The American Jewish scholar behind Labour’s
‘antisemitism’ scandal breaks his silence
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=172563#172563
JAMIE STERN-WEINER and NORMAN FINKELSTEIN 3 May 2016
Norman G. Finkelstein talks Naz Shah MP, Ken
Livingstone, and the Labour ‘antisemitism’ controversy.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/jamie-stern-weiner-norman-finkelstein/american-jewish-scholar-behind-labour-s-antisemitism-scanda
Norman Finkelstein, (image: Youtube)
Norman Finkelstein is no stranger to controversy.
The American Jewish scholar is one of the world’s
leading experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict
and the political legacy of the Nazi holocaust.
Apart from his parents, every member of
Finkelstein’s family, on both sides, was
exterminated in the Nazi holocaust. His 2000 book
The Holocaust Industry, which was serialised in
the Guardian, became an international best-seller
and touched off a firestorm of debate. But
Finkelstein’s most recent political intervention came about by accident.
What are your thoughts on the Labour
'antisemitism' scandal? Tell us in the comments below.
Last month, Naz Shah MP became one of the most
high-profile cases to date in the ‘antisemitism’
scandal still shaking the Labour leadership. Shah
was suspended from the Labour party for, among
other things, reposting an image on Facebook that
was alleged to be antisemitic. The image depicted
a map of the United States with Israel
superimposed, and suggested resolving the
Israel-Palestine conflict by relocating Israel
into the United States. It has been reported that
Shah got the image from Finkelstein’s website. I
spoke with Finkelstein about why he posted the
image, and what he thinks of allegations that the
Labour party has a ‘Jewish problem’.
Did you create the controversial image that Naz Shah reposted?
I’m not adept enough with computers to compose
any image. But I did post the map on my website
in 2014. An email correspondent must have sent
it. It was, and still is, funny. Were it not for
the current political context, nobody would have
noticed Shah’s reposting of it either. Otherwise,
you’d have to be humourless. These sorts of jokes
are a commonplace in the U.S. So, we have this
joke: Why doesn’t Israel become the 51st state?
Answer: Because then, it would only have two
senators. As crazy as the discourse on Israel is
in America, at least we still have a sense of
humour. It’s inconceivable that any politician in
the U.S. would be crucified for posting such a map.
Shah’s posting of that image has been presented
as an endorsement by her of a ‘chilling
“transportation” policy’, while John Mann MP has compared her to Eichmann.
Frankly, I find that obscene. It’s doubtful these
Holocaust-mongers have a clue what the
deportations were, or of the horrors that
attended them. I remember my late mother
describing her deportation. She was in the Warsaw
Ghetto. The survivors of the Ghetto Uprising,
about 30,000 Jews, were deported to Maijdanek
concentration camp. They were herded into
railroad cars. My mother was sitting in the
railroad car next to a woman who had her child.
And the woman I know it will shock you the
woman suffocated her infant child to death in
front of my mother. She suffocated her child,
rather than take her to where they were going.
That’s what it meant to be deported. To compare
that to someone posting a light-hearted,
innocuous cartoon making a little joke about how
Israel is in thrall to the U.S., or vice
versa…it’s sick. What are they doing? Don’t they
have any respect for the dead? All these
desiccated Labour apparatchiks, dragging the Nazi
holocaust through the mud for the sake of their
petty jostling for power and position. Have they no shame?
What about when people use Nazi analogies to
criticise the policies of the State of Israel?
Isn’t that also a political abuse of the Nazi holocaust?
It’s not a simple question. First, if you’re
Jewish, the instinctive analogy to reach for,
when it comes to hate or hunger, war or genocide,
is the Nazi holocaust, because we see it as the
ultimate horror. In my home growing up, whenever
an incident involving racial discrimination or
bigotry was in the news, my mother would compare
it to her experience before or during the Nazi holocaust.
My mother had been enrolled in the Mathematics
faculty of Warsaw University, I guess in 1937-38.
Jews were forced to stand in a segregated section
of the lecture hall, and the antisemites would
physically attack them. (You might recall the
scene in Julia, when Vanessa Redgrave loses her
leg trying to defend Jews under assault in the
university.) I remember once asking my mother,
‘How did you do in your studies?’ She replied,
‘What are you talking about? How could you study under those conditions?’.
