NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: THE DESCENT OF A RED DIAPER BABY BROOKLYN JEW INTO EVIL


Avi Dershowitz points to this particular passage in Norman Finkelstein's writing to show that Finkelstein's mother was a Kapo during her imprisonment for seven weeks at Maidanek death camp before she was transferred to two slave labor camps. Like mother like son is Deshowitz's theory.

Except for allusions to relentless pangs of hunger, my mother never spoke about her personal torments during the war, which was just as well, since I couldn't have borne them. Like Primo Levi, she often said that, being "too delicate and refined, the best didn't survive." Was this an indirect admission of guilt? Much later in life I finally summoned the nerve to ask whether she had done anything of which she was ashamed. Calmly replying no, she recalled having refused the privileged position of "block head" in the camp. She especially resented the "dirty" question "How did you survive?" with the insinuation that, to emerge alive from the camps, survivors must have morally compromised themselves. Given how ferociously she cursed the Jewish councils, ghetto police and kapos, I assume my mother answered me truthfully. Although acknowledging that Jews initially joined the councils from mixed motives, she said that "only scum," reaping the rewards of doing the devil's work, still cooperated after it became clear that they were merely cogs in the Nazi killing machine. When queried why she hadn't settled in Israel after the war, my mother used to reply, only half in jest, that "I had enough of Jewish leaders!" The Jewish ghetto police always had the option, she said, of "throwing off their uniforms and joining the rest of us" -- a point that Yitzak Zuckerman, a leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, made in his memoir. (It was always gratifying to find my mother's seemingly erratic or harsh judgments seconded in the reliable testimonial literature.) Still shaking her head in disbelief, she would often recall how, after Jews in the ghetto used the most primitive implements or even bare hands to dig bunkers deep in the earth and conceal themselves, the Jewish police would reveal these hideouts to the Germans, sending their flesh-and-blood to the crematoria in order to save their own skins. One of the first acts of the ghetto resistance was to kill an officer in the Jewish police. On a sign posted next to his corpse -- my mother would recall with vengeful glee -- read the epitaph: "Those who live like a dog die like a dog." Still, if she didn't cross fundamental moral boundaries, I glimpsed from her manner of pushing and shoving in order to get to the head of a queue, which mortified me, how my mother must have fought Hobbes's war of all against all many a time in the camps. Really, how else would she have survived? (www.NormanFinkelstein.com, "Haunted House")

If Maryna Finkelstein was a Nazi collaborator it was unlikely she would have appeared as a witness against concentration camp guard Hermine Ryan as she herself might have been accused by Ryan of collaboration.

Norman crossed the Holocaust denial line a long time ago. He has lectured before Nazis, his books pander to Nazis and somewhere in that twisted psyche, Norman respects the Nazis more than the Jews! It wouldn't surprise the JDO if Norman had a few Nazi uniforms in his closet. It also would not surprise the JDO if Norman came out of the closet. Norman says that he is not the marrying type and was overly attached to his mother. He lives in the same apartment in Brooklyn that he and she grew up in. His sexuality has been warped by an Oedipus Rex which caused him to hate the opposite sex. He claims he is pro-Palestianian but he is really anti-Jewish. He told the German Magazine Die Welt "Not only does the "Six Million" figure become more untenable but the numbers of the Holocaust industry are rapidly approaching those of Holocaust deniers....Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud.")

FINKELSTEIN SHOWS HIS TRUE COLORS

By The Associated Press

A vocal American critic of Israel met Monday with a senior official from the militant Hezbollah group and visited villages in southern Lebanon that witnessed heavy fighting in the 2006 war between the guerrillas and the Jewish state.

Norman Finkelstein, who resigned last year as a political science professor at DePaul University in Chicago, met Hezbollah's commander in south Lebanon, Nabil Kaouk, in his office in the coastal city of Tyre.

He visited the border village of Maroun el-Rass where heavy fighting between Hezbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops took place during the two side's 34-day war in the summer 2006, according to the state-run National News Agency and Hezbollah's Al-Manar television.

Finkelstein also toured the border village of Aita al-Shaab, the location from where Hezbollah guerrillas triggered the war after they crossed the border, killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two others in hopes of trading them for Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails, according to the report.

The 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war left more than 1,000 Lebanese, mostly civilians, dead. About 160 Israelis, including 119 soldiers, also died in the fighting.

"After the horror and after the shame and after the anger there still remain a hope, and I know that I can get in a lot of trouble for what I am about to say, but I think that the Hezbollah represents the hope. They are fighting to defend their homeland," the Brooklyn-born Finkelstein told reporters. The U.S. government has labeled Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

Finkelstein is on a one-week visit to Lebanon where he is scheduled to hold lectures and visit Palestinian refugee camps.

In the past, Finkelstein has argued that some Jewish groups have exploited the Holocaust for political and financial gain. In September, Finkelstein resigned from his job at DePaul University, months after he was denied tenure at the school where his views and scholarship came under fire.

In 2000, Finkelstein published The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the
Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. The reaction to the book - in which he
claimed Jews in Israel and the United States have used the Holocaust to, among other things, extort money from Germany - was both loud and angry.