The Holocaust Industry von Norman G. Finkelstein

The Holocaust Industry

Norman G. Finkelstein

Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, Hillel Director, Yale University:

"It seems to me the Holocaust is being sold - it is not being taught".

Was soviel heißt wie: "Es erscheint mir, dass der Holocaust vermarktet wird, er wird nicht gelehrt."

Abba Eban, ehemaliger israelischer Außenminister:

„No Business like Shoa-Business“.

Zu Deutsch: „Es gibt kein Business wie das Shoa-Businesss.“

                      ******************

Kommentar:

brea...@my-deja.com meint: Die Holocaust Industrie: Das ist größte Geschäft des Jahrhunderts, eine gigantische  Erpressung. Die meisten Gelder fließen in die Taschen derjenigen die nicht im Geringsten gelitten  haben… Und wir Goyims sind so dumm das alles zu bezahlen. Hinzu kommt daß der "Erlös"  oft dazu gebraucht wird unsere Politiker zu bestechen. - Also, ein doppelter Tritt in  den Hintern.

15.10.00

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

Amerikanische Juden wie Israelis hissen die Holocaust-Fahne hoch und nutzen sie politisch, wirtschaftlich und gesellschaftlich leidenschaftlich aus. Die Shoah wird von Zionisten, um eigene Interessen zu realisieren,  regelrecht  instrumentalisiert und ausgeschlachtet.

The Holocaust Industry  -  Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish Suffeing

  

Verso / London, New York City, April 2000                    ISBN: 1-85984-773-0

Dieses Buch-Besprechung auf Englisch ist vor dem Erscheinen des Buches in Deutschland geschrieben.

"It seems to me the Holocaust is being sold - it is not being taught."

Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, Yale University

From the Beginning  -  Der Anlass

Das Buch sollte auch in Deutschland erscheinen. Die zionistische Lobby und der Zentralrat der Juden liefen Sturm dagegen.

Ich habe gedroht: "In short this book will be published in Germany. Should the "Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland" succeed to prevent this publishing, we will translate the whole book, word by word and spread it very, very, very wide, all over Germany and the world".

Izzeddin Musa, Nov. 15, 2000
                         
Nachtrag: Das Buch hat in Deutschland eine große Kontroverse ausgelöst, ehe es überhaupt verlegt war: Trotz zahlreicher Proteste wurde das Buch Finkelsteins:  "Die Holocaust-Industrie"  im Februar 2001 veröffentlicht..

Wir veröffentlichen hier einen Auszug aus der englischen Originalfassung (bevor das Buch in Deutschland veröffentlicht wurde). 

Extract: 

INTRODUCTION

The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Through its deployment, one of the world's most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a "victim" state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status. Considerable dividends accrue from this specious victimhood - in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified. Those enjoying this immunity, I might add, have not escaped the moral corruptions that typically attend it. From this perspective, Elie Wiesel's performance as official interpreter of the Holocaust is not happenstance. Plainly he did not come to this position on account of his humanitarian commitments or literary talents. Rather, Wiesel plays this leading role because he unerringly articulates the dogmas of, and accordingly sustains the interests underpinning, The Holocaust.

(Remark: like the use of the "Auschwitz-club" against the german inferiority complex as a moralizing  second-degree murderer tool in the course of current dialogue.  Michael Wolffsohn - zu Deutsch: Einsatz der  "Auschwitz-Keule"  als moralisierendes Totschlaginstrument in der aktuellen Diskussion gegen nationale  Minderwertigkeitskomplexe der Deutschen.)

The initial stimulus for this book was Peter Novick's seminal study, "The Holocaust in American Life". More a congeries of provocative apercus than a sustained critique, The Holocaust in American Life belongs to the venerable American tradition of muckraking. Yet like most muckrakers, Novick focuses only on the most egregious abuses.

Novik's central analytical category is "memory". Currently, all the rage in the ivory tower, „memory" is surely the most impoverished concept to come down the academic pike in a long time.

(A remark on a realistic book writer, not muckraker, I might add Leon Weliczker Wells: "And they done Politics, the American Zionists and the Holocaust"

My original interest in the Nazi Holocaust was personal. Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps.

The more important point, however, is this. A part from this phantom presence, I do not remember the Nazi Holocaust ever intruding on my childhood. The main reason was that no one outside my family seemed to care about what had happened.

I sometimes think that American Jewry "discovering" the Nazi Holocaust was worse than its having been forgotten.

Both my parents,  although daily  reliving that past until  the day each died, lost interest by the end of their lives in The Holocaust as a public spectacle.

 My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies... The current campaign of the Holocaust Industry to extort money from Europe in the name of "needy Holocaust victims" has shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom to that of a Monte Carlo casino...  to truly learn from the Nazi Holocaust, its physical dimension must be reduced and its moral dimension expanded.

                                        CAPITALIZING THE HOLOCAUST

(...) In fact, the Nazi Holocaust is just about the only historical reference that resonates in a university classroom today. Polls show that many more Americans can identify The Holocaust than Pearl Harbor or the atomic bombing of Japan.

Between the end of World War II and the late 1960s, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject.

