• Dershowitz correspondence with DePaul University

    by  • 11.17.2007 • Beyond Chutzpah, News

    At 12:02 PM 6/15/2006, Patrick Callahan wrote:

    Dear Professor Dershowitz:

    I hope this note finds you well and enjoying your summer.

    I write you about the matter of Norman Finkelstein, who comes up for a
    tenure decision this autumn. To prepare myself, I am investigating your
    charges that he is guilty of various forms of intellectual dishonesty.
    I have contacted Professor Peter Novick to follow up on his indictment
    which you quoted in your letter of November 10, 2005, to Father
    Holtschneider and in the manuscript titled “Literary McCarthyism” which
    you sent me the previous year. I am contacting you, too, to ask your
    assistance. Could you point me to the clearest and most egregious
    instances of dishonesty on Finkelstein’s part?

    Thank you for your assistance in this matter. If you care to contact me
    via telephone, my office number is 773.325.7338. During the summer I
    will be working out of my home most of the time; my number there is
    630.264.0773.

    Best regards,

    Patrick Callahan
    Professor
    Department of Political Science
    DePaul University
    Chicago, IL

    September 18, 2006

    Dear Professor Callahan,

    You asked for some examples of outright lies that Norman Finkelstein has
    told or written.

    I would like to point out from the outset that the ugly and false
    assertions that I will discuss below are not incidental to Finkelstein’s
    purported scholarship; they are his purported scholarship. Finklestein’s
    entire literary catalogue is one preposterous and discredited ad hominem
    attack after another. By his own admission, he has conducted no original
    research, has never been published in a reputable, scientific journal, and
    has made no contributions to our collective historical knowledge. He is a
    defamer of individuals — selected for their ideology — and a spreader of
    false quotations, assertions, and propaganda. There is nothing scholarly
    about his writings. Although he claims to be a “forensic scholar,” he
    limits his defamations to one ideological group and never applies his
    so-called “forensic” tools to his own work or to those who share his
    ideological perspective. One does not deserve the title of “forensic
    scholar” unless he is prepared to apply that science equally across the
    board. Finkelstein merely uses forensic tools available to any first-year
    college student to defame his ideological enemies. That is not forensic
    scholarship; it is propaganda. And he uses the imprimatur of whatever
    university affiliation he currently enjoys in order to try to bestow a
    seemingly-academic pedigree on his demonstrable lies. Unlike some other
    academics, who try to distinguish their scholarly work from their
    polemical writing, Finkelstein always uses his academic title, even in his
    most extreme polemical writing, such as the one accompanying the cartoon,
    attached and discussed below. Clearly he is trying to use the fine
    reputation of DePaul University to lend credibility to his otherwise
    discredited work.

    Of course I am not in a position to refute much of what Finkelstein has
    said (for example, about Holocaust reparations, or about what is found in
    German archives). That work has been comprehensively done by others, such
    as Peter Novick, whose book The Holocaust in American Life Finkelstein has
    characterized as “the initial stimulus for [his] book.” Novick has
    assessed Finkelstein’s “scholarship” in the following terms: “As concerns
    particular assertions made by Finkelstein concerning reparations and
    restitution, and on other matters as well, 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
    suggest that you solicit a detailed letter from Professor Novick, or
    request that he appear in person before the appropriate faculty groups.
    (Novick’s article is enclosed.) Another distinguished scholar, Omer
    Bartov of Brown University, characterized The Holocaust Industry as
    “irrational and insidious,” a “conspiracy theory,” “verg[ing] on
    paranoia,” full of “dubious rhetoric and faulty logic,” “indifference to
    historical facts,” and “sensational ‘revelations’ and outrageous accusations.”

    Most of the writing I have done concerning Finkelstein has been aimed at
    exposing his hateful remarks about “American Jewish elites” (“all
    opinion-leaders, from the left to the right, are Jews”), the Middle East
    (“My chief regret is that I wasn’t more forceful in defending Hezbollah
    …”); his conspiracy theories (Schindler’s List was filmed in order to
    advance the interests of American Jews and Israel); and, of course, his
    slanders against me. Because of my support of Israel, he has compared me
    to “Adolf Eichman [sic],” accused me of expressing “Nazi moral judgments”
    and calling me a “raving maniac,” “hoodlum,” and “one of the world’s great
    charlatans and frauds.” He even accused me of “constitutionally incapable
    of saying anything that is true. I think that if a true word actually
    came out of [Dershowitz], he would probably implode.” In his most recent
    article about me (“Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for
    Assassination”), Finkelstein collaborated with a cartoonist he regularly
    features on his website. The cartoon portrayed me as masturbating in
    rapturous joy while viewing images of dead Lebanese civilians on a TV set
    labeled “Israel peep show,” with a Jewish Star of David prominently
    featured. It can be seen here:
    http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/08/10/18296109.php.

    The cartoon aptly represents the content of Finkelstein’s piece, which
    accuses me of being a “moral pervert” who “missed the climatic scene of
    his little peep show.” This is simply disgusting, more suitable for a
    writer for Hustler than for an assistant professor writing under the
    imprimatur of a major research university. Finkelstein also claims quite
    absurdly that I “sanction mass murder” and “the extermination of the
    Lebanese people.” And he calls me a Nazi not once, but twice, first
    saying that I subscribe to “Nazi ideology” and then comparing me to Nazi
    propagandist Julius Streicher, who was prosecuted at Nuremberg by my
    mentor Telford Taylor. This is consistent with his oft-maid claim, found
    on page 176 of Beyond Chutzpah, that “It is hard to make out any
    difference between the policy Dershowitz advocates and the Nazi
    destruction of Lidice, for which he expresses abhorrence-except that Jews,
    not Germans, would be implementing it.” The trouble is that the policy
    and passage Finkelstein quotes actually says, “[Israel] would then
    publicly declare precisely how it will respond in the event of another
    terrorist act, such as by destroying empty houses in a particular village
    that has been used as a base for terrorists, and naming that village in
    advance.” In Finkelstein’s world, “destroying empty houses” in order to
    deter terrorism is the equivalent of genocide.

    Here, though, are a few of some of the lies that I am absolutely confident
    the Finkelstein told.*

    1. Burt Neuborne

    Finkelstein actually tried to get Burt Neuborne, a professor of law at NYU
    and one of the country’s top civil liberties and Supreme Court advocates,
    disbarred. The supposed grounds for disbarment were Neuborne’s role in
    the Holocaust reparations cases against Swiss banks. He claims that
    Neuborne lied and blackmailed Swiss banks in the process of securing a
    $1.25 billion settlement for survivors. His evidence was the “fact” that
    the Volcker report, an investigation into European banks’ theft from
    survivors, found that “no evidence of systematic destruction of account
    records for the purpose of concealing past behavior has been found.”

    Neuborne’s answered this false charge in a letter-to-the-editor of The
    Nation, dated December 25, 2006:

    (New York City) Norman Finkelstein calls my work on the Swiss bank
    Holocaust case an exercise in blackmail. But the $1.25 billion Swiss bank
    settlement on behalf of Holocaust victims cannot possibly be
    characterized as blackmail unless that term is distorted to include any
    payment made by a defendant who is afraid to go to trial. Did the lawyers
    put pressure on the Swiss banks? You bet we did. We threatened them with
    justice.

    Finkelstein’s principal claim is that I misstated the documentary record
    when I charged that Swiss banks systematically destroyed records of
    Holocaust deposits. Let’s look at the document Finkelstein cites-the
    report of the Volcker committee, which conducted an intensive audit of
    the banks. The Volcker report finds that records for 2.8 million accounts
    opened during the Holocaust era had been completely destroyed by the
    Swiss banks (Volcker report, para. 20). The Volcker report calls the
    destruction of those records an “unfillable gap.” Moreover, the Volcker
    report finds that almost all of the transaction records for the remaining
    4.1 million accounts were also destroyed, leaving a record of an
    account’s opening and closing, but no information about the account’s
    size, or whether it had been plundered (Volcker report, para. 21). I call
    that a pretty good job of systematically destroying records, especially
    since, in the absence of records, the banks get to keep the money because
    Switzerland has no escheat law. It is true that under Swiss law, the
    banks were required to keep records for only ten ears. But, having
    accepted deposits from Holocaust victims, and knowing that most Jewish
    depositors had failed to survive the Nazis, how can anyone defend the
    Swiss banks’ widespread destruction of the records needed to trace the
    true ownership of the Holocaust funds?

    Despite the immense hurdles created by the destruction of records, the
    Volcker report identified 46,000 Swiss bank accounts with a “probable or
    possible” connection with Holocaust victims. The names of 26,000 of the
    accounts are about to be published, and the federal court has set aside
    $800 million to pay the owners of those funds. Neve Gordon, in his review
    of Finkelstein’s book, suggests that the sum is exaggerated, but his
    figures dovetail closely with mine. The $800 million for bank deposits
    includes an interest/inflation factor of 10 that the Volcker committee
    found was necessary to permit payment of current value. Everyone,
    including Raul Hilberg, agrees that Jewish deposits into Swiss banks on
    the eve of the Holocaust were at least $80 million. Surely, the Swiss
    banks should not have the use of that money for sixty years without
    paying interest to the accounts’ true owners. $800 million is, therefore,
    a very conservative estimate of what the banks really owe. Finally, in a
    characteristically venomous charge, Finkelstein accuses me of “making a
    mockery of Jewish suffering during World War II,” because I have
    estimated that 1 million victims of the Holocaust are still alive. In
    order to reach such a figure, Finkelstein argues that I must be diluting
    what it meant to suffer during the Holocaust. But, as usual,
    Finkelstein’s obsession with criticizing anyone who acts on behalf of
    Holocaust survivors blinds him to the facts. My figure of 1 million
    victims was intended to include all surviving victims, not merely Jewish
    survivors. The German foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and the
    Future estimates that more than 1 million former slave and forced
    laborers are still alive and qualify for compensation. The fact is that
    the Holocaust did not affect only Jews. The Swiss settlement includes
    Sinti-Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled and gays. The German
    foundation will distribute most of the slave/forced labor funds to
    non-Jews. About 130,000 Jewish survivors and about 900,000 non-Jewish
    victims are still alive. Norman Finkelstein accuses me of being a “main
    party” to seeking compensation for them. Thank you, Norman. I could not
    be prouder.

    Burt Neuborne

    (Enclosed please find Omer Bartov’s New York Times review of The Holocaust
    Industry.)

    2. Israeli Torture

    Finkelstein repeatedly claims that Israel, despite outlawing any sort of
    coercive interrogation in 1999, systematically tortures and kills in cold
    blood Palestinian detainees. His favorite — and indeed, often his sole
    – evidence is an Israeli Supreme Court decision. Here is what he said in
    Chicago on March 18, 2004: “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.” If you go to Dershowitz’s book, he discusses the case and says,
    quote, ‘An independent inquiry found that he didn’t die from the shaking,
    but from a previous illness.’ That was just made up.” (Emphasis added.)

    It was Finkelstein who 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. This is not a translation error. It is an example of a
    made-up quotation. Remember, Finkelstein said he was “quoting,” not
    paraphrasing, yet the words he purports to quote simply do not
    exist. Finkelstein has never, to my knowledge, responded to this serious
    charge of fabricating a quotation from the Israeli Supreme Court.

    Finkelstein’s pattern of making up quotations, a pattern identified first
    by Professor Novick, should alone disqualify him from any tenured academic
    position.

    3. Jews Lie About Being Holocaust Survivors

    “I am not exaggerating when I say that 1 out of 3 Jews you stop in the
    street in New York will claim to be a survivor [of the Nazi Holocaust].”

    I would ordinarily include this in a list of Finkelstein’s wild and
    hysterical hyperboles. But he uses this figure often, and, as you see, he
    prefaces it be specifically saying that it is not an exaggeration.

    Of course not even one in three Jews in New York is old enough to be a
    survivor. His statistic is not an exaggeration. It is an outright
    fabrication. Moreover, only a tiny percentage of those old enough claim
    to be survivors, and Finkelstein provides no proof that they are not being
    truthful. Imagine the reaction if he had said that one of three women
    falsely claim to be a survivor of rape.

    4. Israel — As A Matter of Policy — Fetishizes Aryan-Looking People

    In a interview published on Alexander Cockburn’s Counterpunch, Finkelstein
    claimed that a number of non-Jewish Russians had been able to immigrate to
    Israel because “the Israeli establishment likes the blue eyed, blonde
    haired Aryan types as a racial group.” It goes without saying that this
    is absolutely untrue. It’s characteristic, though, of
    Finkelstein’s drop-of-a-hat willingness to associate Israel with the Nazi
    racist ideology bizarre as it is from someone whose parents were Holocaust
    survivors is simply not justifiable on any rational basis. And it gets
    even stranger. Finkelstein then tried to substantiate his claim about the
    Israeli government’s preference for “Aryans” by claiming that Leon Uris
    gave his blond-haired and blue-eyed protagonist in his book Exodus the
    name “Ari” because it was short for “Aryan.” Ari which means lion in
    Hebrew is about as classic as Hebrew names get, short for names that
    appear in the Bible many thousands of years before the word “Aryan” even
    found its way into the English language. Again, Finkelstein simply made
    it up.

    5. Daniel Goldhagen

    Among the dozen or so Jewish writers whose careers Finkelstein has tried
    to destroy with the same accusations — “fraud,” “huxter,” “shake-down
    artist,” “plagiarist” — he has only ever written a full book about one
    other: Daniel Goldhagen. Goldhagen did a masterful job of going
    point-by-point on Finkelstein’s many lies and distortions. I’m attaching,
    below, a copy of Goldhagen’s essay, “The New Discourse of Avoidance.”

    6. I Don’t Write My Own Books

    Finkelstein asserts, and has said on many, many occasions, that my books
    are written for me by others. Here are some of the remarks Finkelstein
    has made about my supposed ghostwriters:

    “I don’t think he wrote the book [The Case for Israel]“; “I very much
    doubt he had read the book”; “There is no way he wrote the book”;
    “[Dershowitz] has come to the point where he’s had so many people write so
    many of his books. You know, he just churns them out… [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.”

    He characterized our single on-air interaction like this:

    “So I kept saying to him, “Mr. Dershowitz I don’t think you wrote the
    book.” Now, if somebody really wrote the book you would expect a
    ferocious answer. Like the guy is going to go at you and want to throttle
    you. But he really didn’t answer that way, because Alan knew he didn’t
    write the book. And then I figure which I honestly believe don’t
    believe he read the book. People think that I’m speaking
    cavalierly occasionally I do, but mostly in private. In public I want to
    be responsible for my words. And I said to him at one point, “Look Mr.
    Dershowitz, if you have any sense of self respect you would just say, ‘I
    didn’t write the book and I had no time to read it. I’m sorry.’”
    But I’m serious. There is no way he wrote the book…”

    Here is the actual transcript of the conversation in which Finkelstein
    claims that I essentially acknowledge his absurd charge that I didn’t
    write The Case for Israel by not vigorously answering it:

    NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I read your book. Or the book you purport to have
    written.

    ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Now you claim somebody else wrote it?

    NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I hope so. For your sake I truly hope you did not
    write this book.

    ALAN DERSHOWITZ: I proudly wrote it.

    NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I think the honorable thing for you to do would be to
    say I didn’t write the book, I had no time to read it. I’m sorry.

    ALAN DERSHOWITZ: I wrote every word of it.

    He repeated the above false remarks even after I sent his publisher my
    handwritten manuscript. I write all of my books *by hand* and have the
    manuscripts. I stand ready to send them to you for your
    perusal. Finkelstein knows full well that I write my books by hand and
    that I wrote The Case for Israel. Yet he continues to state the opposite
    because it draws reactions from his skewed college audiences.

    It should also be noted that I did not have a preexisting feud with
    Finkelstein prior to his claims that I don’t write my books. I’d quoted
    him a few times in The Case for Israel, but had never met him and
    certainly had no prior interaction with him.

    After claiming that I didn’t write The Case for Israel, Finkelstein hedged
    his accusation by saying that if I *did* write the book, I plagiarized
    it. Of course I was completely cleared of that charge by an independent
    Harvard University investigation. I am not answering that charge here,
    because much of it turns on the definition of plagiarism: whether it is
    proper to find a quotation in one source, check it against the original
    source, and cite to the original, rather than the secondary, source. The
    Chicago Manual of Style says that that is the preferred method of
    citation; Finkelstein calls that plagiarism. Indeed, many academics whom
    Finkelstein admires — including Noam Chomsky — use precisely this method
    of citation. Of course Finkelstein would never apply his forensic
    scholarship to question their citation methodology. As he himself
    admitted, his first foray into forensic scholarship occurred when he and
    Noam Chomsky agreed to “expose” Joan Peters for writing a book about whose
    substantive conclusions the two disagreed.

    There are also issues of fact involved in Finkelstein’s accusation. Some
    of the sources he claimed that I found in Joan Peters’s book were
    quotations I had been using for decades before Peters even wrote her book,
    including a quotation by Mark Twain and the British Peel Commission. For
    a full response to Finkelstein’s plagiarism accusation, you can read
    Chapter 16 of The Case for Peace, accessible here:

    http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/dershowitz/Chapter_16.pdf

    #search=%22Alan%20Dershowitz%20and%20Chapter%2016%20
    and%20Case%20for%20Peace%22

    6. I Support Ethnic Cleansing

    Finkelstein also likes to say that I support ethnic cleansing, or in the
    alternative, that I “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.”
    (Vancouver, May 15, 2004) (emphasis added).

    This quotation is totally made up. I never said that ethnic cleansing is
    “analogous to massive urban renewal.” He misquotes something I said 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 I wrote, it “may constitute a human rights violation”
    as may the movement of Palestinians following the Arab attack on Israel in
    1947-48. (See Chutzpah, p. 215.)

    ———

    The above are just a few representative examples of Finkelstein’s
    disqualifying academic dishonestly. There are of course many, many more
    examples of simple historical absurdities — for example, he claims that
    Israel started the 1973 Yom Kippur War — that are Finkelstein’s bread and
    butter. But the above are some of the more verifiably false.

    I am also attaching the “speaking packet” that my office has sent to
    schools requesting information from me about Norman Finkelstein. It
    includes a list of preposterous quotations, lies, and damning comments
    about Finkelstein from mainstream, reputable sources. It also includes my
    response to Finklestein’s most recent book, Beyond Chutzpah.

    And finally, here are two student opinion pieces about Finkelstein, the
    first from the Harvard Law Record (“Justice for Palestine or
    Jew-Baiting”), the second from the Yale Daily News (“Finkelstein and the
    YCIAS: Misusing Yale, Abusing Students”):

    http://www.hlrecord.org/media/paper609/news/2005/10/20/Opinion/

    Amicus.Curiae.Justice.For.Palestine.Or.JewBaiting-1028675.shtml

    A school should also take into account the fact that Finkelstein is a
    classic anti-Semite who has invoked anti-Jewish stereotypes.** He says in
    his book Beyond Chutzpah, “Should people like Abraham Foxman, Edgar
    Bronfman, and Rabbi Israel Singer [who are prominent Jewish leaders] get a
    free ride because they resemble stereotypes straight out of Der
    Stürmer?” Can you imagine a professor issuing a similar description of a
    woman or a Muslim, or describe the Pope according to an anti-Catholic
    stereotype? In fact, just a quick check of his website today, Monday,
    shows that in his blog headlines alone, Finkelstein has compared Israel to
    Nazi Germany twice, American Jews to the mafia twice and to the KKK once,
    and has called Elie Wiesel, “[p]ersona summa creepa.” And those are just
    the headlines of his most recent posts! Perhaps most notably, Finkelstein
    has called American Jews “parasites” and blamed Jews themselves for
    anti-Semitism. “Alongside Israel [“American Jewish elites”] are the main
    fomenters of anti-Semitism in the world today… They need to be
    stopped.” Were he not Jewish, these statements would clearly disqualify him
    from tenure. If he made comparable statements about Muslims or Catholics,
    he would be disqualified. The fact that he is a Jew making anti-Semitic
    statements does not mitigate his bigotry. For purposes of scholarship,
    the important point is that, because of his bigotry, he has forever
    disqualified himself from being taken seriously on issues of Jews, the
    Jewish State, Jewish leaders, or the Jewish religion.

    In the end, there is no Finkelstein “scholarship”; there are only false
    attacks.

    Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

    Sincerely,

    Alan Dershowitz

    * Sometimes there are differences involving interpretation of words, where
    reasonable people might disagree on the meanings of words used. I am not
    speaking of those sorts of disagreements such as Finkelstein’s statement
    concerning his mother:

    Still, if she didn’t cross fundamental moral boundaries, I glimpsed from
    her manner of pushing and shoving in order to get to the head of a queue,
    which mortified me, how my mother must have fought Hobbes’s war of all
    against all many a time in the camps. Really, how else would she have
    survived?

    I interpreted that question — If she did not “cross fundamental moral
    boundaries … how else would she have survived?” — as Finkelstein
    questioning whether his mother had crossed such boundaries, that is,
    whether she might well have collaborated or violated other moral norms in
    the camps. When I pointed out that Finkelstein even questioned his own
    mother’s survival story, Finkelstein savagely attacked me for claiming
    that his mother might have been a Nazi collaborator (when of course he was
    the one who raised that question, not me). Finkelstein disputes that he
    was raising such suspicion about his mother. Perhaps. It is a matter of
    interpretation upon which reasonable people could disagree. I leave these
    issues out of the present letter.

    ** I do not think that harsh criticism of Israel, or even strident
    anti-Zionism, is tantamount to anti-Semitism. Nor do I think, though,
    that harsh criticism of Israel exempts one from being an anti-Semite if
    that charge can be independently established. In my book The Case for
    Peace, 139 – 41, I outline thirty factors that can be used to distinguish
    anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism.

    ———

    * * * * *

    The New Discourse of Avoidance

    By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

    Before my book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, was published in Germany
    last year, many launched attacks on it that have since been shown to be
    gross misrepresentations of its contents. Der Spiegel was at the forefront
    of the initial assault, publishing a lengthy cover story, “A People of
    Demons?” Its central theme was the fictitious charge that I had revived
    the notion of “collective guilt,” in which Der Spiegel tried to blacken my
    character, among other ways, by likening me to an American who during the
    war wrote that Germans should all be sterilized.(1) Der Spiegel then
    published another fictitious story claiming that the German translation of
    my book was cooked, which was such obvious nonsense that it was ignored in
    Germany.(2) These stories did, however, give a hint as to the depths of
    dishonesty to which some would sink in order to impugn a book that told
    long neglected truths that many desperately wished not to hear.

