April 18, 2005
In News
Editor’s note: A backup is located here .
See also The Real Axis of Evil.
The Marketplace of Ideas: Know Who You Are Listening To or Reading.
The Norman Finkelstein Top Ten Lists
(If you come across more, please feel free to add them to the ever-growing list. As Einstein said: “The difference between genius and stupidity is that there are limits to genius.”)
04.18.2005 | Click here for the original MS Word document pamphlet on campusj.com.
The 10 Nuttiest Things “The Nutty Assistant Professor” Has Said
10. …on Finkelstein’s “International Jewish Conspiracy”
“All opinion-leaders, from the left to the right, are Jews…The Silence around my book in the US—if this is not a conspiracy, then what is one?”(1)
Finkelstein’s “international Jewish conspiracy” includes Steven Spielberg, Leon Uris, critics of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and NBC:
…on Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List”
“Give me a better reason!…Who profits [from the movie]? Basically, there are two beneficiaries from the dogmas [of Schindler’s List]: American Jews and the American administration…”(2)
…on Leon Uris’ “Exodus”
“The name of the character is Ari Ben Canaan because Ari is the diminutive for Aryan. It is the whole admiration for this blond haired, blue eyed type.” (3) (The fact is that Ari a traditional biblical name meaning lion.)
“[T]he Israeli establishment likes the blue eyed, blonde haired Aryan types as a racial group.” (4)
…on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats”
“Some people [who support the thesis of a new anti-Semitism think the musical] Cats is a codeword for K-A-T-Z, Katz.”(5)
…on the NBC series “Holocaust”
“In 1978, NBC produced the series Holocaust. Do you believe, it was a coincidence, 1978? Just at this time, when peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt took place in Camp David?” (6)
9. …on David Irving
David Irving, the notorious Holocaust denier who claims there were no gas chambers and that Hitler was “the Jews’ greatest friend,” is “a good historian” who has “made an ‘indispensable’ contribution to our knowledge of World War II.” (7)
8. …on Jews as devil worshipers
“I don’t know about Judaism, but [Israel Shahak, an anti-Jewish zealot who wrote that Jews worship Satan] did. He knew it well. He took an interest in it and I have no doubt that what he wrote is accurate.” (8)
7. …on Finkelstein’s own research and “scholarly independence”
…on not doing research
Question: “[Mr. Finkelstein] If you are a historian, why didn’t you write a serious study about the subject? Why didn’t you do research yourself? Interview people, etc.?”
Finkelstein’s answer: “Why should I interview people?” (9)
…on obeying Chomsky
“I’m a person of the left, and when you get a call from Professor Chomsky [asking you to ‘find’ that a pro-Israeli book you haven’t even read was a ‘fraud’], his wish is your command.” (10)
6. …on Holocaust survivors
“Finkelstein says…that most ‘survivors’ are bogus.”(11)
“I am not exaggerating when I say that one out of three Jews you stop in the street in New York will claim to be a survivor.”(12)
“‘If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one,’ my mother used to exclaim, ‘who did Hitler kill then?'” (13)
5. …on Israel
“[I] can’t imagine why Israel’s apologists would be offended by a comparison with the Gestapo.” (14)
Israel’s human rights record is “interchangeable with Iraq’s” when it was ruled by Saddam Hussein. (15)
4. …on Osama bin Laden
“Frankly, part of me says…’you know what, we deserve the problem on our hands because some things Bin Laden says are true’. One of the things he said on that last tape was that ‘until we live in security, you’re not going to live in security’, and there is a certain amount of rightness in that.” (16)
3. …on Hezbollah
“[T]he honorable thing now is to show solidarity with Hezbollah as the US and Israel target it for liquidation. Indeed, looking back my chief regret is that I wasn’t even more forceful in publicly defending Hezbollah against terrorist intimidation and attack.” (17)
2. …on Pan Am 103
“Libya had nothing to do with it [the blowing up of Pan Am 103, for which Libya has acknowledged responsibility] but they are playing along. And that is the thing with the Swiss banks …because they are so afraid of those hoodlums…. They are ruthless and reckless thugs [referring not to Libyan terrorists or Nazi war criminals, but to Jewish leaders seeking compensation for Nazi crimes].” (18)
1. …on blaming the victims
“…the worst enemies in the struggle against real anti-Semitism are the philo-Semites… Alongside Israel [“American Jewish elites”] are the main fomenters of anti-Semitism in the world today… They need to be stopped.” (19)
The 10 Most Devastating Things People Have Said About Finkelstein
10. “You don’t know who Finkelstein is. He’s poison, he’s a disgusting self-hating Jew, he’s something you find under a rock.” (20)
Leon Wieseltier,
literary editor of The New Republic
9. “Norman Finkelstein [is] a writer celebrated by neo-Nazi groups for his Holocaust revisionism and comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany.”(21)
Marc Fisher,
Reporter of The Washington Post
8. “[C]rackpot ideas, some of them mirrored almost verbatim in the propaganda put out by neo-Nazis around the world.” (22)
Gabriel Schoenfeld,
Senior editor of Commentary
7. “Finkelstein is a Jew…who supports anti-Semitism. He is grist to [Germany’s] extreme right’s mill.” (23)
Martin Dietzsch and Alfred Schobert,
German scholars on the issue of neo-Nazism
6. Norman Finkelstein is “the Jewish Ward Churchill.” (24)
5. Finkelstein’s own mentor on Finkelstein
“As concerns particular assertions made by Finkelstein…, the appropriate response is not (exhilarating) “debate” but (tedious) examination of his footnotes. Such an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention… No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites…. I had not thought that (apart from the disreputable fringe) there were Germans who would take seriously this twenty-first century updating of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ I was mistaken.” (25)
Peter Novick,
whose work Finkelstein described as the “initial stimulus” for The Holocaust Industry
“Finkelstein’s book is trash.” (26)
Peter Novick,
for writing The Holocaust Industry
4. “[Because of Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry] I feel like a kid in a candy store… Finkelstein is a Jewish David Irving.” (27) [Irving is the notorious Holocaust denier who claims that Hitler was “the Jews’ greatest friend.”]
Intended to be a compliment by
Ingrid Rimland, wife of neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Ernst Zuendel
3. “This book is, in a word, an ideological fanatic’s view…by a writer so reckless and ruthless in his attacks… [His theory is] both irrational and insidious…an international Jewish conspiracy verges on paranoia and would serve anti-Semites…. [Finkelstein] combines an old-hat 1960’s view of Israel as the outpost of American imperialism with a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, ”The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which warned of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world…. [A] series of vague, undocumented and contradictory assertions…. There is something sad in this warping of intelligence, and in this perversion of moral indignation. There is also something indecent about it, something juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid.” (27)
Omer Bartov,
world leading expert on the issue of the Holocaust
2. “Finkelstein’s work is, from beginning to end, a tendentious series of inventions. …[T]he examples from his article that are deemed to be the strongest are thoroughly misleading and without merit. Finkelstein’s writing is the sort of transparent political polemic that—had others not cynically propped him up as an expert and a champion of truth—would not even merit a response. This is a man who has made a career of attacking Israel’s legitimacy…. His documented inventions about my book, it is worth noting that Finkelstein has never before written anything on the Holocaust or German history and cannot read German…which means that he cannot read many of the sources on which he is passing his ‘expert’ opinion…. [A] man who has arrived overnight to a scholarly field made up of massive scholarly literature, not to mention all the documents, who, to boot, cannot read most of the sources because they are in German.” (29)
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
1. Finkelstein about Finkelstein
“I’m in exile in … Chicago because I was thrown out of every … school in New York.”
