Remember the fate of David Cole, the young Jewish Revisionist who was so viciously silenced by character assassination and physical threats on grounds that he was an "enemy of Jews"? Now it is Norman Finkelstein's turn to try to survive under similar assaults and vituperations.
This character assassination beauty was written by one Jonathan Freedland and published in the Guardian on July 14, 2000 at <http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/#top>
It's title is "An enemy of the people". (As if the only people on earth are the Jews!)
Freedland:
Perhaps he thought the sky would fall in. Perhaps Norman Finkelstein imagined his "explosive" new polemic, The Holocaust Industry, serialised in the Guardian, would drive the Jewish world crazy with fury. Maybe he is a little disappointed that, in Britain at least, that hasn't happened yet.
Zundelsite:
Not yet! It would seem they are working up a rage. Lots of personal attacks, but very little substantive criticism have appeared so far - either in past write-ups or in the one below. Tell us where Finkelstein is wrong when he speaks of an "extortion racket" based on "fake survivors"!
Freedland:
But there is good reason. For though Finkelstein likes to cast himself as the brave prophet, nobly confronting his wayward people with a truth only he dare tell, his claims are not nearly as shocking to Jews as he would like to imagine. Indeed, the chief questions he raises have been at the heart of Jewish debate for at least a decade. So he tells us that the Holocaust should not be treated as a sacred mystery, impervious to human inquiry - and that its lessons must be applied to genocide and suffering the world over. Most Jews accepted that long ago. More controversially, he insists that the Holocaust is not unique - as if unaware that a debate has long raged on this very question.
Zundelsite:
Well, did we read right? We thought that "debate" about the Holocaust was such a political taboo that 1,300 websites had to be blackened out by Germany to prevent young German university students from reading about the announced debate between the Zundelsite and Nizkor. Remember? That was a mere five years ago - and why do people land in prison in many European countries for wanting to debate what's not "debatable" - according to such intellectual lights as Debbie Lipstadt?
More to the point: The new editor of the US-Jewish publication, Forward, in a recent editorial wrote that Jews are now so powerful that they can safely wash their dirty linen in public - or words to that effect.
Freedland:
Some insist that the Shoah did indeed witness an unprecedented convergence of state bureaucratic power and modern technology in a systematic, industrialised attempt to extinguish an entire people. Others counsel against "hierarchies of oppression," in which Jews claim first place in an Olympic games of world suffering. It is a loud, important debate - but it did not begin with Norman Finkelstein.
Zundelsite:
No. Two groups, it seems, have been "debating" unilaterally. We knew about one - the Revisionist camp - who wanted to make it two-way. We didn't know about the other - and what do we now hear?
Up to this point, this supposed Jewish "debate" was apparently contained in Yiddish or Hebrew journals or papers - why? Out of cunning calculations, to prevent the goyim from knowing that some people were bothered by the strident claims and unbridled hyperbole of the traditional Holocaust Enforcers?
There was no meaningful "debate" except in Revisionist circles and the underground media before Finkelstein blew the lid off this can of worms. Finkelstein has nicely moved "debating" as a social goal right to center stage!
Freedman
The same goes for the "memory" industry, the abundance of museums, films, books and conferences commemorating the Holocaust. Finkelstein is no pioneer here either. Indeed it was a former Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban, who first quipped that "There's no business like Shoah business" (a trade, incidentally, which this latest book has now joined).
Zundelsite:
It's one thing to quip about a topic to one's tribal brethren. It's another thing altogether to take it on frontally as Finkelstein has done.
Abba Eban's remark was like an in-house joke. Finkelstein's assault against the liars and the lie is brutal, frank - and long overdue!