    When my book was finally published in German, several things became clear
    to the German public. The initial attacks constituted a discourse of
    avoidance that deflected attention from the real issues, the new
    materials, and the conclusions that my book brings forth. It was also
    obvious that many of the critics simply did not want to discuss these
    central issues that had hitherto never been forcefully put before the
    public: Why did so many ordinary Germans (however many did) support and
    even participate in the persecution of the Jews and how did long existing
    anti-Semitism (however widespread it was) contribute to their actions?

    Having failed with its earlier attempts, Der Spiegel is now resorting to
    using a notorious anti-Zionist ideologue, Norman Finkelstein, to launch a
    new discourse of avoidance, with its article “Goldhagen — a Source
    Trickster?”(3) Finkelstein’s piece, “Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ‘Crazy’
    Thesis,” is a fifty page screed (stretched out over one hundred pages in
    the book version to lend it more gravity), which relies systematically on
    distortions, misrepresentations, out-of-context quotations, and outright
    inventions, to present a fallacious case that I misrepresent the secondary
    sources and that my arguments are self-contradictory.(4) Der Spiegel, in
    making its case for Finkelstein’s “devastating result,” obviously chose to
    present what it believes are the strongest examples from Finkelstein’s
    piece. So looking at the “best” that Finkelstein has to offer is
    sufficient to reveal the general character of his work.

    One of Finkelstein’s examples concerns the ritual murder charges (that
    Jews killed Christian children for ritual purposes) during the nineteenth
    century, and that twelve of the charges eventually led to trials between
    1867 and 1914. I bring them up as a small part of a larger discussion of
    how widespread, vehement, and hallucinatory the anti-Semitism was in
    nineteenth century Germany (and Austria) where such canards had widespread
    currency. Ignoring the other voluminous evidence regarding the wide scope
    and great intensity of anti-Semitism in Germany during this period,
    Finkelstein zooms in on the fact that prosecutors could not prove that
    Jews had actually committed these invented crimes (these cases actually
    went to trial!) and concludes that this shows that Germans were not
    anti-Semitic, and I should have said as much.(5) He writes as if “ritual
    murder” trials of Jews had to yield guilty verdicts before one is
    permitted to conclude that the widespread currency of such charges in
    Germany indicated anything at all about the character of anti-Semitism
    among its people. Based on the relevant German secondary sources, which
    Finkelstein’s footnotes indicate he has not read, I write: “Even liberal
    newspapers took to printing all manner of rumors and accusations against
    Jews, including ritual murder charges, as if they had been proven
    facts.”(6) Finkelstein would have people believe that this is either not
    true or irrelevant to the discussion of how widespread and hallucinatory
    anti-Semitism was in Germany, and that the only thing that matters about
    the routine ritual murder talk and accusations is that a court of law –
    where actual evidence must be presented — could not convict any Jew on
    the charge.

    Finkelstein also attacks my discussion of the anti-emancipation petition
    campaign in Bavaria in 1849.(7) In the original, New Left Review version
    of his piece, he uses a qualification that I present in my own endnote,
    where I openly discuss the complexity of the events and the contested
    nature of some of the evidence, to suggest that what I write in the text
    is a misrepresentation! Moreover, in order to make his case, he violates
    scholarly practice by presenting another scholar’s words describing the
    campaign, “spontaneous, extremely broad-based, and genuine…,” as mine,
    for which he attacks me as misrepresenting the real nature of the
    campaign.(8) This conclusion about the nature of the opposition to Jewish
    emancipation is from James Harris’ exhaustive, definitive book on the
    subject, The People Speak! Anti-Semitism and Emancipation in
    Nineteenth-Century Bavaria. I write: “James Harris’ study of the petition
    campaign concludes that, in one region of Bavaria, five to six times more
    Germans opposed than favored Jewish emancipation.”(9) But Finkelstein –
    whose notes indicate that he has not even consulted Harris, the expert on
    the subject — declares not only the opposite to be true but also that I
    have misrepresented the record.

    After I exposed this example of Finkelstein’s unscholarly legerdemain in
    the Frankfurter Rundschau, Finkelstein doctored this section of his piece
    for its sanitized publication in A Nation on Trial. Finkelstein’s New Left
    Review version on p. 48 reads: “To further document the extent of German
    anti-Semitism, Goldhagen recalls a ‘spontaneous, extremely broad-based,
    and genuine’ petition campaign in Bavaria opposing the full equality of
    Jews. Yet the corresponding note tucked in the book’s back pages reveals
    that…” The same passage in A Nation on Trial on p. 21 reads: “Quoting a
    scholarly study, Goldhagen recalls a ‘spontaneous, extremely broad-based,
    and genuine’ petition campaign in Bavaria opposing the full equality of
    Jews. Yet in the corresponding note buried in the book’s back pages,
    Goldhagen himself cites credible evidence that…” So Finkelstein, in his
    original falsified version, has my note “revealing” that my attempt to
    show that my statement about anti-Semitism’s scope is a misrepresentation.
    In the revised version — which was doctored after Finkelstein got caught
    – Finkelstein has me quoting a “scholarly study” and then in my note
    “cit[ing] credible evidence” that casts doubt on the general statement.
    His now revised section, in which he still leaves out the relevant
    evidence, is still a misrepresentation of my book, of Harris’ work, and
    the historical record — though as damning criticism of me, it hardly
    makes sense.

    Finkelstein has effectively conceded with his surreptitious alteration of
    his text after the exposure of his falsehood that he fabricated the
    original New Left Review example of my supposed misrepresentation of the
    record. He does so without informing the reader. And when one sees the
    real text of my book, which follows the conclusions of James Harris, it
    becomes clear that Finkelstein’s charge here is just a calumny. If
    Finkelstein were, in a similar manner, to change every one of his
    misrepresentations of text so that his piece’s contents would accord with
    the actual relevant texts, then his “textually” based case would
    evaporate. It is worth emphasizing that this is one of Finkelstein’s
    strongest, most unassailable examples, which, in so many ways, does
    nothing more than reveal that Finkelstein has delegitimized himself and
    has himself proven that he has no credibility.

    A third example concerns a section in my book on the widespread posting of
    signs in German cities and towns declaring “Jews Not Wanted.” From that
    section, Finkelstein quotes, out of context, three words, “Germans posted
    signs,” suggesting that I covered up that it was really “Nazis” who did
    so.(10) The section in my book begins: “For the next two years, Germans
    inside and outside the government succeeded in making life for Jews in
    Germany… all but unbearable…. During this period, the society-wide
    attack proceeded in an uncoordinated manner. Some of its aspects were
    mandated from above, some initiated from below, the latter generally,
    though not always, by avowed Nazis. The main, though not sole, initiators
    of assaults upon Jews were the men of the SA, the brown shirt shock troops
    of the regime.” So I make it clear here that they were mainly Nazis,
    specifically saying that most of them were SA men. I then write: “During
    the 1930s, towns throughout Germany issued official prohibitions on Jews
    entering them, and such signs were a near ubiquitous feature of the German
    landscape.”(11) These passages make it clear that it was principally Nazis
    who were responsible (who else was in a position to make “official
    prohibitions”?), so Finkelstein’s attack that I cover up that the signs
    came from Nazis is a fiction, which he makes by quoting three words out of
    context.

    The fourth example regards his falsification of evidence concerning my use
    of a source. The compiler of Hitler’s public pronouncements, Max Domarus
    believed that Hitler’s many public declarations that the war would end in
    the extermination of the Jews was put forward within the context of
    foreign policy because, in Domarus’ view, Hitler believed that the
    extermination would not be approved of in Germany. After Finkelstein
    quotes this, he writes: “Yet, Goldhagen writes: ‘Hitler announced many
    times, emphatically, that the war would end in the extermination of the
    Jews. The killing met with general understanding, if not approval.’ The
    endnote refers to Max Domarus.”(12) With this Finkelstein, as he does
    throughout his article, contends that I appeal to the authority of other
    authors when they say the opposite of what I maintain. The texts of my
    book and Domarus’ book show that Finkelstein has invented this notion in
    order to invent yet another false charge against me.

