Never shall it be said that the Zundelsite doesn't give a platform to our opposition. Today and tomorrow, two Holocaust Aficionados have the word.
Below we have a response to the London Evening Standard write-up on Dr. Norman Finkelstein's book, "The Holocaust Industry." This one comes from the Daily Telegraph, posted at <http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk:80/dt?ac=003106019716656=LlKhyGbd=HHHHHH8 L_from_link=/00/7/14/dl01.html=/Offsite/http://www.dailytelegraph.com>www. dailytelegraph.com/leaders>
Daily Telegraph:
(Title) "Shameful"
AN acrimonious dispute has erupted on both sides of the Atlantic about The Holocaust Industry. Its author, Norman Finkelstein, is a minor American academic who enjoys a certain notoriety in New York. His latest tract, serialised and promoted by The Guardian, indicts "the Holocaust industry" on three counts.
Zundelsite:
Suddenly Finkelstein is a "minor American" (not Jewish) academic, while Lipstadt is referred to in various mainstream publications as a "powerful" one? The smear campaign has begun!
Daily Telegraph:
First, American Jews are alleged to have ignored the Nazi genocide until the Six Day War in 1967, when an ideological construct emerged, renamed the Holocaust with a capital H, which could be used to "justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies".
Zundelsite:
Check your encyclopedias and dictionaries for the 1040s, 1950s, 1960s. The "Holocaust" begins to become a "Jewish Holocaust" only in the middle 1970s.
Before that, the term was described as a Greek word denoting "sacrifice by fire" or "consumed entirely by fire."
Daily Telegraph:
Second, Mr Finkelstein claims that the Holocaust industry has falsified the historical record, notably by claiming a spurious uniqueness, by promoting fraudulent "survivor testimonies" and by falsely accusing gentiles of ubiquitously harbouring murderously anti-Semitic designs.
Zundelsite:
Dr. Israel Shahak, an Israeli Human Rights activist, wrote two books on this topic - "Jewish History, Jewish Religion" and, as I recall, a title called "Jewish Fundamentalism and its Influence on Israeli Politics" which thoroughly document Dr. Finkelstein's claims.
Daily Telegraph:
Finally, Mr Finkelstein accuses Jewish organisations of systematically "extorting" vast sums in compensation from Switzerland, Germany and now Eastern Europe, very little of which has ever reached Holocaust survivors.
Zundelsite:
Even Abe Foxman of the terrorist ADL, whose employees go around character-assassinating people and ruining their reputations and careers, said about the Swiss extortion racket:
"We bludgeoned them and bludgeoned them and bludgeoned them - but at what price?"
Finkelstein is right on the money, if I may be permitted a pun. The price for that kind of extortion is a strong anti-Semitism now flourishing in Switzerland.
Daily Telegraph:
Not one of these accusations stands up to scrutiny. Post-war interpretations evolved under the impact of war crimes trials (such as Eichmann's) and the dissemination of first-hand accounts (such as Anne Frank's diary). Many survivors needed decades to talk about their experiences. The concept of "the Holocaust" was a stage in this post-traumatic process, not a Zionist plot. There have been a few hoaxes, pathological rather than sinister, but systematic falsification of history by anyone other than those who deny the Holocaust is a fantasy. Significantly, Mr Finkelstein defends David Irving against his accuser, Deborah Lipstadt.
Zundelsite:
Israel has admitted that they conceived and carried out Eichmann's kidnapping, trial and execution to teach a new generation of Jews, and the world generally, about Jewish "victimhood".
Daily Telegraph:
The Holocaust Industry is intemperate in tone and extreme in content. Its author writes, it is true, as the son of parents who survived the Warsaw ghetto and the camps; but he thinks that "American Jewry 'discovering' the Nazi holocaust was worse than its having been forgotten". His belief in the malign and manipulative influence of the Holocaust industry (which he never defines or distinguishes from "American Jewry") verges on the obsessive. The Holocaust industry is responsible for the revival of European anti-Semitism, for trying to suppress one of his books, and so on. In short, Mr Finkelstein is a conspiracy theorist.
Zundelsite:
If anyone is obsessive in behavior, it is the Holocaust Promoters and Enforcers - from the Simon Wiesenthal Center on to Bronfman, Steinberg, Spielberg etc. This is more than stating the obvious. There is no relief, it seems these days, in the world's mainstream papers from Holocaust overload.
Daily Telegraph:
This is a pity, for his diatribe obscures what might have been a serious critique. Too little of the money paid in compensation by the states, firms and others who profited from Hitler's Final Solution has yet reached the victims. The Jewish Claims Conference, in particular, has been widely criticised, as have the victims' lawyers. It is also true that the Holocaust is debased by polemical overuse. We are now sufficiently remote to hope for objectivity. But Mr Finkelstein's contribution is hardly calculated to advance dispassionate historical inquiry into the Holocaust; his book is, rather, a prime example of its exploitation.
Zundelsite:
Listen to this: "Dispassionate historical inquiry"!
Are these people ever on the defensive - or what?!
Finkelstein has kicked loose an avalance - the above is nothing more than a feeble attempt at damage control, while sheepishly conceeding point after point Revisionists have been making for decades!
Daily Telegraph:
The Holocaust was not unique in all respects. To compare is not necessarily to diminish. Stalin's Russia and Mao's China committed crimes on a similar scale to Hitler's Germany, though with less systematic genocidal intent. But Mr Finkelstein is not interested in comparing Auschwitz to the Gulag or the Laogai. He denies the uniqueness of the Holocaust in order to demonise an American and Zionist conspiracy. The Guardian should be ashamed of itself for lending respectability to a book which it would have been the first to denounce if a Right-wing polemicist had written it.
Zundelsite:
"Crimes on a similar scale . . . though with less systematic genocidal intent"! Shifty, shifty - aren't they? Defending Communism's brutal reign of terror - while talking of an "American" conspiracy! The Americans are goodhearted people who have permitted themselves, ever since 1933, to become pawns in this Zionist game, and now they wake up from their snooze.
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Thought for the Day:
"Why would Zionists want Israel when they have all the US and Canada? The natives here are easier than the PLO. They turn on the tv and go duuuhhhh.The media, newspapers, TV, movies, higher and public education,book publishing are all under favorable pro Zionist ownership. The executive branch is in control, the congress well trained and bought. The Suprme Court is no threat. Canada is in the bag.
"Its all of North America versus a pile of sand and a billion nasty Arabs. Hey, whats not to like."
(Letter to the Zundelsite in response to "The Decline of Zionism" by Charles Krauthammer)
Back to Table of Contents of the Aug. 2000 ZGrams