Not only Americans in general but also American Jews, including Jewish intellectuals, paid the Nazi Holocaust little heed. In an authoritative 1957 survey, sociologist Nathan Glazer reported that the Nazi Final Solution (as well as Israel) "had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry."(...)  No monuments or tributes marked the Nazi Holocaust in the United States. To the contrary, major Jewish organisations opposed such memorialization. The question is, why?

The standard explanation is that Jews were traumatized by the Nazi Holocaust and therefore repressed the memory of it. In fact, there is no evidence to support this conclusion...  The Problem was that the Americans didn't want to listen.

The real reason for public silence on the Nazi extermination was the conformist policies of the American Jewish leadership and the political climate of postwar America. In both domestic and international affairs American Jewish elites hewed closely to official US policy. Doing so in effect faciliated the traditional goals of assimilation and access to power. With the inception of the Cold War, mainstream Jewish organisation jumped into the fray. American Jewish elites "forgot" the Nazi holocaust because Germany – West Germany by 1949 - became a crucial postwar American ally in the US confrontation with the Soviet Union. Dredging up the past served no useful purpose; in fact in complicated matters.

With minor reservations (soon discarded), major American Jewish organizations quickly fell into line with US support for a rearmed and barely de-Nazified Germany. The American Jewish Committee (AJC), fearful that "any organized opposition of American Jews against the new foreign policy and strategic approach could isolate them in the eyes of the non-Jewish majority and endanger their postwar achievements on the domestic scene," was the first to preach the virtues of realignment. The pro-Zionist World Jewish Congress (WJC) and its American affiliate dropped opposition after signing compensation agreements with Germany in the early 1950s, while the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was the first major Jewish organization to send an official delegation to Germany, in 1954. Together these organizations collaborated with the Bonn government to contain the "anti-German wave" of Jewish popular sentiment (Wasn't the same game with the Nazi government?).

The Final Solution was a taboo topic of American Jewish elites for yet another reason. Leftist Jews, who were opposed to the Cold War alignment with Germany against the Soviet Union, would not stop harping on it. Remembrance of the Nazi Holocaust was  tagged a communist cause. Strapped with the stereotype that conflated Jews with the Left - in fact, Jews did account for a third of the vote for progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948 - American Jews elite did not shrink from scarifying fellow Jews on the altar of anti-Communism. Offering their files on alleged Jewish subversives to government agencies, the AJC and the ADL actively collaborated in the McCarthy-era witch-hunt. The AJC endorsed the death penalty for the Rosenberg’s, while its monthly publication, "Commentary", editorliazed that they weren't really Jews.

Fearful of association with the political Left abroad and at home, mainstream Jewish organisations opposed cooperation with anti-Nazi German social-democrats as well as boycotts of German manufactures and public demonstrations against ex-Nazi touring the United States.

Ever  anxious to  ingratiate themselves with  US ruling elites and dissociate themselves from the Jewish Left, organized American Jewry did invoke the Nazi holocaust in one special context: to denounce the USSR. "Soviet (anti-Jewish) policy opens up opportunities which not be overlooked," an internal AJC memorandum quoted by Novick gleefully noted, "to reinforce certain aspects of AJC domestic program." Typically, that meant bracketing the Nazi Final Solution with Russian anti-Semitism. "Stalin will succeed where Hitler failed,"  Commentary  direly predicted. "He will finally wipe out the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.... The parallel with the policy of Nazi extermination is almost complete." Major American Jews organisations even denounced the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary as "only the first station on the way to a Russian Auschwitz."

Everything changed with the June 1967-Arab-Israeli war. By virtually all accounts, it was only after this conflict that the Holocaust became a fixture in American Jewish life. The standard explanation of  this transformation  is that  Israel's  extreme  isolation and
vulnerability  during  the June war  revived memories of the  Nazi extermination. In fact, this analysis misrepresents both the reality of Mideast power relations at the time at the nature of the evolving relationship between American Jewish elites and Israel.

Just as mainstream American Jews organisations downplayed the Nazi Holocaust  in the years  after  World War II  to conform to the US governments Cold War priorities,  so their attitude to Israel kept in step with US policy. From early on, American Jewish elites harbored profound misgivings about a Jewish state. Uppermost was their fear that it would lend credence to the "dual loyalty" charge.... Indeed, the AJC supported Israel's founding mainly out of fear that a domestic backlash against Jews might ensue if the Jewish DPs in Europe were not quickly settled.

(...) To secure US interests in the Middle East, the Eisenhower Administration balanced support for Israel and for Arab nations, …

(...) "The kidnapping of Eichmann," Erich Fromm opined, "is an act of lawlessness of exactly the type of which the Nazis themselves ... have been guilty."

Then came the June war. Impressed by Israel's overwhelming display of force, the United States moved to incorporate it as a strategic asset.

For American Jewish elites, Israel's subordination to US power was a windfall.  Zionism had sprung from the premise that assimilation was a pipe dream, that Jews would always be perceived as potentially disloyal aliens. To resolve this dilemma, Zionists sought to establish a homeland for the Jews (rem.: it means, there is no any historical claim to Palestine!).  In fact, Israel's founding exacerbated the problem, at any rate for Diaspora Jewry: it gave the charge of dual loyalty institutional expression. (...) Whereas before 1967 Israel conjured the bogy of dual loyalty, it now connotes super-loyalty (...)

