Greg Johnson Interviews Gilad Atzmon

6,312 words

Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by V. S. of Greg Johnson’s April 12, 2015 interview with Gilad Atzmon. To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.” 

Greg Johnson: I’m Greg Johnson. Welcome to Counter-Currents Radio! I am here in London with Gilad Atzmon, who is a writer that I have admired and read steadily for years. I’ve reviewed his book The Wandering Who? at Counter-Currents. And I just want to welcome you, Gilad!

Gilad Atzmon: I welcome you to my city!

GJ: Well, thank you! We’ve spent some time over lunch trying to just get to know one another better and I’d like my audience to know you a little better. You are one of the most prominent anti-Zionist Jews, or critics of Jewry, today, a Jewish critic of Jewry.

Describe your views and how you came to them.

GA: To start, just a light correction. I’m not a Jew. I don’t regard myself as a Jew, and I never speak as a Jew.

GJ: Okay.

GA: This is really crucial. You are right to argue that I am an anti-Zionist. I think that initially it was my frustration with Israel, Israeli politics, the Jewish lobby that made me interested in this discourse. But then one of the first things that I realized was that Israel defined itself as a Jewish state. It sees itself as a Jewish state from the day of inception, and in order to understand its politics, the first questions that we have to ask ourselves are “What is Jewishness?,” “Who are the Jews?,” “What is Judaism?,” “How are these terms related to Zionism?,” and I was very quick to realize that as soon as I asked these questions I was immediately in a conflict not with Israel, not with the so-called Zionists, but with our imaginary allies, with the Jewish anti-Zionists. People like the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Jews for Boycott, Jews for Debt. All of those people identify as Jews and progressive Jews.

Now I believe that conflicts are not necessarily bad things. They’re very revealing. One can hardly learn from agreement. When you have a conflict you start to ask questions. What’s happening? Why wasn’t I allowed to ask “What is Jewishness?,” “What is Judaism?,” “Who are the Jews”? These are the most relevant questions when it comes to the Jewish state, the state that defines itself as the Jewish state, especially now after the Israeli cabinet – and the next government is basically going to be the same cabinet — passed the Israeli national bill that affirms that everything Israel is doing is driven by Israel’s Jewishness.

I realized — it took me some time to say it loudly and clearly — that the Jewish anti-Zionists, the so-called progressive Jews who claim to support Palestine, are not the solution. They are actually the core of the problem. Their agenda is very clear: to restrict the discourse, to set very clear boundaries that would divert attention from the core of the problem.

GJ: How does that work?

GA: Very simple. Very, very simple. The way they do it is through correctness. They impose measures of correctness. They define the terminology. So it is very clear, for instance, to every person who deals with the Palestinian cause that the heart of the matter is the right of the return.

In 1948, seventy-five to eighty percent of the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, brutally, by the Israelis and were prevented from coming back due to new Israeli legislation, the Law of Return, that is basically racially driven and not different from the Nuremberg Laws.

Most Jews who support Palestine never talk about al-ʿawda, the right of return. They started talking about ending the occupation. Now, while the right of return brings us back to 1948, to the inception of the Jewish state as a Jewish state, the Jewish anti-Zionists call for the end of the occupation, which would bring us to ’67, which means that around six million Palestinians are left out of their historic Palestine with no solution to the problem.

GJ: Right. So, they start the clock at 1967. That’s the problem that needs to be solved.

GA: For sure. This is an example. Another thing that they would do, they would talk about colonialism. Israel, or Zionism, is not a colonial project. Colonialism is defined by a clear material exchange between a mother-state and a settler-state. Israel is a settler-state, but there is no mother-state. If there is no mother-state, it means that we are dealing with a very unique occurrence in the history of humanity. It’s a settler-state with no mother-state.

GJ: Couldn’t people say that the mother-state is sort of the diffused diaspora Jewish community? It’s not a state, but it’s a community.

GA: I’m not against it, but this is exactly where they don’t want to go, because if the mother-state is this vague Jewish nation entity, then every Jew is complicit in the crimes that are committed by the Jewish state, and their agenda is to differentiate between the Jews and the Zionists.

GJ: Right.

GA: Okay. So, yeah, this is definitely one solution. This is definitely one solution, but this is definitely not a solution that they’re going to take.

