Nazi." He then went on to say that some of Irving's earlier work, stuff not remotely related to the holocaust or holocaust denial, is respected by some experts in World War II history. Dr. Finkelstein then states that War history is not his area of expertise, so he cannot judge that question. That is a far cry from the representation of Finkelstein's views that some have manufactured.
Norman Finkelstein is an unabashed leftist in almost all respects. As the son of two parents who were both survivors of the Nazi death camps, and someone one who lost every single relative; aunts, uncles cousins...every single one to Nazi extermination, Dr. Finkelstein is personally infuriated that this holocaust has been used and used and continues to be used over and over again by certain professionals; both for personal gain and for political exploitation.
The worst that anyone can honestly say about Norman Finkelstein was probably said by the great Israeli historian from Oxford, Avi Shlaim,
"I would like to make one last point, which is that his style is very polemical, and I don’t particularly enjoy the strident polemical style that he employs. On the other hand, what really matters in the final analysis is the content, and the content of his books, in my judgment, is of very high quality. The world's leading holocaust scholar and the father of holocaust studies and one of the world's leading Israeli historians on the subject of the Arab/Israeli conflict defend Norman Finkelstein and praise his scholarship: (one note: This aired on May 9, 2007. The holocaust historian Raul Hilberg sadly passed away On August 4, 2007.)
link to full interviews/listen or watch online or download or read transcript:
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/5/9/it_takes_an_enormous_amount_of"Finkelstein’s two main topics of focus over his career have been the Holocaust and Israeli policy. Today we are joined by two world-renowned scholars in these fields:
Raul Hilberg. One of the best-known and most distinguished of Holocaust historians. He is author of the seminal three-volume work “The Destruction of the European Jews” and is considered the founder of Holocaust studies. He joins us on the line from his home in Vermont.
Avi Shlaim. Professor of international relations at Oxford University. He is the author of numerous books, most notably “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.” He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Israeli-Arab conflict.
______________
"AVI SHLAIM: Yes. I think very highly of Professor Finkelstein. I regard him as a very able, very erudite and original scholar who has made an important contribution to the study of Zionism, to the study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, in particular, to the study of American attitudes towards Israel and towards the Middle East.
Professor Finkelstein specializes in exposing spurious scholarship on the Arab-Israeli conflict. And he has a very impressive track record in this respect. He was a very promising graduate student in history at Princeton, when a book by Joan Peters appeared, called From Time Immemorial, and he wrote the most savage exposition in critique of this book. It was a systematic demolition of this book. The book argued, incidentally, that Palestine was a land without a people for people without a land. And Professor Finkelstein exposed it as a hoax, and he showed how dishonest the scholarship or spurious scholarship was in the entire book. And
he paid the price for his courage, and he has been a marked man, in a sense, in America ever since. His most recent book is Beyond Chutzpah, follows in the same vein of criticizing and exposing biases and distortions and falsifications in what Americans write about Israel and about the Middle East. So I consider him to be a very impressive and a very learned and careful scholar."
RAUL HILBERG: And I was struck by the fact, even as I, myself, was researching the same territory that Professor Finkelstein was covering, that the Swiss did not owe that money, that the $1,250,000,000 that were agreed as a settlement to be paid to the claimants was something that in very plain language was extorted from the Swiss. I had, in fact, relied upon the same sources that Professor Finkelstein used, perhaps in addition some Swiss items. I was in Switzerland at the height of the crisis, and I heard from so-called forensic accountants about how totally surprised the Swiss were by this outburst. There is no other word for it.
Now, Finkelstein was the first to publish what was happening in his book The Holocaust Industry. And when I was asked to endorse the book, I did so with specific reference to these claims. I felt that within the Jewish community over the centuries, nothing like it had ever happened. And even though these days a couple of billion dollars are sometimes referred to as an accounting error and not worthy of discussion, there is a psychological dimension here which not must be underestimated.
I was also struck by the fact that Finkelstein was being attacked over and over. And granted, his style is a little different from mine, but I was saying the same thing, and I had published my results in that three-volume work, published in 2003 by Yale University Press, and I did not hear from anybody a critical word about what I said, even though it was the same substantive conclusion that Finkelstein had offered. So that’s the gist of the matter right then and there.
"RAUL HILBERG: However,
leaving aside the question of style -- and here, I agree that it’s not my style either -- the substance of the matter is most important here, particularly because Finkelstein, when he published this book, was alone. It takes an enormous amount of academic courage to speak the truth when no one else is out there to support him. And so, I think that given this acuity of vision and analytical power, demonstrating that the Swiss banks did not owe the money, that even though survivors were beneficiaries of the funds that were distributed, they came, when all is said and done, from places that were not obligated to pay that money. That takes a great amount of courage in and of itself.
So I would say that his place in the whole history of writing history is assured, and that those who in the end are proven right triumph, and he will be among those who will have triumphed, albeit, it so seems, at great cost. " link to full interviews/listen or watch online or download or read transcript:
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/5/9/it_takes_an_enormous_amount_of There is now a new documentary about Norman Finkelstein,
American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein link to trailer and more information about the film:
http://www.americanradicalthefilm.com/trailer.html.
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