“Never has one of my articles been published in a scientific magazine” (30)
The 10 Most Despicable Things Finkelstein Has Said About Others
10. …on Elie Wiesel
“Elie Wiesel [is] resident clown of the Holocaust circus.” (31)
“Elie Wiesel is such a ridiculous character… The expression ‘There’s no business like Shoah-business’ is literally coined for him…He’s turned it into a business, where he casts himself as a person who’s doing all this from anguish and pain and personal sacrifice, while he has made a fortune out of it.” (32)
“Elie Wiesel…is such a wimp.” (33)
9. …on Edgar Bronfman
“Edgar Bronfman is the Jewish Ribbentrop. He is a liquor salesman and then he decides he is going to represent the World Jewry. Where he got the idea to represent the world Jewry. That is really the megalomania of money and power.”
(34)
8. …on Rabbi Singer
“[Bronfman’s] crooked sidekicks, like Rabbi Singer … belongs in jail. He is a blackmailer, an extortionist. He belongs behind bars.” (35)
7. …on Alan Dershowitz
“If [Dershowitz] is [one of the main archetypes of evil in America], then he is a representation of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. You want to believe that there is something profound in evil. But evil has no depth. Look at Adolf Eichmann; he could have been a vacuum salesman. Yes Dershowitz is evil, a
vacuum salesman at Harvard.” (36)
6. “One of the world’s greatest charlatans and frauds.” (37)
5. Dershowitz is “constitutionally incapable of saying anything that is true. I think that if a true word actually came out of [Dershowitz], he would probably implode.” (38)
4. “[Dershowitz] has come to the point where he’s had so many people write so many of his books.… [I]t’s sort of like a Hallmark line for Nazis… [T]hey churn them out so fast that he has now reached a point where he doesn’t even read them.)” (39)
3. …on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre
“The Centre is renowned for its ‘Dachau-meets-Disneyland’ museum exhibitions and ‘the successful use of sensationalistic scare tactics for fund-raising.” (40)
2. Finkelstein’s favorite false attack words against pro-Israel and pro-Holocaust survivor authors:
…on Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial: “spectacular hoax,” “fraud from start to finish,” “plagiarism” (41)
…on Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: “hoax…with footnotes” (42)
…on Alan Dershowitz’ The Case for Israel: “hoax,” “sheer fraud from beginning to end,” “plagiarized” (43)
1. …on the ADL
“[The] Anti-Defamation League. Its main purpose is to defame the character of anyone who criticizes Israel. Its current National Director, or I prefer to say, its grand wizard is Abraham Foxman.” (44)
The 10 Biggest Lies Finkelstein Has Been Caught Telling
10. The Lie: “I had an excellent teaching record, yes I had an excellent publication record.” (45)
The Truth: He has been fired by Brooklyn College, N.Y.U., and several other schools for “incompetence,” “mental instability” and “abuse” of students with politics different from his own, according to a high-ranking official at one of the schools.
His writings have been universally condemned by objective reviewers as “an ideological fanatic’s view,” “crackpot ideas,” and “pure inventions.”
9. The Lie: “[Dershowitz’s] book—well we have to put that in quotes, ‘his book,’ because the likelihood of him having written the book is roughly equal to the likelihood of me performing in the Bolshoi ballet or as a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall…” (46)
The Truth: Dershowitz wrote every book by hand. His manuscripts are preserved in an archive.
8. The Lie: “One third of it [The Case for Israel] is simply plagiarized… [Dershowitz] plagiarized another hoax. [referring to Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial]” (47)
The Truth: That is impossible, since 90% of Dershowitz’ book deals with current issues, occurring after the publication of the Peters book. Moreover, there is not a single word or phrase in Dershowitz’ book that is copied from anyone without attribution.
7. The Lie: “And in the proofs, it says in the footnotes before the footnotes are actually entered. It says: copy from Joan Peters.” (48)
The Truth: The instruction says exactly the opposite. In the advanced proofs, footnote 20, Dershowitz instructed his research assistant to cite to the original sources, as mandated by the Chicago Manual of Style.
6. The Lie: “[I]f you look at the footnotes for the book, he never once—I mean literally, not once—mentions any mainstream human rights organization. Never a mention of Amnesty’s findings, never a mention of Human Rights Watch’s findings, never a mention of B’Tselem findings, Public Committee Against Torture, Physicians for Human Rights—none.” (49)
The Truth: Dershowitz cites Amnesty on at least five occasions, B’Tselem on three occasions and numerous other human rights groups. Amnesty and B’Tselem even appear in the index. Indeed much of the book is a critique of the double standard employed by these very organizations with regard to Israel.