Intellectually, this is a very lame project. They would call Israel apartheid. Israel is not apartheid. Apartheid is a racist system of exploitation. Israel doesn’t want to exploit the Palestinians. It wants them gone. Israel is a racist ethnic cleanser.

Why do they call it colonialism or apartheid? To convey the image that we are dealing with an ordinary historical pattern with a beginning and an end. If it’s colonialism, then we will have a post-colonial era, and so on and so on. It would convey the feeling that we know the answers, that we know how to deal with this unique development, that it is not as unique as we may think.

But the truth of the matter is that the Jewish national project is a very, very unique project and this is why we don’t really know how to deal with it, how to fight it, and I must admit that the fact that Left Jews or progressive Jews have managed to gain control of the so-called “Palestinian solidarity” discourse — at least for a while, now it’s starting to subside — is in itself very, very interesting, and it only suggests that they are indeed uniquely clever and uniquely powerful. Do you think that the German national immigrants to Britain or America would be able to take over the British anti-Nazi party here or in America? I don’t think so. They would come to the British nationalists and say, “Don’t say German, say Nazi! Don’t say Nazi, say German!” No. No.

GJ: Right.

GA: But it was quite amazing that it is the Jews who are telling us how to deal with the Jewish state.

GJ: Right. They’re framing the issue.

GA: Right. It is very unique. I am not an activist. I am a thinker. I assume that I possess a curious mind, and I find this topic intellectually intriguing. I’ve been looking into it for fifteen or twenty years now, and I didn’t have a single boring day. They are very interesting characters.

GJ: Most definitely. What do you think is the solution? Is there a solution? Do you think that Israel has a future?

GA: I think that Israel is imploding. You can just follow Israeli press and learn about the huge problems that they face internally, you know, social issues.

I just met a German friend of mine. She’s a doctor. She just came back from Israel and she visited a few hospitals there, and she said it’s hard to believe. It’s worse than any Third World country. I think that they are falling apart. The gap between rich and poor is horrendous. They don’t need the Palestinians. And this is in itself very, very interesting.

The Zionist project was in itself, initially, uniquely anti-Semitic, let us say. The early Zionists were very critical of their Jewish brothers. They argued that the anti-Semites were right. There was something wrong with the Jews in the diaspora. They were involved with money, with capital, and hardly involved in production. This is the line of thought that was expressed by Nordau, by Borochov. Borochov argued that every normal society looks like a pyramid. You have many working class, then middle class, then very few bourgeoisie on the top, but when you look at the Jewish society it’s like an upside-down pyramid. Maybe you have one Jew who works in a factory, but most of them are in Wall Street or whatever.

GJ: Right.

GA: Frankfurt. He said, “This is wrong. This is very bad. But it’s not our fault. It all happened because we don’t have our own land. We live on other people’s lands.” He thought that once they moved back to their Promised Land — what they believed to be their Promised Land — this would change.

And the truth of the matter is that there was a change. They went there and, you know, doctors became farmers, and stockbrokers started to work in factories. It worked for maybe one, two, three, four weeks, and then they realized that the Palestinians were slightly cheaper, and they started to celebrate their cultural symptoms, and this is what we see now. It didn’t take long before it was very clear that the Jewish state, Israel, Zionism failed to amend what they themselves defined as the Jewish symptoms, which is very, very interesting but also I believe that I can explain it.

At the heart of Zionism, we find the Zionist call for Jews to become, to be like all other people. Now, this is very problematic, because all other people don’t want to be like all other people.

GJ: Right. They want to be themselves.

GA: They want to be themselves!

GJ: Right.

GA: So, this mimicking tendency that is found at the heart of Zionism led towards a loss of identity rather than the adaptation of an identity, and when they really realized that they have to understand who they are and what they are for, this is where we start to see the sharp rise of Right-wing Zionism, messianic Zionism, and also a surge in the popularity of religious schools within the new Israeli society. Because if you’re looking for identity, Judaism has a lot to offer.

GJ: Right.

GA: You know, they’ve been doing it now for three thousand years. They have a lot of answers.