When she saw the segregation of
African-Americans, whether at a lunch counter or
in the school system, that was, for her, like the
prologue to the Nazi holocaust. Whereas many Jews
now say, Never compare (Elie Wiesel’s refrain,
‘It’s bad, but it’s not The Holocaust’), my
mother’s credo was, Always compare. She gladly
and generously made the imaginative leap to those
who were suffering, wrapping and shielding them
in the embrace of her own suffering.
For my mother, the Nazi holocaust was a chapter
in the long history of the horror of war. It was
not itself a war she was emphatic that it was
an extermination, not a war but it was a unique
chapter within the war. So for her, war was the
ultimate horror. When she saw Vietnamese being
bombed during the Vietnam War, it was the Nazi
holocaust. It was the bombing, the death, the
horror, the terror, that she herself had passed
through. When she saw the distended bellies of
starving children in Biafra, it was also the Nazi
holocaust, because she remembered her own pangs of hunger in the Warsaw Ghetto.
If you’re Jewish, it’s just normal that the Nazi
holocaust is a ubiquitous, instinctual
touchstone. Some Jews say this or that horror is
not the Nazi holocaust, others say it is. But the
reference point of the Nazi holocaust is a constant.
What about when people who aren’t Jewish invoke the analogy?
Once the Nazi holocaust became the cultural
referent, then, if you wanted to touch a nerve
regarding Palestinian suffering, you had to make
the analogy with the Nazis, because that was the
only thing that resonated for Jews. If you
compared the Palestinians to Native Americans,
nobody would give a darn. In 1982, when I and a
handful of other Jews took to the streets of New
York to protest Israel’s invasion of Lebanon (up
to 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed,
overwhelmingly civilians), I held a sign saying,
‘This son of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising, Auschwitz, Maijdenek will not be
silent: Israeli Nazis Stop the Holocaust in
Lebanon!’. (After my mother died, I found a
picture of me holding that sign in a drawer among
her keepsakes). I remember, as the cars drove
past, one of the guys protesting with me kept
saying, ‘hold the sign higher!’ (And I kept replying, ‘easy for you to say!’).
If you invoked that analogy, it shook Jews, it
jolted them enough, that at least you got their
attention. I don’t think it’s necessary anymore,
because Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians
now have an integrity of their own. They no
longer have to be juxtaposed to, or against, the
Nazi holocaust. Today, the Nazi analogy is gratuitous and a distraction.
Is it antisemitic?
No, it’s just a weak historical analogy but, if
coming from a Jew, a generous moral one.
Last week, Ken Livingstone took to the airwaves
to defend Naz Shah, but what he said wound up
getting him suspended from the Labour party. His
most incendiary remark contended that Hitler at
one point supported Zionism. This was condemned
as antisemitic, and Labour MP John Mann accused
Livingstone of being a ‘Nazi apologist’. What do you make of these accusations?
Livingstone maybe wasn’t precise enough, and
lacked nuance. But he does know something about
that dark chapter in history. It has been
speculated that Hitler’s thinking on how to solve
the ‘Jewish Question’ (as it was called back
then) evolved, as circumstances changed and new
possibilities opened up. Hitler wasn’t wholly
hostile to the Zionist project at the outset.
That’s why so many German Jews managed to survive
after Hitler came to power by emigrating to
Palestine. But, then, Hitler came to fear that a
Jewish state might strengthen the hand of
‘international Jewry’, so he suspended contact
with the Zionists. Later, Hitler perhaps
contemplated a ‘territorial solution’ for the
Jews. The Nazis considered many ‘resettlement’
schemes the Jews wouldn’t have physically
survived most of them in the long run before
they embarked on an outright exterminatory
process. Livingstone is more or less accurate
about this or, as accurate as might be expected
from a politician speaking off the cuff.
He’s also accurate that a degree of ideological
affinity existed between the Nazis and Zionists.
On one critical question, which raged in the U.K.
during the period when the Balfour Declaration
(1917) was being cobbled together, antisemites
and Zionists agreed: could a Jew be an
Englishman? Ironically, in light of the current
hysteria in the UK, the most vociferous and
vehement opponents of the Balfour Declaration
were not the Arabs, about whom almost nobody gave
a darn, but the upper reaches of British Jewry.
