Finkelstein and the far left
Posted on Monday 28 December, 2009
Filed Under History
BACK in 2000 – the year in which ‘The Holocaust Industry’ was first published – I can plausibly claim to have been too preoccupied with the arrival of my first child to have kept up to speed with then-current controversies.
But to allow almost a decade to elapse without picking up on what must rank as the most important polemic of the twenty-first century so far was clearly a bad call on my part, which I have rectified in the last few days.
Norman Finkelstein’s work remains of sufficient first-rank import that all educated people should feel themselves obliged to read it and then take a position on the issues it raises.
The book is based on the premise that the historical reality of the Nazi holocaust has since 1967 been hijacked by ‘Jewish elites’ in the US, and transformed into an ‘indispensable ideological weapon’, used to justify unquestioning Washington support for the actions of the state of Israel.
It also details the way in which the memory of the murder of up to 6m Jews has been used to ‘shake down’ both Switzerland and Germany for large sums of money in respect of their real or alleged complicity or culpability in these events.
The standard charge against Finkelstein is that his account dovetails neatly in the narratives of the neo-Nazi far right, resurrecting the Shylock stereotype of Jewish hucksters out to extract a pound of gentile flesh.
Yet serious scholarship – much of it undertaken by Jewish men and women – has for many years undermined key aspects of the authorised version of what happened in the holocaust.
The work of Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt, for instance, highlighted uncomfortable but undeniable findings that bourgeois elements within some Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe sought to save their own skins by various degrees of collaboration with the SS.
The facts of the Rudolf Kastner case are a matter of historical record. Aware that by 1944, Hungarian Jews were being shipped to Auschwitz at the rate of 12,000 a day, Budapest-based Zionist leader Kastner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann the passage to Switzerland of 1,685 wealthy Jews, in exchange for money, gold and diamonds.
An Israeli court, ruling on a libel action brought by the Israeli government against a critic of Kastner in 1955, found that he had effectively damned the many to save the few. He was subsequently assassinated, after which the verdict was overturned by the supreme court.
Morally speaking, it is possible to put a number of constructions on Kastner’s actions. Perhaps, it might be maintained, he preserved the lives of those whose lives it was possible to preserve, and nothing he could have done would have prevented the deaths of the others. Which of us, had we found ourselves in his circumstances, would not at least have been tempted to do as he did?
But another obvious reading is that he cynically acted in the narrow interests of his own class, to the fatal detriment of the impoverished majority of Hungarian Jewry.
Finkelstein’s book effectively charges that today’s American Jewish elite, motivated once again by class interests, have advanced their own political ideas and bankrolled the projects that instantiate these positions by using the holocaust to delegitimise criticism of their goals.
That is not an accusation to be made lightly, and Finkelstein’s pervasive rhetorical flourishes do him no favours. But if you are going to engage in polemic, there is no point in not stating your stance as aggressively as our media-dominated age requires.
Ultimately the documentation is sufficiently meticulous to seem to me persuasive; Finkelstein’s thesis only falls if the underlying evidence used to buttress it can be refuted, and as far as I am aware, nobody has been able to achieve that.
Yet looking at some of the reviews from the time, I remain a little puzzled by the reaction to publication of ‘The Holocaust Industry’ in some quarters of the British left. You can read what Alex Callinicos, a leader of the Socialist Workers’ Party, had to say about it back in 2000 here.
Amid the somewhat forced praise – ‘Finkelstein … has raised legitimate questions’ – Callinicos compares some of the author’s formulations with the ‘rantings’ of holocaust denier David Irving. He concludes:
But so exaggerated is his polemic that at times [Finkelstein] comes, quite contrary to his own intentions, dangerously close to giving comfort to those who dream of new holocausts.
That, I think, is an unfortunate way to characterise the writings of an academic who has done his best to set down the truth as he sees it, much as that will discomfit many. That no more damns the work of Finkelstein than it discredited the work of Hilberg or Arendt. If there are any guilty parties here, they are those whose actions Finkelstein simply documents.
Yet in more recent years, Callinicos himself has reportedly been ready to mount a qualified defence of the ‘Thermidorian’ regime in Iran, a government that really is headed by a holocaust denier who does indeed dream of wiping Israel off the map.
