Norman G. Finkelstein: The Holocaust Industry - Part 3/5
Dr. Izzeddin Musa
Part 3 - Extract:
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HOAXERS, HUCKSTERS, AND HISTORY
"Holocaust awareness," the respected Israeli writer Boas Evron
observes, is acutually "an official, propagandistic indoctrination,
a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real
aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a
manipulation of the present." In and of itself, the Nazi holocaust
does not serve any particular political agenda. It can just as
easily motovate dissent from as support for Israeli policy. Refrac-
ted through an ideological prism, however, "the memory of the Nazi
extermination" came to serve - in Evron's words - "as a powerful
tool in the hands of the israeli leadership and Jews abroad. " The
Nazi holocaust became The Holocaust.
Tow central dogmas underpin the Holocaust framework: (1) The Holo-
caust marks a categorically uniqe historical event; (2) The Holo-
caust marks the climax of an irrational, eternal Gentile harted of
Jews. Neither of these dogmas figured at all in public discourse
before the June 1967 war; ... On the other hand, both dogmas draw
on important strands in Judaism and Zionism.
...
At the most basic level, every historical event is unique, ...
... Even if the Holocaust were unique, what difference it make?
How would it change our understanding if the Nazi holocaust were
not the first but the fourth or fifth in a line of comparable
catastrophes?
...
Dubbed by Novick the "sacralization of the Holocaust," this
mystification's most practices purveyor is Elie Wiesel. For Wiesel,
Novicl rightly observes, The Holocaust is effectively a "mysrtey"
religion. Thus Wiesel intones that the Holocaust "leads into dark-
ness," "negates all answers," "lies outside, if not beyond, histry,"
"defies both knowledge and description," "cannot be explained nor
visualized," is "never to be comprehended or transmitted," marks a
"destruction of history" and a "mutation on a cosmic scale." Only
the survivor-priest (read: only Wiesel) is qualified to devine its
mytery. And yet, The Holocaust mystery, Wiesel avows, is "noncommu-
nicable"; "we cannot even talk about it." Thus, for his standard
fee of $ 25,000 (plus chauffeured limousine), Wiesel lectures that
the "secret" of Auschwitz's "truth lies in silence."
... A favorite Wiesel tag line declares that "the universality of
the Holocaust lies in its uniqueness." But if it is incomparably
and incomprehensibly unique, how can The Holocaust have a universal
dimension?
... The unique evil of the Holocaust, according to Jacob Neusner,
not only sets Jews apart from others, but also gives Jews a "claim
upon those others." For Edward Alexander, the uniqueness of The
Holocaust is "moral capital"; Jews must "claim sovereignty" over
this "valuable property."
...
There is another factor at work, The claim of Holocaust uniqueness
is a claim of Jewish uniqueness. Not suffering of Jews but that
Jews suffered is what made The Holocaust unique. Or: The Holocaust
is special because Jews are special. ..., Elie Wiesel is no less
vehement that Hews are unique. "Everything about us is different."
Jews are "ontologically" exceptional. ...
...
The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred has served both to
justify the necessity of a Jewish state and to acount for the
hostality directed at Israel. The Jewish state is the only safe-
guard against the next (inevitable) outbreak of homicidal anti-
Semitism; (The greatest error is: founding the Jewish state on
Palestinian soil), conversely, homicidal anti-Semitism is behind
every attack or even defensive maneuver against the Jewish state.
To account for criticism of Israel, fiction writer Cynthia Ozick
had a ready answer: "The world wants to wipe out the Jews ... the
world had always wanted to wipe out the Jews." If all the world
wants the Jews dead, truly the wonder is that they are still
alive - ...
...
... Driven by "irrational arguments," the anti-Semite, according
to Wiesel, "simly resents the fact that the Jew exists." ...
...