Accordingly, American Jewish elites suddenly discovered Israel. After the 1967 war, Israel's military elan could be celebrated because its guns pointed in the right direction - against America's enemies. (...) From bit players,  they (Jews)  could advance to top billing in the cold War drama. Thus for American Jewry, as well as the United States, Israel became a strategic asset.
(...)  

After the June war, mainstream of Jewish organisations worked full time to firm up the American-Israeli alliance.  (...)  Coverage of Israel in The New York Times increased dramatically after June 1967. 1955 and 1965  entries for Israel in The NYT Index each filled 60 column inches. The entry for Israel in 1975 ran to fully 260 column inches. "When I want to feel better," Wiesel reflected in 1973, "I turn to the Israeli items in the NYT." Like Podhoretz, many mainstream American Jewish intellectuals also suddenly found "religion" after the June war. Novick reports that Lucy Dawidowicz, the doyenne of Holocaust literature, had once been a "sharp critic of Israel." Israel could not demand reparations from Germany, she railed in 1953, while evading responsibility for displaced Palestinian: "Morality cannot be that flexible." (...)

(....) Noam Chomsky has suggested that these (American) "supporters of Israel" should more properly be called "supporters of the moral degeneration and ultimate destruction of Israel."

To protect their strategic asset, American Jewish elites "remembered" The Holocaust...

(...) The Holocaust industry sprung up only after Israel's overwhelming display of military dominance and flourished amid extreme Israeli triumphalism. The standard interpretative framework cannot explain these anomalies.

(...) Novick typically reports: "Among American Jews.... the situation of a vulnerable and isolated Israel came to be seen as terrifyingly similar to that of European Jewry thirty years earlier. (...)

(....)

While American Jewish organisations could do nothing to alter the recent past in the Middle East, and precious little to affect its future, they could work to revive memories of the Holocaust. So the "fading" memories" explanation offered an agenda for action.

(...) Why was "reviv(ing) memories of the Holocaust" the only agenda for action? Why not support the international consensus that called for Israel's withdrawal from the lands occupied in the June war as well as a "just and lasting peace" between Israel and its Arab neighbors (UN Resolution 242)?

(...,) The Holocaust proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel.(...)

It was not Israel's alleged weakness and isolation, not the fear of a "second Holocaust," but rather its proven strength and strategic alliance with the United States that led Jewish elites to gear up the Holocaust industry after June 1967. However unwittingly, Novick provides the best evidence to support that conclusion. To prove that power considerations, not the Nazi Final Solution, determined American policy toward Israel, he writes: "It was when the Holocaust was freshest in the mind of American leaders - the first twenty five years after the end of the war - that the United States was least supportive of Israel.(...) It was not when Israel was perceived as weak and vulnerable, but after it demonstrated its strength, in the Six Day War, that American aid to Israel changed from a trickle to a flood".

There are also domestic sources of the Holocaust industry.(...); Jews accordingly sought their own ethnic identity in the Holocaust.

(...). In fact, identity politics and The Holocaust have taken hold among American Jews not because of victim status but because they are not victims.

As anti-Semitic barriers quickly fell away after World War II, Jews rose to preeminence in the United States. According to Lip set and Raab, per capita Jewish income is almost double that of non-Jews; sixteen of the forty wealthiest Americans are Jews; (...) The list goes on. Far from constituting an obstacle to success, Jewish identity has become the crown of that success.(...)

(...) What an American Jewish child inherits, according to novelist Philip Roth, is "no body of law, no body of learning and no language, and finally, no Lord ... but a kind of psychology: and the psychology can be translated in three word: "Jews are better."

(...)
(...) Just as Israelis, armed to the teeth by the United States, courageously put unruly Palestinians in their place, so American Jews courageously put unruly Blacks in their place.

Lording it over those least able to defend themselves; that is the real content of organized American Jewry's reclaimed courage.

                           HOAXERS, HUCKSTERS, AND HISTORY

 "Holocaust awareness,"  the respected  Israeli writer  Boas Evron observes, is actually "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 motivate dissent from as support for Israeli policy. Refracted 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 Holocaust marks a categorically unique historical event; (2) The Holocaust marks the climax of an irrational, eternal Gentile hatred 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, Novick rightly observes, The Holocaust is effectively a "mystery" religion. Thus Wiesel intones that the Holocaust "leads into darkness," "negates all answers," "lies outside, if not beyond, history," "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 divine its mystery. And yet, The Holocaust mystery, Wiesel avows, is "noncommunicable"; "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 account for the hostility directed at Israel. The Jewish state is the only safeguard 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, "simply 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 "fundamentally 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 know gratitude as we do; we are forever grateful." Ever chastised, 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 accomplished gentiles resent smaller numbers of more accomplished Jews." Albeit negatively, The Holocaust thus confirmed the choosiness of  Jews. Because Jews are better, or more successful, they suffered ire of Gentiles, who then murdered them.

(...)                           

(...)

The first major Holocaust hoax was The Painted Bird, by Polish émigré 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 sensitivity." (...)