Freedman:
Thoughtful Jews have been questioning for a while the wisdom of making the Holocaust the centre of Jewish identity. Peter Novick's landmark book, The Holocaust in American Life, makes this case far more powerfully than Finkelstein. He offers a moving plea for today's Jews to define themselves as a people with a rich, vibrant culture - rather than as a ghost-nation, a walking version of the corpses of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Zundelsite:
To that I say: "Well, bully for you! Who would want to worship that unattractive cult of the dead?" When I asked Ernst Zundel to comment, he said that this Freedman paragraph was just so much blah-blah-blah!
Freedman
Novick is just as appalled by Holocaust theme parks and Auschwitz tourism as Finkelstein. But there's a crucial difference - which explains why Novick's book was welcomed for posing some awkward but necessary questions, while Finkelstein's has been dismissed or condemned. Novick wrote as a Jew, concerned that his fellow Jews were taking a path that could only end in harm. This new book has none of that sensitivity or human empathy - surely prerequisites of any meaningful debate about the Holocaust. It asks some legitimate questions, among them whether the Shoah was used unfairly to immunise Israel from criticism. But it reads like a rant, with splenetic attacks on individuals, many of them survivors, and vast generalisations about the whole of world Jewry.
Zundelsite:
Are Jews so thin-skinned that they can only be criticized with "sensitivity"? (If you happen to live in Canada, you aren't even allowed to do that...) Jews are relentless in their criticism of others, especially the Germans. Crybabies that they are, Jews can dish it out but not take it on the chin like men - especially when they provoked it and deserve it!
Freedman:
In a telephone call to Brooklyn yesterday, I asked Finkelstein why he reserved his most scathing language for his fellow Jews - much harsher than any words he had for the Nazis themselves. "If I was writing a book about the Nazis, I'm sure I'd use scathing language about them," he said, rather feebly. It is perhaps too easy to write off a critic like Finkelstein as a self-hating Jew, but it is striking to hear someone who appears to have nothing but contempt for his own people. He issues the same call sent out by David Irving in the high court this year - that Jews should not simply condemn anti-semitism, but examine their own role in provoking it. Like Irving, Finkelstein sees Jews as the authors of their own suffering. He claims that Jews have made up stories of persecution and that there are too many survivors to be true - another Irving favourite. In fact, what this claim amounts to is the fair statement that Jews expanded their definition of survivor to mean not just those who were held in camps, but those who fled or hid from the Nazis. But to put it like that would be to give Jews the benefit of the doubt. And Finkelstein, like Irving, is not in that game.
Zundelsite:
Maybe, just maybe, Jewish writers, media pundits, self-appointed community leaders and self-elected spokesmen like Foxman, the Rabbis Hier and Cooper, and Elia Steinberg will re-examine their offensive and abrasive style and show a little more respect for the majority. If nothing else, the Finkelstein book calls for that.
Freedman:
Besides the animus and the vitriol, there is a subtler way in which Finkelstein does the anti-semites' work for them. He constructs an elaborate conspiracy theory, in which the Jews were pushed from apathy to obsession about the Holocaust by a corrupt Jewish leadership bent on building international support for Israel. He has no truck with the idea that Jews might themselves have changed their attitude to the Shoah, for a complex range of reasons. Instead Jews are mere sheep, pushed around by a wicked Jewish elite.
Zundelsite:
Strange. Every Jewish leader of note always sees some Arabs conspiring, or some Nazi or neo-Nazi conspiracies evolving - and then has the nerve to try to lay down a smoke screen so one should not examine what amounts to a conspiracy to use the Holocaust as a weapon. It's yet another so-well-known Jewish gyration to accuse people like Finkelstein of a "conspiracy theory"!
Freedman:
Finkelstein sees the Jews as either villains or victims - and that, I fear, takes him closer to the people who created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it.
Zundelsite;
So there you have it. When all else fails, there's always the little corporal mustache to scare the timid skeptics.
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Thought for the Day:
"The bureaucratic objective is this: If you cannot suppress the news or control it, then for heaven's sake convert it into a meaningless mass of gobbledegook."
(- Roger Tarterian, Editor, United Press International, March, 8, 1967.)