Home > Author > Norman G. Finkelstein
1 " Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and—most unforgivably—increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault. "
― Norman G. Finkelstein , Goldstone Recants: Richard Goldstone Renews Israel's License to Kill
2 " So you have a maniac who says he's representing all of World Jewry, and people say "okay, if he represents all of World Jewry, then the Jews are a problem "
― Norman G. Finkelstein
3 " My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies. "
4 " Manifest Destiny anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler's Lebensraum policy. In fact, Hitler modeled his conquest of the East on the American conquest of the West.* During the first half of this century, a majority of American states enacted sterilization laws and tens of thousands of Americans were involuntarily sterilized. The Nazis explicitly invoked this US precedent when they enacted their own sterilization laws.'' The notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of the franchise and forbade miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews. Blacks in the American South suffered the same legal disabilities and were the object of much greater spontaneous and sanctioned popular violence than the Jews in prewar Germany. To highlight unfolding crimes abroad, the US often summons memories of The Holocaust. The more revealing point, however, is when the US invokes The Holocaust. Crimes of official enemies such as the Khmer Rouge bloodbath in Cambodia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo recall The Holocaust; crimes in which the US is complicit do not. "
― Norman G. Finkelstein , The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering
5 " One can imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to find refuge in another country able to accommodate it; one is hard-pressed, however, to imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to politically and perhaps physically displace the indigenous population of another country. Yet, as Shapira [Zionist] forthrightly acknowledges, the latter was the actual intention of the Zionist movement. "
― Norman G. Finkelstein , Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
6 " The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian youngsters is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to horror. Their homes are demolished, their parents are humiliated in front of their eyes, soldiers storm into their homes brutally in the middle of the night, tanks open fire on their classrooms. And they don’t have a psychological service. Have you ever heard of a Palestinian child who is a “victim of anxiety”? "
― Norman G. Finkelstein , Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
7 " The day after, bloody revolutions seem always to disappoint, and in the scramble to the top, those with the most blood on their hands seem always to get there first. "
― Norman G. Finkelstein , What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage
8 " if the Americans do not launch a conventional attack Israel would be compelled and justified in launching a nuclear strike to prevent a “second Holocaust. "
― Norman G. Finkelstein , Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel Is Coming to an End
9 " it must be shown to American Jews that the choice between Israel’s survival and Palestinian rights is a false one; that it is in fact Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights and reflexive resort to criminal force that are pushing it toward destruction; that it is possible to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict so that everyone, Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab, can preserve their full human dignity; and that such a settlement has been within reach for decades, but that Israel—with critical U.S. backing, largely because of the Israel lobby—has blocked it. "
10 " It is important to recognize that our efforts at communal property restitution,” Stuart Eizenstat told a House committee, “are integral to the rebirth and renewal of Jewish life” in Eastern Europe. Allegedly to “promote the revival” of Jewish life in Poland, the World Jewish Restitution Organization is demanding title over the 6,000 prewar communal Jewish properties, including those currently being used as hospitals and schools. The prewar Jewish population of Poland stood at 3.5 million; the current population is several thousand. Does reviving Jewish life really require one synagogue or school building per Polish Jew? The organization is also laying claim to hundreds of thousands of parcels of Polish land valued in the many tens of billions of dollars. “Polish officials fear,” Jewish Week reports, that the demand “could bankrupt the nation.” When Poland’s Parliament proposed limits on compensation to avert insolvency, Elan Steinberg of the WJC denounced the legislation as “fundamentally an anti-American act.”80 "
11 " For the “new democracies” in Eastern Europe, meeting this standard “would be commensurate with their passage from totalitarianism to democratic states.” Eizenstat is a senior US government official and a prominent supporter of Israel. Yet, judging by the respective claims of Native Americans and Palestinians, neither the US nor Israel has yet made the transition.85 "
12 " Do not compare” is the mantra of moral blackmailers. "
13 " True, the annals of humankind appear rife with violence. But, Gandhi contended, this was an optical illusion fostered by scribes and scholars who, by virtue of their profession, took note of the exceptions to the rule: “History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul.”3 "
14 " The shakedown of Switzerland and Germany has been only a prelude to the grand finale: the shakedown of Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, alluring prospects opened up in the former heartland of European Jewry. Cloaking itself in the sanctimonious mantle of “needy Holocaust victims,” the Holocaust industry has sought to extort billions of dollars from these already impoverished countries. Pursuing this end with reckless and ruthless abandon, it has become the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe. "
15 " Public opinion has so far not been averse to the blackmailing of Swiss bankers and German industrialists, but it might look less kindly on the blackmailing of starving Polish peasants. Jews who lost family members during the Nazi holocaust might also take a jaundiced view of the WJRO’s machinations. Claiming to be the legitimate heir of those who perished in order to appropriate their assets could easily be mistaken for grave-robbery. "
16 " The Jerusalem Report captures this Holocaust kitsch moment on the March: “‘I’m so scared, I can’t go on, I want to be in Israel already,’ repeats a young Connecticut woman over and over. Her body is shaking. . . . Suddenly her friend pulls out a large Israeli flag. She wraps it around the two of them and they move on.” An Israeli flag: don’t leave home without it.87 "
17 " The Holocaust industry has always been bankrupt. What remains is to openly declare it so. "
18 " (One Jewish critic of the “Holocaust-themed dinner” conjured this scenario: “Mass murder. Horrible plunder. Slave labor. Let’s eat.”) "
19 " In fact, trading in looted Nazi gold was official US policy until Germany’s declaration of war precluded the practice. The relevant passage from the Commission report merits extended quotation: "
20 " لقد اُختُزل غاندي في ابتهالٍ يطابق بين اسمه واللاعنف. "