Eminent British Jews published open letters to
newspapers like the Times opposing British
backing for a Jewish home in Palestine. They
understood such a declaration and Zionism as
implying that a Jew belonged to a distinct
nation, and that the Jewish nation should have
its own separate state, which they feared would
effectively disqualify Jews from bona fide
membership in the British nation. What
distinguished the Zionists from the liberal
Jewish aristocracy was their point of departure:
as Theodor Herzl put it at the beginning of The
Jewish State, ‘the Jewish question is no more a
social than a religious one . . . It is a
national question’. Whereas the Anglo-Jewish
aristocracy insisted Judaism was merely a
religion, the Zionists were emphatic that the
Jews constituted a nation. And on this back
then, salient point, the Zionists and Nazis agreed.
John Mann, when he accosted Livingstone in front
of the cameras, asked rhetorically whether
Livingstone had read Mein Kampf. If you do read
Mein Kampf, which I suspect none of the
interlocutors in this debate has done (I used to
teach it, before the ‘Zionists’ drove me out of
academia joke!), you see that Hitler is
emphatic that Jews are not a religion, but a
nation. He says that the big Jewish lie is that
they claim to be a religion; whereas in fact, he
says, they’re a race (at that time, ‘race’ was
used interchangeably with ‘nation’). And on page
56 of the standard English edition of Mein Kampf,
he says that the only Jews honest enough to
acknowledge this reality are the Zionists. Now,
to be clear, Hitler didn’t just think that Jews
were a distinct race. He also thought that they
were a Satanic race, and ultimately, that they
were a Satanic race that had to be exterminated.
Still, on the first, not trivial, premise, he and
the Zionists were in agreement.
As a practical matter, the Zionists and Nazis
could therefore find a degree of common ground
around the emigration/expulsion of Jews to
Palestine. It was a paradox that, against the
emphatic protestations of liberal Jews, including
sections of the Anglo-Jewish establishment,
antisemites and Zionists back then effectively
shared the same slogan: Jews to Palestine. It was
why, for example, the Nazis forbade German Jews
to raise the swastika flag, but expressly
permitted them to hoist the Zionist flag. It was
as if to say, the Zionists are right: Jews can’t
be Germans, they belong in Palestine. Hannah
Arendt wrote scathingly about this in Eichmann in
Jerusalem, which is one of the reasons she caught
hell from the Jewish/Zionist establishment.
Even if there was a factual basis for
Livingstone’s remarks, to bring the issue up at
that moment wasn’t he just baiting Jews?
I can understand his motivation, because I’m of
roughly his generation. If he was ‘baiting’, it
was a reflexive throwback to the factional
polemics in the 1970s-80s. Israel marketed
Zionists as the only Jews who had resisted the
Nazis. The propaganda image projected back then
was, the only resistance to the Nazis came from
the Zionists, and the natural corollary was, the
only force protecting Jews now is Israel. Every
other Jew was either a coward, ‘going like sheep
to slaughter’, or a collaborator. Those who
dissented from Israeli policy back then, in order
to undercut this Zionist propaganda, and to
strike a nerve with them, would recall this
unsavoury chapter in Zionism’s history. Some
pamphlets and books appeared such as Lenni
Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
(1983) to document this ‘perfidious
Zionist-Nazi collaboration’. Livingstone’s recent
comments were born of the same reflex that
motivated us back then. These certifiable creeps
who went after Naz Shah got under his skin, and
so he wanted to get under their skin. That’s how
we used to fight this political battle: by
dredging up those sordid chapters in Zionist history.
Livingstone based himself on Brenner’s book.
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that perhaps
Brenner’s book contains factual errors, it’s more
of a party pamphlet than a scholarly tome, and
it’s not exactly weighed down with copious
documentation. Still, the fact of the matter is,
when Brenner’s book was published, it garnered
positive reviews in the respectable British
press. The Times, which is today leading the
charge against Livingstone and the elected Labour
leadership, back then published a review praising
Brenner’s book as ‘crisp and carefully
documented’. The reviewer, the eminent
editorialist Edward Mortimer, observed that
‘Brenner is able to cite numerous cases where
Zionists collaborated with anti-Semitic regimes,
including Hitler’s’. So, it’s a tribute to Ken
Livingstone that at age 70 he remembered a book
he read more than 30 years ago, that got a good
review in the Times when it first appeared. If
the Times is upset at Livingstone’s remarks, it
has only itself to blame. I myself only read
Brenner’s book after the Times review.