Finally, you will notice that the link to the Callinicos article leads to the archive of a US-based Marxist discussion list. This is because the piece appears to have been taken down from the website of Socialist Worker, the journal in which it was originally published.
Hopefully someone will be able to let me know the technical reason for this step, and reassure me that the removal was not purposely undertaken as a gesture of friendship between the SWP and their Islamist allies of convenience a few years back. Surely that could not be enough to justify an about face on an issue of such monumental impact on recent history?
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81 Responses to “Finkelstein and the far left”
“But so exaggerated is his polemic that at times [Finkelstein] comes, quite contrary to his own intentions, dangerously close to giving comfort to those who dream of new holocausts.” Callinicos
“That, I think, is an unfortunate way to characterise…”
Yes, it IS unfortunate; it’s jus plain NOT TRUE
“…the piece appears to have been taken down from the website of Socialist Worker, the journal in which it was originally published.
…Hopefully someone will be able to let me know the technical reason for this step, and reassure me that the removal was not purposely undertaken as a gesture of friendship between the SWP and their Islamist allies of convenience a few years back. Surely that could not be enough to justify an about face on an issue of such monumental impact on recent history? ”
Or maybe the SWP too thought it was ” an unfortunate way to characterise blah blah ”
And now we get to what seems to be the point of this piece:
” Yet in more recent years, Callinicos himself has reportedly been ready to mount a qualified defence of the ‘Thermidorian’ regime in Iran, a government that really is headed by a holocaust denier who does indeed dream of wiping Israel off the map. ”
Yet another attempt to slip through that proven lie ” dream of wiping Israel off the map “. You know perfectly well that that was deliberately mistranslated and distributed to the Western media by the massively funded zionist propaganda machine (just wait for the HP lot to show up here claiming there is no zionist propaganda machine). But anyway, do YOU not dream of wiping Israel off the map? If not, why not? Israel is by definition the ‘state of the jews’, a racist state – it should indeed be consigned to the dustbin of history, like apartheid S.Africa, as Ahmanedinijad (?) actually said.
“Callinicos himself has reportedly been ready to mount a qualified defence of the … regime in Iran ”
A limited defence like noting that the election results were quite compatible with several very credible polls, and that generally speaking it’s not the business of anyone but the Iranian people to remove the regime? I haven’t heard of Callinicos or any other SWP or Stop the War people going further than that, or even HOPI – that zionist propaganda operation whose sole purpose is to demonise the Stop the War movement as supporters of ‘Islamo-fascism’. Is that where you’re ‘coming from’ Dave?
jock. At least you acknowledge that ‘Islamo-fascism exists’. As long as the SWP have any relationship with Islam they will remain in the wilderness with fellow socialists and the British voter. A good thing though. Who wants dictators whatever cloak or disguise they wear.
I haven’t read Finkelstein’s book, but it seems to me to raise valid points. It would be utopian in the extreme to imagine that Jews are/were socially all the same class. There were poor Jews, rich Jews, religious Jews, politically active Jews etc. Under the conditions that actually prevailed in war-torn Europe, I have no doubt that decisions had to be made, and unfortunately, some where damned and some were saved. it would have been preferable if no-one had been damned, but let’s face it, that wasn’t on the agenda. Zionists weren’t the only ones who only helped wealthy people escape, I remember reading that a book about one of France’s worse mass murderers. I have forgotten his name (perhaps if Coatsey is reading this he could help me out). During the Occupation he claimed to be running a railway to help people escape from Paris, but what he was doing was relieving them of all their gold and wealth and then murdering them. (So he was helping them evade the Nazis in one sense).
Personally, I have long thought that any defence of the existence of the State of Israel does not (or need not) rely totally on any historical events that happened 60 years ago. I have always found it hypocritically that the same people who insist that the nation state is redundant and that there shoudl be no national boundaries, are very often the same people who scream blue murder at Israel and talk about ‘stolen land’ and ‘European Jews’.
As far as Iran goes, can Jock McTrousers give us his perspective on today’s events in Tehran, please.
