ZGram - 8/30/2003 - "Norman Finkelstein, as outspoken as ever"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

August 30, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

It is very strange about self-imposed taboos - they are practically 
unassailable.  Just as every far-sighted, fair, rational and 
reasonable Jew - there are a few, believe it or not! - can't bring 
himself to say in public that the so-called "gassings" in German 
concentration camps didn't happen because there is no evidence, so 
practically every fair-sighted, fair, rational and reasonable person 
on the Right can't bring himself to say in public that (gulp!) Hitler 
might have had a point or two - and might have had, in fact, a few 
farsighted, fair, rational and reasonable programs to lessen the ills 
of our world.

Dr. Norman Finkelstein, with whose writings I have hardly any 
quarrel - being the genteel Gentile lady that I am, I just pretend I 
didn't hear that he called Revisionists "kooks" - cannot bring 
himself to say that "gassings" didn't happen.  Israel Shamir, for 
whose stylistic masterpieces and consistent ethical stance I have the 
greatest reverence, can't either.  Makow can't.  Chomsky can't. 
Margolis can't.  I could go on and on. 

Similarly, but not to the point of the ZGram to follow, if I look in 
the haystack with the proverbial magnifying glass, I cannot find five 
Western journalists or politicians of any stature worthy of respect 
of their admirers or constituents, who can bring themselves to say 
that Zundel might be right about the things he says about the Führer. 

Odd, isn't it? 

Adolf Hitler has been dead for more than half a century, and there 
isn't a chance of a snowball in hell that what he saw and tried to 
remedy in the 1930s in Europe could be revived and applied on our 
continent - or elsewhere, given present Western leadership.  Then why 
such irrational fear?

Such is the power of self-censorship.

Here's Finkelstein in a European media interview, as published in the 
Irish Times, July 1, 2003, page 13:

NORMAN Finkelstein is the nearest you can get to a Jewish heretic. He 
is a Jew but an anti-Zionist; the son of Holocaust survivors but a 
ceaseless critic of what he terms "the Holocaust industry"; a 
left-wing historian whose views are often praised by revisionist 
right-wingers such as David Irving.

He is a pugilist by inclination, never missing an opportunity to fire 
insults at his enemies among Jewish organisations in the US and 
Israel.

They, it must be said, are not slow to respond in kind. Insults flew 
within minutes when Finkelstein appeared recently with an Israeli 
government spokesman on RTE Radio 1's Morning Ireland, and Cathal Mac 
Coille, the presenter, had to call the two off each other and beg for 
calm. "You're supposed to lie down and take the insults, and I'm not 
going to do it," Finkelstein says. "The level of arrogance of these 
people just boggles the mind."

He believes Jewish organisations are "huckstering" the Holocaust by 
extracting huge sums in compensation that never get to the survivors. 
"What they have done, by turning the central tragedy of Jews in the 
20th century into a weapon for shaking down people for money is 
pretty disgusting; it's wretched." He denounces some of the campaigns 
for reparations against Swiss banks and claims that more than $20 
billion (E17.5 billion) has been collected in compensation claims 
arising from the Holocaust.

Because he is Jewish, Finkelstein gets away with the kind of language 
others would never be allowed to use. He accuses Jewish 
organisations, for example, of conducting themselves "like a 
caricature from Der Sturmer", the notorious Jew-baiting magazine of 
the Nazis. He repeatedly refers to the organisations as "crooks" and 
has even called Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who won the Nobel 
Peace Prize in 1986, the "resident clown" of the Holocaust circus.

The roots of his anger lie in his parents' experience. Finkelstein's 
father survived the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz concentration camp; 
his mother lived in the ghetto and ended up in Majdanek camp. He 
describes both as confirmed atheists.

His father received compensation from the German government. "I still 
remember the blue envelopes that came in every month. At the end of 
his life he was getting $600 a month, or a grand total of about 
$250,000. Even though there was no love lost between my father and 
the Germans - he hated them all - there was never any complaint about 
the money. The Germans were always very competent and efficient."

In contrast, his mother's compensation was channelled through 
American Jewish organisations. "Even though they went through the 
same experiences, she got a grand total of $3,000 and no pension. 
That's what you get from Jewish organisations."

THE line he takes on the Israel-Palestine conflict is similarly 
controversial, at least within his community. "A colossal wrong has 
been inflicted on the Palestinians, and no amount of rationalisation 
can justify that. There are possibilities for peace, but the Israeli 
elite won't allow them to happen."

Finkelstein's latest book, a second edition of Image And Reality Of 
The Israel-Palestine Conflict, is a scholarly attempt to undermine 
the popular image of Israel and its dispute with the Palestinians. He 
situates the creation of Israel firmly in the colonial tradition and 
seeks to debunk writers who claim the Palestinians never existed 
historically.

He compares Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to apartheid South 
Africa's attitude to its blacks or US settlers' view of native 
Americans.

"All these settlers used the same language. What was left out of the 
picture was that there were people living there before they arrived. 
We were told there was a wilderness, that it was virgin land and that 
every once in a while there were these savages, slightly above the 
level of the fauna, who would attack the settlers."

A New Yorker by birth, Finkelstein admits he has very little direct 
experience of Israel, although he has visited the occupied 
territories more than 20 times. "When I'm there no one even cares 
less that I'm Jewish. In the first year I was a novelty; by the third 
or fourth it was just, hey, Norman's back."

"Elie Wiesel, the resident clown of the Holocaust circus"

So is he, along with other solidarity workers who spend time with 
Palestinians but enjoy freedom of speech and personal security back 
home in the West, just a meddler? "I don't want to be there. I'm a 
complete coward. My hat comes off to those young people who work in 
difficult circumstances, who help Palestinians dig a well or who come 
to aid of people who are being shot at. If that's meddling, I say we 
need a lot more meddling in the world."

Asked if Israel can be considered a democracy, he responds: "Was 
South Africa a democracy in the old days? It was a democracy for 
whites, for the 'superior people'. Similarly, Israel, for the larger 
part of its history, has been a society where half the population has 
all the rights and half the population has none."

But what about the democratic rights of Palestinians under Yasser 
Arafat? "How can you have a democracy under occupation? People there 
have no rights without the approval of Israel. How democratic is 
Alcatraz? Or a concentration camp?"

There is a solution, he insists. "I don't think the way out is so 
complicated. People constantly try to shroud the Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict in all kinds of mystification. They say it's about ancient 
enmities, it's about the Bible or religion or it's about the clash of 
cultures. But when you go to live there you see it's not complicated 
at all. The fact is that there's a military occupation, and that has 
to end." And then what? "Then you hope Palestinians and Israelis will 
live together in peace."

Although Finkelstein enjoys the security of being a US citizen, he 
has paid a price for his views. His four books have been popular 
successes in Europe - The Holocaust Industry sold 130,000 copies in 
Germany in three weeks - but in the US he has been shunned and his 
books have been savaged.

The New York Times, he once commented, gave a more hostile review to 
The Holocaust Industry than it did to Hitler's Mein Kampf. This 
clearly rankled, and he returns to it. "I don't want to play the 
martyr, but if you look at my history I didn't make out so well. I 
didn't get the headlines. I'm in exile in [DePaul University in] 
Chicago because I was thrown out of every [university] school in New 
York.

"I'm not happy to be in Chicago. I want to be at home. That's why I 
keep an apartment there. I'm still praying for a miracle. I've had a 
hard time."

=====

Image And Reality Of The Israel-Palestine Conflict by Norman 
Finkelstein is published by Verso, £15 in UK