GJ: For me, it strikes me that it’s possible for Jews to be a “normal” people like other people. Well, the issue for me is this. Every people forms its identity by differentiating itself from other people, right? What unifies us divides us from them.

However, it strikes me that what’s problematic with Jewish identity is there’s such a strong emphasis on the negative aspect of identity formation, right? The oppositional nature of it. This really came out very strongly when I watched Yoav Shamir’s Defamation, where they have these young Israelis going off to Poland to go to Auschwitz.

GA: Yeah. It’s a great film.

GJ: Yeah. And he really brought home the idea that maybe if Jews could sort of walk back from this extremely adversarial understanding of their relationship to the rest of the world, that maybe that would be the path to them being a “normal” people. Does that make sense?

GA: This is very interesting, because, at least historically, Zionism was born in 1897. Exactly the same year, there was another school of Jewish thought which was called the Bund . . .

GJ: Right.

GA: . . . which was so-called anti-Zionist. They said, “No, we’ll stay here in East Europe. We are the Yiddish people. Yiddish is our language. We have a culture.” And so on and so on and so on.

Zionism, at the time, was openly anti-Jewish. It was totally marginal and uniquely unpopular amongst Jews. It was much more popular amongst anti-Semites like Churchill, who at the time said, “Oh, this is a great idea! The Jews will go to Palestine, and we support it.”

GJ: Honestly, that’s why I support it.

GA: It’s fine. It’s fine. I don’t have an issue with it. I understand where you come from. I understand where Churchill was coming from. The only problem with this solution, as I suggest in my new book, is that Zionism was supposed to solve the Jewish Question, and it practically just moved it to a different place.

GJ: Right!

GA: Okay. This is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Okay, but what I’m saying is that the Bund was uniquely popular, and yet it was also an isolationist agenda. They also wanted to differentiate the Jews from the goyim, and this is, by the way, why Lenin stood up against them. I think in 1902 or 1903 — you can check it out — Lenin’s speech on the Bund. I think it was 1902 or 1903, and he criticized them sharply, and I think that his argument is correct.

I think that there is no way . . .  It’s not just about Israel. I came to the conclusion that there is no collective solution to the Jewish Problem or to the Jewish Question. If you want to solve your issue, find your way out. It could be through your music, it could be through your shiksa wife (how they call it) . . .

GJ: Right.

GA: Find your way. Once you join a tribal operation, you start to work for tribal interests. Now, it’s not because you’re a bad person.

There is one thing that I don’t know and I may never know. I can definitely prove that all those Jews who support Palestine are serving tribal interests. I can show how they’ve corrupted our vocabulary. I can show how they led to a paralysis of this movement. But there is one thing that I cannot really prove. Was it a conscious operation, or really something that was designed as a default within the culture? This is a much bigger question. Were they really trying to paralyze the movement? I’m not so sure.

When Max Blumenthal is chasing me, like, every two weeks, is it because he really understands what I am saying? Probably not, because when he produces criticism of me, it has nothing to do with my work. Is he doing it because he’s a bad person? Is it because he’s stupid? Or does he follow his most inherent tribal instincts? I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a big question.

GJ: So, let me ask you about some figures who have influenced your work. People you read, people you respond to. I think of you as somebody who’s a philosopher. You refer to a lot of the philosophers that I read in your books. Can you talk about some of your intellectual influences, and can you talk about some of the people that you’re in dialogue with in the contemporary scene and how this has shaped your thinking?

GA: Yeah. As a philosopher, I studied German philosophy. Kant was obviously a great influence. And then this Idealist school of thought, and German early Romanticism, that pretty much ends up with Heidegger.

I love thinking in a Germanic manner. What do I like about it? What do I like about Heidegger? Heidegger is not easy to read. I think that you are reading Heidegger now. I remember when I was sitting in the British Library, and I saw a lot of Germans reading Heidegger in English because somebody did the work trying to understand what he was trying to say. It’s not easy. But I was asked to talk about Heidegger a while back, and I realized what fascinated me and why it was so influential on my work and on the way I think. It’s not easy, but Heidegger would ask a question. What is art? What is thinking? What? What? What? What is? And then all the papers look pretty much the same.