“Callinicos himself has reportedly been ready to mount a qualified defence of the ‘Thermidorian’ regime in Iran”
While I am no fan of Callinicos, the link you provide does not show him mounting any defence of the Iranian regime, but rather quibbling about how it should be characterised. And “Thermidorian” is, as you are fully aware, not a positive characterisation in Trotskyist jargon.
Pharisee
You miss the finer point of Trot theory here. Thermidorian regimes are implicitly progressive, as the uphold new progressive property forms.
In describing the Stalinist regime as Thermidorian, Trotsky was arguing that it should not be overthrown by revolutionary means, as internal reform was possible.
He proceeded to change his opinion. Callinicos has resurrected the category, but not fully explained himself.
Those damned Muslims. If they’re not providing religious justification for honour killings, or advocating domestic violence, or trying to wipe Israel off the map, then they’re encouraging self-censorship on the part of the SWP. It’s enough to drive you to Islamophobia.
“Callinicos has resurrected the category, but not fully explained himself”
Indeed. Does it not strike you that a cryptic and not fully explained reference to a quaint Trotskyist term found in a one line second hand account of a meeting on an ultra left website is a fairly flimsy basis on which to infer that somebody is mounting a defence of anti-Semitism, genocide and holocaust denial?
Dave, you left the lid off the sewer over the Christmas holidays and the racist vermin that inhabit the comments on your blog ran amuck.
Are you hoping for the same effect for the new year holiday ?
“But so exaggerated is his polemic that at times [Finkelstein] comes, quite contrary to his own intentions, dangerously close to giving comfort to those who dream of new holocausts.”
This is actually quite true. Neo-nazi groups such as the National Alliance in the US actually sell his book (see their website). Finkelstein’s personal view aside, his works are written in such a manner that they are completely palatable with an openly antisemitic and neo-Nazi world view.
Isn’t there something deeply wrong with that?
Besides, anyone who shouts ‘We are all Hezbollah” from the stage at demonstrations (as he did in NYC in 2006) has completely lost my support.
As a member of the Jewish Socialists Group which is affiliated with both Stop the War Coalition and HOPI, I am intrigued to learn from your correspondent McTrouser that HOPI is a “Zionist” operation created to smear the Stop the War Coalition.
I wonder who the crypto-Zionist is on the steering committee, me or Moshe Machover? I won’t bore you with either of our records fighting the Zionists, we go back a bit and people know us, but McTrouser whoever he is hiding behind that name is plainly the pants when it comes to honest political analysis.
It could be the Iranians of course, some of whom have a bit more experience of revolution than most of the British Left, but McTrouser kindly grants the right of Iranians to oppose their regime so maybe he will extend that to exiles (so long as they do not disturb the opportunism of some Brit Lefts and not-so-lefts). You have to admit we’ve been clever in not only campaigning against sanctions and the threat of war on Iran, but in trying twice to affiliate HOPI with the Stop the War Coalition, solely in order to denounce the STWC leadership when it refused our affiliation. It was the same a few years ago when some Iranian refugees walked from Birmingham to London to join the big STWC rally, and ‘phoned en route to ask if they could have a few minutes from the platform. No way! Can’t have the poor punters thinking it is possible both to oppose the war and oppose the regime.
But the SWP seemed to shift a little bit this Summer, towards a bit of liberalism anyway, so McTrouser had better watch he is not caught with his trousers down when the lies he uses as braces wear too thin.
The link between Ahmadinejad and Holocaust deniers is nothing to do with that mistranslated speech about states wiped off the atlas (which is what happened to Palestine anyway) but with the Iranian leader expressing skepticism and then hosting a conference of neo-Nazis and other scum such as ex-Klan leader David Duke in Tehran. No help whatsoever to the Palestinians, nor incidentally to Muslims in the West who are targeted by these racists, but just what the Zionist propaganda machine ordered. And the connections may go further. The most charitable thing we can say is that Ahmadinejad is stupid, and McTrouser is ignorant. But he is also a liar as he accuses HOPI and its supporters of using the “Islamo-fascist” tag which does not appear anywhere, except among people who are opposed to HOPI.
