The basic exchange started with this broadside from The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg.
Rather unbelievably (or believably, depending on where you sit) Mearsheimer has written an endorsement of Atzmon's new book, "The Wandering Who?" Here is what Mearsheimer says about Atzmon:
Gilad Atzmon has written a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world. He shows how assimilation and liberalism are making it incredibly difficult for Jews in the Diaspora to maintain a powerful sense of their 'Jewishness.' Panicked Jewish leaders, he argues, have turned to Zionism (blind loyalty to Israel) and scaremongering (the threat of another Holocaust) to keep the tribe united and distinct from the surrounding goyim. As Atzmon's own case demonstrates, this strategy is not working and is causing many Jews great anguish. The Wandering Who? Should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.'
In this new book, Atzmon suggests, among other things, that scholars should reopen the question of medieval blood libels leveled against Jews-- accusations that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make matzo, and which provoked countless massacres of Jews in many different countries.
At this point, Mearsheimer had two choices: (1) swallow his pride, and admit the error; or (2) double down on his endorsement of a Jew-hating bigot's treatise on Jewish identity.
Mearsheimer, to the fatal detriment of his credibility, chose the latter option.
It is hard to imagine any sane person making such an argument, and Atzmon never does. Goldberg refers to a blog post that Atzmon wrote on March 25, 2010, written in response to news at the time that AIPAC had "decided to mount pressure" on President Obama. After describing what was happening with Obama, Atzmon notes that this kind of behavior is hardly unprecedented. In his words, "Jewish lobbies certainly do not hold back when it comes to pressuring states, world leaders and even superpowers." There is no question that this statement is accurate and not even all that controversial; Tom Friedman said as much in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago.
In the second half of this post, Atzmon says that AIPAC's behavior reminds him of the March 1933 Jewish boycott of German goods, which preceded Hitler's decision on March 28, 1933 to boycott Jewish stores and goods. His basic point is that the Jewish boycott had negative consequences, which it did. In Atzmon's narrative -- and this is a very important theme in his book -- Jews are not simply passive victims of other people's actions. On the contrary, he believes Jews have considerable agency and their actions are not always wise. One can agree or disagree with his views about the wisdom of the Jewish boycott -- and I happen to think he's wrong about it -- but he is not arguing that the Jews were "persecuting Hitler" and that this alleged "persecution" led to the Holocaust. In fact, he says nothing about the Holocaust in his post and he certainly does not justify in any way the murder of six million Jews.
Here is the language from Atzmon that Mearsheimer is defending:
Not many people are aware that in March 1933, long before Hitler became the undisputed leader of Germany and began restricting the rights of German Jews, the American Jewish Congress announced a massive protest at Madison Square Gardens and called for an American boycott of German goods...
....Jewish texts tend to glaze over the fact that Hitler's March 28 1933, ordering a boycott against Jewish stores and goods, was an escalation in direct response to the declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership.
This is repulsive, and to the extent that Mearsheimer claims that language like "declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership" is not overt Nazi-sympathizing and Jew-blaming, he is either a liar or someone so unbothered by pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish hate speech that he himself can be fairly accused of anti-semitism.
But, Mearsheimer gets even worse.
Finally, let me address the charge that Atzmon himself is an anti-Semite and a self-hating Jew. The implication of this accusation, of course, is that I must be an anti-Semite too (I can't be a self-hating Jew) because I agreed to blurb Atzmon's book. I do not believe that Atzmon is an anti-Semite, although that charge is thrown around so carelessly these days that it has regrettably lost much of its meaning. If one believes that anyone who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite, then Atzmon clearly fits in that category. But that definition is foolish -- no country is perfect or above criticism-and not worth taking seriously.
The more important and interesting issue is whether Atzmon is a self-hating Jew. Here the answer is unequivocally yes. He openly describes himself in this way and he sees himself as part of a long dissident tradition that includes famous figures such as Marx and Spinoza. What is going on here? . . .In sum, Goldberg's charge that Atzman is a Holocaust denier or an apologist for Hitler is baseless. Nor is Atzmon an anti-Semite. He has controversial views for sure and he sometimes employs overly provocative language. But there is no question in my mind that he has written a fascinating book that, as I said in my blurb, "should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike." Regarding Goldberg's insinuation that I have any sympathy for Holocaust denial and am an anti-Semite, it is just another attempt in his longstanding effort to smear Steve Walt and me.
So, according to Mearsheimer, the "self-hating Jew" is not an anti-semite nor a Holocaust denier, but merely uses 'overly provocative language' when he writes things like:
“I must admit that I have many doubts concerning the Zionist Holocaust narrative. Being familiar with many of the discrepancies within the forcefully imposed narrative, being fully familiar with the devastating tale of the extensive collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists before and throughout the Second World War, I know pretty well that the official Holocaust narrative is there to conceal rather than to reveal any truth.”
"It took me years to accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its current form, doesn’t make any historical sense.... (I)f the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war? Why didn’t the Jews wait for their Red liberators?"
"I do not regard anti-Jewish activity as a form of anti-Semitism or racial hatred because Jews are neither Semites nor do they form a racial continuum whatsoever. The rise of hatred towards any form of Jewish politics and Jewish lobbies is a reaction towards a tribal, chauvinist and supremacist ideology."
We must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously.... American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least.
How is that America let its foreign policy be shaped by some ruthless Zionists? How come alleged American ‘free media’ failed to warn the American people of the enemy within? Money is probably the answer, it indeed makes the world go round, or at least the ‘American housing market’. Throughout the centuries, Jewish bankers bought for themselves some real reputations of backers and financers of wars and even one communist revolution].
