The Israel-bashing, conspiracy-minded magazine that started Occupy Wall Street

A more trustworthy Israeli writer, according to Adbusters, is the Israeli-born jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, a self-identified “proud self-hating Jew” who has, in essays posted on his own website, praised the “prophetic qualities” of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and wondered “if the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them” on a death march at the close of the war. Lasn has published multiple pieces on Israel by Atzmon, despite a history of extremism that has made the Israeli anathema even to many on the anti-Zionist left (the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the United Kingdom recently disassociated itself from him).

Leafing through back issues of Adbusters, a reader is introduced not just to the notorious Atzmon, but also to a largely unknown team of cranks and risible “experts” expounding on the dual threats of American and Israeli power. An author named Jim Kirwan opined in the May/June 2005 issue of Adbusters on America’s “dreams of empire” in a piece first published on the Holocaust-denial website Rense.com. Contributor Ken O’Keefe, an anti-Zionist activist who, like Atzmon, was recently disowned by many of his former comrades, recently told Iranian state television that Israel was behind Sept. 11 and argued, on Twitter, for the expansion of the OWS brand to include “Occupy Rothschilds.” An article in the July/August 2010 issue on the “imperial decline” of the United States cites as an expert the Jew-obsessed conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen, who recently claimed that the Mossad was behind Anders Breivik’s gruesome terrorist attack in Norway. Michael Hey, a former associate editor of Adbusters, offered a short piece in the March/April 2007 issue with the punchy title, “Not in the news: 9/11 was an inside job.” And so on.

Lasn frequently published the work of husband-and-wife team Bill and Kathleen Christison, Sept. 11 “truthers” obsessed with Zionism’s “global political and financial power,” who impute almost Rasputin-like powers to Jewish neoconservatives. (Bill died in 2010.) A 2007 article by Kathleen Christison subtly titled “Elliot Abrams: Dual Loyalist and Neocon Extraordinaire,” claimed that the former deputy national security adviser was “a key figure behind the fighting going on … at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon” and “engineered the Hamas-Fatah split that erupted into fighting in Gaza.”