Now to Finkelstein. He is not a Holocaust denier, and the Zionists who attack him and got him denied tenure, and prevented him speaking at an Oxford panel debate, are guilty of slander. Like most witch-hunters they probably have not even read his books. My only quibble is whether a left-wing writer would worry over much that German or Swiss banks were hard done by! But that brings me to another point, that the Zionist Lobby did not just work to ensure US support for Israel, but lent themselves to a hidden conflict between US and European interests. (Earlier, west German reparations to Israel – which did not reach survivors like Finkelstein’s mother -were underwritten by the US to ease the way for German re-armament, so long as west Germany was seen as frontline against the Soviets). Iran’s leaders may have hoped to play the opposite role.
Callenicos has got the SWP in trouble before – the Bookmarks case arose from his remarks concerning some people who took a different stand during the Bosnian war. But that was in another time and place, and besides, thousands are dead. Mustn’t dig up the past.
” As a member of the Jewish Socialists Group … I am intrigued to learn from your correspondent McTrouser that HOPI is a “Zionist” operation created to smear the Stop the War Coalition.”
As a member of the Protestant Socialist Group (is that alright?) I am intrigued as to why someone who denies his object is to slander STWC as supporters of the Iranian regime thinks his case is aided by :
” Can’t have the poor punters thinking it is possible both to oppose the war and oppose the regime.”
Perhaps one of the reasons for the failure of writers on ‘the left’ to make much progress is the chronic habit of expending so much energy decrying those further to the left, even if it means, as in this case, digging up a ten year old book review. I know this is traditionally a season for reflection, but that takes the biscuit!
As for:
“Morally speaking, it is possible to put a number of constructions on Kastner’s actions. Perhaps, it might be maintained, he preserved the lives of those whose lives it was possible to preserve, and nothing he could have done would have prevented the deaths of the others. Which of us, had we found ourselves in his circumstances, would not at least have been tempted to do as he did? But another obvious reading is that he cynically acted in the narrow interests of his own class, to the fatal detriment of the impoverished majority of Hungarian Jewry.”
Why not take the most cynical of the constructions – in spite of the accepted idea that many (most?) of us would have done the same. Personally, I find the fact that some Jews may have ‘sought to save their own skins’ in the face of mass extermination entirely understandable.
I’ve had to revise my ‘Weirdest Blog Post of the Year’ award for 2009.
Congratulations.
I am not sure that the must interesting aspect of Finkelstein’s work is what the SWP thinks about him.
Slightly obscure.
Dave
you are becomming a class act.
You review Finkelstien, and only find in it ammunition to attack the SWP, and criticise those parts of the left who don’t share your growing islamophobia.
Your blog is becommng more and more like the Green arrow
andy newman. You must be a student of psychiatry. Your expert prognosis of Dave and his growing non existent islamaphobia is lamentable. No wonder the left is laughable. Get a grip of yer knickers old chap.
To support the present Iranian government against those demonstrating this week you would need a real Stalinist mindset.
Les Abbey. Or a genocidal mindset.
It’s interesting that the verdict of an Israeli court is seen as being a just ruling. We can be certain that Dyab Abu Jahjah, to name but one, would consider an Israeli court as illegitimate as the Zionist entity itself!
Charlie Pottins makes a valuable point about Norman Finkelsten being denied tenure. The tale would take far too long to tell here, but suffice it to say that academics are a mean and bitchy lot at the best of times – the horrid story of the Oxford Poetry Professorship being a case in point – and it appears probable that there was what amounts to a well-orchestrated conspiracy to prevent Finkelstein obtaining tenure anywhere reputable as a punishment for his heterodox opinions and his irrepressible desire to let cats out of bags.
Is there something about the very name Norman Finkelstein that gives one the giggles? Like, say, Goodwillie? Wouldn’t someone with that sort of name be happier running a magic show on kiddies’ telly rather than banging on about Zionist perfidy, Colonel Eichmann, Treblinka and Dr Rudolf Spanner’s soapworks and so on?
One wonders if Kastner was ever a chess player. Chess is a game of ‘last man standing’ rather than of trying to win the game AND save all one’s pawns. Saving 1,685 high-IQ creative people and good craftworkers and cellists would have been more morally defensible than saving 1,685 people on the grounds of their wealth, but one does the best one can in a bad situation.
