

The catalyst for the rift comes in the person of Holocaust denying anti-Semite Gilad Atzmon. A former Israeli Jew who now considers himself neither Israeli nor Jewish, Atzmon is the author of the recent book The Wandering Who. His book has been praised by anti-Semites such as Richard Falk, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine, and anti-Israel conspiracy theorists such as John Mearsheimer.

Lauren Booth, half-sister of Tony Blair’s wife and a distant relative of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, reports in a lengthy, outraged diatribe that The Palestine Solidarity Campaign now refuses to be associated with Atzmon because of his anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Atzmon has a particular brand of Holocaust denial by which he does not dispute that the Nazi killed Jews but in the face of overwhelming documented evidence, suggests the numbers are vastly smaller than reported and that it was not part of a systematic attempt by Hitler’s forces to exterminate the Jewish people.

According to Booth,” the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has revealed itself to be ethically compromised at the highest level…

This week, Sarah Colborne, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, was quoted in the pro Israeli paper, the Jewish Chronicle, as supporting a boycott of the highly renowned musician and academic Gilad Atzmon”

Siding with Atzmon and other Holocaust deniers, Booth expresses outrage that such a prominent outspoken anti-Zionist would be shunned by their movement. This is in character for Booth, who according to her blog is an employee of the Holocaust denying regime of Mahmoud Ahamdinejad where she presents for PRESS TV, the Iranian state-controlled English language news service. Booth, who reports numerous failed attempts to stop drinking alcohol, attributes her recent conversion to Islam in Iran to her new found abstinence and has had a number of anti-Semitic outbursts of her own in recent years.

This recent rift demonstrates the extent to which the pro-Palestine movement is in many cases led and dominated by those whose primary motive is the hatred of Jews and the destruction of Israel, rather than merely disagreement with Israeli politics and policies.