(...) 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 in 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 misappropriation 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 swissborn 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 "Hitler’s 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 works that 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: derived by pathological hatred, the German people leapt at the opportunity 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 anti-semitic policies to such an extent that it was easy to recruit the murderers." Questioned about this discrepancy, Bauer replied: "I cannot see any contradiction between these statements." (... Without getting red!).

(...) Small wonder that Goldhagen vigorously championed Wilkomirski: "Hitler's Willing Executioners" is "Fragments" plus footnotes. Replete with gross misrepresentations of source material and internal 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 enterprise. 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 audacious 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 precisely 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 poison, he's (...)

(...) The prominent Israeli historian and journalist, Tom Segev, observed in Haaretz that the campaign verged on "cultural terrorism."

(...)
Consider, finally, the pattern: Wiesel and Gutman supported Goldhagen; 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 spectrum, Israeli commentators compared Serbia's actions in Kosovo with Israeli actions in 1948 against Palestinians.(...)

Not all revisionist literature - however 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 sponsor 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 challenge to the Holocaust Museum. *The Nazis systematically murdered* *as many as a half-million Gypsies, with proportional losses* *roughly equal to the Jewish genocide.* ...

Multiple motives lurked behind the museum's marginalizing of the Gypsy genocide. First: one simply couldn't compare the loss of Gypsy and Jewish life. (...)

Second: acknowledge the Gypsy genocide meant the loss of an exclusive Jewish franchise over The Holocaust, (...)" Third: if the Nazi persecuted Gypsies and Jews alike, the dogma that The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennium 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", which claimed 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."

                                          THE DOUBLE SHAKEDOWN

The term  "Holocaust survivor"  originally designated those who suffered  the unique trauma of the Jewish ghettos, concentration camps and slave labor camps, often in sequence.  The figure for these Holocaust survivors at war's end is generally put at some 100,000.  The number of living survivors cannot be more than a quarter of this figure now. Because enduring the camps became a crown of martyrdom, many Jews who spent the war elsewhere represented themselves as camp survivors. Another strong motive behind this misrepresentation, however, was material. The postwar German government provided compensation to Jews who had been in ghettos or camps. Many Jews fabricated their pasts to meet this eligibility requirement. "If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one," my used to exclaim, "who did Hitler kill?"

(...) Even within the industry, Deborah Lipstadt, for example, wryly observes that Holocaust survivors frequently maintain they were personally examined by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.

(...)
In recent years, "Holocaust survivor" has been redefined to designate not only those who endured but also those who managed to evade the Nazis. It includes, for example, more than 100,000 Polish Jews who found refuge in the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion of Poland. ... One contributor to a Holocaust web site maintained that, although he spent the war in Tel Aviv, he was a Holocaust survivor because his grandmother died in Auschwitz. To judge by Israel Gutman, Wilkomirski is a Holocaust survivor because his "pain is authentic." The Israeli Prime Minister's office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million. (...)

The reparation issue provides unique insight into the Holocaust industry. As we have seen, aligning with the Unites States in the Cold War, Germany was quickly rehabilitated and the Nazi Holocaust forgotten. Nonetheless, in the early 1950s Germany entered into negotiations with Jewish institutions and signed indemnification agreements. With little if any external pressure, it has paid out to date $60 billion (Remark: Correct, $60 billion in cash and the same amount in military equipment and another levels).

Compare first the American record. Some 4-5 million men, women and children died as result of the US wars in Indochina. (...) (Remark: US killed and destroyed everything. No penny for reparations, no apologies.)

The German government sought to compensate Jewish victims with three different agreements signed in 1952. Individual claimants received payments according to the terms of the Law of Indemnification (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz). A separate agreement with Israel subsidized the absorption and rehabilitation of several hundred thousand Jewish refugees. The German government (...) and so on, et cetera, et cetera ... Other Jewish victims (and many who in fact were not victims), however, received lifetime persons from Germany (...)

(...)
(...) Large sums were circuitously channeled to Jewish communities in the Arab world and facilitated Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. They also subsidized cultural undertakings such as Holocaust museums and university chairs in Holocaust studies, as well as a Yad Vashem showboat pensioning "righteous Gentiles."

More recently, the Claims Conference sought to appropriate for it denationalized Jewish properties in the former East Germany worth hundreds of millions of dollars that rightfully belonged to living Jewish heirs. As the Conference came under attack by defrauded Jews for this and other abuses, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg cast a plague on both sides, sneering that "it's not about justice, it's a fight for money." (...)

(...)  Foreword for the day of November 25., 2000: In the Evening about 9.30 I heard a piece of reading from Wilkomirski book through the Deutsche Welle. After the reading few people discussed and pointed out the valuable history book of Wilkomirski. It was very funny. The literati did know, that Wilkomirski a Swiss born non-Jew citizen, and never met with the Holocaust. Germans are so ingenious and silly. They are still and will. Therefore it's no wonder that Jews will always use the "Auschwitz-Keule".

In recent years, the Holocaust industry has become an outright extortion racket (Re.: in German Auschwitz-Keule). (...)

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, Switzerland's president formally apologized in May 1995 for denying Jews refuge during the Nazi holocaust. (...)

The world Jewish Congress, a moribund organization until its campaign denouncing Kurt Waldheim as a war criminal, leapt at this new opportunity to flex its muscle. (...)