Eddie Truman laments that the manhole covering the sewers was ill-secured over Christmas and that mighty hosts of noxious vermin surged forth – like ‘Willard’ or the tale of the Pied Piper.
Which brings to mind the sort of question an inquisive sewer rat would ask:
WHO ACTUALLY FUNDS THE VERY SLICKLY-RUN ISLAMOPHIA WATCH ?
A pair of self-hating white blokes rapoidly depleting their savings?
Lord Ahmed and his Dauntless Ten Thousand?
The Ayatollahs?
Prince Walid bin Eurodisney?
Who?
Again I pause to ask whether I’m the only contributor currently in the Middle East.
Surely those who unashamedly snuggle up to the current regime in Iran ought to have a group of their own called
HOATSPI
Hands off the Ayatollahs, Torturers and Secret Police of Iran
Bill Corr, your odd belief that you are a master of whimsical humour is frankly even more annoying than your crass racism.
It’s at a slight tangent, but the Chinese government have just executed a Muslim with bi-polar disorder. What will Andy Newman do…?
Given his past form, including support for Gary McKinnon’s extradition and the death sentence (they do it Cuba and North Korea, etc) I take he he’s rather happy at the idea of the Holy State putting someone to death. However, the guy’s a Muslim, so which way will he jump?
Is it to be Sinophobia, or Islamophobia? I think we have a right to know!
“WHO ACTUALLY FUNDS THE VERY SLICKLY-RUN ISLAMOPHIA WATCH?”
Perhaps Bill Corr should get his own blog. That way, he could post his views there and we’d be spared his racist rants. Plus he’d find out that setting up and running a website really isn’t very expensive. That’s why so many people do it.
“and only find in it ammunition to attack the SWP”
Oh the irony coming from Andy .
The marx.org glossary gives this definition of Thermidor:
Thermidor is that moment in the development of a revolution when the masses begin to withdraw from active intervention in history and the original leadership of the revolution is replaced by a conservative bureaucracy.
As the account of Callinicos’ words is only taken second hand from the Permanent Revolution site, which isn’t always liable to quote the SWP in context,and whose account here is hazy at best, perhaps not too much should be deduced from it. But I don’t see why Ahmedinijad being a Holocaust denier should fundamentally determine a Marxist attitude towards Iran. Syria employed an actual Nazi to run its intelligence service for many years, yet most socialists would have supported it in its wars against Israel.
The fact that Finkelstein has been rattling Alan Dershowitz’s cage for years puts him on the side of the angels. Dershowitz is a despicable shit who approves of murder and torture and any Zionist re-writing of Middle East history to justify the founding of Israel and what followed.
It is a few years since I read Finkelstein’s book. I remember at the time the world seemed to be divided into those who thought it was the work of the devil or the most wonderful thing since sliced bread. Of course it was neither. I felt more like giving it a mark out of 10 and might have given it 6. It had some sound basic arguments – there are people and institutions who have created a holocaust industry on the backs of the suffering of the Nazis victims and this has financial and political goals. But it was, as Charlie Pottins says, rather too concerned on behalf of Swiss bankers and the German elite for a socialist.
I remember finding it over-polemical in style, with unnecessarily conspiratorial overtones – using formulations designed to wind up certain readers rather than challenge their assumptions, and written with the vastly over-simplified and dubious aim of reading directly from this European/American past into the present conflicts of Israel/Palestine.
There were other publications on similar ground at the time that arrived with less hype and fanfare – such as Peter Novick’s “the Holocaust in American Life” or Guli Neeman-Arad’s “America, its Jews and the rise of Nazism”, which make some similar points in much more measured tones and with a much less black and white worldview
While the connections between the failure to prevent the extermination of Jews in the Holocaust and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine are obvious, there are surely enough reasons to condemn and mobilise against Zionism and Israeli state policy without trying to read into current political standpoints from the actions of people like Kastner.