If you want to know what thinking is, first you have to ask yourself to explore the notion of thinking, to explore the notion of is, to understand what is what. It takes quite a lot of pages and you may not get to the end of it, but after you read a few papers, you learn how to ask questions.

I realized that unlike the activists around — Chomsky, Popper, you know, those people who are supposed to be intellectual but actually operate as activists —

GJ: Right.

GA: — the Germanic way of thinking is to teach us how to think, how to ask questions, while the Left pseudo-intellectual attitude is to tell us what to think!

GJ: Right.

GA: What would be the right way to think. Say “colonialism,” say . . .  No. No. No.

GJ: Yeah.

GA: The first question, I said, “Colonialism, okay. What is colonialism?”

GJ: Right.

GA: I look at colonialism and I say that it’s complete nonsense. My task is to refine the question.

GJ: Right.

GA: And I’m very good at it. I’ve never been a part of any movement. I’ve never affiliated with anyone. I’ve never even been a part of the Solidarity movement or whatever. And in spite of that, I have tons of followers, and the reason is very simple. Philosophy, at the end of the day, is supported by common sense. You don’t need the facts. We are the facts. When I come with an idea, all you have to do is to close your eyes and think about it for a second.

And this brings us to Otto Weininger, who was a great influence on me. Otto Weininger wrote in his very important book, which everybody hates except me, Sex and Character . . .

GJ: I like it, too.

GA: It’s a fucking great book! It’s outrageous, but it’s fucking incredible! And by the way, I’m going to an extreme, it is well accepted that until World War Two he was, probably, one of the most influential Western philosophers, you know.

He says, “The physicists, the biologists, they look at the world and they tell us something about the world. Well, this is slightly boring. The artists look in the mirror and tell us something about the world.” And this was a very, very important and significant development for me, a very significant insight, because for many years I spoke about the Jews, and I realized that if I really want to understand the Jews, I can look in the mirror and look at what is left out of the Jew in me in order to explain everything. Everything that happens in Israel happens here.

GJ: Right.

GA: All the trickery attitude that is performed by our Jewish voices for peace, I can find here. This explains maybe why Jews are so concerned with self-haters. How is it possible that if I hate myself, you Jews are getting annoyed, you know? If your neighbor doesn’t like himself, it’s not your problem. You may find it slightly funny. But how is it possible that I am — well, I’m not a Jew anymore — regarded as a self-hating Jew? How is it possible that so many Jews are offended by me hating myself? The reason is because they grasp that when I look into myself, when I look inside myself, I see them.

GJ: Right. Right.

GA: And they feel exposed. This is the only explanation that I can come up with. You know, you can ask Max Blumenthal. You should interview Max Blumenthal. Maybe he can come up with an answer.

GJ: Right.

GA: When I look into myself and I see what is left of this ugly tribal operator, I don’t like it. But Max Blumenthal feels offended. Unique.

GJ: Right. How has Heidegger influenced your views of history?

GA: Yeah, this is very, very interesting actually. I needed to read Lyotard on Heidegger and the Jews in order to understand how influential Heidegger was. Heidegger is saying something very interesting. It’s very crucial. He said that history presents itself as an axis to our past. This is how it is delivered by Lyotard, by the way. What it does in practice is provide an institutional concealment of our shame. History conceals our shame, and this is why the role of the really good historian is very similar to the role of the psychoanalyst: to unveil the shame.

GJ: Right.

GA: Now, to understand the issue of concealment. You know, Americans, you have a lot to conceal, you know. You dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and then a few hours later another one. Why? How do you explain these atomic bombs, this mass, colossal genocide, you know? And the explanation is even more embarrassing. Brits are quite embarrassed about the fact that it was Britain actually that declared World War Two. You know, they had some reasoning, but for some reason when my kids go to school they don’t really learn it.

Jews, to explain the fact that every few years, every few decades there is another Holocaust, wherever they go — it’s quite embarrassing, so they have to zig-zag all through history to present an occult narrative that makes the goyim into a bunch of lunatics and the Jews are always victims. Now, it’s quite embarrassing, because the goyim are basically humanity.

GJ: Right.

GA: Palestinians: how is it possible that after seventy years of struggle, and some people would say more than one hundred years, the Palestinians achieved nothing except Jews dominating their solidarity discourse with money that is sent by light Zionist George Soros.

GJ: Right.

GA: A lot to conceal. This is history. I’m not a historian, but my job as a thinker is to identify the concealment. Now, this is very, very painful because the first reaction to a good psychoanalyst is denial.

GJ: Right.

GA: So, whenever I come to a room, whether this room is filled with Jewish anti-Zionists or Brits or Japanese, and I bring it out, there is a shock. There is a case of denial. Some people are brave enough to move on and some are not.

By the way, I gave this talk about concealment in Japan. “Listen, this is fascinating. Just make sure that when you come to Japan you show us some evidence.” Now you know, for me, I’m not a historian. My daughter speaks Japanese. It took me two minutes to realize that I could never do it in Japan because in Japan everything is concealed. So, it didn’t work. But in other places, you know, like in America, the Jewish narrative is absolutely possible.

Now when you look, for instance, at the work of a better Israeli historian, Shlomo Sand, it is very interesting, because he definitely unveiled some of the content. But when I interviewed Shlomo Sand – and I never published it, because I thought that it would reflect very badly on him, and I didn’t want to damage him. He was a very intelligent guy. I like him, so it’s probably not neutral, which I accept. When I interviewed him, we got to the point where I asked him about other revisionists, for instance German revisionists or Holocaust history revisionists and so on and so on, and this is where he became very, very shaky.

GJ: Right.

GA: So, even people who are very brave to unveil some part of history are not necessarily making it into a universal message.

But it is understandable. We are dealing with the nature of human beings. Shame is something you want to suppress.

GJ: Right.

GA: Or sometimes you don’t want to suppress, but you just suppress it without even knowing.

GJ: Right. Let me ask you about Kevin MacDonald’s work. You’ve had certain dialogue with him. He reviewed your book. You responded. Tell me what you think about his work.

GA: You know, I’d been doing it for eleven years or twelve years before I had the guts to open a Kevin MacDonald text. I was afraid. Why was I afraid? Because some people are very successful in planting fear in our midst. The situation with Kevin MacDonald was very funny. He reviewed my book. He actually loved it. And when his review came out, there was another review that came out by a guy called Mark Gardner, a supremacist, Zionist Jew who actually hated the book yet produced a very, very intelligent review of the book. He hated the book because he said, “What Gilad has done in this book,” which he regarded as the most anti-Semitic text of our era, which by the way set me a very serious challenge . . .  I definitely want to make sure I manage to break my own record in the near future. And I don’t think that it’s anti-Semitic; it’s just revealing. Mark Gardner couldn’t stand my book because he argued that I’ve managed to open the Jewish Question, which means that I’ve managed to interfere with the concealment project.

GJ: Right.

GA: It was very interesting for me. Without thinking about it, I published it on my Website. I wrote something like, “This is how The Wandering Who? is read by supremacists.” Within minutes I started to get a lot of e-mails from Kevin MacDonald’s readers, and they said, “Gilad, why do you call him a supremacist or White supremacist?” I didn’t have an answer, because I hadn’t read Kevin MacDonald, you know. I just repeated. I behaved like a tribal member. I behaved exactly like they wanted me to behave.

GJ: Right.

GA: I’m not proud of it. And I said, “Well, this is good. An opportunity.” I don’t remember if I removed my comment or changed it. I wrote on my Website, “Give me ten days and I will look into it and make up my mind.” And I started to read Kevin MacDonald.

And it was heaven! I learned so much. It was beautiful. What a level of scholarship. He knows so much. And within a few days – it probably didn’t take me even ten days – I said, “Sorry, guys. A week ago I published blah blah blah blah blah. It was outrageous. Probably the Jew in me, the one I try to fight, was popping out.” It was my apology.

Since then, I’ve started to read Kevin MacDonald, and I’ve learned a lot. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, but, as I said before, if I would agree with everything it would probably be very, very boring.

GJ: Right.

GA: The issue of biology is very interesting, and I think that Kevin MacDonald himself understands it. How much of it is biology, race, culture? These questions should be discussed openly. I don’t see Jews as a race. There is no Jewish racial continuum, but there is definitely a cultural pattern that has some biological implications. And I talk about it in detail, there is a talk of mine that I gave in Manhattan about, I can provide you the link if you want to . . .

GJ: Sure.

GA: Maybe you saw it already. I use The Bell Curve models to show how Jews’ cognitive ability distribution was in the Jewish society. There is something that people don’t know a lot about. Kevin MacDonald definitely knows about it. He wrote about it. Jews, for as long as 1,500 years, European Jews married intelligence – the sage, the rabbi, the young boy that is destined to become the rabbi – with the merchant’s daughter. For 1,500 years, in the ghetto, rabbinical Jews married scholarship with money, and they have managed to create a very unique elite that specialized in scholarship and money.

Now, this is a bit anachronistic, in modern terms we could call it a eugenic project, but they didn’t see it as a eugenic project. They were living in ghettos in a hostile environment, and they really wanted to make sure that their affairs were managed by the best people.

GJ: Right.

GA: As it happened, the clever Jews were schlepped – schlepped, were sent to . . .  No, but in England we say schlepped. It is, I think, taken from Yiddish. Do you say it in America as well?

GJ: Yeah, well, I try to avoid it, but I do find that I occasionally schlep things around.

GA: Yeah, the thing is that it’s right to use it in such a reference, because it’s definitely a Jewish reference. They were schlepped to Central Europe.

GJ: Right.

GA: So, we see a very unique cognitive elite centered in Central Europe, while in the Pale area, the Jews’ elite are becoming more and more clever, and by doing so they are actually robbing their Jewish masses of talent. So, as some Jews are becoming more and more clever . . .

By the way, it was a meritocracy. If you are a Jew from a very poor background, it was more than likely that you would join the elite. So, it wasn’t like the British aristocracy, that you are born into wealth or into status. They start very low.

GJ: Right. Yeah.

GA: It’s very much like the Shia. Like Ahmadinejad, he started very low, he was just very clever. Sheikh Nasrallah is the same. This is why the Shia are a very serious opponent to the Jews. This is why the Israelis run this assassination project in Iran. They kill the brains.

This is a very, very interesting project. It offers us a kind of biologist’s understanding of the evolution of this society, and I think that this is pretty much my take on the subject. I think that Kevin is tapping into it. I would have loved to have spent some time with him to come up with a project that explores this issue from evolutionary psychologist perspectives as well as cultural.

I think that – it’s outrageous what I’m going to say now – but this was my feeling when I read Kevin MacDonald. In between Kevin MacDonald and Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who?, you have quite a wide presentation of all necessary perspectives needed in order to understand Jewish power, Israeli-Jewish dominance in culture and media and finance, and so on.

So, yeah, I definitely see him as a major contributor for the way I think, the way things are.

By the way, I know now that every book they try to prevent me from reading, whether it’s The Bell Curve, Kevin MacDonald, Bernard Lazare, Sombart on Jewish economy, Mein Kampf of course . . .  Each of these books are banned because they are very revealing. You know, I caught a lot of flak for admitting that I read David Duke.

GJ: Right.

GA: I find it so peculiar, because to start with, my job as an intellectual is to read. I also read Benzion Netanyahu, and I can tell you that Benzion Netanyahu is the best historian of Zionism. Benzion Netanyahu is Benjamin Netanyahu’s father. People will hate me for saying it. Yes, I read controversial texts, and when I read David Duke I just couldn’t believe how much this goy knows about Jewishness. He’s never been in a synagogue. He didn’t go to a bar mitzvah, I’m pretty sure. How is it possible that he knows more than me? I was really bothered by this question, and by the time I came up with an answer I realized that I have to make it into a rule. And everyone, when they tell you don’t, do. Just do it. If they tell you, “Don’t read,” just read. And when they tell you, “Don’t listen,” go and listen.

David Duke is a person who is not afraid of thinking in racialist terms, in terms of race. He’s open about it.

Now, I was raised in a racist society. We were motivated to celebrate our racial supremacy. We even killed in the name of racial purity, but we were never allowed to admit to ourselves that we were racist. This was our concealed project.

I read David Duke, who can think about racial matters in an open manner, and he understands exactly what is happening in the Jewish society or the Jewish national project. Obviously, I don’t agree with him about some matters, but I don’t see disagreement as an issue, as I mentioned already twice. For me, disagreement is an opportunity to think.