5. The Lie: “If you open up [Dershowitz’s] book, Chutzpah, he says that, well as far as I’m concerned, he says, ethnic cleansings are, quote, a fifth-rate moral issue, and no different – he says, and they’re analogous—I’m now quoting him—they’re now, ethnic cleansings are analogous to massive urban renewal.” (50)
The Truth: This quotation is totally made up. Dershowitz was writing about an entirely different matter: the movement of people as part of a post-conflict “political solution,” such as what occurred after World War II when “approximately fifteen million ethnic Germans” were moved from Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European nations to Germany as part of an international effort to produce increased stability. This is not ethnic cleansing, but, as Dershowitz wrote, it “may constitute a human rights violation” as may the movement of Palestinians following the Arab attack on Israel in 1947-48. (51)
4. The Lie: [I]f you look at the latest book of that raving maniac, Alan Dershowitz, he actually says at the very beginning that he only became actively involved supporting Israel after June 1967.” (52)
The Truth: Dershowitz says no such thing. In fact, Dershowitz began to make that case in early 1967 before the war began. He was among the leaders of the student and faculty campaign at Harvard in support of Israel during weeks leading up to the Six Day War. He was an active Zionist from the age of 10 when he attended a Hebrew speaking Zionist camp. Dershowitz went to a Zionist high school and belonged to a Zionist house plan in college.
3. The Lie: “There was a famous case in 1995 of a Palestinian who was shaken to death while in detention. And nobody disputed the facts—the Israeli pathologist’s office, the forensic pathologists who were brought into the case, eventually it went to the Israeli High Court of Justice—they all agreed. And I’m quoting now from the High Court of Justice Judgment: “All agree that Harizad died from the shaking.” (53)
The Truth: Finkelstein made up the quotation. The Supreme Court actually said that “the suspect expired after being shaken.” The difference between “died from the shaking” and “expired after being shaken” is considerable, especially since the sentence that follows in the decision attributes the death to an extremely rare complication, and the sentence before summarizes the literature as having no examples of anyone dying from shaking.”
2. The Lie: “Several times, … I kept saying [to Dershowitz] things like: ‘The book you claim that you have written.’ And I was expecting him sort of implode. If you tell somebody a book you claim to have written, there is no bigger insult. But he was actually quite calm about it. It is if he would say, ‘That is interesting. How do you know?'” (54)
The Truth: As the transcript of the debate shows, Dershowitz immediately interrupted him and replied: “I proudly wrote it.”
1. The Lie: Finkelstein has called Elie Wiesel a “liar” because “[i]n his memoir Wiesel had written that ‘I read The Critique of Pure Reason—don’t laugh!—in Yiddish.” Finkelstein claims that The Critique of Pure Reason was never translated into Yiddish.” (56)
The Truth: Former Oxford professor Dovid Katz, one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of Yiddish literature, attests to the fact that the Critique of Pure Reason was translated into Yiddish and that he has seen a copy. Moreover, its substance was included in a popular Yiddish philosophy compendium by Chaim Zhitlovsky. Finally, a Yiddish translation of the Critique of Practical Reason is available in the Harvard Library.
Footnotes:
1. NRC Handelsblad, August 5, 2000
2. NRC Handelsblad
3. Norman Finkelstein, “The Holocaust Industry,” March 10, 2004
4. Don Atapattu, “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: A Conversation with Professor Norman Finkelstein,” CounterPunch, December 13, 2001
5. Catalyst Radio Interview With Dr. Finkelstein
6. NRC Handelsblad
7. Anne Applebaum, “The battle for the Holocaust Legacy,” Sunday Telegraph, July 16, 2000; and “The Holocaust Industry,” p. 71
8. Norman Finkelstein, “The Holocaust Industry,” March 10, 2004
9. Victor Frkle, “Shoa Business.” Interview with Norman Finkelstein
10. Norman Finkelstein, Vancouver, May 15, 2004
11. Guardian, Wednesday July 12, 2000
12. Sunday Times of London, June 11, 2000
13. “The Holocaust Industry,” p. 81
14. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, “Canadian Jewish Organizations Charged With Stifling Campus Debate”