    The Domarus work to which I refer is a multivolume compilation of Hitler’s
    speeches and proclamations. It contains an introduction by Domarus, where
    he presents a different interpretation from mine of how to understand
    Hitler’s not entirely consistent statements. Finkelstein falsely suggests
    that I cite Domarus (“the endnote refers readers to Max Domarus”) as a
    supporter of my interpretation while concealing that he actually has a
    different view; yet my book is as clear as can be — following standard
    scholarly practice — that I am not citing Domarus, the interpreter, but
    referring to the materials that he has compiled. The endnote reference
    mark in my book is placed after my sentence “Hitler announced many times,
    emphatically, that the war would end in the extermination of the
    Jews,”(13) which is an undisputed fact. The single page in Domarus’ book
    which I cite in this note is vol. 1, p. 41. It contains some of these
    announcements and references to others. My sentence subsequent to the
    endnote reference mark, “The killings met with general understanding, if
    not approval,” is clearly my view, which I spend the next four hundred
    pages substantiating. There is no reference or appeal to Domarus’ views or
    authority. The view of Domarus that Finkelstein cites is not on the page
    that I cite but on vol. 1, p. 37. So Finkelstein has taken an endnote
    reference — which indicates exactly and only where readers can find the
    relevant quotations from Hitler — and invented the notion that it comes
    after a sentence in my book where I state my own interpretation of the
    data. It is on the basis of Finkelstein’s own deception that he then
    attacks my integrity. For Finkelstein to make this and his many other
    charges seem plausible, he must engage in this sort of falsification,
    which he does again and again. Concocting these sorts of falsifications
    requires effort and ingenuity.

    It is only through such wholesale falsification of evidence that
    Finkelstein can give surface plausibility to his attack. His two principal
    charges are, on the face of it, absurd. The first is that I have falsified
    secondary sources. After hundreds of articles have been written about my
    book — including very critical ones, some by scholars in the field who
    are the authors of the secondary sources that Finkelstein cites –
    suddenly Finkelstein, a man who is a self-proclaimed amateur in the field,
    for the first time, “discovers” my alleged transgression. His second
    charge is that my argument falls apart through internal contradiction.
    Prior to Finkelstein’s second “discovery,” one of the standard criticisms
    of the book is that its argument was too tight, too neat, seamless.
    Finkelstein can make this second argument seem plausible only through
    out-of-context quotation, the manifest twisting of meaning, and blatant
    misrepresentation. This is also his standard technique for inventing the
    aspersion that I have misused sources.

    In addition to misrepresenting the contents of my book and the secondary
    literature, Finkelstein relies on a second technique of deception
    throughout. He finds an instance where a scholar disagrees with my
    interpretation about some point. He then asserts, as if it is uncontested
    fact, that such a disagreement shows that I have falsified two things. The
    first is my conclusions. It is an assumption of his entire piece that
    whenever a disagreement over interpretation exists between any scholar and
    me 1) that the other scholar is automatically correct, 2) that I know it,
    and 3) that I have willfully hidden it. He typically presents other
    scholars’ interpretations of data as facts, which makes it seem as if my
    putting forward a different position is to deny uncontested facts.

    My second alleged falsification is of the work of others. He writes as if
    any time one uses a single fact that is contained in another book, it
    creates an obligation to accept its author’s interpretation of that fact
    and on seemingly all other matters as well. No scholar does this.(14) (My
    book is not a historiography of the scholarship on the Holocaust but a
    study of the Holocaust itself which already has 125 pages of endnotes
    without the additional endless historiographical discussions that the man
    who cannot read most of the sources demands.) That my interpretations and
    conclusions, on small and large points, often differ from those of other
    scholars is extremely well known — after all my book is based on new
    evidence and new interpretations, and I say at the beginning that it
    revises central notions about the Holocaust. That these differences exist,
    I also frequently state explicitly in my book and refer readers to
    alternative views. Virtually every reviewer of the book has also stated
    that my book departs from existing interpretations.

    Without these two central techniques of falsification, Finkelstein would
    have no critique to write other than one which merely expressed his
    ideological aversion for my book. The examples discussed here are,
    according to Der Spiegel’s choice, Finkelstein’s strongest, most
    scholarly, and presumably most devastating ones. Yet they are so blatant
    in their violation of scholarly practice that they show that nothing can
    be believed in Finkelstein’s piece without first comparing his text
    against my original text and whatever sources are relevant, including, of
    course, the enormous number of sources, primary and secondary — which
    Finkelstein pretends do not exist — which support my conclusions and
    which are cited in my book.(15) Undertaking such verification would show
    that Finkelstein’s violations of scholarly practice and rectitude, found
    in the examples discussed here, are typical of and repeated throughout his
    piece. It would also show that his piece is nothing more than the
    ideological tract that he all but announced it to be in the last section
    of its original publication in New Left Review (discussed below), which
    consists of an anti-Zionist diatribe and wild inventions about, and
    denunciations of, Holocaust studies.

    Finkelstein’s gross misrepresentation of my book is just one indication
    that his attack on it has little to do with any knowledge of, and concern
    for, scholarship on the Holocaust and everything to do with his burning
    political agenda. Here are the facts about the German history and
    Holocaust “expert” Finkelstein. None of his previous published books and
    articles are on German history or the Holocaust. Even though the primary
    material and critical secondary material are in German, he does not cite a
    single German source because he does not even read German. Nevertheless,
    the neophyte Finkelstein makes a string of pronouncements (and errors)
    about what the sources prove, all the while pretending that the enormous
    amount of evidence that contradicts his wishful assertions and ideological
    pronouncements do not exist.

    None of this is surprising, since Finkelstein’s published work has been in
    the “field” of anti-Zionism. In an earlier article, Finkelstein argued
    that Israel is as criminal as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the state that
    decimated Kuwait and systematically slaughtered Kurds and Shiites.(16)
    Elsewhere, he has written, “I can’t imagine why Israel’s apologists [those
    who defend Israel against such charges] would be offended by a comparison
    with the Gestapo,” suggesting that those who supported Israel should be
    flattered by the comparison.(17)

    Finkelstein’s attack on my book flows from his earlier work in a manner
    that suggests that, in order to write it, he did not even have to consult
    the sketchy source base that he did. His piece about my book in New Left
    Review ends with a five page anti-Zionist diatribe in which he argues that
    non-German scholars of the Holocaust are Zionist propagandists whose work
    legitimizes Israel’s existence “which is celebrated as a bastion of
    Western Civilization doing battle on the front lines with and, against,
    all odds, smashing the Arab hordes.”(18) According to Finkelstein, not
    only my book but all of what he terms “Holocaust studies” is “mainly a
    propaganda enterprise.”(19) Thus, Finkelstein writes: “‘The Holocaust’ is
    in effect the Zionist account of the Nazi holocaust.”(20) What amounts to
    an international Zionist conspiracy even allegedly goes so far as to
    silence dissenting voices with something Finkelstein invents, called “the
    ‘Holocaust Studies’ index,” which supposedly proscribes works that diverge
    from the alleged Zionist propagandistic position, as the Catholic Church
    once did.

    Finkelstein fabricates the whopper that I am now at the cutting edge of
    this Zionist conspiracy: “Seen through Goldhagen’s effectively
    ultra-Zionist lens, in the dialectic of anti-Semitism, not only can
    Gentiles do no good but Jews can do no evil.” Thus, Finkelstein goes far
    beyond the phony “collective guilt” charge with new, invented, monstrous
    allegations that I believe that no non-Jew can ever do good, that all
    non-Jews are “potential if not actual homicidal anti-Semites,” and that
    Jews can do no evil. He also writes that “the essence of Goldhagen’s
    thesis” is “that only deranged perverts could perpetrate a crime so
    heinous as the Final Solution.”

