GA: I believe that i have never circulated the following article. It was published originally in March 2012. It is very well written and genuinely presents the arguments against me and in favour of my work. Evidently, the call for ‘my disavowal’ was never taken seriously by anyone out of the pro Palestinian Jewish ghetto and had zero impact on my career and activity. However, I admit, it is exiting for me to see that just two years after the call to 'ignore my thoughts', every thinking being involved with Palestine accepts now that Jewish culture, identity and supremacy are t the core of any issues to do with the Jewish State and its Jewish lobby.

End

By Paul Woodward

http://warincontext.org/2012/03/17/the-campaign-to-silence-gilad-atzmon/

Speaking at a panel discussion on “Jewish identity politics” in London last October, shortly after the publication of his book, The Wandering Who?, Gilad Atzmon made this observation:

Identity drifts you far away from what you are. This is the issue. This is one of the most important [issues raised in the book] — I wouldn’t like to call it a revelation because maybe I’m not the one who brought it up — but people who know who they are, they don’t need identity. Identity is actually a form of identification. This book is now endorsed very widely by a lot of people, a lot of Muslims and Muslim converts wrote about it, like the one I have in mind at the moment is Kevin Barrett who wrote, this is the most important text — he is definitely not a Jew, he is a Muslim — he said this is a very important text for me about identity politics. It teaches me how to drift away from this whole restricting discourse into a society where we can celebrate who we are without falling into a kind of methodical discourse that tells us who we should be or what we ought to be.

This merits repetition and reflection: people who know who they are, don’t need identity.

And the converse is also true: people who cling to an identity, don’t know who they are.

For some people, these philosophical observation are not of the slightest interest when articulated by Atzmon for the simple reason that he has been labelled an antisemite. Thus, for someone like Alan Dershowitz, Atzmon is beneath contempt. Instead, Dershowitz shamelessly directs his venom at anyone in a position of influence who dares to suggest that Atzmon’s ideas are worth reflecting upon.