Norwegian daily newspaper Nationen (Oslo) on 28.11.02 published an op-ed
attacking me. Here is my reply followed by rough translation of the op-ed. I
used contributions of our comrades Dave Kersting and Michael Neumann. As
sooner or later everyone gets attacked as an anti-Semite, it could be useful
as a blank standard reply.

I do not like philo-Semites, i.e. people choosing to fight anti-Semitism, of
all ills. In this world, so full of trouble and real suffering, there is
something deeply pervert in persons preferring to protect and support – not
the poor, not the refugees, not the oppressed, but the wealthy, influential
and well-connected group actively engaged in ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The Chief proponent of this well-endowed movement is an American Jew, the
head of ADL, Abe Foxman. Two years ago he was caught taking large sums of
money from the super-thief Marc Rich, a crook who cheated American tax-payer
and found refuge in Switzerland. For years Foxman and his organisation
collected dossiers on people who objected to apartheid and sold them to
Mossad and to South Africa of Forster. They broke into houses, stole
documents, run professional surveillance of the left activists in
California. Last year, Foxman and ADL were found guilty in the US court of
law, and paid millions of dollars to people they intimidated and smeared.
Foxman’s best chum is Ariel Sharon, the mass murderer of Sabra, Shatila,
Kibie and Jenin. A new book by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, “The
Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel’s Super Spy” confirms the
professional philo-Semites have permanent ties with Mossad, the long arm of
Israeli apartheid, memorable to you by Lillehammer murders. In brief, the
philo-Semites are sleazy guys taking money from sleazy crooks in order to
cover up the creeping genocide of Palestinians.

It is not strange, as the very emphasis on “anti-Semitism” is disgustingly
racist, as if it were worse than racism against anyone else. People who decr
y “anti-Semitism,” instead of “racism” or “ethnic-prejudice,” are actually
saying that there is something really special – and particularly bad – about
discrimination against this one particular group. In other words, they are
racists.

Your average Norwegian does not hesitate to say he dislikes Swedes.
Sometimes he corrects himself and says he actually hates Swedes. Older
Norwegians freely speak of their hatred to Germans. So do Jews: recent
bestseller by a philo-Semite Goldhagen called all Germans ‘willing
executioners of Hitler’. ‘Every Jew must maintain in his heart holy hatred
to Germans’, quoth Elie Wiesel, another professional philo-Semite. Somehow
nobody is worried about these racist statements; Wiesel even received Nobel
peace prise from the Norwegian Academy.

Germans are not exclusion. A Jewish scribe, Daniel Pipes, wrote a piece
together with a Dane Lars Hedegaard in the Canadian daily National Post
(August 27, 2002), published by the Jewish media lord, Israel Asper, a great
friend of my country, saying:

“Predominantly Muslim immigrants constitute 5% of the population but consume
upwards of 40% of the welfare spending. Muslims are only 4% of Denmark’s 5.4
million people but make up a majority of the country’s convicted rapists, an
especially combustible issue given that practically all the female victims
are non-Muslim”. I am not sure one can be more racist than that, even if one
mobilises Der Sturmer. But somehow nobody is worried about it.

The racist talk of anti-Semitism is used to protect Israeli racism. It is
amazing that some people still pay attention to it, and their crocodile
tears drip into newspapers. I wonder why the Third Reich did not try to stop
the Allied forces by claiming they are led by ‘anti-German prejudice’. One
imagines Russian soldiers at Stalingrad listen to such a broadcast and drop
their weapons in shame. Or is it only anti-Jewish prejudice that is
objectionable? Apparently, it is the case for philo-Semites: the Guardian
wrote about assassinated Dutch racist leader that though he hated Muslims
and Arabs, he was not a bad guy, as he liked Jews. Can one be more racist
than that?

The piece by Christine Mohn is true to its racist genre. She described me as
‘an ethnic Jew who defines himself as a Christian’. Like Adolf Hitler, she
thinks ‘once a Jew, forever a Jew’, baptism notwithstanding, he can only
‘define himself as a Christian’. However, non-racists are of different
opinion. A philo-Semite is a potential Jew, as he considers Jews being more
equal than other people. A Jew by birth can leave Jewry if he believes in
equality of Man as did St Paul, Marx and Trotsky. Here the opinions of the
Church and of the Communist party coincide.

Indeed, that was the vision of Abram Leon, a young follower of Trotsky, who
perished in Auschwitz in 1944. In his important book, The Jewish Question:
Marxist Interpretation (I am grateful to Noam Chomsky who introduced me to
this author), this communist of Jewish origin described the Jews,
“people-class”, historically attuned to exploitation of others. A man of
Jewish origin always could leave ‘the Jews’ and join mankind, wrote Leon.

But Ms Mohn is totally ignorant of Judaism. She writes: “The phenomenon of
“Chosen-ness”, as understood in Jewish tradition, has nothing to do with
closeness to God or superiority versus non-Jews”. We can believe her, or we
can believe the late Chief Rabbi of Israel, the greatest modern proponent of
Judaism, Rabbi Kook, who wrote: “The difference between a Jewish soul and
souls of non-Jews is greater and deeper than the difference between a human
soul and the souls of cattle”[i]

ORDER IT NOW

Philo-Semites would like us to speak ‘good, or nothing’ about Jewishness.
But this is the prerogative of dead. In the modern discourse, we freely
discuss shortcomings of Islam and Christianity, of capitalism and communism,
and indeed, Jewishness should be discussed as well. It is not a racist
discourse: leading modern debunkers of Jewishness are people of Jewish
origin from Karl Marx to Israel Shahak. It is not a right-wing discourse
either: The First International of Marx condemned, after long and lively
debate, philo-Semites as well as anti-Semites.

Racists are often nasty and stupid. Indeed, Christine Mohn succeeded to
concoct a nasty piece proving her inability to read and understand the text.
For instance, she writes, “The most important content in Shamir’s political
agenda is that Jews are best characterised as Christ-murderers”, while I
write just an opposite: “There is no collective guilt over many generations.
The Jews should not be blamed for killing Christ anymore than French blamed
for sending Joan of Arc to the stake.”[ii] Her other claims are equally
wrong.

To conclude, I would quote an American socialist thinker Dave Kersting: “We
should feel offended by this dramatic concern about anti-Semitism – at a
time of OPENLY racist horrors against the NON-Jewish population of
Palestine, who are suffering from the UNDISGUISED ethnic-supremacy of the
Zionists. Disproportionate concern about “anti-Semitism” is a key weapon in
the most brazen ACTUAL ethnic violence of our time and place”.
Israel Shamir,

Jaffa

www.israelshamir.net

info@…

ANTI-SEMITISM IS NOT ACCEPTABLE FOR CRITICISM AGAINST ISRAEL

By Christine Mohn, psychologist, secretary of Norwegian Association against
anti-Semitism

Anti-Semite: The central place Israel Shamir has in some Norwegian
intellectual circles illustrates that central Norwegian press organs are
willing to distribute anti-Semitic attitudes under cover of Israel-critics,
the author writes. Internationally Shamir was dismissed as a confused “noisy
bucket”, but he has for some reason acquired almost a cult status among
Norwegian left-radicals.

In the last months, Klassekampen, Friheten, Dagbladet and Morgenbladet
newspapers have often used statements and comments from the Israeli scribe
Israel Shamir in debates and articles about the conflict between Israel and
the Palestinians. Sometimes Shamir even was permitted to write an op-ed.

Israel Shamir is disreputable due to the paradox of being an ethnic Jew and
at the same time anti-Semite. He is born and grown up in the Soviet Union,
and defines himself as a Christian. He has been linked to the Israeli
Communist party Mapam, but also flirts with right-extremist groups.

The most important content in Shamir’s political agenda is that Jews are
best characterised as Christ-killers, that Jewish Israelis organise pogroms
against their Christian fellow citizens, that wealthy Jews usually have
earned their fortunes dishonestly and that Jews by nature are “rootless”
individuals that in the deepest meaning do not fit in anywhere. Another
anti-Semitic cliché he enjoys to put forward is the wish of the Jews of
economic and military world dominance, and how they are “like a virus”
infect non-Jewish societies with the aim of breaking them down. These
attitudes are expressed in an aggressive, rude, sexist language, and are
primarily raised in discussions about the fate of the Palestinians, who are
Shamir’s special object of interest.

As a background for his opinions about Jews and the Judaism Shamir refers,
among others, to Karl Marx, Isaac Deutscher, Knut Hamsun, T.S. Eliot and the
ultra-orthodox Rabbi Kook. In other words, he builds his hate on literature
written by people who themselves had a somewhat incongruous view of the
Jews. Especially Shamir cares for the description of Jews as God’s Chosen
people. For Jews it means implies that Jews must follow Jewish rules of
living, i.e. in relation to food and holidays, while other people must
follow their traditions. The phenomenon of Chosen-ness, as understood in
Jewish tradition, has nothing to do with closeness to God or superiority
versus non-Jews, as this term however is usually comprehended by Christians.

Shamir writes for some Russian publications, among others for the weekly
paper Zavtra, the most anti-Semitic of the present Russian press. Zavtra
upheld the Red-Brown message of the new Stalinist party in Russia, The
Communist Party of Russian Confederation, which takes further the notorious
hate of the Stalin-period against ethnic minorities. The editor of Zavtra,
Alexander Prokhanov, invited in March 2000 the former Ku Klux Klan leader
David Duke to Moscow to ask for his advice how to ethnically cleanse Russia.

Further, during the last French election campaign, Shamir expressed his wish
that Front National should win because of the comments of Jean Marie Le Pen
that “the Jews dominate France”.

In addition to his writings, Shamir has a hobby; he collects Nazi documents
from the WWII that he tries to bring further to the present
right-extremists. One of the more famous of these, the British historian
David Irving, however, called Shamir “not serious” and refused to have
contact with him.

The anti-Semitism of today is most widespread in the Arabic world, where
Mein Kampf and The Protocols of Zion are freely distributed. These days e.g.
the Egyptian television shows a TV series based on the Protocols of Zion to
“unmask” the aims of the Israelis. Arabic newspapers are filled up with
statements that could have been published in Der Stürmer. Movies or books
portraying Jews in a positive way are usually getting prohibited. Holocaust
is often denied, but sometimes assessed as a positive event. Israel Shamir
rejects however this as “Zionist propaganda”. When the planned revisionist
conference in Beirut last year was expelled due to the fear of Lebanon of
international criticism, Shamir complained that these “excellent
researchers” did not get their message through. He denies the existence of
Islamic terrorist organisations, and claims that the Palestinian suicidal
attack against the discotheque “Dolphinarium” in Tel Aviv June 2001, costing
22 young people their lives, was done by Russian mafia.

Due to such activities, a range of Shamir’s former fellows on the extreme
left wing and in Muslim circles have taken distance to him, among those
Nigel Parry, Tim Hall, Stanley Heller and Hussein Ibish – the last named is
the leader of the American Muslim umbrella organisation CAIR – and claim
that Shamir’s hate to the Jews makes him unsuitable champion for the cause
of Palestine.

ORDER IT NOW

Internationally Shamir was dismissed as a confused “noisy bucket”, but he
has for some reason acquired almost a cult status among Norwegian
left-radicals. It is maybe not surprising that Friheten and Klassekampen
embrace him – he claims no other attitudes to Jews and Israelis than what
the East European communists did – but it is alarming that he is allowed
into the politically moderate organs such as Dagbladet and Morgenbladet. The
central place Israel Shamir has in certain intellectual circles illustrates
two things – first, that anti-Semitism is not something that only
characterises right-extreme groups, and second, that central Norwegian press
organs are willing to distribute anti-Semitic attitudes under cover of
Israel-critics. It is raised above any doubt that objective, legitimate
criticism of Israel’s policy by no means can be defined as anti-Semitism.
However, Israel Shamir’s statements are neither objective nor legitimate,
and the use of him as a witness of truth in the debate about Middle East is
the same as inviting to debate of Holocaust with David Irving in the panel
of experts.

It is frightening to see that journalists do not recover the hate of Jews
when they achieve it directly in their arms, and such examples are
strengthening the impression of the Norwegian Jews that Norwegian media can
not behave to Israel and Mid-East in a balanced way.

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[i] Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, p 9

[ii] Freak Factory, www.israelshamir.net