In late 1995, Edgar Bronfman, president of the WJC and the son of a Jewish Claims Conference official, and Rabbi Israel Singer, the secretary-general of the WJC and a real estate tycoon, met with the Swiss bankers. Bronfman, heir to the Seagram liquor fortune (his personal wealth is estimated a $3 billion), would later modestly inform the Senate banking Committee that he spoke "on behalf of the Jewish people" as well as "the 6 million, those who cannot speak for themselves." (...) Before the Swiss were finally brought to their knees, the WJC, working with the gamut of Holocaust institutions (including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Simon Wiesenthal Center), had mobilized the entire US political establishment. From President Clinton, who buried the hatchet with D'Amato (the Whitewater hearings were still going on) to lend support, through eleven agencies of the federal government and as well as the House and the Senate, down to state and local governments across the country, bipartisan pressures were brought to bear as one public official after another lined up to denounce the perfidious Swiss.

Using the House and the Senate banking committees as a springboard, the Holocaust industry orchestrated a shameless campaign of vilification. (...) Gregg Rickman, D'Amato's chief legislative aide, boasts in his account that the Swiss bankers were forced "into the court of public opinion where we controlled the agenda. The bankers were on our turf and conveniently, we were judge, jury, and executioner." (...)

(...) "The last thing the banks need is negative publicity," Rabbi Singer explained "We will do it until the banks say, 'Enough. (...)

(...)
(...) The extract of the hearings, however, was not to inform but, in journalist Isabel Vincent's words, "to create sensational stories." If enough mud was flung, it was reasonably assumed, Switzerland will give in.

(...)
The main weapon to break Swiss resistance, however, was the economic boycott. "Now the battle will be much dirtier," Avraham Burg, chair of the Jewish Agency and Israel's point man in the Swiss banking case, warned in January 1997. "Until now we have held back Jewish pressure.“...

(...)

In July 1998 Hevesi and McCall threatened stiff new sanctions. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan and California joined in within few days. In mid-August the Swiss finally caved in. (...)

"You have been a true pioneer in this saga," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated D'Amato. "The result is not only an achievement in material terms but a moral victory and a triumph of the spirit." Pity he didn't say "the will".

(...)

Already in the late 1940s, when the US was pressing Switzerland to identify dormant Jewish accounts, the Swiss protested that Americans should first attend to their own backyard. In mid-1997 New York Governor Pataki announced the creation of a State Commission on the Recovery of Holocaust Victims' Assets to process claims against Swiss banks. Unimpressed, the Swiss suggested that the Commission might more usefully process claims against US and Israeli banks. Indeed Bower recalls that Israeli bankers had "refused to release lists of dormant accounts of Jews" after the 1948 war, (… ()European Jews (...) and opened bank accounts in Palestine during the British mandate to support the Zionist enterprise or prepare for future immigration.) In October 1998, the WJC and WLRO "reached a decision in principle to refrain from dealing with the subject of assets in Israel of Holocaust victims on the ground that responsibility for this lay with the Israeli government" (Haaretz). The writ of these Jewish organizations thus runs to Switzerland but not to Jewish state. The most sensational charge leveled against the Swiss banks was that they required death certificates from the heirs of Nazi holocaust victims. Israeli banks have also demanded such documentation. One searches in vain, however, for documentations of the "perfidious Israelis." To demonstrate that "no moral equivalence can be drawn between banks in Israel and Switzerland," the New York Times quoted a former Israeli legislator: "Here it was negligence at best; in Switzerland it was a crime." Comment in superfluous.

(...)
For the Holocaust industry, the Swiss banks affair - like the postwar torments endured by Swiss Holocaust "survivor" Binjamin Wilkomirski - was yet further proof of an ineradicable and irrational Gentile malice. The affair pointed up the gross intensively of even a "liberal democratic, European country," Itamar Levin concludes, to "those who carried the physical and emotional scars of the worst crime in history“ (...)

Material compensation for the Holocaust "is the greatest moral test facing Europe at the end of the twentieth century," Itamar Levin maintains. (...) Indeed, emboldened by its success in shaking down the Swiss, the Holocaust industry moved quickly to "test" the rest of Europe. The next stop was Germany (Remark: crowned with success, however, Germany is paying since 1954, $ 60 billion, same amount $60 billions for military equipments and many other levels).

After the Holocaust industry settled with Switzerland in August 1998, it deployed the same winning strategy against Germany in September. (Rem.: After many pressure negotiations with Germany, Chancellor Schroeder was angry and pronounced "no penny more than $6 billion." Here after President Clinton cited him to the White House and urged him to pay, otherwise (...) Chancellor Schroeder accepted $10 billion. The rest of the story is well known). The same three legal teams (Hausfeld-Weiss, Fagan-Swift, and the World Council of Orthodox Jewish Communities) initiated class-action lawsuits against German private industry, demanding no less than $ 20 billion in compensation. Brandishing the threat of an economic boycott, New York City Comptroller Hevesi began to "monitor" the negotiations in April 1999. (...), Congressman Rick Lazio bluntly urged the Committee "to focus on the private sector German companies, in particular, those who do business in the US." To wipe up public hysteria against Germany, the Holocaust industry took out multiple full-page newspaper advertisements in October. The awful did not suffice; all the Holocaust buttons were pressed. An ad denouncing the German pharmaceutical corporation Bayer dragged in Josef Mengele, although the evidence that Bayer "directed" his murderous experiments was nil. Recognizing that the Holocaust juggernaut was irresistible, the Germans caved in to a substantial monetary settlement by year's end. The Times of London credited this capitulation to the "Holocash" campaign in the United States. "We could not have reached agreement," Eizenstat later told the House Banking Committee, "without the personal involvement and leadership of President Clinton (...) as well as other senior officials" in the US government.

