Rank the Killers

'I lost alot of respect today for ak_m_f and Whisper....the callousness of your hearts is appauling.'

Please don't feel hurt by their comments. ak_m_f has got doubt on the figures only. I believe he also keeps a sympathetic feeling for the Jews.

What's wrong about brother Whisper?
He seems nowhere be happy of the Jews being murdered.

Jews not being liked by muslims has come from my experience speaking with Muslims.  There are alot of your brethern who don't distinguish between a Zionist Israeli jew with anti-palestinian feelings and any other jew.  That is my experience. 

If you doubt the "6 million" number, could you please cite a reliable source that would indicate another number.  And I'm not talking about nazi sympathizing socialist newspapers and pamphlets that deny the existence or put the numbers so low they are ridiculous. 

There are hundreds of organizations who have gathered the names of the dead and missing from WWII.  The numbers are not exact.  "6 million" is an estimation based off of the numbers of missing during those times.  Considering mass graves are still being discovered as of only a year ago or so...we will never know the shear number of dead.  But, if you have proof of a different number...please share?????

 

Angela, I know how mutual hatreds have been sown between el Kitab for sheer political purpose by the Special Executive units in these past few decades.

But, I can't be put amongst those who suffer with this ailement of not liking the Jews. A few years ago, I earmarked one of my areas to establish my own Pentagon - with a Mosque, a Coptic Church, a Synagogue, a Hindu temple and a Sikh Gurdawara - in one place for all to worship together.

It was the wrong time, Muslim feelings were running high with the situation in Palestine and I had to fold up the project. The three faiths have collaborated more often than not. I see the example in Toledo, Spain and at many spots in Turkey of the lost days.

I am sensitive enough not to mock the Jewish or for that matter, any suffering.

But I definitely disagree with the politics of establishing a divine figure, not just the six million, any number for that matter by instituting a criminal penal code to protect it. You may be surprised, many of my very close and enlightened Jewish friends also do the same.

These figures are estimates.

THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY - REFLECTIONS ON THE EXPLOITATION OF JEWISH SUFFERING by Norman G. Finkelstein. Pub: Verso Press, London and New York, 2000. Pp: 150. Hbk: �16/$23.

By Iqbal Siddiqui
[Crescent International, August 16-31, 2000.]

Muslims have often said that the greatest promoters of �Holocaust denial� in the world are the zionists, because of their exploitation of the �holocaust� for their political goals. Establishing historical truths, through the dislocations of time, and out of the partial memories and records of contemporary actors, is always difficult; in the case of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, the sheer volume of misinformation and disinformation generated by both sides of the debate have made any impartial and informed discussion of the issue virtually impossible.

Did 6 million Jews die, or 5 million, or 4 million, or 1 million? To what extent was there a deliberate plan to exterminate them, or were they largely victims of murderous brutality and callous negligence? These are questions that will always be asked � not because a few apologists for Hitler insist that he was not an evil monster, but because the massive and wealthy zionist lobby has produced so much transparent and self-interested propaganda on the subject, and worked so hard to ensure that anyone even asking these questions should be marginalised and disparaged. The result is that many open-minded people wonder what the zionists are trying to hide.

These opening paragraphs alone are sufficient to have both this writer and Crescent International condemned as �Holocaust deniers� and �anti-semites�. No matter: we are used to the accusations, because of our regular comments on Israel. As far as the holocaust is concerned: does it really matter whether 6 million died (a figure which even scholarly Jewish sources discount), or 1 million? Is the degree of evil demonstrated by the killing of 1 million people any less than that shown by the killing of 6 million? The lessons of the Nazis� persecution of the Jews (and the Romany and the blacks and the disabled and the handicapped...) does not depend on numbers, and is not specific to the Jews; it is simply man�s capacity for evil and brutality towards other humans, once they are removed from a moral framework. The lesson is not that the world owes the Jews a living, and must allow them to do what they like because they are an eternally persecuted people, nor that Israel must be given a free hand to do as it likes in the world.

