The machine behind Zionism

“The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering” by Norman Finkelstein

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific events ever occurred in history, where approximately 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. However, after the World War II ended, the Jewish genocide was actually regarded as only another casualties among other mounting World War II casualties and nothing more.

As the author Normal Finkelstein remarks, “Between the end of World War II and the late 1960s, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. There was only one university course offering in the United States on the topic. When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, she could draw on only two scholarly studies in the English language – Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg’s masterpiece itself just managed to see the light of day.”

It wasn’t until 1967 that it became a global horror, more famous than the genocides in China, Soviet Union, Cambodia, Bosnia, East Timor, Ottoman Empire, Zaire, or the slaughtering of the Native Americans even though some of these genocides had much more death toll. And it even had a special word assigned to it: the Holocaust. How can that possibly be? Enter the Holocaust Industry.

This is by far the most comprehensive book that I’ve read to really understand Zionism and the machine behind it, the Holocaust Industry. It shows the core idea behind their Hasbara propaganda, how they fund their movement, and how they can be the most powerful ethnic group in the United States that controls key areas in modern economy but yet can still acquired the victim status.

“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”, explains Finkelstein. “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.”

We can see this dogma reflected in the very creation of the Holocaust Industry immediately after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when Israel badly needed a good PR. That year was when Israel staged a war against its neighbouring countries and captured the Golan Heights from Syria, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan. And they needed a justification and/or excuse for these violations of international law. As Finkelstein elaborates, “This dogma has also conferred total license on Israel: Intent as the Gentiles always are on murdering Jews, Jews have every right to protect themselves, however they see fit. Whatever expedient Jews might resort to, even aggression and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defense.”

The book then goes into a great length of providing meticulous evidence at seemingly every other paragraphs, as well as citing multiple names and their works, over the development of this Holocaust Industry. From obscurity, to gaining momentum after the 1973 war, to a complete dominance in the US and in the world stage.

It also addresses some of the hoaxes created by the Holocaust Industry to enhance the illusion of their suffering and downplaying their criminal acts. Hoaxes such as The Painted Bird, a book written by Polish émigré Jerzy Kosinski that was supposedly about Kosinski’s autobiographical account of his time as a solitary child in rural Poland during World War II, which described the sadistic sexual tortures and insults perpetrated by Polish peasants towards the Jews.

However, in reality Kosinski lived with his parents throughout the war and he made up almost all the horrific episodes that he wrote, and the Polish peasants even harbored the Kosinski family although they were fully aware that they are Jewish and they themselves will get into trouble if caught. Nevertheless, “The Painted Bird became a basic Holocaust text. It was a best-seller and award-winner, translated into numerous languages, and required reading in high school and college classes.”

Another example of fabricated Holocaust memoir is Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski, with a depiction of a Nazi concentration camp filled with sadistic guards and more crucially a depiction of life after the Holocaust, with all the trauma, the Holocaust deniers, and anti-Semitism still very much haunting little Benjamin. And just like Painted Bird, “Fragments was translated into a dozen languages and won the Jewish National Book Award, the Jewish Quarterly Prize, and the Prix de Mémoire de la Shoah. Star of documentaries, keynoter at Holocaust conferences and seminars, fund-raiser for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Wilkomirski quickly became a Holocaust poster boy.” However, historians such as Raul Hilberg and an exposé by the New Yorker show that the book was indeed a fraud.

And these two are examples of first-hand sources. The secondary sources within the Holocaust library are even more filled with hoaxes and false propaganda, sources that are still cited widely till this day. One notorious false information is on the stance of Jerusalem’s mufti. As Finkelstein explains, “Although the Mufti of Jerusalem didn’t play “any significant part in the Holocaust,” Novick reports, the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (edited by Israel Gutman) gave him a “starring role.” The Mufti also gets top billing in Yad Vashem: “The visitor is left to conclude,” Tom Segev writes, “that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plans to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.””

The Holocaust Industry also altered the facts in history. For example, where the Jews became the first political victims of the Nazis instead of the real first victims the communists, and the first genocidal victims weren’t the handicapped but the Jews. And the half million gypsies that were also slaughtered by the Nazis? They heavily downplay the gypsies’ suffering: “Multiple motives lurked behind the museum’s marginalizing of the Gypsy genocide. First: one simply couldn’t compare the loss of Gypsy and Jewish life. Ridiculing the call for Gypsy representation on the US Holocaust Memorial Council as “cockamamie,” executive director Rabbi Seymour Siegel doubted whether Gypsies even “existed” as a people: “There should be some recognition or acknowledgment of the gypsy people . . . if there is such a thing.””

Why do they downplayed the gypsies genocide? Enter the second and third points: “Second: acknowledging the Gypsy genocide meant the loss of an exclusive Jewish franchise over The Holocaust, with a commensurate loss of Jewish “moral capital.” Third: if the Nazis persecuted Gypsies and Jews alike, the dogma that The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews was clearly untenable. Likewise, if Gentile envy spurred the Jewish genocide, did envy also spur the Gypsy genocide? In the museum’s permanent exhibition, non-Jewish victims of Nazism receive only token recognition.”