The Holocaust industry charged that Germany had a "moral and legal obligation" to compensate former Jewish laborers. "These slave laborers deserve a small measure of justice," Eizenstat pleaded, "in the few years remaining in their lives." Yet, as indicated above, it is simply untrue that they hadn't received any compensation. Jewish slave laborers were covered under the original agreements with Germany compensating concentration camps inmates. The German government indemnified former Jewish slave laborers for "deprivation of liberty" and for "harm to life and limb." (...)Those who sustained enduring injuries each received a substantial lifetime pension. Germany also endowed the Jewish Claims Conference with approximately a billion dollars in current values for those Jewish ex-camp inmates who received minimum compensation. (...) Still, fifty years later the Holocaust industry was demanding money for "needy Holocaust victims" who had been living in poverty because the Germans allegedly never compensated them.

(...)

Whether "needy Holocaust victims" will ever see any of the new German monies is an open question. The Claims Conference wants a large chunk set  aside as its own "Special Fund." According to the Jerusalem Report, the Conference has "plenty to gain by ensuring that the survivors get nothing." Israeli Knesset member Michael Kleiner (Herut) lambasted the Conference as a "Judenrat, carrying on the Nazis' work in different ways." It's a "dishonest body, conducting itself with professional secrecy, and tainted by ugly public and moral corruption," he charged, "a body of darkness that is maltreating Jewish Holocaust survivors and their heirs, while it sits on a huge pile of money belonging to private individuals, but is doing everything to inherit (the money) while they are still alive." (...) Rabbi Israel Singer (...) "We don't want that money paid to heirs. We want that money to be paid to victims." Yet, Haaretz reports that Singer has been the main proponent of using Holocaust compensation monies "to meet the needs of the entire Jewish people, and not just those Jews who were fortunate enough to survive the Holocaust and live into old age."

In a US Holocaust Memorial Museum publication, Henry Friedlander, the respected Nazi holocaust historian and ex-Auschwitz inmate, sketched this numerical picture at war's end:

If there were about 715,000 prisoners in the camp at the start of 1945, and at least one third that is, about 238,000 - perished during spring 1945, we can assume that at most 475,000 prisoners survived. As Jews had been systematically murdered, and only those chosen for labor - in Auschwitz about 15 percent - had even a chance to survive, we must assume that Jews made up no more than 20 percent of the concentration camp population.

"We can thus estimate, he concluded, "that the number of Jewish survivors numbered no more than 100,000." (Remark: In case all 100,000 survivors live until our day, every one became just from Germany's last 10 billion dollars compensation 100,000 US dollars) (Re.: Jewish Holocaust industrialists were always very good acrobats of figures.) (...) In an authoritative study, Leonard Dinnerstein reported: "Sixty thousand Jews (...) walked out of the concentration camps. Within a week more than 20,000 of them had died."

(...) Yet, as it entered into negotiations with Germany, the Holocaust industry demanded compensation for 135,000 still living former Jewish slave laborers. The total number of still living former slave laborers, Jewish and non-Jewish, was put at 250,000 (look at Wilkomirski, a non-Jew Jewish survivor who never was in a camp!?!). In other words, the number of former Jewish slave laborers still alive increased nearly tenfold from May 1999, (…) In fact, to believe the Holocaust industry, more former Jewish slave laborers are alive today than a half-century ago. (Is it same game, "the 6 millions victims of the Holocaust ?"

(...)

(...) How can one reconcile these established facts, however, with the claim that many hundreds of thousands of Jewish slave laborers survived the camps? (...)

In a full-page New York Times advertisement, Holocaust industry luminaries such as Elie Wiesel, Rabbi Marvin Hier, and Steven T. Katz condemned "Syria's Denial of the Holocaust." (...) Regrettably, the Syrian charge is true. (...)

The shakedown of Switzerland and Germany has been only a prelude to the grand finale: the shakedown of Eastern Europe. (...)

(...) Claiming to be the legitimate heir of those who perished in order to appropriate their assets could easily be mistaken for grave-robbery. On the other hand, the Holocaust industry doesn't need a mobilized public opinion. With the support of key US officials, (Remark: M. Albright, W. Cohen, R. Robin, D. Glickmann, G. Tenet, S. Berger, E. Liebermann, S. Eizenstat, D. Ross, M. Indyk (...) et cetera, and so on ...) it can easily break the feeble resistance of already prostrate nations.

(...) "Polish officials fear", Jewish Week reports, that the demand  "could bankrupt the nation." When Poland's Parliament proposed limits on compensation to avert insolvency, Elan Steinberg of the WJC denounced the legislation as "fundamentally an anti-American
act."