Let’s zoom out a bit. You’ve written a great deal
about how antisemitism accusations have been used
to discredit and distract from criticism of
Israel. Should we see the current campaign
against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Left more
generally as the latest episode in that history?
These campaigns occur at regular intervals,
correlating with Israel’s periodic massacres and
consequent political isolation. If you search
your nearest library catalogue for ‘new
antisemitism’, you’ll come up with titles from
the 1970s proclaiming a ‘new antisemitism’,
titles from the 1980s proclaiming a ‘new
antisemitism’, titles from the 1990s proclaiming
a ‘new antisemitism’, and then a huge uptick,
including from British writers, during the
so-called Second Intifada from 2001. Let’s not
forget, just last year there was a hysteria in
the UK over antisemitism. A couple of ridiculous
polls purported to find that nearly half of
Britons held an antisemitic belief and that most
British Jews feared for their future in the UK.
Although these polls were dismissed by
specialists, they triggered the usual media
feeding frenzy, as the Telegraph, the Guardian
and the Independent hyperventilated about this
‘rampant’ ‘new antisemitism’. It was exposed as
complete nonsense when, in April 2015, a
reputable poll by Pew found that the level of
antisemitism in the UK had remained stable, at an underwhelming seven percent.
This farce happened only last year. One would
have imagined that its mongers would be hiding in
shame, and that we would enjoy at least a brief
respite from the theatrics. But lo and behold, in
the blink of an eye, right in the wake of the Pew
poll showing that antisemitism in the UK is
marginal, the hysteria has started up all over
again. The reality is, there is probably more
prejudice in the UK against fat people than there is prejudice against Jews.
Ask yourself a simple, but serious, question. You
go for a job interview. Which trait is most
likely to work against you: if you’re ugly, if
you’re fat, if you’re short, or if you’re Jewish?
It’s perhaps a sad commentary on our society’s
values, but the trait most likely to elicit a
rejection letter is if you’re ugly. Then fat;
then short. The factor least likely to work
against you is, if you’re Jewish. On the
contrary, aren’t Jews smart and ambitious? Pew
found antisemitism levels at seven percent. Is
that grounds for a national hysteria? A May 2015
YouGov poll found that 40 percent of UK adults
don’t like Muslims and nearly 60 percent don’t
like Roma. Imagine what it’s like to apply for a
job if you’re a Roma! So where is your order of moral priorities?
Many of those involved in last year’s
‘antisemitism’ hysterics are also participants in
the current campaign against Corbyn.
The question you have to ask yourself is, why?
Why has this issue been resurrected with a
vengeance, so soon after its previous outing was
disposed of as a farce? Is it because of a
handful of allegedly antisemitic social media
postings from Labour members? Is it because of
the tongue-in-cheek map posted by Naz Shah?
That’s not believable. The only plausible answer
is, it’s political. It has nothing whatsoever to
do with the factual situation; instead, a few
suspect cases of antisemitism some real, some
contrived are being exploited for an ulterior
political motive. As one senior Labour MP said
the other day, it’s transparently a smear campaign.
The ‘antisemitism’ accusations are being driven
by the Conservatives ahead of the local and
Mayoral elections. But they’re also being
exploited by the Labour Right to undermine
Corbyn’s leadership, and by pro-Israel groups to
discredit the Palestine solidarity movement.
You can see this overlap between the Labour Right
and pro-Israel groups personified in individuals
like Jonathan Freedland, a Blairite hack who also
regularly plays the antisemitism card. He’s
combined these two hobbies to attack Corbyn.
Incidentally, when my book, The Holocaust
Industry, came out in 2000, Freedland wrote that
I was 'closer to the people who created the
Holocaust than to those who suffered in it'.
