From: Miroslav Antic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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. http://www.left.ru/inter/august/silver.html _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________