Norman G. Finkelstein, himself a Jew and a child of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto (a Jewish area of Warsaw besieged and destroyed by the Nazis), is an established Jewish critic of Israel�s aggression and an authority on contemporary Jewish affairs. In this book, he turns his attention to the �holocaust industry�, arguing that the present high-profile presentation of the holocaust was a deliberate strategy on the part of some sectors of the Jewish community, and some Jewish institutions and organizations, designed to rally support for the zionist state, and otherwiseto promote their own interests, on the basis of the suffering of some of their co-religionists fifty years ago. Finkelstein in blunt: the authors of the holocaust industry, he says, are interested not in remembering the dead but in exploiting them, and their actions are not a tribute to them but an abuse of them.

The book is divided into three sections, each exploring one particular aspect of the industry. The first section, "Capitalizing the Holocaust", explores changing attitudes to the holocaust in America in particular, and why the holocaust has come to be such a dominant feature in American cultural life. Finkelstein is clear that this has little to do with traditional Jewish explanations that its lessons must not be forgotten, or that there is a continued risk of repetition. Instead, he points out, the awareness of the holocaust in the west � and that effectively means in the world � has depended on the interests of US Jewry and Israel. During the first two decades after the end of the second world war there was no great awareness of the holocaust, even among Jews. It was only after Israel�s 1967 victory, and the increasingly open alliance between the US and Israel, that the holocaust was suddenly trumpeted, and the spectre of anti-semitism raised to enable both American Jews and Israel to promote and defend their burgeoning interests with impunity.

The second section, "Hoaxers, Hucksters and History", explores the way in which this holocaust myth has been created and is used. It opens with a quote from an Israeli writer, Boas Evron, that "holocaust awareness is an official, propagandist indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present."

Finkelstein begins by pointing out that the Nazi persecution of the Jews is in fact historically neutral; it can just as well be used to criticise Israel and to support it, and the fact that it is used to support the zionist state is a deliberate strategy. He points to particular dogmas of the "holocaust framework": that the Nazi persecution of the Jews is a categorically unique event, and that "it marks the climax of an irrational, eternal Gentile hatred of Jews". Both of these, he points out, draw on important strands of zionist thought, and do not figure in any holocaust discourse before 1967. Most modern holocaust literature, he shows, is spurious, fraudulent and politically motivated. Among others, he is particularly scathing of Elie Wiesel, the "survivor-priest" of zionism and the holocaust. Finkelstein also goes beyond simply exposing the holocaust industry to discuss its impact on contemporary Jewry, as well as its utility for zionism, for example in its deliberate linking of Nazism and Arab opposition to zionism.

Finkelstein�s final chapter is called "The Double Shakedown". In it, he argues that "in recent years, the Holocaust industry has become an outright extortion racket. Purporting to represent all of world Jewry, living and dead, it is laying claim to Holocaust-era Jewish assets throughout Europe." He particularly examines the recent campaign to extort money from Swiss banks that supposedly took advantage of Jewish victims of the holocaust. He points out that many of the charges were based on deceit, and that the final settlement was based on blackmail rather than justice: the threat being that if the Swiss refused to pay up, the Jewish lobby worldwide would attack them and threaten to bring down their banking system. The settlement was thus extorted even before an objective study of the issue was completed.

Finkelstein also points out that many of those running the campaigns � both Jewish individuals and institutions � are in fact getting rich on the money they are supposedly claiming on behalf of holocaust survivors; his title refers to the fact that both the Swiss and the survivors were "shaken down". Similar campaigns are now being prepared against German banks and other European institutions, though not against Israel�s ally, the US, which � Finkelstein points out � followed broadly similar policies to the Swiss.

All this is material that no non-Jew can hope to say without being viciously attacked by the zionist lobby. Even Finkelstein and others like him are routinely attacked as being �self-hating� Jews, and the fact that papers such as Crescent quote him will no doubt also be used against him in future. In publishing this book, however, Finkelstein has done a favour not only to fellow anti-zionists, but also to other Jews.

The fact is that zionists today are not only the greatest reason for �holocaust denial�, but also the greatest promoters of anti-semitism, by committing all their offences in the name of Judaism; it is hardly surprising then that some people should blame all Jews for the zionists� offences. Writers such as Finkelstein, for reminding the world that there are Jews who recognise their co-religionists� sins, may be attacked today; but when Jews look back and recognise zionism as yet another disastrous episode in their history, they will be grateful that they can point also to Jews such as Norman G. Finkelstein