By conferring total blamelessness on Jews, The Holocaust dogma
immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure. Arab
hostility, African-American hostility: they are "fundementally
not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish action"
(Goldhagen). Consider Wiesel on Jewish persecution: "For two
thousand years ... we are always threatened. ... For what? For
no reason."... No people in the world knows gratitude as we do; we
are forever grateful." Ever chstised, ever innocent: this is the
burden of being a Jew.
The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred also validates the
complementary Holocaust dogma of uniqueness. ...
Finally, Jewish suffering was unique because the Jews are unique.
... Anti-Semitism, according to Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter,
sprang from "gentile jealousy and resentment of the Jews' besting
Christians in the marketplace ... large numbers of less accom-
plished gentiles resent smaller numbers of more accomplished Jews."
Albeit negatively, The Holocaust thus confirmed the chosenness of
Jews. Because Jews are better, or more successful, they suffered
ire of Gentiles, who then murdered them.
...
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...
The first major Holocaust hoax was The Painted Bird, by Polish
emigre Jerzy Kosinski. ...
In the New York Times Book Review, Elie Wiesel acclaimed The
Painted Bird as "one of the best" indictments of the Nazi era,
"written with deep sincerity and sensivity." ...
... Doing the Holocaust circuit, Kosinski dubbed himself a "cut-
rate Elie Wiesel."
A more recent fraud, Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments, borrows
promiscuously from the Holocaust kitsch of The Painted Bird. ...
The singularity of Fragments kies inn its depiction of life not
during but after The Holocaust. ...
... More than a homage to Holocaust dogma, Fragments is the smoking
gun: even in Switzerland - neutral Switzerland - all the Gentiles
want to kill the Jews.
... True, Wilkomirski fabricated hid Holocaust past, but the larger
truth is that the Holocaust industry, built on a fraudulent mis-
appropriation of history for ideological purposes, was primed to
celebrate the Wilkomirski fabrication. He was a Holocaust "survivor"
waiting to be discovered.
In October 1999, Wilkomirski's German publisher, withdrawing
"Fragments" from bookstores, finally acknowledged publicly that he
wasn't a Jewish orphan but a swiss-born man named Bruno Doessekker.
...
Consider now Holocaust secondary literature. ... The Mufti also gets
top billing in Yad Vashem: "The visitor is left to conclude,"
Tom Segev writes, "that there is much in common between the Nazis'
plans to destroy the Jews and the arabs' enmity to Israel." ...,
Wiesel objected only the presence of a Muslim qadi: "Were we not
forgetting ... Mufti Hajj amin el-Husseini of Jerusalem, Heinrich
Himmler's friend?" ...
The most recent Holocaust extravaganza is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's
"Hitlers Willing Executioners." Every important journal of opinion
printed one or more reviews within weeks of its release. The New
York Times featured multiple notices, acclaiming Goldhagen's book
as "one of those rare new worksthat merit the appellation landmark"
(Richard Bernstein). ...
... Nominated for the Holocaust chair at Harvard University, paired
with Wiesel in the national media, Goldhagen quickly became a
ubiquitous presence on the Holocaust circuit.
The central thesis of Goldhagen's book is standard Holocaust dogma:
drived by pathological hatred, the German people leapt at the
oppotunity Hitler availed them to murder the Jews. Even leading
Holocaust writer Yehuda Bauer, a lecturer at the Hebrew University
and director of Yad Vashem, has at times embraced this dogma.
Reflecting several years ago on the perpetrators' mindset, Bauer
wrote: "The Jews were murdered by people who, to a large degree,
did not hate them. ... The Germans have not to hate the Jews in
order to kill them." Yet, in a recent review of Goldhagen's book,
Bauer maintained the exact opposite: "The most radical type of
murderous attitudes dominated from the end of the 1930s onward....
By the outbreak of World War II the vast majority of Germans had
identified with the regime and its antisemitic policies to such
an extent that it was easy to recruit the murderers." Questioned
about this discrepancy, Bauer replied: "I cannot see any contra-
diction between these statements." (... without getting red!)