    Those who are the least bit familiar with my book know that it emphasizes
    that we must restore the humanity to the perpetrators of the Holocaust and
    recognize that they were ordinary people from all walks of life, who, like
    other genocidal killers (e.g., in Turkey and in Rwanda), acted upon their
    beliefs. Those who are familiar with my statements about postwar Germany,
    including in my book itself, know that I am an admirer of the Federal
    Republic of Germany, where anti-Semitism has declined enormously. Anyone
    who knows any of my clearly stated views on these and other subjects will
    also know that Finkelstein’s allegations, including that I think Germans
    are “crazy” and “deranged perverts,” are wild inventions.

    And his “evidence” is no better. Finkelstein’s hollow practice, which
    consists of his customary techniques of falsification documented here,
    flows from his ideological pronouncements: Finkelstein, in the cause of
    anti-Zionism, declares Holocaust studies, and work that shows that the
    Jewish people were persecuted because they were hated, to be “propaganda.”
    Some of these clear statements of Finkelstein’s self-discrediting
    ideological views were excised from the version of Finkelstein’s piece
    that Henry Holt published in A Nation on Trial. A comparison of the last
    section of the versions in New Left Review (pp. 82-87) and in A Nation on
    Trial (pp. 87-100) reveals this cover-up. It is not hard to believe that
    the publisher would want to conceal Finkelstein’s true views, views of the
    sort which, heretofore, had been confined to the publications of fringe
    groups. If the publisher had included in the book the views that
    Finkelstein has so stridently expressed about “Holocaust studies” being
    propaganda and the like, then Finkelstein and the entire publishing
    enterprise would have been exposed by Finkelstein’s own ideological
    pronouncements to be the unscholarly, dishonest polemic that it is; Henry
    Holt would have immediately delegitimized its own publication.

    Imagine that someone would write that all or most German scholarship on
    the Holocaust is mainly “propaganda” and would attack a German scholar in
    the most vicious of terms. Does anyone believe that Der Spiegel would
    pretend that such a person is an expert voice of scholarly probity and
    reason, and would devote many pages to his attacks on a scholar? Would
    Henry Holt? But when Finkelstein, a man with an explicit political agenda
    who has never written about the Holocaust, writes the same about the
    scholarship of Jews — which is what he makes clear he means by “Holocaust
    studies” (the occasional, in his view, exceptional Jewish scholar of the
    Holocaust notwithstanding) — Der Spiegel and now Henry Holt present him
    as the crown witness.

    Der Spiegel, in its initial attack on my book, used the irrelevant facts
    of my identity to suggest that I have other than scholarly motives. In its
    current attack, it uses the exact same irrelevant facts about Finkelstein
    (as Finkelstein does himself) but this time to portray Finkelstein, the
    anti-Zionist crusader and conspiracy theorist, as a man above suspicion,
    who could not possibly have any agenda other than telling the world the
    truth about the Holocaust! Henry Holt and those who support the
    publication of A Nation on Trial present Finkelstein in the same manner.
    With the justification that Finkelstein’s parents are survivors of the
    Holocaust, Der Spiegel tells the unwitting reader: “It is certain that
    Finkelstein has no ulterior motives in making his attack.” Henry Holt has
    now tried to foist the same deception on what it hopes remains an
    unsuspecting public.

    End Notes:

    1. Der Spiegel, May 20, 1996, pp. 48-77.

    2. “‘Riesige Mehrheit,’” Der Spiegel, August 12, 1996, p. 42.

    3. “Goldhagen — ein Quellenstrickser?” Der Spiegel, August 11, 1997, pp.
    156-158.

    4. Published in A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical
    Truth (New York: Owl Books, 1998), pp. 1-100. The earlier version, which
    Henry Holt sanitized in order to make it more presentable, is to be found
    in New Left Review, July/August, 1997, pp. 39-87.

    5. A Nation on Trial, p. 21.

    6. Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 64.

    7. A Nation on Trial, p. 21.

    8. New Left Review, p. 48.

    9. See James F. Harris, The People Speak! Anti-Semitism and Emancipation
    in Nineteenth-Century Bavaria (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
    1994), p. 169.

    10. A Nation on Trial, p. 40.

    11. Hitler’s Willing Executioners, pp. 91-92.

    12. A Nation on Trial, p. 30.

    13. Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 8. That Hitler would repeatedly
    assert publicly, for the entire nation, that he would annihilate the
    Jewish people, immediately casts doubt on Domarus’ notion that Hitler was
    convinced that the majority of the German people and of the members of the
    Nazi Party would “resist” such a program — if he had believed this, then
    why would he keep announcing and emphasizing it both before and while he
    was annihilating the Jews?

    14. Domarus’ view of how widespread anti-Semitism was in Germany prior to
    the Nazis’ assumption of power is on p. 38: “At the time National
    Socialism was beginning to take hold, it was widely held that the Jews
    were responsible for every mishap in Germany from the early Middle Ages to
    the 20th century.” This is a view similar to my own, which Finkelstein,
    against overwhelming and voluminous evidence, denies and accuses me of
    inventing. According to Finkelstein’s own disingenuous accusatory
    practice, his reliance on Domarus elsewhere means that he is obliged to
    present this view of Domarus and, since Finkelstein has not, he has
    therefore falsified a secondary source.

    15. So, on anti-Semitism, which Finkelstein would have people believe was
    neither very widespread nor particularly virulent, Werner Jochmann, the
    leading scholar of anti-Semitism in late nineteenth and early twentieth
    century Germany writes: “A wealth of examples shows how, in the [18]90′s,
    anti-Semitism infiltrated in this way into every last citizens’
    association, penetrating folk clubs and cultural societies.” After
    surveying anti-Semitism in Germany from 1914 to 1924, Jochmann concludes
    “that already in the first years of the republic the anti-Semitic flood had
    inundated all dams of legality. Still greater was the devastation in the
    spiritual realm. Even the democratic parties and the governments of the
    republic believed that they could escape the pressure being exerted on
    them if they recommended to the Jews restraint in political and social
    life, and deported or interned the East European Jews.” See Hitler’s
    Willing Executioners, pp. 72, 84. For Jochmann’s devastating documentation
    of the ubiquity and virulence of anti-Semitism in Germany, see the original
    essays, “Structure and Functions of German Anti-Semitism, 1878-1914,” in
    Herbert A. Strauss, ed., Hostages of Modernization: Studies on modern
    Antisemitism, 1870-1933/39 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993); “Die
    Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus in Deutschland, 1914-1923,” in
    Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeinschaft in Deutschland, 1870-1945 (Hamburg:
    Hans Christians Verlag, 1988); and the other chapters of
    Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeinschaft in Deutschland, 1870-1945.

    16. “Israel and Iraq: A Double Standard in the Application of
    International Law,” Monthly Review 43, 3 (July-August 1991).

