Questions You Should Never Raise
Daniel Cohen: Dear Gilad, we certainly share many ideas and thoughts. We both oppose Zionism and Israeli policies, however, rather, too often, you fail to be careful enough with your formulations, and this gives room for some misunderstandings. You seem to challenge some issues to do with the Holocaust, and history in general. It seems to me as if, often enough, you raise questions to which various sufficient answers already exist.
Gilad Atzmon: I can already tell you, at this stage, that I have a slight problem with your approach. To start with, as a philosopher, I am far more interested in the art of asking questions. I leave the ‘answers’ to politicians. Moreover, the relationship between questions and answers is paradigmatically oriented. A sufficient ‘answer’ within one paradigm (or discourse) may as well be totally inadequate or irrelevant within another -a certain ‘answer’ within Aristotelian physics may well be within the realm of the inexpressible within a ‘Newtonian’ paradigm.
Daniel: If you ask, for instance, why were the Jews repeatedly hated in so many places along their history, as you do in some of your texts, you create room for anti-Semites who may say it is because they are intrinsically evil.
Gilad: To start with, as a thinking being full of curiosity, I do not take instructions from anti Semites or Zionists or Jewish anti Zionist campaigners. I instead follow my instincts and go along with my sincere ethically driven truth-seeking adventure. Also, I believe that the answer you attributed to anti Semites can be easily addressed. Jews cannot be ‘intrinsically evil’ because Jews do not form a racial or ethnic continuum. Any racial attribution to Jews is clearly wrong and silly.
