ZGram - 12/17/2001 - "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

December 17, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Professor Norman Finkelstein, who has taken a verbal bulldozer to the
shameless Holocaust Industry with his fiery book by like name, recently did
an interview sent to me from someone who found it on www.counterpunch.com
Unfortunately, the website has exprienced server problems, so I cannot give
you the URL.

I checked the Finkelstein website in a cursory fashion and did not find it
posted there yet - but in the meantime, enjoy!  And visit
www.normanfinkelstein.com for more!  The paperback version has just come
out!

Not one of us, the Holocaust Industry Hucksers will duly note, has ever
used language as pungent as Finkelstein does!  He has already lost his job
and suffered other fallout - but he is still hanging on for dear life with
white knuckles to the Steven Spielberg version of the Holocaust.

What will it take to dislodge him - and get him to be as courageous and
honest as he otherwise seems to be?  A penny for your thoughts.

Here is a recent interview that's brought to you in two parts:

[START]

 A Conversation with Professor Norman Finkelstein

 How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

 By Don Atapattu

 Professor Norman Finkelstein is one of a dying breed of American mavericks
that relentlessly defies any attempt at easy categorization. He is the son
of Holocaust survivors but an unremitting critic of Holocaust reparation
claims; a Jew but is a life-long anti Zionist; and though very much a
Leftist, he is often praised by far Right revisionists of the Third Reich,
such as Hitler-admiring historian David Irving. He initially made his name
by revealing Joan Peter's massively successful From Time Immemorial (a book
heavily promoted by the Israeli lobby, that claimed there were no native
Arabs before Zionist immigration into Palestine), as a colossal fraud, and
for 10 years he was a Professor of Political Science at New York
University.

 However, he is best known as the author of four books, the most recent
being The Holocaust Industry, which has catapulted him into the spotlight,
due to its contention that American Jewry have ruthlessly exploited the
Nazi holocaust for political and financial gain. Often lambasted for his
intemperate approach, Finkelstein is unlikely to win popularity contests in
America for the language he employs, as much as his arguments. Like his
close friend and mentor Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein is not one to
mince his words. In his eyes the mainstream Jewish organisations are
'hucksters', 'gangsters' and 'crooks'; Elie Wiesel (celebrity Holocaust
survivor) is the 'resident clown' for the Holocaust 'circus'; reparations
claims against Germany for Nazi era slave laborers are 'blackmail'; and he
infamously dismissed Professor Goldhagen's critically acclaimed Holocaust
bestseller 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' as the 'pornography of
violence'. Small wonder then that he has few friends amongst the American
Jewish establishment, with Elian Steinberg (World Jewish Congress Executive
Secretary) stating on TV that 'Finkelstein is full of shit', and the
literary editor of the pro Israeli New Republic describing him as  'poison
- something you would find under a rock'.

 In its initial hardback edition, The Holocaust Industry was a tremendous
success in many nations (selling 130 000 copies in a few weeks on its
publication in Germany), but in America its sales were limited to a paltry
12000. This relative failure stateside is attributed at least in part by
Finkelstein to a fatwah by the Jewish establishment--he notes indignantly
that the New York Times book review was much more hostile toward The
Holocaust Industry than it was even to Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'. Now the
revised paperback edition has just been released many of these same
periodicals are uncharacteristically silent, perhaps thinking they can kill
it more effectively through lack of exposure rather than outright
aggression. The following is an interview conducted with Norman Finkelstein
on 15 October 2001, on the eve of the paperback's publication.

Q:  It is generally considered that growing up Jewish and growing up
Zionist  are mutually inextricable. What made you break this link?

Finkelstein:  First of all, I don't agree that Zionism and growing up in a
Jewish  household are inextricably linked. It is fair to say that growing
up Jewish  and having a consciousness about Israel are inextricably linked.
As a Jew I  felt that I bore a certain amount of responsibility for the
policies of  Israel because Israel claimed to speak in the name of the
Jewish people,  and therefore they were using the history and suffering of
the Jewish  people as a means to justify its policies. However, my family
were not  Zionists, and therefore I see no special connection between the
two.