Tightening the screws on Poland, Holocaust industry attorneys filed a class-action lawsuit in Judge Korman's court to compensate "Aging and dying Holocaust survivors." (...) dispatched a letter to the Polish Parliament demanding "comprehensive legislation that  would return 100% of all property and assets seized during the Holocaust." (Rem.: Don't demand, better is to send all Polish Jews back to Poland, all German Jews should return back to Germany, all Jews from East Europe back to East Europe, all American Jews back to America. However, every Jew back from where he came. The Problem will be solved.)

(...)

(...) Eizenstat urged Congress to "elevate" Holocaust compensation, put it "high on the list" of requirements for those East European countries that are seeking entry into the OECD, the WTO, the European Union, NATO, and the council of Europe: "They will listen if you speak.(...) They will get the hint."  Israel Singer of the WJC called on Congress to "continue looking at the shopping list" in order to "check" that every country pays up. "It is extremely important that the countries involved in the issue understand," Congressman Benjamin Gilman of the House International Relations Committee said, "That their response (...) is one of several standards by which the United States assesses its bilateral Relationship." (...)  Recalling his  "fights"  with the Romanian Prime Minister, Hirschson testified: "But I ask one remark, in the middle of fighting, and it changed that atmosphere. I told him, you know, in two days I am going to be in a hearing here in Congress. What  do you want me to tell them in the hearing? Whole atmosphere was changed. (...)

(...) To justify the pressures exerted on Eastern Europe, Eizenstat explained that a hallmark of "Western" morality is to "return or pay compensation for communal and private property wrongfully appropriated." (...) Eizenstat is a senior US government official and a prominent supporter of Israel. Yet, judging by the respective claims of Native Americans and Palestinians, neither the US nor Israel has yet made the transition.

(...)In January 2000 officials from nearly fifty states, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel (Rem.: including Mr. Arafat also), attended a major Holocaust education conference in Stockholm. The conference's final declaration underlined the international community's "sole men responsibility" to fight  the evils of genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism and xenophobia. A Swedish reporter afterward asked Barak about the Palestinian refugees. On principle, Barak replied, he was against even one refugee coming to Israel: "We cannot accept moral, legal, or other responsibility for refugees." Plainly the conference was a huge success.

(...) Insurance companies, banks, art museums, private industry, tenants and farmers in nearly every European country are under the Holocaust industry gun. (...) The Holocaust may yet turn out to be the "greatest robbery in the history of mankind."

When Israel first entered into negotiations with Germany for reparations after the war, historian Ilan Pappe reports, Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett proposed transferring a part to Palestinian refugees, "in order to rectify what has been called the small injustice /the Palestinian tragedy), caused by the more terrible one, (the Holocaust)." Nothing ever came of the proposal. A prominent Israeli academic has suggested using some of the funds from the Swiss banks and German firms for the "compensation of Palestinian Arab refugees." Given that almost all survivors of the Nazi Holocaust have already passed away, this would seem to be a sensible proposal.

In vintage WJC style, Israel Singer made the "startling announcement" on 13 March 2000 that a newly declassified US document revealed that Austria was holding heirless Holocaust-era assets of Jews worth yet another $10 billion (Remark: See you later in  "Austria."). Singer also charged that "fifty percent of America's total art is looted Jewish art." The Holocaust industry has clearly gone berserk.

                                                    CONCLUSION

It remains to consider the impact of the Holocaust in the United States. In doing so, I also want to engage Peter Novick's own critical remarks on the topic.

Apart from Holocaust memorials, fully seventeen states mandate or recommended Holocaust programs in their schools, and many colleges and universities have endowed chairs in Holocaust studies. Hardly a week passes without a major Holocaust-related story in the New York Times. The number of scholarly studies devoted to the Nazi Final Solution is conservatively estimated at over 10,000. Consider by comparison scholarship on the Hetacomb in the Congo. Between 1891 and 1911, some 10 million Africans perished in the course of Europe's exploitation of Congolese ivory and rubber resources. Yet, the first and only scholarly volume in English directly devoted to this topic was published two years ago.

(...) Decrying the tawdry purposes to which the Holocaust is put, Elie Wiesel declared, "I swear to avoid (...) vulgar spectacles." Yet Novick reports that "the most imaginative and subtle Holocaust photo op came in 1996 when Hillary Clinton, then under heavy fire for various alleged misdeeds, appeared in the gallery of the House during her husband's (much televised) State of the Union address, flanked by their daughter, Chelsea, and Elie Wiesel." For Hillary Clinton, Kosovo refugees put to flight by Serbia during the NATO  bombing recalled Holocaust scenes in Schindler's List. "People who learn history from Spielberg movies," a Serbian dissident tartly rejoined, "should not tell us how to live our lives."

The "pretense that the Holocaust is an American memory," Novick further argues, is a moral evasion. It "leads to the shirking of those responsibilities that do belong to Americans as they confront their past, their present, and their future." He makes an important point. It is much easier to deplore the crimes of others than to look at ourselves. (...) In fact, Hitler modeled his conquest of the East on the American conquest of the West. During the first half of this century, a majority of American states enacted  sterilization laws and tens of thousands of Americans were involuntarily sterilized. The Nazis explicitly invoked this US precedent when then enacted their own sterilization laws. The notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of the franchise and forbade  miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews. Blacks in the American South suffered the same legal disabilities and were the object of much greater spontaneous and sanctioned popular violence then the Jews in prewar Germany.

To highlight unfolding crimes abroad, the US often summons memories of the Holocaust. The most revealing point, however, is when the US invokes the Holocaust. Crimes of official enemies such as the Khmer Rouge bloodbath in Cambodia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo recall the Holocaust; crimes in which the US is complicit do not.

Just as the Khmer Rouge atrocities were unfolding in Cambodia, the US-backed Indonesian government was slaughtering one-third of the population in East Timor. Yet unlike Cambodia, the East Timor genocide did not rate comparison with the Holocaust; it didn't even rate news coverage. Just as the Soviet Union was committing what the Simon Wiesenthal Center called  "another genocide" in Afghanistan, the US-backed regime in Guatemala was perpetrating what the Guatemalian Truth Commission recently called a "genocide" against the indigenous Mayan population. President Reagan dismissed the charges against the Guatemalian government as a "bum rap." To honor Jeane Kirkpatrick's achievement as Chief Reagan administration apologist for the unfolding crimes in Central America, the Simon Wiesenthal Center awarded her the Humanitarian of the Year award. Simon Wiesenthal was privately beseeched before the award ceremony to reconsider. He refused. Elie Wiesel was privately asked to intercede with the Israeli government, a main weapon supplier for the Guatemalian butchers. He too refused. The Carter Administration invoked the memory of The Holocaust as it  sought haven for Vietnamese "boat people" fleeing the Communist regime. The Clinton Administration forgot The Holocaust as it forced back Haitian "boat people" fleeing US-supported death squads.

Holocaust memory loomed large as the US-led NATO bombing of Serbia commenced in the spring 1999. As we have seen, Daniel Goldhagen compared Serbian crimes against Kosovo with the Final Solution and, at President Clinton's bidding, Elie Wiesel journeyed to Kosovar refugee camps in Macedonian and Albania. Already before Wiesel went to shed tears on cue for the Kosovars, however, the US-backed Indonesian regime had resumed where it left off in the late 1970s, perpetrating new massacres in East Timor. The Holocaust vanished from memory, however, as the Clinton Administration acquiesced in the bloodletting. "Indonesia matters,! a Western diplomat explained, "and East Timor doesn't."

Novick points to passive US complicity in human disasters dissimilar in other respects yet comparable in scale to the Nazi extermination. Recalling, for example, the million children killed in the Final Solution, he observes that American presidents do little more that utter pieties as, worldwide, many times that number of children "die of malnutrition and preventable diseases" every year. One might also consider a pertinent case of active US complicity. after the United States-led coalition devastated Iraq in 1991 to punish  "Saddam-Hitler," the United States and Britain forced murderous UN sanctions on that hapless country in an attempt to depose him. As in the Nazi holocaust, a million children have likely perished. Questioned on national television about the grisly death toll in Iraq, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright replied that "the price is worth it."

"The very extremity of the Holocaust," Novick argues, "seriously limit(s) its capacity to provide lessons applicable to our everyday world." (...) In fact, it was the Nazi holocaust that discredited the scientific racism that was so pervasive a feature of American intellectual life before World War II.

(...) Slavery occupied roughly the same place in the moral universe of the late nineteenth century as the Nazi holocaust does today. (...)

Organized American Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel's and its own morally indefensible policies. Pursuit of these policies has put Israel and American Jewry in a structurally congruent position: the fates of both now dangle from a slender thread running to American ruling elites. Should these elites ever decide that Israel is liability or American Jewry expendable, the thread may be cut. No doubt this is speculation - perhaps unduly alarmist, perhaps not. (Really this is just speculation, and will remain a speculation, at least for the being time, however, the influence and power of the American Jewry are invincible in-between.)

(...) If Israel fell out of favor with the United Sates, many of those leaders who now stoutly defend Israel would courageously divulge their disaffection from the Jewish state and would excoriate American Jews for turning Israel into a religion. And if US ruling circles decided to scapegoat Jews, we should not be surprised if American Jewish leaders acted exactly as their predecessors did during the Nazi holocaust. "We didn't figure that the Germans would put in the Jewish element," Yitzhak Zuckerman, an organizer of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, recalled, "that Jews would lead Jews to death."                             

During a series of public exchanges in the 1980s, many prominent German and non-German scholars argued against "normalizing" the infamies of Nazism. The fear was that normalization would induce moral complacency. However valid the argument may have been then, it no longer carries conviction. The staggering dimensions of Hitler's Final Solution are by now well known. And isn't the "normal" history of humankind replete with horrifying chapters of inhumanity? A crime need not be aberrant to warrant atonement. The challenge today is to restore the Nazi holocaust as a rational subject of inquiry. Only then can we learn from it. The abnormality of the Nazi holocaust springs not from the event itself but from the exploitive industry that grown up around it. The Holocaust industry has been always bankrupt. What remains to openly declare it so. (Rem.: Same with Zionism). The time is long past to put it out of business. The noblest gesture for those who perished is to preserve their memory, learn from their suffering and let them, finally, rest in peace.

Izzeddin Musa, Nov. 2000, eingestellt 03.05.2019