    17. Quoted in John Dirlik, “Canadian Jewish Organizations Charged with
    Stifling Campus Debate,” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
    Finkelstein’s “scholarship” in his own area of expertise, The Rise and
    Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years (Minneapolis:
    University of Minnesota Press, 1996), received the following sobering
    evaluation in Kirkus Reviews (September 30, 1996): “Another contribution
    to the vast body of propagandistic literature (produced by both sides)
    that has helped to block a balanced discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian
    conflict… this book is fatally compromised by a radical anti-Israel
    animus. In the service of his bias, Finkelstein sometimes distorts
    history, as in his ludicrous claim that ‘Israel’s founding father, David
    Ben-Gurion, envisioned that the future state would incorporate the West
    Bank and Gaza, Jordan, the Golan Heights, and Lebanon,’ and his assertion
    that ‘it was Yasir Arafat’s acceptance of the two-state solution that
    triggered Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.’ There is no evidence for
    the latter argument.” The reviewer then informs the reader of the basic
    facts that show the falsity of Finkelstein’s account of the partition:
    Ben-Gurion accepted the UN’s 1947 partition plan, which was rejected by
    all the surrounding Arab states. The reviewer continues: “In support of
    his positions, Finkelstein sometimes cites himself, sometimes such extreme
    critics of Israeli policies as Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn, and
    almost never a meticulous scholar at home in both Hebrew and Arabic
    sources, such as Benny Morris. This work may interest those who are
    already convinced that Israel is a kind of neocolonialist state.” The
    reviewer concludes with the recommendation that those who want to get “a
    more balanced and substantial view” of the sources of the conflict should
    look elsewhere.

    18. New Left Review, p. 84; A Nation on Trial, p. 92.

    19. New Left Review, p. 83; excised from A Nation on Trial.

    20. New Left Review, p. 84; A Nation on Trial, p. 94.

    21. New Left Review, p. 83; doctored in A Nation on Trial, p. 89.

    22. New Left Review, p. 85; excised from A Nation on Trial.

    23. New Left Review, p. 86; A Nation on Trial, p. 98.

    24. See, for example, my speech “Modell Bundesrepublik: National History,
    Democracy, and Internationalization in Germany,” available at this website.
    25. “Holocaust studies first flourished in the wake of the June 1967
    Arab-Israeli war… Jewish intellectuals suddenly discovered the Jewish
    state, now celebrated as a bastion of Western Civilization doing battle on
    the front lines with and, against, all odds, smashing the Arab hordes.
    They also suddenly discovered the Nazi genocide. A tiny cottage industry
    before 1967, Holocaust studies began to boom” (New Left Review, p. 84; A
    Nation on Trial, p. 92 for the amended version). It should come as no
    surprise that the man who would have people believe that the Germans who
    tortured, brutalized, and killed Jews were not anti-Semites, that whatever
    enmity existed against Jews was partly the Jews’ own fault (he derides the
    notion that Jews were “innocent” in the Germans’ genocidal assault on
    them), would also like people to believe that when Jews study the
    systematic attempt to annihilate the Jewish people, resulting in the death
    of one-third of the world’s Jews, they do so not because of any genuine
    interest in the world historical catastrophe but because of a desire –
    that Finkelstein has himself concocted and imputes to them — to serve Zionism.

    * * * * *

    Peter Novick’s review of The Holocaust Industry

    ‘Offene Fenster und Tueren,’

    02.07.2001 | Sueddeutsche Zeitung
    By Peter Novick

    Last summer, after the initial publication of Norman Finkelstein’s The
    Holocaust Industry in English, there was said to be something called a
    “Finkelstein debate” in Germany. Now that the book has appeared in German
    translation, we will perhaps see this renewed. But it is hard to know what
    there is in The Holocaust Industry, then or now, that is “debatable.”

    Finkelstein’s assertion that in negotiations with Swiss banks and German
    industrial corporations inflated numbers were often tossed around by
    claimants is hardly “debatable.” It is simply a fact that this was the
    case–as is the fact that, from the other side, deflated numbers were
    presented. Similarly, it is an undebatable fact that heavy-handed pressure
    tactics were sometimes employed on behalf of the claimants–a response to
    intransigence and delaying tactics on the part of the banks and
    corporations. One could certainly wish that the negotiations had been
    conducted differently; wish, especially, that all these matters had been
    disposed of decades ago. But they weren’t: another undebatable fact. In
    any case, all of this is widely known, and widely-deplored: what was
    there, what is there, to debate?

    As concerns particular assertions made by Finkelstein concerning
    reparations and restitution, and on other matters as well, 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.

    Among his more startling claims is that the treasury of the World Jewish
    Congress has “amassed no less than ‘roughly $7 billion’ in compensation
    monies.” Finkelstein’s source for this startling revelation is an article
    in FAZ which reported the very unstartling fact that the WJC was holding
    discussions about how such monies might be distributed if and when they
    received. This is not just carelessness on Finkelstein’s part, since he
    knew when he wrote the book that the WJC had not received any such funds:
    deliberate deception. (Examples could be multiplied. 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.)

    Or is the issue in the “Finkelstein Debate” his overall thesis, of which
    the discussion of reparations and restitution is merely an illustration?
    That larger thesis is clearly stated in his book and is easily summarized.
    “American Jewish elites,” Finkelstein argues, have cynically constructed a
    “Holocaust Industry” to serve their selfish interests. To anyone familiar
    with the author’s lifelong crusade against Israel, it will come as no
    surprise that first among these interests is to “justify criminal policies
    of the Israeli state”.

    But to credit “American Jewish elites” with sincerity in their concern
    for Israel would, in his view, be a mistake. In reality, he says, these
    elites are merely sycophantic tools of American imperialism. They came to
    support Israel only when it became a compliant tool of US policy-makers;
    they would abandon immediately if it ceased to be an American “strategic
    asset.”

    “The Holocaust Industry,” Finkelstein tells us, also serves domestic
    American purposes. Keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust immunizes
    American Jews from “justified criticism” for their shift rightward in
    recent years. But here too, we are told, one should not credit “American
    Jewish elites” with sincere concern for the well being or reputation of
    American Jewry: “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. . . . ‘Jews would lead Jews to
    death.’”

    The overall argument of Finkelstein’s book is that “American Jewish
    elites” conspire only in their private interest: to line their own pockets
    and to facilitate their “entry into the inner sanctums of American power.”
    For these elites, he tells us, “the Holocaust performed the same function
    as Israel: another invaluable chip in a high-stakes power game.” For
    Finkelstein, it is only by acknowledging this long-standing conspiracy of
    “Jewish elites” that one can really understand what was involved in
    reparations and restitution negotiations.

    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: last summer the
    reviewer for the FAZ compared the book’s author to Hannah Arendt; said
    that reading the book was “like opening a window for a sudden gust of
    fresh air.”

    Understandably dismayed by this sort of response to Finkelstein’s book,
    there were those in Germany who said that it was “impermissible” for
    Germans to discuss the questions which the book raised. As an outsider, I
    hesitate to express an opinion on how Germans conduct their public
    discourse, but I must say that I am opposed to their ruling any subject
    “impermissible” or “out of bounds.” And this applies particularly to
    subjects having to do with the memory of the Holocaust.

    Germany’s relationship to the Holocaust and its memory is not “given”–set
    in stone–but, must, like the relationship between any collectivity and
    its memories, be the subject of continued rethinking and renegotiation.
    Among American Jews, the rethinking and renegotiation of how we handle the
    memory of the Holocaust has been underway for some time, and it has been
    the occasion of lively debate. Though obviously the two cases are very
    dissimilar, many of the same issues arise. As the years pass, what should
    change and what should stay the same in our relationship to the memory?
    How does one steer a path between forgetfulness and obsession? What should
    be the relative weight of this memory compared to other memories of the
    collective past? If we’ve made mistakes in how we’ve memorialized the
    Holocaust, how can we learn from those mistakes and do better in the future?

    On neither side of the Atlantic should discussion of any of these issues
    be “impermissible.” Indeed such discussions are highly desirable. But
    Finkelstein’s rant is not a contribution to such discussions; it is a
    subtraction from them.

