When the British Zionist zealots figured out that their smear campaign against me had gone nowhere and Reading Festival was not going to surrender to their relentless pressure, they decided to mobilise. They deployed their special weapon: the sleazy orthodox Rabbi Zvi Solomons, who was available since he was sacked by his congregation in 2016, which he then sued.

The problematic rabbi played his part. He has able to tick every box in the Hasbara book, from verbal smears to proper harassment. On the day of my talk, he and his rebbetzin wife even visited the Fairtrade shop at the community centre where I was presenting my talk and attempted to intimidate the staff by shoving a camera in front of their faces. This shouldn’t surprise us: if it looks like a settler and behaves like a settler, it may as well be a settler. However, the British town of Reading is not in the West Bank and that kind of vile behaviour is not what well mannered Britons expect from religious clerics.

Forty-eight hours before I was scheduled to talk, the rabbi circulated a letter to the local councillors in Reading’s councillors, the local press and other parties involved. In the letter the rabbi wrote:

I wish to express on behalf of my community [as mentioned above, the rabbi doesn’t have a community, he was dismissed] my great distress that RISC [Reading International Solidarity Centre] are allowing a meeting to be held to promote Gilad Atzmon’s latest book.

The rabbi promised to “provide examples” of Gilad Atzmon’s “hateful, anti-Semitic output”.

However, the rabbi failed to present a single cogent argument. Those who examined his accusations found them misleading, unfounded and duplicitous. But he did succeed in providing insight into the problematic Jewish institutional attitude to shonda (shame) in relation to Jewish sex predators.

Rabbi Solomons accused me of being an “anti-Semite” for pointing at the troubling and embarrassing fact that the British press omitted from its coverage that Lord Greville Janner was the head of the Jewish community at the time that the British press wrote that he was engaged in gross predatory behaviour towards young British children.

Here are Rabbi Solomons’s words, taken from his message to the local press, Reading councillors and the leader of Reading Borough Council.

On this page, Atzmon uses the trope of Jewish power and the trope of the Jew as the child-abuser. Here are selected quotations which are anti-Semitic in nature; I have coloured the anti-Semitic elements red [shown below in blue – to avoid confusion with hyperlinks]:

“The Daily Telegraph and other press outlets list the sex abuse allegations against Lord Janner, a 27-year Labour MP. But there is one thing The Telegraph and other British press outlets fail to mention. They omit the fact that at the time Lord Janner was allegedly sexually abusing young British orphans, sometimes, actually in his marital bed, he was the head of the British Jewish community.

“Between 1978 and 1984 Lord Janner was the chairman of Board of Deputies of British Jews, a body with claims to represent British Jewry.”

I admit, I fail to see what I am accused of. The rabbi doesn’t dispute the facts. At the time Lord Janner was allegedly molesting young orphans in his marital bed, he was the chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. As such, he was de facto the leader of British Jewry. What is anti-Semitic about me pointing out that fact? The rabbi doesn’t accuse me of not telling the truth; quite the opposite – he sees me as a “hateful character” for actually sticking to the truth.

Rabbi Solomons continues quoting me as he desperately attempts to identify my “anti-Semitsm”.

While inflicting Shoah on British orphans, Lord Janner was a prominent advocate of holocaust education. He was the chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, the president of the Commonwealth Jewish Council, and Vice-President of the World Jewish Congress.

“Specifically,” the rabbis asks, “why would this have been relevant?”

Here the rabbi is suggesting that Lord Janner was the leader of British Jews at the same time he reportedly raped kids is somehow irrelevant. I actually believe that this information is so relevant that not a single British outlet knew how to handle it.

“And why does Atzmon use the word shoah (holocaust) in the second paragraph? This is obvious anti-Semitism,” Rabbi Solomons continues.

Is it really too complicated for the Rabbi to understand why the shoah is relevant? At the time Lord Janner reportedly molested young orphans and inflicted a personal shoah on each of them, he was the chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust. I guess that in Rabbi Solomons’s mind, the shoah is Jews-only territory.

Solomons concludes his point by quoting me yet again:

If Jewish power is the capacity to silence the discussion of Jewish power, in the case of Lord Janner it also managed to delete the fact that Britain’s suspected arch sex offender was also the leader of the Jewish community.

To which the rabbi comments, “Imagine if Atzmon were to say this about any other ethnic minority.”

I guess that by now it will surprise no one that Rabbi Solomons lies compulsively. This is an obvious and deliberate attempt to deceive councillors and the local press since he conceals that in the next paragraph I addressed his supposed question.

Here are my words:

At the least, all these prominent Jewish organisations ought to issue an apology or at least admit to gross misjudgement in letting a person who was a suspected paedophile remain a leader of prominent Jewish institutions for almost five decades. Would the English church enjoy such impunity? Would the British Muslim community get away with any of its leaders being associated with buggery and paedophilia? I’ll let you ponder this one.

Many Britons are perplexed and angered by the intense whitewash surrounding Lord Janner and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse shambles.

Rabbi Solomons’s message provides us with precious insight into the dark forces operating behind the scene and suppressing truthfulness and justice. The rabbi’s message is obvious: looking into Lord Janner’s possible misconduct involves a head on war with the Jewish leadership and institutions; it interferes with their sense of total impunity. As we know, most British Jewish leaders and institutions kept silent about Lord Janner. Rabbi Zvi Solomons is stupid enough to unveil the sinister and orchestrated matrix that is involved in this concealment campaign.