Over the holidays I’ve been reading a book I’ve meant to get a long time ago called “On both Sides of the Wall” written by a socialist (Bundist) called Vladka Meed, originally in Yiddish in 1948 and published in English in the 1970s. She operated as a courier for the Jewish anti-Nazi resistance in Warsaw both during and after the uprising and took part in the 44 Polish uprising too. It is very painful reading – there are far more betrayals than acts of solidarity, and some acts of bravery and selflessness don’t necessarily tally with the perceptions of holders of those political standpoints today. It is a good corrective to any temptation to draw conclusions too quickly about people’s behaviour in relation to their stated political ideology or objective interests.
copies are available on Amazon – I’m near the end and so far have found it a far more enlightening read than Finkelstein’s book.
As for the SWP’s behaviour around the book – this surely is about opportunism rather than political principles. Is this something new then? I don’t think so.
Shameless plug time! The Weekly Worker – the voice of Common-Sense & Decency – has featured lengthy ‘pro-Finkelstein’ reviews, most of them (if not all of them) penned by yours truly:
http://tinyurl.com/y9l5wkz
http://tinyurl.com/ycnore5
http://tinyurl.com/yc95cu5
related: http://tinyurl.com/y9md97d
and Tony Greenstein’s take:
http://tinyurl.com/y8lmmq6
It is to be regretted, with a shrug of grudging acceptance, that there are those whose favourate word of accusation is “racist!” Older readers will recall a fictional character in a text by C.S.Lewis, a bullying girl at a ‘progessive school,’ yelling “fascist!” as a term of abuse.
So what does the term ‘racism’ mean, anyway?
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_otbie-racism.html
Theodore Dalrymple’s sharp little piece may throw some light on the way the term is used.
There are those who claim that no less a figure than Trotsky, in his Mexican period, invented the term but one immediately suspects so neat an attribution. Like ‘politically correct’ it probably had several contending parents.
Finkelstein’s book is exactly as Dave describes it: a serious and at times heart-rending account. As David Rosenburg also says it’s rather too concerned with “Swiss bankers and the German elite” for a serious socialist analysis. As well as its “dubious aim of reading directly from this European/American past into the present conflicts of Israel/Palestine.”
I look at this through the lens of those, like the Jewish Socialist Group, who begin with the reality of the Shoah itself.
As a supporter of HOPI, who heard Charlie vigously criticising Israel at the AGM a few weeks ago, and who like the other comrades there, from the Commune, Weekly Worker, Green Party (Jim Jeeps), and Iranian opposition, I am intrigued to hear that us lot are Zionist stooges. Including Tony Greenstein, who though not at this meeting is a founding member.
The true comrades know one another, and we are all HOPI supporters.
“Finally, you will notice that the link to the Callinicos article leads to the archive of a US-based Marxist discussion list. This is because the piece appears to have been taken down from the website of Socialist Worker, the journal in which it was originally published.”
As can be seen from the Marxmail post, the Callinicos piece criticising Finkelstein appeared in issue 1706 of Socialist Worker, dated 22 July 2000.
If you look on the Socialist Worker website in the Back Issues section you’ll find that only two issues of the paper from 2000 are available online. The site administrators state that they “aim to add further back issues in the future”.
I have never been able to take Finkelstein srioujsly since he expressed smpathy with Islamist threats upon the life of Irshad Manji. I contacted him at the time, just to check whether or not it actually had been him: his evasive response made it clear that it had, indeed, been him. The man is scum.
A typically stupid and intemperate comment from Jim Denham.
Jim, it might be helpful if you explained who Irshad Manji is, what the Islamist threats were and how Finkelstein expressed sympathy with them.
By the way, what do you think about the book in question?
It is all too easy to muddy the waters in any discussion of Israel / Palestine. As a Marxist you wouldn’t want to do that, would you?
Irshad Manji is a Canadian woman who makes a tidy living lecturing Christian and Jewish audiences on why Muslims are morally inferior to Christians and Jews. She’s also a vigorous supporter of both the War on Terror and a certain Middle Eastern state. Needless to say, James regards her as the acceptable face of Islam, and her critics as “clerical fascists”, to use his sect’s buzzword.
In fact, the Canadian Muslim Congress – an impeccably liberal bunch who even support gay marriage – have sharply criticised Manji as someone who is actually setting back the cause of progressive Muslims. I suppose they’re clerical fascists too.
As for Finkelstein, it’s nice to see Mr Denham continue his long record of denouncing Jews as antisemitic if they don’t adhere to the Mahoneyite line on Israel.
