Two differing Jewish-origin views on Zionism by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.

The words of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen

While researching my book of Zionism I spent an amount of time considering the positions of well known Jewish-born people and especially those who most influenced me as a young Greek person.

The opinions of people born Jewish has a value in how those of us neither Jewish nor Zionist learn about Zionism as well as what we learn about Jewish people who choose Zionist ideology.

Mostly, what most non-Jewish people know about Zionism was learned from Zionists. I learned about Zionism as a Greek boy growing up in South Africa at the height of the Apartheid era of Christian fascism, from Zionists. Including probably the most famous South African Zionist who was my first Zionist teacher, the very glamorous girl from Graaff Reinet, Sylvia Raphael.

The Apartheid model I grew up in was a black and white way of understanding discrimination against those who were different and the-lesser for it. I was White, which put me in the chosen few of the 16% who were chosen-by-God to do whatever they chose to do to the other 84% who were not born White.

My fortuitous birthright color provided some insight into the advantages of membership in a Chosen Few, with superiority enshrined in law. Understanding Zionism was made less challenging thanks to my experience of growing up in an Apartheid Chosen-Few system.

In 1970, the white population of South Africa was estimated at 3,792,848 people, representing 16.86% of the total population. Within the White community, Greeks were a small percentage. Approximately 100,000 from a White population of 3.8 million. That is around 0.38%.

In 1970, the Jewish population in South Africa reached a peak of approximately 118,200, the seventh largest religious denomination in the country.

Greek and Jews, similar sized minorities in a racist society, both would expect to receive similar amounts of discrimination as minorities

Being a White Greek in a small minority neither English nor Afrikaans in a racist Apartheid society, I experienced discrimination while growing up. As you would expect being in a small minority group of less than 1%. I knew at the time, by conversations with my Jewish friends discussing the discrimination they experienced, that we had that in common. As you would expect. They too were a minority of less than 1%. I bonded early with Jewish kids with the shared enemy that is racism.

Brian Johnson, an English kid who lived at No 40 Eaton Avenue, who was a year ahead of me at Bryanston High, once appeared on the driveway at my home at No 28, where he bellowed at the top of his voice. “Andrew Broulidakis is a Bloody Greek.” White apartheid-centric English South Africans loved to call Greeks ‘Bloody Greeks.’ It was a thing.

On many occasions I experienced various levels of racist abuse for not being Afrikaans, not being sufficiently anti Black and not being sufficiently Christian. It never really bothered me though. I knew that the racists who struggled in this way would face a long and difficult life ahead.

I had several further instances of racist discrimination during my two year forced conscription in the South African Apartheid army where, more than once, officers noticing my Greek Mediterranean sun tanned complexion threatened me by saying “You look like you have a touch of the tar brush. Maybe we should have you reclassified.”

Apartheid law classifies people by color. A touch of the tar brush was their description for people of not-pure white provenance. Losing the classification as a White meant you had to live in an area designated for your particular race.

A touch of the tar brush.

People with a touch of the tar brush were designated as Colored. You were a Colored if, for example, your great Grandmother was bi-racial. Even if you appeared as white as Edgar Winter, if your mother was partially mixed race, you were designated as colored.

Once you were designated in this way you had to obey the laws that followed your classification. The Group Areas act meant you had to live in an area designated for Coloreds. You had to attend Colored only schools teaching a curriculum the Administration contrived for Coloreds. The Mixed marriages act meant you could never date a girl whose classification was white, on pain of death. Being colored was not as nice as being classified white, which White Jewish people were. Like White Greek People.

Around this time in my developing awareness of discrimination, apartheid and white superiority, I had three Jewish people to inform my understanding of Zionism. The first was my school mate, Saul, who told me about antisemitism. Which I learned was a specific form of discrimination that applied exclusively to Jewish people who were the only Semites. With this common purpose we enjoyed discussing ways of processing discrimination; mostly by reasoning why we were both genetically and culturally superior to the small minded racists seeking to diminish our humanity with their Apartheid laws. After all, my ancestors gave the world civilization. Certainly a more cheerful cultural legacy than gifting the world Apartheid.

We learned by experience how discrimination enshrined in law is an unimaginably powerful weapon in the hands of a corrupt leader class with malign intention.

With my Jewish friends guidance I learned about how Jews, Semites, were discriminated against around the world, being a group of people with no home. A diaspora linked by the Jewish religion who were primarily either; Arab Jews, who spoke Hebrew, had their roots in Palestine, who had Arab genetic characteristics relating to the Semite tribes of Abraham that identified them as Semites.