15. Link, “A Reply to Henry Kissinger and Fouad Ajami.”
16. Don Atapattu, “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: A Conversation with Professor Norman Finkelstein,” CounterPunch, December 13, 2001
17. Norman Finkelstein, “A Reply to Michael Young”
18. Norman Finkelstein, “The Holocaust Industry,” March 10, 2004
19. The Occupation’s Spillover Effect,” Tikkun, March/April 2005, p. 14
20. accessible at http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=3&ar=41
21. “Campus Should Cultivate Its Seeds of Debate,” Washington Post, December 3, 2002
22. Response to Critics, “Holocaust Reparations,” Commentary, January 2001, p. 20
23. Eds. Martin Dietzsch and Alfred Schobert, “Ein „jüdischer David Irving”?, p. 6
24. Intended to be a compliment by Portland Independent Media Center,
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/03/312868.shtml.
25. Peter Novick, Offene Fenster und Tueren. Ueber Norman Finkelsteins Kreuzzug, in: Petra Steinberger (ed.): Die Finkelstein-Debatte, (Piper Verlag: Muenchen 2001), p. 159 (translated from German)
26. Tagesspiegel, Feb 6, 2001 (translated from German)
27. Eds. Martin Dietzsch and Alfred Schobert, „Ein „jüdischer David Irving”?,p. 11
28. Omer Bartov, “A Tale of Two Holocausts,” New York Times, August 6, 2000, p. 8
29. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, A Comment by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen on: A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth” (found at www.goldhagen.com/csiz2.html.)
30. Norman Finkelstein, “‘I won’t lie down and take the insults,'”Irish Times, July 1, 2003, p. 13; NRC Handelsblad, Aug. 5, 2000
31. Irish Times, “‘I Won’t Lie Down and Take the Insults.'”
32. Victor Frkle, ‘Shoa Business.’ Interview with Norman Finkelstein
33. Norman Finkelstein, “The Holocaust Industry” (March 10, 2004)
34. Norman Finkelstein, interview “The Holocaust Industry” (March 10, 2004)
35. Norman Finkelstein, interview, “The Holocaust Industry” (March 10, 2004)
36. Y.M.D. Fremes, “Interview with Professor Norman G. Finkelstein,” Palestine Chronicle, November 24, 2003
palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20031124204126866
37. Catalyst Radio Interview With Dr. Finkelstein
38. Catalyst Radio Interview With Dr. Finkelstein
39. Norman Finkelstein, New York, Oct. 4, 2003 http://theexperiment.org/articles.php?news_id=1991
40. Norman Finkelstein, The Business of Death, The Guardian, July 12,2000
41. May 15, 2004, public forum at the Vancouver Public Library, “Is Criticism of Israel Anti-Semitic?,” Norman Finkelstein, Disinformation and the Palestine Question: The Not-So-Strange Case of Joan Peters’ “From Time Immemorial,” in: Said, Hitchens (eds.): Blaming the Victims, p. 34
42. Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, p. 64
43. Chicago, February 4, 2004
44. Catalyst Radio Interview With Dr. Finkelstein
45. Interview with Norman Finkelstein, conducted by Don Atapattu, CounterPunch, “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
46. Catalyst Radio Interview With Dr. Finkelstein
47. Chicago, February 12, 2004
48. Calgary, April 3, 2004
49. Chicago, March 18, 2004
50. Vancouver, May 15, 2004
51. see Chutzpah, p. 215
52. October 2003
53. Chicago, March 18, 2004
54. Calgary, April 3, 2004
54. The transcript of the show can be viewed at democracynow.org/static/dershowitzFin.shtml
55. Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, p. 82