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
|
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..
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.
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.
(...) 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."
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. (...)
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 - (...
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.
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?" (...)
...
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). (...)
(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."
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.
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.(...)
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? (...)
(...) 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. (...)
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."
(...) 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 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.“...
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“ (...)
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."
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
