Brian Leiter's defense of Gilad Atzmon

I have (virtually) encountered prof. Leiter quite some time ago. He made an impression of a somewhat limited professional of rather left-wing persuasion, humorless, self-important, obsessed with a strange business of "ranking" - but otherwise quite a harmless individual, safely contained in the lofty spheres of academy. He provided (with assistance of his mysterious relative Maurice) material for two posts, afterward to be forgotten.

And suddenly, Mr Leiter surfaced again, this time as a totally unexpected defender of that vermin Gilad Atzmon. As a veteran "admirer" of Atzmon, I cannot but applaud the extraordinary chutzpa of the esteemed professor, who first of all declares that:

Prior to this tempest in a teapot ... I'd not heard of Gilad Atzmon...

And then, having read an interview by Atzmon and being as talented as he is, prof. Leiter states:

But it's equally clear that there's nothing in the positions articulated above that marks him as an anti-semite, in the Sartrean or any other offensive sense of the term; his position is cosmopolitan, though, for reasons of autobiography I suppose, he errs on the side of polemic mainly against the anti-cosmopolitan tendencies embodied only in one ideology.

I don't know how Sartrean definition of the term is more relevant to the case than the basic definition (aside of professor's passion to sound like a professor), but I do know a putz when I see one. And why that putz doesn't read (for instance) this excellent essay on Mearsheimer and Walt's indefensible defense of the little Nazi wannabe? In the Nietzschean sense or any other...

And then return to the warm embrace of the University of Chicago, where he can lick his wounds and cry on the shoulder of his learned colleague, one prof Mearsheimer...

Update: Yesterday, several hours after posting this, I had me an idle thought: isn't prof. Leiter secretly envying prof Chomsky and his Faurisson Affair? Taking patronage over Atzmon will be a good idea then...