And what did they do with these sole victimhood propaganda? They use it for blackmail in order to get compensations. At the end of World War II there were around 100,000 Holocaust survivors, which consist of those who suffered the trauma of the Jewish ghettos, the concentration camps, and the slave labour camps. However, in practice many Jews who spent the war elsewhere also claimed to be a camp survivor, simply because the postwar German government provided compensation to the Holocaust survivors. And so a lot of Jews fabricated their past to meet the eligibility requirement.

The label Holocaust survivor also became a distinctive special honour, which through time spread into a family honour, like one contributor to a Holocaust web site reportedly “although he spent the war in Tel Aviv, he was a Holocaust survivor because his grandmother died in Auschwitz.” Naturally, therefore, the number of Holocaust survivors became inflated from 100,000 to nearly a million people.

This came in handy when Germany reached a deal with Jewish institutions and signed indemnification agreements and paid out to date around $60 billion. Finkelstein compared this with American compensation towards the Vietnamese, where “Compare first the American record. Some 4–5 million men, women and children died as a result of the US wars in Indochina. After the American withdrawal, a historian recalls, Vietnam desperately needed aid. “In the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets, 25 million acres of farmland, 12 million acres of forest were destroyed, and 1.5 million farm animals had been killed; there were an estimated 200,000 prostitutes, 879,000 orphans, 181,000 disabled people, and 1 million widows; all six of the industrial cities in the North had been badly damaged, as were provincial and district towns, and 4,000 out of 5,800 agricultural communes.” Refusing, however, to pay any reparations, President Carter explained that “the destruction was mutual.””

And here’s the kicker: “Whatever benefits (if any) the actual Jewish victims received were indirect or incidental. Large sums were circuitously channeled to Jewish communities in the Arab world [i.e. Israel] and facilitated Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. They also subsidized cultural undertakings such as Holocaust museums and university chairs in Holocaust studies, as well as a Yad Vashem showboat pensioning “righteous Gentiles.””

The Holocaust Industry also went after the Swiss Banks and German firms. As Finkelstein remarks, “In a widely reported story, an Israeli journalist cited a document – misread, as it turned out – proving that Swiss banks still held Holocaust-era Jewish accounts worth billions of dollars.” Specifically, “The Holocaust industry first alleged that Swiss banks had systematically denied legitimate heirs of Holocaust victims access to dormant accounts worth between $7 billion and $20 billion.” Chapter 3 of the book then covers their attempt to extract as much money as possible from the Swiss, using lies and deceptions, using political pressure and of course using the Holocaust victim card and use this against their portrayal of a “greedy Swiss Bankers.”

The Swiss eventually settled for $1.25 billion, which covers three classes: claimants to dormant Swiss accounts, refugees denied Swiss asylum, and victims of slave labor which Swiss benefited from. However, once the Swiss signed away the money, again, more than a year later there was still no distribution plan. In fact, “as of December 1999, less than half of the $200 million “Special Fund for Needy Victims of the Holocaust” established in February 1997 had been distributed to actual victims.” And instead, after paying the lawyers, the majority of the funds were sent into the coffers of “worthy” Jewish organisations.

Even Finkelstein’s own mother – who is a real Holocaust survivor alongside his father – only received peanuts compared with others who are fake Holocaust survivors but get more money and even pensions.

Finkelstein then adds, “The Jewish Claims Conference’s official Guide to Compensation and Restitution for Holocaust Survivors lists scores of organisational affiliates. A vast, well-heeled bureaucracy has sprung up. Insurance companies, banks, art museums, private industry, tenants and farmers in nearly every European country are under the Holocaust industry gun. But the “needy Holocaust victims” in whose name the Holocaust industry acts complain that it is “just perpetuating the expropriation.” Many have filed suit against the Claims Conference. The Holocaust may yet turn out to be the “greatest robbery in the history of mankind.””

Today in the US there is an Annual Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust, while all 50 states are sponsoring commemorations and often in state legislative chambers. Moreover, the Association of Holocaust Organizations have over 100 Holocaust institutions, 7 major Holocaust museums, with the centerpiece of this is the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Pretty bizarre if considering that they are commemorating an incident at another part of the world, and they don’t even have this much museums and organisations for the Native Americans.

As Finkelstein commented, “why we even have a federally mandated and funded Holocaust museum in the nation’s capitol. Its presence on the Washington Mall is particularly incongruous in the absence of a museum commemorating crimes in the course of American history. Imagine the wailing accusations of hypocrisy here were Germany to build a national museum in Berlin to commemorate not the Nazi genocide but American slavery or the extermination of the Native Americans.”

So, what’s the point of all of this? Finkelstein argues that “The Holocaust museum signals the Zionist lesson that Israel was the “appropriate answer to Nazism” with the closing scenes of Jewish survivors struggling to enter Palestine.”

And as we can all see, the Holocaust victim card, that was first created after the Arab-Israeli war 1967, has proven to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel. Today, we can hear almost repeatedly that Israel have the right to defend itself, any criticism towards Israel is quickly labelled as anti-Semitic, and the horrifying image of the Holocaust through movies, books, diaries, museums, etc constantly remind us that the attacks on Jews should never happen again. Even though they are now the ones who are committing the crimes.