AAARGH
[Note de
l'AAARGH: Finkelstein a un site web où l'on trouve le dossier
de son livre: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/index.html]
Our anti-Jewish bias
Thursday July 13, 2000
Norman Finkelstein argues in extracts from his forthcoming book (G2, July 12 and 13) that Holocaust remembrance has become an exploitative industry used to justify Israel's policies and that the campaign by Jewish survivors for compensation for assets lost under Nazi occupation and slave labour is directed by gold diggers.
More disturbing is the Guardian's decision to promote Finkelstein's views in such a high profile way. We are not among those who obsessively search for media bias. However, it seems to us the Guardian has consistently given a prominent forum to imbalanced and often bigoted views on Jewish issues. In the past four months you have run articles on the trial of Iranian Jews in Shiraz suggesting that pressure from the west - in response to Jewish lobbies - was responsible for the unfair anti-government reporting of the trial. You published a report on the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon that referred to the residents of northern Galilee as "settlers", setting up a mis guided association between these people and the settlers in the occupied territories. You printed a comment piece by Martin Kettle on Israel's 52nd anniversary arguing it had been born in original sin through expulsion of Palestinians, and a long review about a celebrated documentary on the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics in which Edward Said ranted against Zionist bias and provided an entirely distorted view of the film.
We are both active supporters of the Israeli peace movement and strongly endorse critical discussion of Israeli policies and Jewish issues. We certainly agree it is appropriate to question the excesses of particular Holocaust groups. But there is a significant difference between critical discussion and a systematic defamatory agenda. We doubt the Guardian would publish long articles by right-wing authors denouncing the "African-American slavery industry", or the "Armenian genocide remembrance business". It seems that Jews are fair game for crank provoca tions. We find it remarkable that a newspaper which flatters itself as the voice of progressive liberal opinion in Britain indulges in this bizarrely illiberal practice.
Prof Shalom
Lappin
Kings College, London
shalom.lappin@kcl.ac.uk
Dr Colin Shindler
School of Oriental and African Studies
Half of my family were murdered by Lithuanian and Latvian Nazis - victims of the only "Holocaust industry". I shall shortly revisit their mass graves.
On my return I shall continue to campaign for the extension of Holocaust education, not only to commemorate the hideous past but as a beacon of warning against genocide miseries of the present and future - despite Finkelstein's nauseous approach to the Holocaust.
Lord Janner
of Braunstone QC
Chairman,
Holocaust Educational Trust
I'm offended that Johannes Asamer, an Austrian gravel producer, says compensation for slave labourers is unnecessary because "those who did the real forced labour are no longer alive" (Austrian slave fund is rejected, July 10).
My father worked for five years as a slave labourer in the stone quarries of Mauthausen camp in Austria. He died in May, having spent his last days reliving the horror of his time there. It has taken too long to compensate victims like him; how dare these wealthy businessmen hold the process up even longer?
I say thank goodness that "the Jews are exerting so much pressure". Without their determined lobbying, there would be no justice for any of the slave labourers, Jewish or not.
Christina
Strupinska
London
The Holocaust's divided legacy
Monday July 17, 2000
As the publisher of Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry, I am dismayed at Jonathan Freedland's article (An enemy of the people, July 14). He seems not to disagree with any of the significant arguments in the book, but insists they have all been made previously. He is quite wrong: Finkelstein's explanation for the comparatively recent adoption of the Holocaust as a major issue by American Jewish leaders has never been made before and his research on the misappropriation of Holocaust compensation is both new and shocking.
Freedland's primary criticism is that the tone of the book implies a hostile attitude towards the Jews and that Finkelstein, a Jew whose parents were survivors of the Nazi camps, is self-hating. Freedland repeatedly suggests similarities between Finkelstein's outlook and that of Holocaust denier David Irving.
These claims are crudely insulting of a writer who has displayed great courage in raising difficult questions about the policies of Jewish leaders and their detrimental effect on the wider Jewish community. Hannah Arendt, in the storm prompted by the publication of her book Eichmann In Jerusalem, was defended by Gershom Scholem as someone who loved the Jews. Arendt declined this defence pointing out that whilst she loved her friends and family she could not possibly love an entire people. Freedland's requirement that Finkelstein waves a flag of affection for all Jews draws on the same reasoning as anti-Semites who preach hatred against them.