Q:  You stated in a BBC interview that your radical politics have exacted
'a  substantial personal cost' to yourself. Have you found yourself
alienated  from mainstream Jewish life?

Finkelstein:  I wouldn't say that alienation has been the price because I
have managed to  find a crowd of people who share my values in my life,
which has been quite  satisfying to me. I'd say that without wanting to
pose a martyr, that I've  paid a professional price for my views. Most
recently I taught at Hunter  College, City University of New York, and
every semester I was the highest  rated professor in my department on
student evaluations, I had also  published in the last five years, four
books and I would say that in every  reckoning I had proven myself to be
worthy as a professor. Nonetheless, I  was always the lowest paid by far, I
had the heaviest teaching load, and  this past May after 10 years faithful
service at slave wages, I was let go  and forced--at the ripe old age of
49--to relocate to Chicago to find  temporary work.

Q:  How have Jewish academics and Middle East specialists reacted to the
arguments that you have expanded upon in your books?

Finkelstein:  The reviews of my first book (Image and Reality of the
Israel-Palestine  Conflict), were given the content of the book remarkably
favorable. I was  quite surprised by the positive reception of the first
book. Generally  speaking, I don't have much contact with the mainstream. I
don't publish in  mainstream journals, and have never been asked to publish
in them. It is  also true that my name comes up quite a lot in articles in
mainstream  publications; my writings on a variety of subjects are quite
frequently cited.

Q:  While researching your second book (The Rise and Fall of Palestine: The
Intifadah Years), you lived with Palestinian families in the Occupied
Territories. How do you regard this time in retrospect?

Finkelstein:  First of all, it's not looking back, I still go fairly
frequently, I was  there in June and I stay in close touch with the
families of whom I write  in the book. When I first went it was a moral
test of the values that are  meaningful to me, and I wanted to see if I
could bridge the chasm between a  Jew and a Palestinian based upon our
common humanity and our shared  commitment to justice and decency. To that
extent I would say that it was a  satisfying experience, because I think
that we developed close and  meaningful relationships.

Q:  Were conditions in the territories as bad as you had anticipated?

Finkelstein:  I would say that the situation there is horrible. Whenever I
go I almost  literally count the minutes before I leave. I can't stand it
there because  you feel that you are watching people endure a living death.
For no  justifiable reason people are suffering and they're wasting away a
life.  It's very hard to bear, because it is impossible to rationalise to
oneself  why you should have a meaningful and satisfying life, and these
people have  to endure a meaningless and horrifying life. It is impossible
to  rationalise, unless you consider yourself a superior human being and
deserve better, than maybe it would be a tolerable situation. When you
recognise your common humanity and realise that for reasons for nothing to
do with anything these people have ever done that they should have to
suffer this way.. it's really hard.

Q:  Did you ever experience any hostility because of your background (as an
American Jew)?

Finkelstein:  Quite the contrary. The first couple of years, I was treated
like royalty  and people were gracious and wonderful, by the third year no
one could care  less that I was Jewish. It was not even a topic of
discussion. Even this  summer I spent time in Gaza, where the people knew I
was Jewish, and they  didn't care. It's not an issue; the issue is whether
you are for or against  the occupation.

Q:  'Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict' is a radical
reinterpretation of Israeli-Arab history, turning on its head the standard
Western notion of Israel being the constant victim of Arab aggression. How
have historians reacted to the arguments contained within it?

Finkelstein:  As I said earlier it does get frequently cited. The chapter
on Joan  Peters--the hoax about Palestine being empty on the eve of Jewish
colonization--is considered a standard text, everybody cites it. The
chapter on Benny Morris and the Palestinian refugee question (in which
Finkelstein dismisses Morris' claims that there was no overall plan by the
Zionists to expel the Arabs from Palestine), is considered the definitive
critique on the Morris book, and nowadays most scholarship agrees that I'm
closer to the truth than Morris. The last chapters on the `67 and `73
wars...they're pretty much ignored.

Q:  Regarding your most recent work, The Holocaust Industry, can you
explain  who the Holocaust Industry (according to your interpretation) are
and what  their goals might be?

 The Holocaust Industry, is as I conceive in the book, is institutions,
organisations and individuals who have put to use Jewish suffering for
political and financial gain. Throughout the little book, I am not at all
shy of naming names, so large numbers of organisations and individuals are
cited for their activities in the exploitation of the Nazi holocaust. It is
hard to say the main ones, but the mainstream Jewish organisations and
individuals such as Elie Wiesel, they feature prominently in the book.

Q:  Do you believe the 'Holocaust Industry' were responsible for the poor
sales  of the book in the US in comparison with its spectacular success
elsewhere?

Finkelstein:  First of all, I do name names and a lot of these individuals
and  organisations have a huge vested interest in the Nazi holocaust. It's
a  political weapon, but it's also plainly a financial weapon, and it's
unsurprising that the book would die an early death in the United States.
Given those facts, it would be shocking were it otherwise.

Q:  Do you believe these people were involved in your dismissal from New
York  University?

Finkelstein:  I think it works much more subtly in our system. Sometimes
phone calls are  made, no doubt about it, but I think things work through a
crystallising of  a consensus--in the sense of 'this guy is more trouble
than he is worth,  and so it is time to let him go'. I think this is what
happened at Hunter  College, that yes I had an excellent teaching record,
yes I had an  excellent publication record, but it's also true that 'a lot
of people are  complaining about him and we do get all these phone calls
and there are  faculty members who are very uncomfortable with him because
he is just not  professional' and so on and so forth. Finally, a consensus
crystallises  that it is time to let him go.

Q:  A spokesman for the World Jewish Congress suggested that you should be
grateful to organisations such as themselves, for the compensation that
your parents received. Is there not some truth in that were it not for the
awareness raising campaigns of these bodies, Holocaust survivors would not
have been compensated at all?

Q:  These organisations frankly, bring to mind an insight of my late
mother,  that it is no accident that Jews invented the word "chutzpah".
They steal,  and I do use the word with intent, 95% of the monies earmarked
for victims  of Nazi persecution, and then throw you a few crumbs while
telling you to  be grateful. It is very hard to sink much lower than to
turn the colossal  suffering of the Jewish people during World War Two into
an extortion  racket. I really think that not even Julius Streicher
(leading anti Semitic  publisher in 1930's Germany) were he editing Der
Stuermer today, could have  conjured up the image of Jews huckstering their
dead, but that's exactly  what this gang of wretched crooks have done. They
have disgraced the memory  of the Jewish people's suffering on the one hand
by turning it into an  extortion racket. If there were any doubt left, I
would point to the recent  London Times article headlined 'Swiss Holocaust
cash revealed to be a  myth', that is all the claims against the Swiss
banks were a fantastic  concoction of the Holocaust hustlers. But then
after turning Jewish  suffering into an extortion racket.to then deny the
actual victims these  monies extorted..it is very difficult to imagine
sinking any lower on a  moral level than that. If they were all put behind
bars, it wouldn't be  yet, in my opinion, be a just punishment.

Q:  Many of the same adjectives crop up in the hostile reviews of The
Holocaust  Industry, such as 'bitter', 'angry', 'shrill', and 'polemical'.
Do you  think this is because you are breaking a hereto untouchable taboo?

Finkelstein:  Only one of the many reviews I have read, made the comment
that the book  was very funny, and I think that there is a certain amount
of humour in the  book. I didn't note personally any intimation of a rant
or shrillness. You  find humour there and irony there, but I should point
out that the book  went through several editors who were quite exacting and
wherever it did go  over the top, they pulled me back. I think a lot of
reviews stem from the  fact that most people (including myself), tend to
defer to authority, and  the first reviews the word that was constantly
used was 'rant' and before  you knew it everyone began to pick up on that,
and so that became the drum  beat theme of the negative reviews. Therefore,
I don't think it is so much  that I broke a taboo; I think the initial
negative reviews set a tone for  what followed.

