{"id":38076,"date":"2011-11-20T07:30:35","date_gmt":"2011-11-20T07:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=38076"},"modified":"2011-11-23T08:26:50","modified_gmt":"2011-11-23T08:26:50","slug":"in-defense-of-gilad-atzmon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=38076","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of Gilad Atzmon"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Sarah Gillespie \u2013 November 19, 2011<\/h2>\n

Herodotos is an historian who trains you as you read. It is a process of asking, searching, collecting, doubting, striving, testing, blaming, and above all standing amazed at the strange things humans do\u2019\u00a0Poet and translator of ancient Greek, Anne Carson,\u00a0Nox\u00a0(2011)<\/em><\/h5>\n
\u00a0<\/span>Gilad Atzmon\u2019s\u00a0<\/span><\/a>intellectual expedition into the daunting terrain of Jewish identity politics\u00a0has always evoked a storm of controversy. Still, when I first met Gilad, it was hard not to suspect he was exaggerating the extent of abuse he received from various UK pressure groups. Primarily, it\u2019s not easy to wrap your head around the notion that a person\u00a0can plausibly be branded as \u2018a racist\u2019 when they\u00a0tour the world with a gypsy violinist, a black drummer, a Jewish bass player and a token English white boy on piano. However, as I began to understand the full complexities of Gilad\u2019s arguments \u2013 a process, which, for me, required as much unlearning as it did learning \u2013 I reluctantly grasped the problem. And, to my utter horror, I also fathomed the full measure of pathological bile wielded against him. Indeed, some of it hemorrhaged in my direction.<\/h5>\n
After the 2009 Israeli assault on Gaza I organized a concert for \u2018Medical Aid for Palestinians\u2019 featuring iconic violinist Nigel Kennedy. Campaigners launched an onslaught from all sides – the right, the left, the Zionists and the anti-Zionists – individually and collectively, lobbied the owner of the venue, the director of MAP and myself, demanding that we cancel the event.\u00a0\u00a0Some even accused us of mobalising art to fund rocket attacks on Jews.\u00a0I was shocked, upset and embarrassed that I had inadvertently dragged my friend, who owns the club, into such a shameful debacle.<\/h5>\n
After the concert (a huge success) I was labeled a Holocaust denier.\u00a0\u00a0Not only was this accusation ludicrous and totally unfounded it was potentially damaging to me. It is clear that in this culture, you could query the extent of the Holodomor, the Nakba or the annihilation of American Indians without raising much of an eyebrow in the public domain, but to do the same with the deaths of Jews in the Second World War is tantamount to career suicide.\u00a0My lawyer advised me to get the accusation removed from the Internet but I think it best serves as a small, cyber monument to the preposterous and baseless sewage in which some people are content to swim.<\/h5>\n
More recently the cacophony of hysteria we are subjected to since Gilad\u2019s polemic\u00a0The Wondering Who\u00a0crowned him a\u00a0cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre,\u00a0has\u00a0shot off the richter scale. Gilad puts up with it almost daily.\u00a0Yesterday the Jewish Chronicle demanded that the Arts Counsel of Britain withdraw funding from the\u00a0Raise Your Banner Festival<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that we are playing at together on 25th\u00a0November. They failed of course, but have now resorted, in a separate piece, to simply\u00a0comparing Gilad to a pedophile<\/span><\/a>. I\u00a0too have been inundated with hostile youtube comments, messages and emails insisting I either drop my gigs with Gilad, or issue a statement denouncing his views.<\/h5>\n
This inspired me to do the exact opposite, to state here categorically how much I support and admire Gilad Atzmon\u2019s work, both as an artist and as a humanist, how much I cherish freedom of thought and speech and to declare that the day I withdraw from a festival because a few campaigners threaten to wreck my reputation, will be a cold day in hell.\u00a0We are artists.\u00a0We are entitled to express ourselves as we wish, we are entitled to sing, ask, dance, write and reflect.<\/h5>\n
It would be advantageous for Gilad\u2019s opponents if he were, as they claim, a banal biological determinist who simply dislikes people according to the lottery of their DNA. If this were the case, I\u2019m sure they would be slightly more successful in dismantling our concerts and banning Gilad\u2019s talks. Unfortunately for them, too many people understand that Gilad is on an intellectual quest for truth. According to the Greek historian Herodotos, quoted above, this is most humane thing you can ever hope to do. We can not be banned from playing, from writing or form \u2018wondering who\u2019 we are. Lest we forget, the word \u2018history\u2019 comes from an ancient Greek verb meaning \u2018to ask\u2019. \u00a0<\/h5>\n
So, alas dear agitators, even if we dropped dead tomorrow someone somewhere would still listening to our albums and reading Gilad\u2019s book. I\u2019m afraid the battle might continue but the war is already won.<\/h5>\n

Sarah Gillespie is a singer songwriter based in London. She will be discussing the role of politics in music on\u00a0BBC Radio 4\u2019s \u2018Start the Week\u2019<\/span><\/a>\u00a0on Monday 21st\u00a0November. Hear How The Might Fall\u00a0here<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong>www.sarahgillespie.com<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Singer songwriter Sarah Gillespie on how, having had some of it aimed at herself she came to realise the full extent of the pathological venom directed against Gilad Atzmon <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Israel_Anti-Semitism_Zionism_and_US-UK_allies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38076"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38314,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38076\/revisions\/38314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}