” The true comrades know one another …” Because you all go to the same N.London synagogue?
“As for Finkelstein, it’s nice to see Mr Denham continue his long record of denouncing Jews as antisemitic if they don’t adhere to the Mahoneyite line on Israel.”
Eh? When did that happen? (Recently, that is.)
My mistake. Above, we merely see Prof Finkelstein described as “scum”. I’m absolutely sure JD had called him an antisemite, however. He regularly does with Jews whose criticism of Israel oversteps what the AWL deems acceptable.
Now here is what I don’t understand, why Finkelstein’s arguments (such as they are) are even given the time of day?
If you heard a Far Right politician talking about “The Jews collaborating with the Nazis during WW2…”, you would, as socialists, instinctively know that it was a pile of stinking manure.
If someone else then made the argument that “****The*** Irish have collaborated with the Nazis during WW2”, trotting out the familiar tale of an old IRA man on a German sub, then automatically you would be suspicious and question the historical accuracy of such a statement.
Is someone was to argue that “The Germans were Nazis and collaborated with Hitler en masse”, then probably you might be tempted to point out how inaccurate that was as a historical statement. Indicating the broader situation, the opposition to Hitler, the difficulties, the crushing of trade unions and political parties, and finally how many Germans were still social Democrats and more on the Left.
As socialists, you’d probably want a subtle, nuanced view of these difficult circumstances, you’d probably reject the overly simplistic and trite arguments trying to blame a whole group, a whole section, a collection of people for the Nazi’s own brutal and murderous campaigns.
As socialists you’d see that the Far Right want to advance certain arguments making equivalents, and thus trying to exculpate the Nazis, you would naturally be aware that this type of argumentation is common currency on the Extreme Right as they try to rehabilitate National Socialism.
You’d be aware of all that and careful.
Yet Finkelstein comes into view, and mist descends before people’s eyes and arguments which would be roundly rejected had anyone else (say, from the Far Right) advanced them, somehow are seen as acceptable, merely because Finkelstein pushes them.
I am at a loss to understand how otherwise intelligent socialists can’t just look at the ****arguments****, think about the history, not Finkelstein’s ethnicity, not that of his parents or anything else but look at the arguments and the history and then see why these are extremely dodgy and questionable points, which have been doing the rounds for years.
I have great admiration for Jim Denham.
He takes a consistent and aggressive stance in defence of any thoroughly fucked analysis of Israel (or whatever) from John O’Mahony.
Splintered Sunrise, Lobby Ludd and a few others ought to make it plain that O’Mahoneyites and Matgamnistas are one and the same.
The Snark really is a Boojum, you see!
Jimmy Glesga obviously believes in the existence of Islamo-Fascism, as do many of us [especially those of us who have travelled rather more and consequently know rather more than some do.]
Can one assert that a curious hybrid which one might call Islamo-Trotskism also exists?
On Irshad Manji, who has a belated cameo role in the Swiss minarets saga:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWRjNTdhMmU5MWUyNTUwYjFjNmI2ZmQwNjhkMzg2OTk=
With links to her site and SOCIALIST UNITY, too!
The link Corr has posted has nothing to do with Irshad Manji. It is to a blog post by John Derbyshire at National Review Online which concludes:
“Mass non-European immigration into the West has highly unpredictable consequences. The mass immigration of Muslims, in particular, seem [sic] like a really bad idea.”
Isn’t it about time that Corr was told he’s not welcome on this site? Or does Dave believe that right-wing racists have a useful contribution to make to political debate here?
Of course, Dave may well reply that it’s difficult to distinguish between Corr’s views and those of Jim Denham or Jimmy Glesga.
Anon is right; I posted the wrong link in error.
However, Anon seems simply unable to grasp the fact that one can be opposed to mass Muslim [or Zoroastrian or even Shintoist] immigration without being any kind of racist.
If the term ‘racism’ has any sort of meaning it denotes an obsession with skin colour, not with confessional identity or collective social behaviour.
Skin colour is not an issue at all; an influx of very dark Tamil Christians, for example, would cause far fewer social problems than an influx of far paler Kurds.
