August 6, 2000
A Tale of Two Holocausts
The first one had victims, Norman G. Finkelstein says; the second has opportunists.
By OMER BARTOV
... 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.'' ...
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 ...
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 ...
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/08/06/reviews/000806.06bartovt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin