| Dave Silver
U.S. JEWS, ISRAEL AND THE HOLOCAUST
INDUSTRY
Norman Finkelstein’s Holocaust Industry (Verso 2000) has made an
important
contribution to busting Lies and showing the ideological
underpinnings to
the term Holocaust which he differentiates from the
Nazi Holocaust which
refers to the physical genocide of the Third
Reich. As he notes that of all
the groups decrying their
victimization, including Blacks, Latinos,Native
Americans and women,
Jews are the only group that has used “identity
politics and the
Holocaust not because of victim status but because they are
not
victims.” For instance the per capita Jewish income is nearly double
that of non Jews and sixteen of the forty wealthiest Americans are
Jews.
Finkelstein cogently observes that “Just as many Jews kept
Israel at arms
length when it constituted a liability, but became born
again Zionists when
it constituted an asset. So they kept their
ethnic identity at arms length
when it constituted a liability and
became born again Jews when it
constituted an asset.” Or
as novelist Philip Roth notes that an American
Jewish child inherits a
kind of psychology which can be translated into
three words: “Jews are
better.”
In the 70’s Jewish leaders concocted a “new anti-Semitism” which served
multiple purposes. According to Finkelstein “it boosted
Israel’s stock as
a refuge (if and when American Jews needed one, and
the fund raising appeals
of Jewish organizations purportedly fighting
anti-Semitism fell on more
receptive ears.” He cogently states
that as “American Jews enjoyed greater
secular success, they moved
steadily toward the right politically.”
Complementing the rightward
turn was “an inward turn, as Jews, no longer
mindful of past allies
among the have nots, increasingly earmarked their
resources for Jewish
concerns only.”
This re-orientation became clearly evident in growing
tensions between
Blacks and Jews. As Finkelstein notes that with
“concerns now couched in
class rather than racial terms, Jews fled to
the suburbs.” In the 1968
teacher work stoppage (it was
not a legitimate labor dispute or “strike”) in
New York Jewish racism
manifested itself as Black communities fought for
some control over
the systemic failure of schools. It is not surprising
therefore
that major Jewish organizations and publications filed amicus
curia
briefs in Supreme Court in the DeFunis (1974) and Bakke (1978) cases
in efforts to dismantle affirmative action programs.
Finkelstein: “Moving aggressively to defend their corporate and class
interests, Jewish elites branded all opposition to their new
conservative
policies anti-Semitic. Thus ADL leader Nathan
Perlmutter maintained that
the ‘real anti-Semitism’ in America
consisted of policy initiatives
corrosive of Jewish interests, such as
affirmative action, cuts in the
defense budget, and neo-isolationism,
as well as opposition to nuclear power
and even Electoral College
reform.” This interest was manifested in “museum
politics,” in which Elie Wiesel led “the offensive to
commemorate Jews
alone.” For instance Holocaust writers such as
Yehuda Bauer maintained that
Gypsies did not fall victim to the same
Nazi genocide as did the Jews. Also
part of the Holocaust
museum’s political agenda has been shaped by the
Israeli-Palestinian
conflict in which the fraudulent claim made in Joan
Peter’s From Time
Immemorial which claimed that Palestine was literally
empty before
Zionist colonization.
Finkelstein deals with the “Holocaust Survivor” in a chapter aptly
called
the Double Shakedown. He says it has come to include not
only those who
endured but also those who managed to evade the
Nazis. It includes for
example, more than 100,000 Polish Jews
who found refuge in the Soviet Union
after the Nazi invasion of
Poland. This notwithstanding that “those who had
lived in Russia had
not been treated differently than citizens of the
country” according
to historian Leonard Dinnerstein. Randall Robinson’s
book
Compensate the Forgotten Victims of America’s Slavery
Holocaust,juxtaposed the U.S. government’s silence “on this theft”
even as
U.S. Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat labored to make
16 German
companies compensate Jews used as slave laborers during the
Nazi era.
Meanwhile the World Jewish Congress allegedly speaking for
“needy Holocaust
survivors” wants to earmark half of Swiss payments to
go to Jewish
organizations and Holocaust education.” As
Finkelstein points out the
Jewish Claims Conference’s official Guide
to Compensation and Restitution
for Holocaust Survivors lists scores
of organizational affiliates including
banks, art museums and private
industry.
In a telling Conclusion Finkelstein says that we can learn much about
ourselves from the Nazi experience. The U.S. imperialist
doctrine Manifest
Destiny “anticipated nearly all the ideological and
programmatic element’s
of Hitler’s Lebensraum policy. In fact
Hitler modeled his conquest of the
East on the American conquest of
the West.” Just as a majority of American
States enacted
sterilization laws during the first half of the 20th century,
the
Nazis specifically invoked the U.S. precedent in enacting their own
sterilization laws. The notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped
Jews of the
franchise and forbade miscegenation between Jew and
non-Jew, so the Blacks
in the South suffered the same legal
disabilities and actually were victims
of greater spontaneous and
sanctioned popular violence than Jews in prewar
Germany.
Finkelstein says that the challenge today “is to restore the Nazi
Holocaust
as a rational subject of inquiry.” This can only be done by
developing a
consciousness in this and future generations as to how
the monster called
the Third Reich came into existence and developed
the enormous
machinery-human and material for its Genocide. To
do this we must first
point to the German Cartels and their US
co-conspirators like General
Electric and IBM as providing the
material base for Nazi conquest and the
use of anti-Communism
(Bolshevism then) linked to the scapegoating of the
Jews as the source
of the vast misery in the Third Reich. Such a
consciousness is a
pre-requisite for establishing viable people’s
organizations capable
of identifying and successfully resisting any future
encroaching
fascism.
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