Although he appears to be, oh, so politically
correct now, he didn’t find it inappropriate to
suggest that I resembled the Nazis who gassed my family.
We appeared on a television program together.
Before the program, he approached me to shake my
hand. When I refused, he reacted in stunned
silence. Why wouldn’t I shake his hand? He
couldn’t comprehend it. It tells you something
about these dull-witted creeps. The smears, the
slanders for them, it’s all in a day’s work.
Why should anyone get agitated? Later, on the
program, it was pointed out that the Guardian,
where he worked, had serialised The Holocaust
Industry across two issues. He was asked by the
presenter, if my book was the equivalent of Mein
Kampf, would he resign from the paper? Of course
not. Didn’t the presenter get that it’s all a game?
Compare the American scene. Our Corbyn is Bernie
Sanders. In all the primaries in the US, Bernie
has been sweeping the Arab and Muslim vote. It’s
been a wondrous moment: the first Jewish
presidential candidate in American history has
forged a principled alliance with Arabs and
Muslims. Meanwhile, what are the Blairite-Israel
lobby creeps up to in the UK? They’re fanning the
embers of hate and creating new discord between
Jews and Muslims by going after Naz Shah, a
Muslim woman who has attained public office.
They’re making her pass through these rituals of
public self-degradation, as she is forced to
apologise once, twice, three times over for a
tongue-in-cheek cartoon reposted from my website.
And it’s not yet over! Because now they say she’s
on a ‘journey’. Of course, what they mean is,
‘she’s on a journey of self-revelation, and
epiphany, to understanding the inner antisemite
at the core of her being’. But do you know on
what journey she’s really on? She’s on a journey
to becoming an antisemite. Because of these
people; because they fill any sane, normal person with revulsion.
Here is this Muslim woman MP who is trying to
integrate Muslims into British political life,
and to set by her own person an example both to
British society at large and to the Muslim
community writ small. She is, by all accounts
from her constituents, a respected and honourable
person. You can only imagine how proud her
parents, her siblings, must be. How proud the
Muslim community must be. We’re always told how
Muslim women are oppressed, repressed and
depressed, and now you have this Muslim woman who
has attained office. But now she’s being
crucified, her career wrecked, her life ruined,
her future in tatters, branded an ‘antisemite’
and a closet Nazi, and inflicted with these
rituals of self-abasement. It’s not hard to
imagine what her Muslim constituents must think
now about Jews. These power hungry creeps are
creating new hate by their petty machinations. As
Donald Trump likes to say it’s disgusting.
Labour has now set up an inquiry that is supposed
to produce a workable definition of
‘antisemitism’ which is to say, to achieve the
impossible. It’s been tried countless times
before, and it’s always proven futile. The only
beneficiaries of such a mandate will be academic
‘specialists’ on antisemitism, who will receive
hefty consultancy fees (I can already see Richard
Evans at the head of the queue), and Israel,
which will no longer be in the spotlight. I
understand the short-term political rationale.
But at some point, you have to say, ‘enough
already’. Jews are prospering as never before in
the UK. The polls show that the number of, so to
speak, hard-core antisemites is miniscule. It’s
time to put a stop to this periodic charade,
because it ends up besmirching the victims of the
Nazi holocaust, diverting from the real suffering
of the Palestinian people, and poisoning
relations between the Jewish and Muslim
communities. You just had an antisemitism
hysteria last year, and it was a farce. And now
again? Another inquiry? Another investigation? No.
In order to put an end to this, there has to be a
decisive repudiation of this political blackmail.
Bernie Sanders was brutally pressured to back
down on his claim that Israel had used
disproportionate force during its 2014 assault on
Gaza. He wouldn’t budge, he wouldn’t retreat. He
showed real backbone. Corbyn should take heart
and inspiration from Bernie’s example. He has to
say: no more reports, no more investigations,
we’re not going there any more. The game is up.
It’s long past time that these
antisemitism-mongers crawled back into their
sewer but not before humbly apologising to Naz
Shah, and begging her forgiveness.
CLARIFICATION: Readers have expressed shock at
the scandalous remarks attributed to Jonathan
Freedland. Finkelstein decided to amend the
paragraph so as to quote Freedland word-for-word.
Readers will now perhaps be even more shocked.
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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