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The BBC wrote on their website:

Jewish American historian Norman Finkelstein argues in his explosive new book, "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering" that Holocaust remembrance has been exploited by the Jewish establishment.

In his book he contends that a greater threat to the memory of the Holocaust than Holocaust deniers is what he calls 'The Holocaust Industry'.

He accuses those who exploit the Holocaust of telling lies and of naked greed.  He argues that the ruthless industrialisation of the Holocaust has encouraged the rebirth of anti-semitism in Europe and the United States.

The son of survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and concentration camps, he says, "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."

But Finkelstein makes clear that the Holocaust Industry is not about making sure that Nazi depravity is not forgotten — it is about extorting huge sums of money from Switzerland, Germany and any other country which can be tarred with the Nazi brush.

Modern-day Germany has already atoned for the sins of the Nazi era, both morally and financially.  Many times since the war (and even today) Germany's leaders have expressed their profound regret at the actions of the Nazis, and have accepted collective responsibility for what happened.  As Finkelstein says, "In the early 1950s, Germany entered into negotiations with Jewish institutions and signed indemnification agreements.  It has paid out to date some $60bn."

Although we may rightly feel contempt for the Germans of the 1920s and 1930s who supported Hitler, most of them are now dead.  Germans born after the war (apart from a few young Nazi sympathizers) think very differently.  Germany no longer has any reason to abase itself before the denunciation of its Nazi past.  Especially not when that denunciation comes from those who appear to be motivated primarily by a desire for money.

The following two extracts from Norman Finkelstein's book were first published in The Guardian (London), Section G2, on July 12th and 13th, 2000.

Norman Finkelstein has caused a storm on both sides of the Atlantic and it is not hard to see why: he says the Holocaust has been exploited to extort cash, that most 'survivors' are bogus and that too much money is spent commemorating the Nazi genocide.  In the first of two exclusive extracts, he argues that it's time to shut down 'the holocaust industry'.

The Business of Death

In the second extract from his controversial new book, Norman Finkelstein argues that the campaign to reclaim Jewish assets from Swiss banks smacks of hypocrisy and double standards.

Swiss Toll

It's not only the hypocrisy of those profiting from the Holocaust industry — the hypocrisy of the United States in this affair stinks to high heaven.  Finkelstein writes:

Like Switzerland, the US denied entry to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism before and during the second world war.  Yet the US government hasn't seen fit to compensate them.  And, although dwarfed in size and resources by the US, Switzerland admitted just as many Jewish refugees as America (approximately 20,000) during the Nazi Holocaust.  ...

Alongside Switzerland, the committee observed, the US was also a primary safe haven for transferable Jewish assets in Europe.  The question is, what happened to the dormant Holocaust-era accounts in American banks? ...

In his House testimony [Professor Seymour] Rubin stated that, after a most superficial and rudimentary audit of banks in just New York, the value of these accounts was put at $6m.  Jewish organisations requested this sum for "needy survivors" from Congress ... [but the US] "took only very limited measures to identify heirless assets in the United States, and made available a mere $500,000, in contrast to the $32m acknowledged by Swiss banks even prior to the Volcker inquiry." In other words, the US record is much worse than the Swiss record.

And, as Finkelstein points out, the US refuses even to consider the question of compensation to African-Americans for having enslaved their ancestors, reduced them and their descendants to poverty and misery, and denied black Americans their human rights during most of the history of the US.

And if we're talking genocide, let's not forget the genocide perpetrated by the US against the original inhabitants of the land (almost all of the continental US) seized by the US government.  How many indigenous American Indian families broken and destroyed?  How many millions slaughtered?  ...  But will the US government consider compensation for survivors of this genocide?  No.

In August 1944 Dwight D. Eisenhower (who in the early 1960s ordered the assassination of Patrice Lamumba) and Henry C. Morgenthau came up with the Morgenthau Plan to inflict collective punishment upon the German people following the end of the Second World War. This was, basically, a plan to starve millions of Germans, mostly citizens, to death (reminiscent of the plan that the Nazis had for Ukrainians and Russians). Although the plan was officially cancelled, it was in fact implemented.

In March 1946 U.S. Senator Langer said in the Senate:

"[We] are caught in what has now unfolded as a savage and fanatical plot to destroy the German people by visiting on them a punishment in kind for the atrocities of their leaders.  Not only have the leaders of this plot [Eisenhower and Morgenthau] permitted the whole world situation to get out ... out of hand ... but their determination to destroy the German people and the German Nation, no matter what the consequences to our own moral principles ... has become a world scandal.  ... We have all seen the grim pictures of piled-up bodies uncovered by the American and British armies, and our hearts have been wrung with pity at the sight of such emaciation — reducing adults and even little children to mere skeletons.  Yet now, to our utter horror, we discover that our own policies have merely spread those same conditions even more widely ... among our former enemies." — Quoted in James Bacque's Crimes and Mercies, p.39.

The result of the Morgenthau plan was that in fact millions of Germans, mostly civilians, died during 1945-1950 as a result of starvation and disease.  (It is not irrelevant to point out that Morgenthau was himself Jewish.)  This was a genocidal action by the British and the American governments. But will the US government consider compensation for survivors of this genocide?  No.  Why not?  Because (in the minds of the perpetrators) genocide is evil only when done by another.

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