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Gilad Atzmon’s idea of a joke: Anne Frank

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The Frontline Club has insisted that no UK Jewish organisations asked it to cancel a screening of a film about the antisemitic Israeli musician, Gilad Atzmon.

The Frontline, the journalists’ club, showed Gilad and All That Jazz at its London premises on Monday night. At a question and answer session after the screening, with both Mr Atzmon and producer David Alamouti, the film’s director, Gorliz Kolahi, claimed that “various Zionist organisations” had urged the Frontline to pull out of the screening.

But a Frontline spokesperson said: “I have to make it absolutely clear that people expressed concern, but no one asked us to pull out.”

The hour-long film follows the life of the self-described “self-hating Jew”. After the screening, Mr Atzmon “entertained” his audience with Anne Frank, Auschwitz and Jew-money jokes, while comparing himself to Jesus Christ and challenging Holocaust denial legislation.

Though attempting to publicise his book, The Wandering Who? he sidestepped a question about its sales and profits, declaring: “Don’t talk to a Jew about money...”

The film, which took three years to make, shows Mr Atzmon saying: “I flipped, all this Holocaust indoctrination — I really didn’t want anything to do with the Zionist war machine...Without the Holocaust and Hitler, Israel would not get away with the atrocities it inflicts on Palestinian people. So the Palestinians are the last victims of Hitler.”

The film also features the Times and JC columnist David Aaronovitch, who said: “One of the reasons why I was reluctant to do this interview is that he sees this very fact of me appearing here, saying what I’m saying now, as a kind of vindication of his desire to get at the centre of people’s lives. He’s a phallic imperialist.”

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