... Small wonder that Goldhagen vigorously championed Wilkomirski:
"Hitler's Willing Executioners" is "Fragments" plus footnotes.
Replete with gross misrepresetations of source material and inter-
nal contradictions, Hitler's Willing Executioners is devoid of
scholarly value. In "A Nation on Trial", Ruth Battina Birn and
this writer documented the shoddiness of Goldhagen's entrprise.
The ensuing controversy instructively illuminated the inner
workings of the Holocaust industry.
Birn, the world's leading authority on the archives Goldhagen
consulted, first published her critical findings in the Cambridge
Historical Journal. Refusing the journal's invitation for a full
rebuttal, Goldhagen instead enlisted a high-powered London law
firm to sue Birn and Cambridge University Press for "many serious
libels." ...
...
Alleging that "Finkelstein's glaring bias and audaious statements
... are irreversibly tainted by his anti-Zionist stance," ADL
head Abraham Foxman called on Holt to drop publication of the
book (same in Germany: the "Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland"):
"The issue ... is not whether Goldhagen's thesis is right or wrong
but what is 'legitimate criticism' and what goes beyond the pale."
"Whether Goldhagen's thesis right or wrong," Metropolitan associate
publisher Sara Bershtel replied, " is percisley the issue."
Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the pro-Israel "New Republic",
intervened personally with Holt president Michael Naumann. "You
don't know who Finkelstein is. He's poisen, he's ...
... The prominent Israeli historian and journalist, Tom Segev,
observed in Haaretz that the campaign verged on "cultural terro-
rism."
...
Consider, finally, the pattern: Wiesel and Gutman supported Gold-
hagen; Wiesel supported Kosinski; Gutman and Goldhagen supported
Wilkomirski. Connect the players: this is Holocaust literature.
...
Denying the Holocaust is an updated version of the "new anti-
Semitism" tracts....
...
... And to suggest that Wiesel has profited from the Holocaust
industry, or even to question him, amounts to Holocaust denial.
... Daniel Goldhagen argues that Serbian actions in Kosovo "are,
in their essence, different from those of Nazi Germany only in
scale." That would make Goldhagen "in essence" a Holocaust denier.
Indeed across the political specxtrum, Israeli commentators com-
pared Serbia's actionsin Kosovo with Israeli actions in 1948
against Palestinians....
Not all revisionist literature - howevr scurrilous the politics
or motivations of its practitioners - is totally useless.
Annual Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust are a national event.
All 50 states sposor Commemorations, often in state legislative
chambers. The Association of Holocaust Organizations lists over
100 Holocaust institutions in the United States. ...
...
... Were Jews the only victims of the Holocaust, or did others
who perished because of Nazi persecution also count as victims? ...
Justifying preemption of the Gypsy genocide posed the main chal-
lenge to the Holocaust Museum. *The Nazis systematically murdered*
*as many as a half-million Gypsies, with proportional losses*
*roughly equal to the Jewish genicide.* ...
Mutiple motives lurked behind the museum's marginalizing of the
Gypsy genicide. First: one simply couldn't compare the loss of
Gypsy and Jewish life. ...
Second: acknowledge the Gypsy genocide meant the loss of an exclu-
sive Jewish franchise over The Holocaust, ..." Third: if the Nazi
persecuted Gypsies and Jews alike, the dogma that The Holocaust
marked the climax of a millenium Gentile hatred of Jews was clearly
untenable....
Finally, the Holocaust museum's political agenda has also been
shaped by the Israel-Palestine conflict. Before serving as the
museum's director, Walter Reich wrote a paean to Joan Peters's
fraudulent "From Time Immemorial", whichclaimed that Palestine
was literally empty before the Zionist colonization. ...
...
In the wake of Israel's appalling attacks against Lebanon in 1996,
climaxing in the massacre of more than a hundred civilians at Qana,
Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit observed that Israel could act with
impunity because "we have the Anti-Defamation League ... and Yad
Vashem and the Holocaust Museum."
Part 4 follows ...
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