Or they were Ashkenazim, whose origins were Eastern Europe and especially Khazaria. They spoke Yiddish; a West Germanic language that originated in 9th-century Central Europe, evolving from a combination of medieval German dialects with elements of Hebrew, Aramaic, and later, Slavic language.

I didn’t realize there was a difference. A Jew was a Jew just like a Greek was a Greek. Jews spoke Jewish and Greeks spoke Greek. Jews had their Torah and Greeks had their Bible, both with one God to rule them all. Pretty straightforward really.

From my friend Saul, who disclosed to me in secretive tones that his father was a Zionist, I learned the difference between Jews and Zionists. Judaism is a religious belief based on old Hebrew texts. Zionism is a 130 year old political ideology based on an 1896 book called Der Judenstaat.

We bonded over our shared experience of discrimination as representatives of two very special old cultures with a long history of discrimination and high achievement. We two both equally from a chosen few. Both equally discriminated against by the South African racists, but not nearly as much as any non whites were.

I shared with Saul my peoples struggles with Genocide, Holocaust, centuries of brutal persecution and AntiHellenism during the 400 year occupation of Muslim tyranny. He shared with me his peoples sorrowful journey to Zionism, that starts in Khazaria.

Khazaria

The Khazars were a nomadic Turkic people who, by the late 6th century CE, had become a sizeable trading empire of the early medieval world, existing as a prosperous crossroad between China, the Middle East, and Kievan Rus.

For some three centuries from c 650 to 965 the Khazars in their Kingdom dominated the vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppes to the eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus.

All was good for these Khazars until the era of King Bulan when the rise of Islam saw them surrounded on one side by Muslims and on the other by raving Christians, both convinced their God was the only one requiring the other ones God to die. King Bulan had to pick as side after he was approached by Byzantine and Arab ambassadors presenting their Abrahamic case. After considering their religions, Bulan chose box number three, Judaism.

The Khazar state was also not the only Jewish state to rise between the fall of the Second Temple (67–70 CE) and the establishment of Israel in 1948. A state in Yemen also adopted Judaism in the 4th century, lasting until the rise of Islam 200 years later.

Other than that though, Judaism did not attract the same big numbers as the other two rising Abrahamic religions which is why in today’s global population of Religious, a fraction of 1% are Jewish and not Christian, like the 2 Billion who are, 25% of the Planets population. Or Muslim, like 1.8 Billion.

The Second Temple, in case you don’t know, skip to the next paragraph if you do, saw the progression of the Hebrew Bible canon, the synagogue, and Jewish eschatology. The rise of Christianity began in the final years of the alleged Second Temple period, the historical era of the Christian religion up to the First Council of Nicaea in 325 that saw Christianity spread from the Levant, across the Roman Empire and beyond, leaving the good-old Hebrew testament very much in the dust of popularity. Interesting only to very few. The chosen few and those who chose to snip-off their penis foreskin for chosen few membership.

Christianity spread like deadly ear-born contagion in the hands of the leader-class elites who controlled exclusive rights to the Biblia. It fell to this small few and their appointed-anointed clergy to decide when where and how the befuddled huddled masses could hear the Greek book-bits the Leader class chose to share with the uneducated mostly illiterate worker class.

The link between today’s Ashkenazim and Jewish Khazarian converts from the 8th Century has been an issue for Israelis claiming Semitic provenance from the outset. Concealing European origins was important to Ashkenazi Semite claims that would weaponize antisemitism effectively, so much so, the majority of the first wave of Zionist leaders changed their names to sound less European and more Jewish.

Golda Mabovitch / Golda Meir. Szymon Perski / Shimon Peres. David Grün/ David Ben-Gurion. Yitzhak Yezernitsky / Yitzḥak Shamir. Benzion Mileikowsky / Benzion Netanyahu.

Enormous effort went into branding the right of return for these original semites cast out of their second temple to which the Covenant of the pieces promised a gloriously lucrative return.

How semitic are these European Jewish converts.

The most comprehensive study of Semite provenance by DNA is by Eran Elhaik, an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden and Chief of Science Officer at an ancestry testing company called Ancient DNA Origins.

Elhaiks research links the DNA of European Jews to Caucasus, European, and Middle Eastern ancestries, portraying the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries, consolidating previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry. He found Ashkenazi genes include a Middle Eastern genetic marker in DNA from Jews, but, he says, it could be from Iran, not ancient Judea.

Elhaiks tests show the likelihood that Ashkenazim are descendants of the Khazars, who then migrated to Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Credible DNA research confirms that contemporary European Jews who drive the Zionist occupation in Palestine have little or no connection to the Jewish people of the Bible, the semites of Abrahamic provenance, at most 10%, making the term antisemitism a disingenuously deceptive irony.

The same DNA ancestry testing shows Palestinians to be above 80% in Abrahamic provenance. Semites being Arabs from the Middle East descended from Abraham; who ploughed his hopeful not-yet-circumcised furrow across the hot desert sand some 4,000 years ago having conversations with God that turned into transactional foreskin-for-land covenants.

Meeting and discussing discrimination with my school friend Saul while growing up in an Apartheid Society revealed; my experience of discrimination was no different to his. My antiHellenism experience no different to his antiJewish experience he called antisemitism. It appeared strange to me that the word antisemitism kept cropping up when none seemed to mention our Greek discrimination. I wondered why that was.

Mostly my awareness of Judaism and Zionism with all it encompasses in word appropriation and a steady diet of manipulative deceits comes from Jewish-origin people with critical thinking skills who identified what goes on behind the veil of weaponized militarized Zionism.

Experientially I believe my informed, unprejudiced understanding and awareness of Judaism and Zionism as a Non religious Greek is shared by some 20% of the global population.

In my opinion, approximately 80% remain unaware that Zionism is a toxic death cult in which incentivized-propagandized members, the Zionists, blindly repeat their chosen-few narrative of entitlement to kill their designated enemies at will and with assured immunity, while demanding that the rest of the world clap-along in legal obligation to celebrate their high bar achievements as serial mass child-murderers while continuing to prosecute their endless mass-murder policy funded by hundreds of billions of US Dollars.

The 20% who know the actual-factual truth of Zionism include many of the best known Jewish-born people who spoke about Zionism before 1948. It was obvious from the beginning that establishing a Jewish State inside a land the European Ashkenazim had no claim to, by stealing land and lives, was always going to invite endless trouble that could only ever end one way.

Compounding that folly, this conduct would give rise to resentment for Jews globally. Zionism, many Jewish-born people believed, would become the single greatest force driving global hatred towards Jews.

Young Andrea, the Greek African born boy in seventies Apartheid South Africa, quickly arrived at the belief that Zionism was the most heinous deceit enabling unspeakable evil to continue behind this psychologically dominating behavior that was never more than a series of lies by serial liars.

A series of disgusting lies inviting and visiting enormous harm on Jewish-born people who do not support Zionism.

In the course of arriving at this belief I read whatever I could find by well known Jewish-origin writers alongside their ethical opposites; the Jewish indoctrinated Zionists and their Christian Zionist brotherhood.

I recognised the two sides to every story by reading both until I became aware of the pointlessness reading the Zionist account represented. Always the same set of lies repeated ad infinitum ad nauseam. Liars lying every time they spoke. Who knew everyone knew they were lying and thrived on knowing that their lies were indemnified by the Zionist lobby controlling the United States who in turn controlled the UN.

As far as broken records go, the one about Zionisms right to exist is about 76 years past arrest.

There is a substantial difference between being Jewish, a religious grouping, often admired and generally well liked as any other religious grouping, and being Zionist. Zionism is an ideological death-cult that is quite rightly despised by all who believe in freedom, and egalitarian justice.

As an ideology predicated on deceits, conflating Judaism with Zionism is up there with the appropriation of weaponized words like; Antisemitism, Genocide and Holocaust.

Why would Jewish people turn to Zionism, I wandered at this early stage of considering the pros and cons.

The cons are; you will have to lie and kill a bunch of people while lying about your intentions, being surrounded by people who hate you because you are stealing their land and killing their people while lying about your intentions. You will be hated globally for lying in this killing behavior that will invite resentment towards all Jews in their communities. Giving rise to anti Jewish hate crimes.

The pros of membership are few. Zionists have the illegal-right, achieved by lying, to defend against a common enemy they label antisemites. Terrible people who hate all Jews for their superiority in everything and especially their exclusive covenants with God. Those various entitlements provide each Zionist their assured piece of the Eretz Yisrael earned by the right to defend Zionist membership from antisemitic persecution by genociding at will, indefinitely, without fear of being persecuted by criminal antisemites protesting their legal child murder entitlement. The right to lie all the time without censure is enshrined in the Zionist Constitution, in perpetuity, underwritten by the Samson Option.

Seduced by this promise of money-for-nothing and the land-for-free, paired with the freedom to kill children for sport and Country, its easy to see why a certain type of American religious thinker would be drawn to the Zionist weaponized fables of Biblical lore in which being circumcised and Jewish involves birthright reward with actual monetary gain.

Why wouldn’t a poor homeless-adjacent Brooklyn Jew get onto the property ladder by moving to Israel for a free house in exchange for murdering Palestinians, legally, while flying the Baruch Goldstein Brooklyn Zionist flag.

Conversely, those high achieving people of Jewish origin with no desperate need to join the free-uplift transactional cult of moral-turpitude, have views on Israel and Zionism that are consistently similar; where the more ethically sophisticated the person, the more they speak against Zionism. Whether they are Jewish or not.

Many well known Jewish origin people I have read are clearly not on board with Zionist terrorism born of moral turpitude. Influences that have affected my thinking include; Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Primo Levi, Albert Einstein, Norman Finkelstein, Joseph Heller, Gloria Steinem, Franz Kafka, Mark Bolan, Gabor Mate and Leonard Cohen, to name a few who I mention in my book as being well-liked and widely respected for their achievements in their fields.

I grew up being influenced disproportionately by Jewish born authors. It is not ironic that I am capable of expressing the views I share thanks to learning critical thinking from predominantly Jewish-origin thinkers.

Most of what I have learned about Zionism and the weaponised monetisation of words like antisemitism, holocaust and genocide to deceive and delude, I learned from Jewish anti Zionists. None more so than Bob Dylan, 5' 7" and Leonard Cohen, 5' 9", the two Jewish-origin writers who most influenced me on the journey to their opposite Jewish-origin journey to their opinions of Zionism, two inches and a world apart.

When considering at most, 0.02% of the Earths population is Jewish at any given time, by my estimate the number of writers and musicians who most informed my developmental years is around 50% Jewish-born creatives.

Go figure the odds. No doubt Jewish born thinkers have special skills and an enormous pedigree in high achievement that is the reason many around the world respect and admire Jewish origin people, probably in equal and opposite measure to how much the majority despise the toxic death-cult that is Zionism.

With that introduction, here are the two Jewish born high-achievers who most impacted on my development in the context of how each has reconciled their Jewish origins with Zionism, thereby impacting on the way I align my allegiance, fifty years later.

Bob Dylan is at #1 for anyone born curious in the sixties as I was.

Growing up in 70’s Apartheid South Africa in a State School offering a Nazi curriculum teaching chosen-few white supremacy propaganda along the narrow rails of fascist punishment-obedience, my educational opportunities to learn about the ways of the world and the concept of human-rights was limited to authors and songwriters.

None offered better value for an inquisitive young mind than Bob Dylan.

From the first time I heard that The Answer was Blowing in the Wind, aged maybe 12, I felt a compulsive interest in learning why. From then I steadily acquired every recording Bob Dylan ever made. Readily, I consumed every story and article about this mysterious vagabond from Hibbing, who hitchhiked his way across the USA, met Woody Guthrie and lived like a Hobo.

His art mimicked my life. My first band when I was 15 was named HOBO because of Bob Dylan. We learned the Am, G, F three-chord staple by playing All along the Watchtower. Three simple chords was all you needed. Round and round. Said the joker to the thief.

As I learned to play the guitar Dylan songs were frequently revealed as a good choice. Learning to play guitar by playing Bob Dylan songs made learning fun because they were easy to play on an acoustic guitar and it was easy to sound like Bob Dylan without attending singing school. Mostly I was drawn to his musicality because the songs followed a logical pattern that resonated with me.

Playing Dylan songs required memorizing his words. I learned by writing the lyrics by hand on a page, then playing the song over and over, memorizing the words so I wouldn't need to read while I played. Eventually, by the time I got to Street Legal in 1978, I had committed several hundred Bob Dylan songs to memory.

That had an unexpected consequence for my memory skills, leaving me with a lasting ability to remember things quite well, affecting the way I think to this day. Who knows what my memory skills might have become if I hadn’t learned to recite ‘Ballad of a Thin man’ verbatim after two listens.

Dear Bob. Thanks for writing those long-winded rambling Jack songs, with at least seven golden verses, each a winding mile long.

“Crimson flames tied through my ears, flowing high and mighty traps. Countless fire n' flaming roads, using ideas as my maps.” The rhyming couplets. Before I even knew it I was rhyming the end of my sentences with the next line, annoying everyone who met me who wasn’t impressed.

Maps/Traps. Brow/Now. Screamed/Dreamed. Somehow/Now. Jealousy/History.

For years I carried every one of the big Dylan songs around in my head, able to replay them word for word on command for anyone prepared to pay. Along the way I became intimately familiar with his process. The man of mystery who controlled his image rights as carefully as he developed his song catalogue.

Always, I felt an enormous indebtedness, a sense of gratitude to Bob for the impact he had on my developing awareness as a human being.

As time passed and I grew musically and educationally the mysterious thrall of Bob’s brilliance migrated to a differently informed value, probably as familiarity with his process affected my blind youthful confidence in his brilliance. Bobs content is often a fusion of current news filtered through Biblical reference points.

I formed the opinion that the holy trinity of Dylan songwriting combines the Bible, the morning papers and a healthy pile of drugs, without which young Bob may well have not ridden that stream of consciousness four-song a day habit that turned a whole generation of liberal-adjacent young people towards raised awareness of what matters most.

Once that was gone all that remained was a confused Zionist.

I learned a great deal about what matters most from Bobs adaptation of news into songs; like for example the story of Emmet Till. A song that transcended its three chord musical anchor, presenting a series of lessons encompassing; Civil rights, Racism, Humanity, Inhumanity, Poverty, Criminality, Barbarity and especially, moral turpitude.

For that dutiful discharge of his ability and skill in raising mindful awareness of societal issues giving voice to the oppressed, Mr. Zimmerman’s value to the planets collective unconscious can never be overstated.

But then something went wrong. Leading me to another musical philosophers observation that seemed to fit. John Coltrane said “How you are as a person is how you are as musician.”

Learning about Bob as a person became as interesting to me as learning about his songs. Specifically, I wondered how he could come up with such obvious brilliance, and follow it with such obvious dross. What was the disconnect.

I was in my early twenties by this time, into my second decade of living with Dylan daily. Still playing a few Dylan songs at my one-man-band gigs in Johannesburg.

My Dylan fork in the road moment came when I heard he had been “Born Again in Jesus Christ.” In the late seventies, Born-Again-Christianity was a trending movement among whites in Apartheid South Africa, polarizing those who are not for Him as being very much against Them who Are, who I couldn’t but help notice, were all too commonly also Equally Pro-Apartheid.

Christian White-Supremacy for Prosperity-Apartheid Jesus was my short form impression of the Born Again Christian Cult. (BACC.)

I was on the other side of this oppressive behavior that ran very much along narrow rails of conformity in which I recognized the “he who is not for me is against me” narrative as a red flag.

I wandered how this brilliant smart influencer, the greatest writer of love songs to ever pen a verse, teaching so much to so many, was now just another obedient supplicant to blind faith logic, that was to my thinking, a hate crime, behind all that was worst about the Apartheid ideology.

I remember where I was when I first heard Slow Training Coming. I took it personally. I remember the crushing weight in the pit of my stomach as I tried to make sense of what I had just learned about this man of mystery up-until-then. Shocking News not quite as ingrained in my memory as where I was when I heard about John Lennon’s encounter with Christianity, but close.

’You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy
You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy.
BUT you're gonna have to serve somebody.
Yes indeed you're gonna have to serve somebody.
It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord.

WTAF Bobby Zim.

Stage/Cage. Thief/Chief. France/Dance. World/Pearls. Turk/Network. Lame/Name. Home/Dome. Tank/Banks. Silk/Milk. Bread/Bed. Timmy/Zimmy.

Although less than five years later flagging demand for more Dylan Gospel music saw Bob distance himself commercially from his born-again relationship with Jesus Christ, for me at least, the damage done could not be undone.

The mysterious vagabond was no more. What emerged from that shadow I wasn’t quite sure. For awhile. Then after ‘The Neighborhood Bully’ I was.

In 1983, not long after he took that Jesus trash to the curb and, apparently, dumped it, Bob Dylan visited Israel again, where for the first time he posed for photos identifying as Jewish and Zionist. This included a Dylan portrait shot at Jerusalem's open-air synagogue wearing a yarmulkah and Jewish phylacteries, and tallith.

I learned that Dylan once lived on a kibbutz. I saw he had performed in Tel Aviv with the Rolling Stones, performing Like a Zionist Rolling Stone, and that he played Israel three times over the last thirty years.

For me, the final nail in the Dylan Cross appeared on his 1983 album Infidels. Its called ‘The Neighborhood Bully’. A Zionist anthem repeating all the worst tropes of Zionism in typical Dylan rhyme.

Man/Land. One/Run. Survive/Alive. Thick Skin/Kicked In. Land/man. Torn/Born. Criticized/Apologize. Glad/Bad. Slim/Him. Back/Maniac. Peace/Cease. Weep/Asleep. Gone/Babylon. Sand/Command. For/War. Indeed/Feed. Scars/Stars. Hill/Still.

This bitterly sarcastic song defending the oppressed Zionists right to genocide their nasty terrorist neighbors arrived during Bobs recovery period from his late 70's rebirth as a Christian when he immersed himself in the binding land contracts God agreed with Abraham for his seed 3,000 years later. Defensively, disingenuously, misleadingly referenced by Dylan now as the "Neighborhood Bullies" made worse by Dylan’s embarrassing effort to deny his ode to genocide was about Zionism.

Reviewers were not fooled. One described Dylan’s neighborhood bully song as a declaration of "full-throated Israel support" a "Zionist anthem" and a "bitter and indignant defense of Israel’s actions”. Another said; “turns out that this man Bob Dylan, so beloved by the American cultural establishment and winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature, is guilty of hate speech. Sooner or later, they all are.”

For me, like many who so admired Dylan’s songwriting for so long, this pro-genocide Zionist apartheid anthem came as a grave disappointment that never found reputational repair. The former spokesman for the oppressed changed sides.

“I’m a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it.”

December 19, 2022, The Wall Street Journal interview with Bob Dylan.

Christian Zionism according to 1983 vintage Bob Dylan. A list of the top tropes of Zionist revision, all perfectly packaged in rhyme in The Neighborhood Bully. You can read the complete list of Bobs Neighborhood Bully Zionist tropes here.

Then there’s my new favorite Jewish origin writer, promoted after my upset following Bobs revelations, although he always was a favorite of mine. The irreplaceable Leonard Cohen. My man.

Leonard Norman Cohen was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Montreal anglophone enclave of Westmount, Quebec, on September 21, 1934. His Lithuanian Jewish Ashkenazi mother, Marsha ("Masha") Klonitsky was the daughter of Talmudic writer and rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline. His parents gave him the Hebrew name Eliezer, which means "God helps". His father, clothing store owner Nathan Bernard Cohen (1891–1944), died when Cohen was nine years old. The family attended Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, Canada’s oldest Ashkenazi synagogue, to which Cohen retained connections for the rest of his life and is where he chose to deposit his earthly remains. On the topic of being a kohen, he said in 1967, "I had a very Messianic childhood. I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest."

I think the single most defining spark-of-life moment for my critical thinking arrived on my 13th birthday when I received a copy of “The Energy of slaves”. Leonard’s book written on Hydra, published in 1972. Right time and place for the impact it had on my awareness of the enormous possibilities that existed for someone willing to learn how to think honestly.

Once, in the mid 80’s soon after I emigrated to England, I was invited to visit Leonard’s home in Hydra for coffee. My cousin who lived there owned a Taverna Leonard frequented on his visits to Hydra.

In 1960 Hydra became a famous retreat for writers, having attracted many creatives to the opportunity of writing in beautiful Island isolation, mostly without electricity or running water. Leonard knew Barbara Rothschild who married the Greek artist Nikos Ghika, the owner of a 40-room mansion on Hydra, where artists and writers visited; among them Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Cyril Connolly and Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Leonard lived full-time on Hydra for seven years from 1960 - 1967, writing many of his best known works there, including ‘Songs to slash your wrists by.’ He returned to Hydra regularly for visits until near the end of his life.

His journey from Judaism that begins and ends at the Congregation Shaar Hashomayim synagogue, takes many twists. He flirted with Scientology and Hare Krishna, spent six years at the Mount Baldy Zen Budhism centre, took a year out for daily satsangs in Mumbai, but in his last days is quoted as saying:

“Religion, teachers, women, drugs, the road, fame, money, nothing gets me high and offers relief from the suffering like blackening pages, writing.”

My arrival on Hydra was in 1986, although I was not there in pursuit of some Artistic muse offering relief from the suffering, but rather, just day tripping from Athens with my family to visit a cousin who owned a Taverna in the harbor. When she found out I was a musician, she said “Do you know of Leonard Cohen”.

Well. Yes. Who doesn’t know Canada’s greatest poet. Although I did not know about his Greek connection until then.

“Leonard is here on the Island. He comes for his coffee here every morning. He is like family. His home is close by. Would you like to visit him. I am sure he will want to meet you.”

With my heart a flutter at this fortuitous Greek opportunity, off we went uphill on a narrow path with the harbor of Hydra behind us, past trees dripping with hundreds of cats branch-snoozing like glistening leaves in the sunlight, eventually arriving at a small white walled cottage.

”Here we are. Leonard’s House” said my cousin.

The day I went for coffee with Leonard Cohen at his Greek Island home. The place where he found his creative voice and wrote many words that traveled all the way to my childhood in South Africa, transforming my thinking in a way that made gratitude an appropriate expression I looked forward to sharing with him.

We knocked. No reply. Knocked again. No reply.
”I am sorry he must be out.”
The day I almost met Leonard Cohen at his Hydra home.

Growing up influenced by great writers and poets was never a discriminatory process affected by any particular ideological allegiance. It would never occur to me that a song I heard should be liked or disliked for any reason other than merit.

At no time would it have occurred to me to think any more or any less of Leonard because he was born Jewish. That is as irrelevant as any irrelevance could be. The same applies to all discriminatory possibilities in which the ideology or race of a creator places above the merit of their creation.

I think the same is true for all Jewish people who do not identify as Zionist. Zionism like any other aggressive ideology entitling a membership to exclusive benefits at the cost of others should expect the same discrimination any similar hate based ideology warrants.

On a global scale I feel the same is true for everyone. No one hates Jews just for being Jewish any more than any other minority being hated, like Irish, or Pakistani, or whatever minority might be targeted by the majority interested in hating.

That’s a myth propagated by Zionists like Herzl to manufacture a unifying energy with which to herd an obedient gang into a defensive cult mentality with which to commit criminality that invites exactly the kind of discrimination you should expect against any cult predicated on constant-endless child murder. Who then lie about their right to do so.

In my conversations with high achieving people of Jewish origin, its clear that high-achieving Jews who have contributed so much to so many do not experience horrible prejudice because they were born Jewish. Assholes are assholes irrespective, or because of, of their cult allegiance. Doing good stuff and being successful and admired, like Jonas Salk for example, leads to respect and affection. Whether you are Norwegian, American or Jewish.

No doubt there were unsavory Jews attracting prejudice just as there were unsavory British, just as there were unsavory Americans. Just as their are unsavory haters who are going to hate anyone that’s not in their gang. But to allocate a special brand of offense for the criticism of Zionists who are operating fascist-genocide methodology to indemnify themselves in law by way of antisemitism, is clearly heinous malfeasance.

Malfeasance that depends on conflating Judaism with Zionism, which is even more malfeasance.

Jewish origin people are not now, nor have they ever been disproportionately targeted by anti-fascist hate. Zionists are, because of their fascist apartheid ideology in which they became thieves of holiness. Liars exploiting sympathy to entitle theft and murder, with the blessing of God.

This one paragraph that I have chosen as a summary of Leonard’s sometimes complicated journey towards reconciling Zionism with his Jewish origins is from his 1984 book of poetry “The Book of Mercy”.

Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation - none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy.

The Covenant is broken, the condition is dishonored, have you not noticed that the world has been taken away? You have no place, you will wander through yourselves from generation to generation without a thread. Therefore you rule over chaos, you hoist your flags with no authority, and the heart that is still alive hates you, and the remnant of Mercy is ashamed to look at you. You decompose behind your flimsy army, your stench alarms you, your panic strikes at love. The land is not yours, the land has been taken back, your shrines fall through open air, your tablets are quickly revised, you bow down in hell beside your hired torturers, and still count your battalions and crank out your marching songs. Your righteous enemy is listening. He hears your anthems full of blood and vanity, and your children singing to themselves. He has overturned the vehicle of nationhood, he has spilled the precious cargo, and every nation he has taken back.

For a last word on this subject, here’s Leonard’s ‘Anthem’.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

You can read more about Jewish-origin thoughts on Zionism in my book Half the Story Has Never Been Told. Why we Lie.