THIS is the link I intended to post:
http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/12/29/muslims-thank-jewish-students-for-support-on-swiss-minaret-ban/
One might add that well-mieaning Jews can try to suck up to would-be minaret-builders till Hell freezes over or the cows come home, whichever is the sooner, but in the eyes of the True Believers among the would-be minaret-builders Jews will forever remains the descendents of apes and pigs and condemned to the Fires of Hell for all eternity.
On Irshad Manji: I happen to think she is a courageous young woman with basically sound if sometimes rather simplistic ideas. But whatever you think of her, surely no-one calling themselves a socialist can support the physical threats gainst her by Islamists. Manji wrote about these threats on her website a couple of years ago and recieved a commemnt from one “Norman Finkelstein” supporting the threats. I emailed Prof Finkelstein drawing his attention to what had appeared in his name and stating (truthfully) that I did not believe the comments was genuinely his: he replied in a semi-’humourous’ and evasive vein that made it fairly claer that it had, indeed, been him. This is all out there somewhere and I’m sure it could be retrived.
On the more substantive point about alleged “collaboration” by certain “bourgeois” Jewish people with the Nazis during WW”. Much has been made of this in Stalinist “anti-Zionist” propagands and by the likes of Lenni Brenner and the playwrite Jim Allen (who based “Prdidition” upon the Kastner case referred to above, by Dave): all I would say about this is that to describe the desperate actions of people forced to make terrible choices at the point of a gun (*literally* at the point of a gun in many cases)as “collaboration” in the Vichy sense of the word strikes me as at best simplistic and at worst (ie in its Stalinist “Zionist-Nazi collaboration” form) as a vile, anti-semitic conspiracy theory.
Yes, Bill Corr, why don’t you be a good boy and just fuck bleeding off.
Jock mctoursers “Because you all go to the same N.London synagogue?”
Rumbled!
I hope no-one finds out about our Central Committee in Wood Green, just beneath the tube. Us green lizards still got some hard work to do, after we and Israel attacked the USA on 9/11 and our Health Care Bill in the Senate.
For those who wish a slightly more critical view of Finkelstein’s work here are a number of reviews:
Bartov
http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/Bartov00a/index.html
Toby Abse is more detailed in his critique:
http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Newint/Finkel.html
For those who wish a slightly more critical view of Finkelstein’s work here are a number of reviews:
Bartov
http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/Bartov00a/index.html
Toby Abse is more detailed in his critique:
http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Newint/Finkel.html
” I hope no-one finds out about our Central Committee in Wood Green, just beneath the tube. Us green lizards still got some hard work to do, after we and Israel attacked the USA on 9/11 and our Health Care Bill in the Senate.”
See! They feel free to openly boast about it now! I note that you ‘forgot’ to mention the ‘bailout’ i.e. the transfer of $13 trillion from the US working class to the Jewish National Fund.
“Finkelstein’s phraseology is not just deeply anti-Semitic, but frequently echoes that of the Holocaust deniers, as the following sentences will demonstrate: ” In fact, to believe the Holocaust industry, more Jewish slave labourers are alive today than a half-century ago….”
‘ Holocaust deniers’ eh? Can’t have that! I wonder if you can help me Mr Modernity. I really want to avoid ‘Holocaust denial’, because it’s ‘not nice’, but I’m not sure of the guidelines. Let me explain: I regularly hear (on tv and radio) ‘the Holocaust’ defined as the nazis industrial scale extermination by gas of 6 million jews; but I can’t find a single historian who believes this, not even the most rabid zionist propagandist liars like the Yad Vashem lot – the most extreme upper estimates for death by gassing seems to be just over 2 million, and for the total death toll just over 5 million. Bear with me, please. It seems that these figures have been ‘revised’ again and again over the years, and that no 2 historians totally agree on much except the thoroughly-documented deportations of European jewry.
And here’s my point. I wonder if you can direct me, therefore, to a list of things ( say lowest permissible estimate for anything) that mark the line where one can slip over into being a ‘denier’? I’m sure there must be one because all these ‘jewish socialists’ one comes across on the internet seem very confident that they ‘recognise denial when they see it’. I mean this sincerely – please help me keep on message.