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Authors: Norman Finkelstein
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to be correct, then what's at
issue are not empirical facts that can be checked, but spiritual facts that must be pondered. What
would be required is soul-checking, and that's an impossibility."
The Holocaust Industry: HOAXERS, HUCKSTERS AND HISTORY
http://www.geocities.com/holocaustindustry/chapter_2.html (7 of 20) [23/11/2000 15:47:20]
There's more. Israel Gutman is a director of Yad Vashem and a Holocaust lecturer at Hebrew
University. He is also a former inmate of Auschwitz. According to Gutman, "it's not that important"
whether Fragments is a fraud. "Wilkomirski has written a story which he has experienced deeply;
that's for sure.... He is not a fake. He is someone who lives this story very deeply in his soul. The pain
is authentic." So it doesn't matter whether he spent the war in a concentration camp or a Swiss chalet;
Wilkomirski is not a fake if his "pain is authentic": thus speaks an Auschwitz survivor turned
Holocaust expert. The others deserve contempt; Gutman, just pity.
The New Yorker titled its expose of the Wilkomirski fraud "Stealing the Holocaust." Yesterday
Wilkomirski was feted for his tales of Gentile evil; today he is chastised as yet another evil Gentile.
It's always the Gentiles' fault. True, Wilkomirski fabricated his Holocaust past, but the larger truth is
that the Holocaust industry, built on a fraudulent misappropriation of history for ideological purposes,
was primed to celebrate the Wilkomirski fabrication. He was a Holocaust "survivor" waiting to be
discovered.
In October 1999, Wilkomirski's German publisher, withdrawing Fragments from bookstores, finally
acknowledged publicly that he wasn't a Jewish orphan but a Swiss-born man named Bruno
Doessekker. Informed that the jig was up, Wilkomirski thundered defiantly, "I am Binjamin
Wilkomirski!" Not until a month later did the American publisher, Schocken, drop Fragments from its
list. 42
Consider now Holocaust secondary literature. A telltale sign of this literature is the space given over
to the "Arab connection." 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." At an Auschwitz commemoration officiated by clergy
representing all religious denominations, Wiesel objected only to the presence of a Muslim qadi:
"Were we not forgetting . . . Mufti Hajj Amin el-Husseini of Jerusalem, Heinrich Himmler's friend?"
Incidentally, if the Multi figured so centrally in Hitler's Final Solution, the wonder is that Israel didn't
bring him to justice like Eichmann. He was living openly right next door in Lebanon after the war. 43
Especially in the wake of Israel's ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and as official Israeli
propaganda claims came under withering attack by Israel's "new historians," apologists desperately
sought to tar the Arabs with Nazism. Famed historian Bernard Lewis managed to devote a full chapter
of his short history of anti-Semitism, and fully three pages of his "brief history of the last 2,000 years»
of the Middle East, to Arab Nazism. At the liberal extreme of the Holocaust spectrum, Michael
Berenbaum of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum generously allowed that "the stones
thrown by Palestinian youths angered by Israel's presence . . . are not synonymous with the Nazi
assault against powerless Jewish civilians." 44
The most recent Holocaust extravaganza is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners.
Every important journal of opinion printed one or more reviews within weeks of its release. The New
York Times featured multiple notices, acclaiming Goldhagen's book as "one of those rare new works
that merit the appellation
issue are not empirical facts that can be checked, but spiritual facts that must be pondered. What
would be required is soul-checking, and that's an impossibility."
The Holocaust Industry: HOAXERS, HUCKSTERS AND HISTORY
http://www.geocities.com/holocaustindustry/chapter_2.html (7 of 20) [23/11/2000 15:47:20]
There's more. Israel Gutman is a director of Yad Vashem and a Holocaust lecturer at Hebrew
University. He is also a former inmate of Auschwitz. According to Gutman, "it's not that important"
whether Fragments is a fraud. "Wilkomirski has written a story which he has experienced deeply;
that's for sure.... He is not a fake. He is someone who lives this story very deeply in his soul. The pain
is authentic." So it doesn't matter whether he spent the war in a concentration camp or a Swiss chalet;
Wilkomirski is not a fake if his "pain is authentic": thus speaks an Auschwitz survivor turned
Holocaust expert. The others deserve contempt; Gutman, just pity.
The New Yorker titled its expose of the Wilkomirski fraud "Stealing the Holocaust." Yesterday
Wilkomirski was feted for his tales of Gentile evil; today he is chastised as yet another evil Gentile.
It's always the Gentiles' fault. True, Wilkomirski fabricated his Holocaust past, but the larger truth is
that the Holocaust industry, built on a fraudulent misappropriation of history for ideological purposes,
was primed to celebrate the Wilkomirski fabrication. He was a Holocaust "survivor" waiting to be
discovered.
In October 1999, Wilkomirski's German publisher, withdrawing Fragments from bookstores, finally
acknowledged publicly that he wasn't a Jewish orphan but a Swiss-born man named Bruno
Doessekker. Informed that the jig was up, Wilkomirski thundered defiantly, "I am Binjamin
Wilkomirski!" Not until a month later did the American publisher, Schocken, drop Fragments from its
list. 42
Consider now Holocaust secondary literature. A telltale sign of this literature is the space given over
to the "Arab connection." 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." At an Auschwitz commemoration officiated by clergy
representing all religious denominations, Wiesel objected only to the presence of a Muslim qadi:
"Were we not forgetting . . . Mufti Hajj Amin el-Husseini of Jerusalem, Heinrich Himmler's friend?"
Incidentally, if the Multi figured so centrally in Hitler's Final Solution, the wonder is that Israel didn't
bring him to justice like Eichmann. He was living openly right next door in Lebanon after the war. 43
Especially in the wake of Israel's ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and as official Israeli
propaganda claims came under withering attack by Israel's "new historians," apologists desperately
sought to tar the Arabs with Nazism. Famed historian Bernard Lewis managed to devote a full chapter
of his short history of anti-Semitism, and fully three pages of his "brief history of the last 2,000 years»
of the Middle East, to Arab Nazism. At the liberal extreme of the Holocaust spectrum, Michael
Berenbaum of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum generously allowed that "the stones
thrown by Palestinian youths angered by Israel's presence . . . are not synonymous with the Nazi
assault against powerless Jewish civilians." 44
The most recent Holocaust extravaganza is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners.
Every important journal of opinion printed one or more reviews within weeks of its release. The New
York Times featured multiple notices, acclaiming Goldhagen's book as "one of those rare new works
that merit the appellation
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