    [1] Accessible at

    http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/div/

    racket/holindustry/novickeng.html ; the
    original article that was published in the German newspaper Sueddeutsche
    Zeitung can be found in: Petra Steinberger (ed.): Die Finkelstein-Debatte,
    (Piper Verlag: Muenchen 2001), pp. 158-162

    * * * * *

    A Tale of Two Holocausts

    08.06.2000 | The New York Times
    By Omer Bartov
    Omer Bartov’s most recent book is “Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity.”

    THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY
    Reflections on the Exploitation
    of Jewish Suffering.
    By Norman G. Finkelstein.
    150 pp. New York:
    Verso. $23.

    NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN first gained a national reputation with his essay,
    “Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ‘Crazy’ Thesis,” included in the book he wrote
    with Ruth Bettina Birn, “A Nation on Trial.” Much of the essay was a
    brilliant dissection of Goldhagen’s book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.”
    Its last section, however, revealed Finkelstein undergoing a bizarre
    metamorphosis, in which he employed the same dubious rhetoric and faulty
    logic he had identified in Goldhagen’s work in order to propound his own,
    even “crazier,” thesis on the dark forces lurking, to his mind, behind his
    adversary’s success.

    Now Finkelstein is back, with a vengeance, a lone ranger with a holy
    mission — to unmask an evil Judeo-Zionist conspiracy. The main argument
    in “The Holocaust Industry” is based on a simple distinction between two
    phenomena: the Nazi Holocaust and “The Holocaust,” which he defines as “an
    ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust.” The author has little
    interest in the former, though he readily acknowledges that it happened,
    since both his parents survived its horrors and since some of the few
    historians he respects, notably Raul Hilberg, have written on it.

    But in one of those strange inversions that characterize his book,
    Finkelstein speaks of the historical event with the same kind of awe, and
    demands the same sort of silent incomprehension, that he ascribes to his
    main foe, Elie Wiesel. In order “to truly learn from the Nazi holocaust,”
    he asserts, “its physical dimension must be reduced and its moral
    dimension expanded.” Whatever that might mean, it comes as no surprise
    that his views about the origins, nature and implications of the genocide
    of the Jews are but a series of vague, undocumented and contradictory
    assertions. Thus, for instance, in one place he writes that the
    “historical evidence for a murderous gentile impulse is nil,” and rejects
    the notion that there might have been an “abandonment of the Jews” by the
    United States government. But in another place he charges that the United
    States Holocaust Memorial Museum “mutes the Christian background to
    European anti-Semitism” and “downplays the discriminatory U.S. immigration
    quotas before the war,” and then goes on to cite approvingly David S.
    Wyman’s book, “The Abandonment of the Jews.”

    But what really interests Finkelstein is “The Holocaust.” The gist of his
    argument is simple: Had the Jews and the Zionists not had the Holocaust
    already, they would have had to invent it. Indeed, for all intents and
    purposes, this is precisely what they have done, in the form of “The
    Holocaust,” despite the distracting fact that, once upon a time, such an
    event actually took place. And why was “The Holocaust” fabricated? Because
    it legitimizes “one of the world’s most formidable military powers,”
    Israel, allowing it to “cast itself as a ‘victim’ state,” and because it
    provides “the most successful ethnic group in the United States,” the
    Jews, with “immunity to criticism,” leading to “the moral corruptions that
    typically attend” such immunity.

    Finkelstein views himself as innocent of any desire to exploit “The
    Holocaust” for his own ends, unlike his apparently countless enemies. The
    fact that his sensational “revelations” and outrageous accusations draw a
    great deal of public and media attention is no fault of his own. Nor is
    his vehement anti-Zionism and seething hatred of what he perceives as a
    corrupt Jewish leadership in the United States anything but a reflection
    of a reality that only he can perceive through the clouds of mystification
    and demagogy that have deceived thousands of lay persons, scholars, and
    intellectuals. From his Mount Sinai, everything is clear and obvious. It’s
    just that his voice is too faint to be heard in the valley.

    The main culprit, in the world according to Finkelstein, is “the Holocaust
    industry,” made up of Israeli officials and fat lawyers, Jewish agents
    well placed in American political circles and ruthless Zionists determined
    to subjugate the Palestinians. Here he 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. Now, however, the
    Jewish conspiracy is intended to “shake down” (his favorite phrase) such
    innocent entities as Swiss banks, German corporations and East European
    owners of looted Jewish property, all in order to consolidate Jewish power
    and influence without giving the real survivors of the genocide anything
    but empty rhetoric.

    Nowhere does Finkelstein mention that the main beneficiaries of
    compensation for forced labor will be elderly gentile men and women living
    their last days in poverty in Eastern Europe, or that German scholars like
    Ulrich Herbert, hardly an employee of “Jewish interests,” have been at the
    forefront of the struggle to gain compensation from corporations that for
    decades refused to admit their enormous gains from slave and forced labor.
    From the author’s perspective, this is simply a case of organized
    American Jewry “lording it over those least able to defend themselves,”
    such as, presumably, the Swiss banks it was “plotting” to boycott, and
    “the United States and its allies” from whom it “finagled another $70 million.”

    Thus have the great powers of the world capitulated to what The Times of
    London called the “Holocash” campaign in the United States, according to
    Finkelstein. He reserves special contempt for the Claims Conference, an
    umbrella of Jewish organizations that distributes reparations funds to
    survivors, and quotes approvingly the right-wing Israeli Parliament member
    Michael Kleiner, who called the conference “a Judenrat, carrying on the
    Nazis’ work in different ways.” Indeed, as Finkelstein says in another
    context, les extrmes se touchent: in denouncing the “shakedown” of German
    corporations, this left-wing anti-Zionist uses precisely the kind of
    rhetoric that Menachem Begin employed when he spoke out against taking
    “blood money” during the right-wing riots against the restitution
    agreement with West Germany in the early 1950′s, which almost toppled the
    Israeli government.

    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. As was shown
    in Peter Novick’s far more balanced (though not entirely satisfactory)
    book, “The Holocaust in American Life,” the changing perception of the
    Nazi genocide of the Jews has also opened the way for a variety of
    exploiters and small-time opportunists. Yet to make this into an
    international Jewish conspiracy verges on paranoia and would serve
    anti-Semites around the world much better than any lawyer’s exorbitant
    fees for “shaking down” a German industrialist.

    Finkelstein speaks of the “Holocaust industry” as “cloaking itself in the
    sanctimonious mantle of ‘needy Holocaust victims.’ “Yet he cloaks himself
    in that very same mantle, while at the same time showing little sympathy
    for the feelings of the survivors and enormous zeal in exposing the
    “reckless and ruthless abandon” of the “Holocaust industry,” which he
    calls “the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe.” By its “blackmailing
    of Swiss bankers and German industrialists,” as well as of “starving
    Polish peasants,” the “Holocaust industry” seeks endlessly to augment that
    pile of gold, or “Holocaust booty,” on which Jewish and Zionist leaders
    are now allegedly sitting. “The Holocaust,” Finkelstein concludes, is
    possibly “the greatest robbery in the history of mankind.”

    What I find so striking about “The Holocaust Industry” is that it is
    almost an exact copy of the arguments it seeks to expose. It is filled
    with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly
    deplores in much of the current media hype over the Holocaust; it is
    brimming with the same indifference to historical facts, inner
    contradictions, strident politics and dubious contextualizations; and it
    oozes with the same smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority.

    This book is, in a word, an ideological fanatic’s view of other people’s
    opportunism, by a writer so reckless and ruthless in his attacks that he
    is prepared to defend his own enemies, the bastions of Western capitalism,
    and to warn that “The Holocaust” will stir up an anti-Semitism whose
    significance he otherwise discounts. Like any conspiracy theory, it
    contains several grains of truth; and like any such theory, it is both
    irrational and insidious. Finkelstein can now be said to have founded a
    Holocaust industry of his own.

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