The Holocaust Industry Quotes

“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

“Do not compare” is the mantra of moral blackmailers.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“And still another lesson is to keep vigilant for crimes against humanity – except those committed by your own government.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“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.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“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. There is a personal motive as well. I do care about the memory of my family’s persecution. The current campaign of the Holocaust industry to extort money from Europe in the name of “needy Holocaust victims” has shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom to that of a Monte Carlo casino. Even”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“American Jewish organizations (as well as Israel) rallied behind the Bush administration’s criminal aggression against Iraq, with Elie Wiesel declaring that “the world faced a crisis similar to 1938” and “the choice is simple,” and with self-promoting “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal proclaiming that “you cannot wait indefinitely on dictators. Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, but for six years the world did not act.” Critics of the war stood accused of everything from Chamberlain-style “appeasement” to “an anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West,” while even prominent American poets opposing the Iraqi war and Israel’s occupation were chastised for playing “on the edges of 1930s-style anti-Semitism.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“One might also consider a pertinent case of active US complicity. After the United States-led coalition devastated Iraq in 1991 to punish “Saddam-Hitler,” the United States and Britain forced murderous UN sanctions on that hapless country in an attempt to depose him. As in the Nazi holocaust, a million children have likely perished.14 Questioned on national television about the grisly death toll in Iraq, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright replied that “the price is worth it.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“Where was the Congressional hue and cry over “perfidious” American bankers? One member after another of the Senate and House banking committees clamored for the Swiss to “finally pay up.” None, however, called on the US to do so. Rather, a House Banking Committee member shamelessly averred – with Bronfman agreeing – that “only” Switzerland “has failed to show the courage to confront its own history.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“a counterculture tabloid that “portrayed Kissinger as a fawning sycophant, coward, bully, flatterer, tyrant, social climber, evil manipulator, insecure snob, unprincipled seeker after power” – in the event, an understatement”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“Everything changed with the June 1967 Arab–Israeli war. By virtually all accounts, it was only after this conflict that The Holocaust became a fixture in American Jewish life.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“In the face of the sufferings of African-Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians, my mother’s credo always was: We are all holocaust victims.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“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.6”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“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”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“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”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“deplore the Holocaust industry’s corruption of history and memory in the service of an extortion racket.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“Who can suspect Clinton’s ethical impulses? During his last hours in office, Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a billionaire commodities trader who fled to Switzerland in 1983 before standing trial on an indictment for fifty-one counts of tax evasion, racketeering and violating trade sanctions with Iran. Building a multibillion-dollar business empire from his Swiss redoubt, Rich became a major benefactor of Jewish and Israeli organizations, while simultaneously – and with perfect consistency – cultivating lucrative ties with the Russian mafia.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“Edgar Bronfman, the multibillionaire heir to the Seagram’s liquor fortune and president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), “cut a dashing figure – tall, handsome and debonair” (52). In Congressional testimony this liquor salesman turned megalomaniacal diplomat claimed to represent all of world Jewry, the living as well as the dead.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“When Germans or Swiss refuse to pay compensation, the heavens cannot contain the righteous indignation of organized American Jewry. But when Jewish elites rob Jewish survivors, no ethical issues arise: it’s just about money.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“To his credit, Kosinski did undergo a kind of deathbed conversion. In the few years between his exposure and his suicide, Kosinski deplored the Holocaust industry’s exclusion of non-Jewish victims. “Many North American Jews tend to perceive it as Shoah, as an exclusively Jewish disaster. . . . But at least half of the world’s Romanies (unfairly called Gypsies), some 2.5 million Polish Catholics, millions of Soviet citizens and various nationalities, were also victims of this genocide. . . .” He also paid tribute to the “bravery of the Poles” who “sheltered” him “during the Holocaust” despite his so-called Semitic “looks.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred has served both to justify the necessity of a Jewish state and to account for the hostility directed at Israel. The Jewish state is the only safeguard against the next (inevitable) outbreak of homicidal anti-Semitism; conversely, homicidal anti-Semitism is behind every attack or even defensive maneuver against the Jewish state.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“As anti-Semitic barriers quickly fell away after World War II, Jews rose to preeminence in the United States. According to Lipset and Raab, per capita Jewish income is almost double that of non-Jews; sixteen of the forty wealthiest Americans are Jews; 40 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics are Jewish, as are 20 percent of professors at major universities; and 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington. The list goes on.48 Far from constituting an obstacle to success, Jewish identity has become the crown of that success. Just as many Jews kept Israel at arm’s length when it constituted a liability and became born-again Zionists when it constituted an asset, so they kept their ethnic identity at arm’s length when it constituted a liability and became born-again Jews when it constituted an asset.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“A more coherent, if less charitable, explanation is that American Jewish elites remembered the Nazi holocaust before June 1967 only when it was politically expedient. Israel, their new patron, had capitalized on the Nazi holocaust during the Eichmann trial.43 Given its proven utility, organized American Jewry exploited the Nazi holocaust after the June war. Once ideologically recast, The Holocaust (capitalized as I have previously noted) proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“The Holocaust could emerge in American life only after June 1967 because “the extermination of European Jewry attained [an] – if not happy, at least viable – ending.” Yet in standard Jewish accounts, not the June war but Israel’s founding marked redemption. Why did The Holocaust have to await a second redemption? Novick maintains that the “image of Jews as military heroes” in the June war “worked to efface the stereotype of weak and passive victims which . . . previously inhibited Jewish discussion of the Holocaust.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“Except as an occasional object of charity, Israel practically dropped from sight in American Jewish life soon after the founding of the state. In fact, Israel was not important to American Jews. In his 1957 survey, Nathan Glazer reported that Israel “had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry.”14 Membership in the Zionist Organization of America dropped from the hundreds of thousands in 1948 to the tens of thousands in the 1960s. Only 1 in 20 American Jews cared to visit Israel before June 1967.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“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:”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“(One Jewish critic of the “Holocaust-themed dinner” conjured this scenario: “Mass murder. Horrible plunder. Slave labor. Let’s eat.”)”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“The Holocaust industry has always been bankrupt. What remains is to openly declare it so.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“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”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“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.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering