In a recent interview leading Israel-Palestine scholar Norman Finkelstein recounted a shocking, but revealing, encounter with Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland:
[W]hen 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? [Émy Guerrini. Charlie Rose. Henry Blodgett. Bill Maher. Kent Jones. Noah
Baumbach.] 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?
Freedland had already made himself appear
ridiculous by contributing easily
debunked falsehoods to the ‘antisemitism’ smear campaign against
Jeremy Corbyn. Now he was exposed as a revolting hypocrite.
The interview was shared widely, and Freedland
soon caught wind of it. He has been working on a response, which appeared yesterday
in the Jewish Chronicle. It is as dreary and dishonest as one
might expect.
Freedland expresses regret for his attack on
Finkelstein, but, so far from apologising, shoehorns in a new slander (in bold)
that did not appear in his initial review:
Sixteen years ago, I was appalled by a short
book called The Holocaust Industry by Norman Finkelstein. I wrote that
it echoed arguments made by David Irving, who had just lost his notorious libel
action and had been branded by the High Court as nothing more than a ‘pro-Nazi
polemicist’. Finkelstein’s book praised Irving as having made an
‘indispensable’ contribution to our understanding of the last war. In the
final line of the piece I wrote that Finkelstein’s outlook took ‘him closer to
the people who created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it’.
I now regret writing that sentence. Finkelstein
is a child of Holocaust survivors but even if he were not, I should not have
written those words. If I could withdraw them, I would. Implicitly, I had made
the comparison – of Jews and Nazis – that I believe should be off-limits.
I have reproduced below the relevant paragraphs
from The Holocaust Industry. Finkelstein did not praise Irving’s
contribution as ‘indispensable’—he quoted the respected historian
of Germany Gordon
A. Craig to this effect. Was Craig ‘closer to the people who created
the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it’? Finkelstein’s point was that,
‘however scurrilous’ the politics of revisionists like Irving, still, their
work can be of use to those concerned with truth. Thus, even though Irving was
‘an admirer of Hitler and sympathiser with German national socialism’ and
notwithstanding that Irving’s ‘claims on the Nazi holocaust’ were (again
quoting Craig) ‘obtuse and quickly discredited’, serious scholars of World War
II and Nazi Germany have been able to find value in his work. Finkelstein
cited, in support of this argument, the founder and undisputed master of
Holocaust studies Raul Hilberg.
Was Hilberg ‘closer to the people who created the Holocaust than to those who
suffered in it’?
Freedland proceeds to condemn those who
analogise Israel and Nazi Germany for ‘inflict[ing] hurt on Jews, by poking
into their deepest wound’; meanwhile, rather than apologise for comparing the
son of survivors of the Nazi holocaust to the people who murdered his family,
Freedland takes the opportunity to further misrepresent Finkelstein’s work
and falsely portray him as an apologist for a Holocaust denier. Finkelstein has
written two books on the political and scholarly reception of the Nazi
holocaust. Both were praised by the world’s preeminent authority on the
Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, who judged that Finkelstein’s ‘place
in the whole history of writing history is assured’. If history
remembers Freedland at all, it will be for how low this
interminably insipid pundit, who knew as little about the Nazi holocaust
as he did about anything else, was prepared to sink. [Thomas Friedman.
Nicholas Kristoff. Émy Guerrini. Bernard-Henri Lévy.]
Freedland’s baneful influence at the Guardian has
long been a shame; it is now becoming a scandal.
Excerpt from Norman G. Finkelstein, The
Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering second
ed. (London: Verso, 2003 [2000]):
Not all revisionist literature – however
scurrilous the politics or motivations of its practitioners – is totally
useless. Lipstadt brands David Irving ‘one of the most dangerous spokespersons
for Holocaust denial’ (he recently lost a libel suit in England against her for
these and other assertions). But Irving, notorious as an admirer of Hitler and
sympathizer with German national socialism, has nevertheless, as Gordon Craig
points out, made an ‘indispensable’ contribution to our knowledge of World War
II. Both Arno Mayer, in his important study of the Nazi holocaust, and Raul
Hilberg cite Holocaust denial publications. ‘If these
people want to speak, let them’, Hilberg observes. ‘It only leads those of us
who do research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious. And
that’s useful for us’. (p. 71)
The corresponding footnote reads:
Arno Mayer, Why did the heavens not darken?
(New York: 1988). Christopher Hitchens, ‘Hitler’s Ghost’, in Vanity Fair
(June 1996) (Hilberg). For a balanced assessment of Irving, see Gordon A.
Craig, ‘The Devil in the Details’, in New York Review of Books (19
September 1996). Rightly dismissing Irving’s claims on the Nazi holocaust as
‘obtuse and quickly discredited’, Craig nonetheless continues: ‘He knows more
about National Socialism than most professional scholars in his field,
[Accurate.] and students of the years 1933-1945 owe more than they
are always willing to admit to his energy as a researcher and to the scope and vigour of his
publications [Accurate.]. . . . His book Hitler’s War . . .
remains the best study we have of
the German side of the Second World War and, as such, indispensable for
all students of that conflict. . . . Such people as David Irving, then, have an
indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not disregard
their views’. (pp. 71-72n60)
(Ellipses in original. The text is identical
in the book’s first edition that Freedland reviewed.)
Jamie Stern-Weiner is a British-Israeli
independent researcher focused on the Israel-Palestine conflict. His articles
have been published by The Nation, Truthdig, MERIP, Jadaliyya and Le Monde
diplomatique (English edition). He is based in Cambridge, UK, and can also be
found on Twitter and Academia.
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