Q:  One extraordinary fact that I learned in your book was that former
President Reagan, and his UN ambassador Jean KirkPatrick, received the
Simon Wiesenthal Center humanitarian of the year award (for their staunch
support of Israel) despite providing political, financial and military
support to extreme Right terrorist groups in Central America. Do you agree
that it is an incredible perversion of history that the racism and violence
of the Nazi holocaust, is now used to justify turning a blind eye to racism
and violence?

Finkelstein:  Well that is what you would expect from the Simon Wiesenthal
Center. This  is really a gang of heartless and immoral crooks, whose
hallmark is that  they will do anything for a dollar. As I point out in the
book, the guy who  runs their headquarters in Los Angeles, runs it as a
family business, and  in the mid 1990's they were collectively raking in
$525 000 a year.

Q:  Do you think The Holocaust Industry would have been published were you
not  the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors?

Finkelstein:  (Laughs) No, I have no doubt about that. First of all, it
just got barely  published as the son of Holocaust survivors.  If I
weren't, there would be no  chance at all.  I would have been buried alive.
Just the other day I was  speaking to someone who I cannot name for this
interview, who met with a  high government official in Germany who we both
know. My friend asked him  about the questions raised in my book concerning
the number of surviving  slave labourers, and whether the German government
knew that the numbers  had been grossly inflated to justify the extortion
of huge amounts of  money. His response was that 'of course we knew what he
was saying was  true', but a decision was made early on to go on with the
blackmail because  'we were afraid of a huge anti Semitic reaction being
unleashed in  Germany', and the attitude was Germany was rich enough to pay
the ransom.  But, if you go to Germany and try to say the things that I
did, the so  called 'Left' become absolutely hysterical as they have this
huge vested  interest in being professional anti anti-Semites and
semophiles. It's this  huge identity that they have carved out for
themselves, and when I go out  there and say that of course be anti Nazis
but a lot of what is being done  in the name of anti anti-Semitism, is in
fact a gross falsification of  history .and unless exposed will do huge
damage to the Jewish people, these  people go berserk. It is one of the
peculiarities of this whole industry,  in that it has created an alignment
between the Left in Germany and the  Right-wing Jewish establishment in the
US. They sing the praises of people  like Israel Singer (disgraced
executive V.P. of the World Jewish Congress),  a complete and total hoodlum
- something that crawled out of the sewer -  and they sing the praises of
him! You would think he was Demetrios the way  they talk about him.

Q:  Another matter that puts you at odds with the Jewish establishment, is
your  rejection of the uniqueness of Jewish persecution compared to the
suffering  of other peoples. What is the position of groups like the World
Jewish  Congress on financial reparations for the Indo-Chinese, Black
slavery, the  slaughter of the American Indians etc?

Finkelstein:  They don't say anything, well I shouldn't say they don't say
anything -  during the US Congressional hearings on the Holocaust
compensation, Maxine  Waters (US Congresswoman) raised the issue with the
special US envoy on  Holocaust compensation, and of course he responded in
exactly the way you  would expect--he said you can't compare and it is not
the same thing, and  that is the standard view of these organisations.
Nothing compares to the  Jews. Everything that the Jews endure, everything
that the Jews achieve, is  special, because we're the 'chosen people', so
don't compare us with  garbage like the Tasmanian savages (the entire
indigenous population of  Tasmania were exterminated under British colonial
rule), or don't compare  us with the Gypsies. I mean God forbid those
uncivilised savages be  compared with us. You have to understand that the
great tragedy of the  Second World War, was not that Jews per se were
killed, but such a cultured  people were killed--if you kill uncultured
people, who cares?

[END]

Tomorrow:  Conclusion

=====

Thought for the Day:

"Sharon is the last bullet in the Israeli rifle. If Sharon is defeated, the
rapid countdown [to the end] of Israel will begin, because that country was
established through historical coercion and will find its end as the
U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia did."

(The Palestine Liberation Organization's political director, Farouq
Al-Qaddumi - as posted on WorldNetDaily today)