Colin Robinson
Verso
Even the most uninformed reader should be able to recognise the tell-tale signs of demagoguery in Finkelstein's wild rhetoric, quotations out of context, and the mixture of trivial and significant detail jumbled together.
But why should the Guardian showcase this bit of American vulgar sensationalism just when your own Imperial War Museum has opened an impressive Holocaust wing and days before the opening of the conference Remembering for the Future? The ill-considered outburst you chose to print only reinforces my sense as an American of a certain British obtuseness when it comes to Jewish matters.
Prof Froma
I Zeitlin
Director of Jewish Studies,
Princeton University
fiz@princeton.edu
If the Holocaust is not being treated as a sacred mystery and a unique historical event, why would states such as the US and UK, which took no part in perpetrating this crime create memorials, museums and commemorative occasions for it while neglecting atrocities in their own histories, such as the genocide of the native Americans and aboriginal Australians and the enslavement of Africans, not to mention the insistence of the US in the 80s on continuing to recognise Pol Pot's government long after it became known that it had slaughtered 2m Cambodians?
Dr Riadh
Abed
Sheffield
abed@globalnet.co.uk
There is no such thing as a "Holocaust industry". There are only good men and women working hard to educate the public about the Holocaust, so that its horrors shall never be experienced again. These same people are also struggling to provide some measure of justice both to ageing Holocaust survivors and non-Jewish victims against whom the Nazis committed the greatest robbery in the history of mankind. Just one example: Estelle Sapir promised her father before he perished at a concentration camp that she would recover money he deposited at a Swiss bank. Ms Sapir struggled for over 50 years to keep her promise and, in May 1999, finally received the return of her father's funds. Finkelstein aims to shock rather than provide accurate information about the struggle to have corporate wrongdoers disgorge the billions in profits they earned from the suffering of others.
Prof Michael
Bazyler
Whittier Law School, USA
As a Dutch gentile, I helped Jews escape occupied Holland until I had to as well. My mother suffered months in prison as a hostage for the Nazis' failure to capture me.
Three points in support of Finkelstein. Many gentiles suffered as much as Jews, as resisters and as slave labourers. Second, most survivors were compensated shortly after war's end, though no doubt inadequately. The third is the most important. Survivors built new lives for themselves, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. It is an insult to those who did so, like my Jewish foster brother, to moan about compensation 60 years later. They confuse money with justice and morality.
Herman Friedhoff
Westcote Barton, Oxon
The Holocaust Industry contains a number of inaccuracies on the work of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The Claims Conference has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to institutions that provide essential social services to survivors of the Shoah. In 1999 alone, in just the former Soviet Union, the Claims Conference funded a programme through which more than 805,000 food packages were delivered and more than 3m hot meals were served. Grants provided nearly 71,000 Nazi victims with fuel to maintain adequate heat through the winter, or with extra blankets, and provided more than 100,000 medical consultations
Ben Helfgott
45 Aid Society
Afficher un texte sur le Web équivaut à mettre un document sur le rayonnage d'une bibliothèque publique. Cela nous coûte un peu d'argent et de travail. Nous pensons que c'est le lecteur volontaire qui en profite et nous le supposons capable de penser par lui-même. Un lecteur qui va chercher un document sur le Web le fait toujours à ses risques et périls. Quant à l'auteur, il n'y a pas lieu de supposer qu'il partage la responsabilité des autres textes consultables sur ce site. En raison des lois qui instituent une censure spécifique dans certains pays (Allemagne, France, Israël, Suisse, Canada, et d'autres), nous ne demandons pas l'agrément des auteurs qui y vivent car ils ne sont pas libres de consentir.
Nous nous plaçons sous
la protection de l'article 19 de la Déclaration des Droits
de l'homme, qui stipule:
ARTICLE 19
<Tout individu a droit à la liberté d'opinion
et d'expression, ce qui implique le droit de ne pas être
inquiété pour ses opinions et celui de chercher,
de recevoir et de répandre, sans considération de
frontière, les informations et les idées par quelque
moyen d'expression que ce soit>
Déclaration internationale des droits de l'homme,
adoptée par l'Assemblée générale de
l'ONU à Paris, le 10 décembre 1948.
Ce document : http://aaargh-international.org/fran/div/racket/holindustry.html>