GJ: Right. So, Gilad, tell us about some of your work, your upcoming projects in music and in publishing.

GA: Yeah, to start with, you know, we didn’t talk about my music. I am primarily a musician. This is how I make a living. I have my own band. It’s called Orient House Ensemble, and we play all over the world. We just came back from Germany earlier. This month we were in France. We had a massive tour here in Britain. I love being a jazz artist. To play jazz is to explore the real meaning of freedom.

In the last few months, I’ve found out that Zionists and the so-called Antifa, in their despair, are trying to wreck my music career. I think that I’ll survive it, but I’m looking forward to this battle. This is something that is very important. This boycott strategy, again, is a very deep Talmudic concept. You know how many synagogues you need in a small village with one Jew?

GJ: How many?

GA: Two. One to go to and another one to boycott. For Jews, boycotting is a fundamental concept.

So, yeah, I’m playing. I’m playing with a lot of very famous bands. I think that your listeners may be thrilled to find out that I’m featured on the recent Pink Floyd album.

GJ: Really?

GA: Yeah. For sure.

GJ: I didn’t even know there was a new Pink Floyd album.

GA: Yes. See, now I’m helping Pink Floyd to boost their sales.

GJ: Yes, that’s good.

GA: Yes, a new Pink Floyd album came out last November after twenty years, The Endless River. Yeah, I’m featured there.

GJ: Oh, that’s great. Can you play the solo from “Money”?

GA: Yeah, I did play with Pink Floyd in their old days, but I was very thrilled to be with Gilmour in the studio. I play with quite big names and so on.

Regarding books, it is quite amazing, a friend mentioned it today. The Wandering Who? came out three or four years ago, and the battle around it hasn’t stopped, which is great. But I was probably lazy for a while, because I just let the book work. I have since then refined some of my thoughts.

I think that this year we will see two or three new Atzmon books. Two for sure. The first book will come very soon. I just saw the first prints of it. It is called From A to Zion. It’s the definitive Israeli lexicon. I wrote it together with the greatest cartoonist, Enzo Apicella, who is a close friend of mine. It’s a very, very, very funny book. I hope to read your review of it when it comes out.

GJ: I’ll review it.

GA: You know, it is a very, very funny book, but again it’s very Weiningerian. It’s basically all aphorisms. It’s a toilet book. If you sit and read it, it’s a bit of a waste because it will take you twenty minutes. It’s a book that you want to leave probably in your restroom, to read it every morning for five minutes. It will entertain you at a time when you have to concentrate on something else.

The next book after it is a book of interviews. It was a year of my life, I gave interviews to a young Swiss journalist called Alimuddin Usmani. He really dug into my work. He asked me a lot of very interesting questions and he made it into a book. I think that it will be a good way to understand how I see things.

My third upcoming book will be a pretty devastating text. It will be a crude attack on what the Left has become. It will be a review of the devastating impact of the Frankfurt School, of political correctness, of the destruction of the working class, and the deep involvement of the New Left dominated largely by a Jewish school of thought. It will be a very, very controversial text. If I survive that, I may declare myself indestructible.

GJ: Well, thank you very much. This has been a really great conversation. It’s been an honor to finally meet you. Like I said, I’ve read your stuff for years, and I hope this is just the first of many conversations.

GA: Yeah, I really enjoyed it a lot. As I told you, your review of my book . . .  We were after a gig, and it was my bass player who read it to me. I was driving. And it was very interesting to me, because you didn’t agree with some of my points or some of my other issues, and you were very clear about it, and I was very, very happy. I really love it when people criticize me for what I say for real.

GJ: Rather than what they . . .

GA: Yeah, because usually what I see, I must mention, is that until now no one has really produced a Jewish criticism of The Wandering Who? So, they call it anti-Semitic, but they never say what is anti-Semitic about it. Or the anti-Zionists who criticize it, they say that they don’t like what I write, but they don’t claim that I’m wrong. It’s very interesting.

Anyway, it was very interesting and I was looking forward to meeting you. I was expecting more challenge to you slaughtering me, but you didn’t even try, so it was a lot of fun.

GJ: Well, thank you! Thank you very much!

GA: Yeah. Pleasure.