...
You may wonder at this stage whether I regard the credit crunch as a Zionist plot. In fact it is the opposite. It is actually a Zionist accident. The patient didn’t make it to the end. This Zionist accident is a glimpse into Political Zionism’s sinister agenda. This Zionist accident provides us with an opportunity to see that as far as misery is concerned, we are together with the Palestinians, the Iraqis and the Afghans. We share one enemy.
“There is a lot of pressure on me to denounce Obama. He has done quite a few things that have made me suspicious of him — but I want to give him a chance.
“I could see that the Israelis were really concerned and were quick to evacuate their forces before he took office.
“They have a lot of people around him already and reading the Israeli press they know something about this man being ethically concerned, and this is something that didn’t happen in America for many years.
“He wants to amend the damage caused by those Jewish political strategies such as Neoconservatism, such as the sub-prime mortgage crisis that was led by Alan Greenspan, who is not exactly a Rasta.”
[Interview author:] The financial meltdown is all just part of the programme, he says.
“I don’t think it was a credit crunch, I think it was a Zionist punch.
“This war in Iraq may have something to do with energy but largely it was America acting as an Israeli mission for fighting the last pockets of resistance, led tactically by Neoconservatives and the Federal Reserve.
“Alan Greenspan’s job was to create a financial boom so America’s people were not concerned with the tactics used in the Middle East.
“It should have worked but it didn’t work because the all-American boom was done at the expense of the most deprived Americans, and they just couldn’t pay the mortgages so it all collapsed.
“It’s not only Jews that have adopted this world view either. Bush behaved Jewishly (ideologically) — he is a supremacist, he was a tribalist, but he is not a Jew as far as I’m aware.
“Even in Christianity, this tendency to go Old Testament — into tribalism, into supremacy, into violence, into shock and awe . . . . This is something we have to fight against.”
Fagin is the ultimate plunderer, a child exploiter and usurer. Shylock is the blood-thirsty merchant. With Fagin and Shylock in mind Israeli barbarism and organ trafficking seem to be just other events in an endless hellish continuum.
c. Zionists are not happy at all with the recycling of some old 'Anti-Semitic slogans and images'. They are especially annoyed when they are blamed for the death of Jesus. (I am referring here to the Jewish American organisations' reaction to Mel Gibson's The Passion. Many people around the world regarded the Israeli siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as an attempt to kill Jesus 'again'.)
I would suggest that perhaps we should face it once and for all: the Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus who, by the way, was himself a Palestinian Jew. But then two questions should be asked:
1. How is it that people living today feel accountable or chased for a crime committed by their great great great ancestors almost 2,000 years ago? I assume that those Jews who get angry when blamed for killing Jesus are those who identify themselves with Jesus's killers. Those who would commit this murderous act today. Those Jews are called Zionists and they are already advancing into their sixth decade of inhuman crimes against the Palestinian people and the Arab world. Zionism, for those who do not know, is a repetition of the darkest age of the Jewish Biblical era. It isn't that surprising therefore that Zionists have selected the most suicidal chapters in Jewish history (such as Massada and Bar Cochva) and turned them into the pillars of their reborn culture. On the other hand, we must praise the Zionists for being consistent. Zionists claim that the whole of Palestine belongs to the Jews because their Jewish ancestors lived there 2,000 ago. Jews attempting to live on confiscated Palestinian lands nowadays regard themselves as the same Jews who lived in Palestine two millennia ago. This must explain why Zionists are so offended when they are blamed for theactions of Judas. They are offended because they are all Judases. Might I remind the reader that the Judases of today are armed with hundreds of nuclear weapons without being signed to any international control treaty.
2. Why is it that the Jews who repeatedly demand that the Christian world should apologise for its involvement in previous persecutions, have never thought that it is about time that they apologised for killing Jesus? I wouldn't ask the Italians to apologise on behalf of the Romans for their part in Christ's killing simply because Italians do not feel remotely offended when Romans are blamed for it. I merely suggest that if a Jew feels offended when accused, this reveals attachment to the perpetrators. It might be the right time for the Jewish state to ask for forgiveness on behalf of the Jewish people for their immoral behaviour.
I assume that the following lingual fact isn't known to most gentiles. Jews do not use the name 'Jesus' when referring to Christ. Instead, they use the Hebrew word 'Yeshu' which means 'may his name and memory be erased for ever' (yeshu Yimach Shemo Vzichro). I do want to believe that most ordinary Jews are not familiar with the etymology of the name Yeshu. In Jewish the hierarchy of insults this is the gravest and most disrespectful. This combination of words is usually attached to Hitler and evils of his calibre. Jesus, it would appear, is considered by Jewish spiritual leaders as the embodiment of all evil. I ask myself if Jesus was as bad as Hitler (in the eyes of the rabbis), why is it that the Jews are so offended when blamed for killing him? Why don't they regard his killing as the most glamorous chapter of their history?
Is John Mearsheimer a complete, pride-bound fool, or is he an anti-Semite? Or both?
Regardless, it is impossible to say in good conscience that he is neither. At his very best, he is an apologist for the vilest of anti-semites, and some of the worst anti-semitism to be expressed since Martin Luther.
The terrible irony is that while the book from 2007 has been vindicated, one of its authors has chosen to undermine that by almost completely confirming the charge that it was authored by anti-semites.
For those who resent the harmful influence of AIPAC, ZOA et al, but also object in the strongest terms to the rancid bigotry of anti-semitism, Mearsheimer's recent folly is a most unwelcome contribution to the discourse. Citing Mearsheimer and his work on any issue touching upon Jews will now strike the same sour note as would a reference to an opera by Wagner.
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