Norman Finkelstein Seems to Have Been Stung by My Criticisms into Responding with an Infantile E-Mail
You Cannot Call BDS a ‘Cult’, Support the Existence of an Apartheid State & Attack the Slogan of the Movement ‘Palestine Must be Free’ & Expect To be Worshipped Like An Ancient God
Norman Finkelstein has been a remarkable analyst and critic but he has also acted like a bull in a china shop.
Finkelstein’s demolition of the fraudulent Joan Peter’s From Time Immemorial, which claimed that it was the Zionist settlement which attracted the Palestinians to Palestine and that there were therefore no refugees, was a classic example of how to deconstruct an opponent’s argument. To say that Finkelstein demolished Peters and her wretched book, whilst swimming against the tide of favourable reviews in all the mainstream press, the NYT included, is an understatement.
When Daniel Goldhagen wrote the execrable ‘The Germans: Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ which said that the Germans killed Jews because they were a particularly sadistic and cruel nation, Finkelstein tore him to pieces. So devastating was his criticism that Goldhagen threatened him with libel initially, rather than reply to the substance of the criticism.
Holocaust Industry
Finkelstein’s Holocaust Industry, helped change the debate over the weaponisation of the memory of the holocaust but it nonetheless refrained from drawing any conclusions about the relations between the Zionists and the Nazis which are surely relevant to the Zionists’ exploitation of the holocaust?
The pre-eminent holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg, author of the Destruction of European Jews was a ‘strong supporter’ of Finkelstein. Finkelstein savaged the Zionist Jewish Claims Conference which has embezzled millions of dollars, intended for the holocaust survivors, for the Zionists’ pet projects (as well as engaging in more mundane corruption).
This was all too much for the Socialist Workers’ Party resident guru, Professor Alex Callinicos [Finkelstein and the holocaust] who declared, in a review which, more than anything, demonstrated that the SWP is incapable of a serious analysis of anti-Semitism today or how the holocaust has been used to undermine Palestine solidarity.
How different is his assertion that “the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not plain fraud” from the Holocaust revisionist David Irving’s rantings during his recent libel case?... so exaggerated is his polemic that at times he comes, quite contrary to his own intentions, dangerously close to giving comfort to those who dream of new holocausts.
Perhaps this is one reason why the SWP front organisation, Stand Up to Racism, continues to march with genocidal Zionist organisations like Glasgow Friends of Israel. Ctd....The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Real nasty email by Norm. What's the matter with him? nm
on December 17, 2024, 8:41 pm