Vampire KillersIsrael Shamir on The Holocaust Industry
[Note: Israel Shamir is an Israeli writer and journalist]
VAMPIRE KILLERS
By Israel Shamir
Folk stories about vampires provide readers with various remedies to the
calamity of a ghoulish attack. A fistful of graveyard dirt is favoured, garlic
is beneficial, and the cross is most efficient. But these remedies don't always
work. In Roman Polansky's hilarious horror comedy, The Fearless Vampire Killers,
the hero tries to scare off a Jewish vampire by a sign of the cross. The Jew
smiles at him with a kind understanding smile, straight from Fiddler on
the Roof, and bares his fangs. The cross does not ward him off. Polansky's work
comes to mind as I follow the new wave of Holocaust controversies. The 'revisionist
historians', who are considered by their
adversaries to be 'Holocaust deniers', are currently meeting in Beirut to
compare their notes on Nazi genocide. The American Jewish establishment,
including the Zionist Organization of America and the Anti-Defamation League,
has demanded a ban on the conference. The ZOA is not against revisionism as such.
This organization
pioneered the art of denying history and published, at the expense of American
taxpayer, a booklet called 'Deir Yassin: History of a Lie'.
Deir Yassin was a peaceful village the Jewish terrorist groups Etzel and Lehi
attacked on the 9th of April 1948, and massacred its men, women and children. I
do not want to repeat the gory tale of sliced off ears, gutted bellies, raped
women, torched men, bodies dumped in stone quarries or the triumphal parade of
the murderers. Existentially, all massacres are similar, from Babi Yar to Chain
Gang to Deir Yassin.
ZOA revisionists have utilized all the methods of their adversaries, the 'deniers':
they discount the eye-witness accounts of the survivors, the Red Cross, the
British police, Jewish scouts andother Jewish observers, who were present at the
scene of massacre. They discount even Ben Gurion's apology, since after all, the
commanders of these gangs became in their turn prime ministers of the Jewish
state. For ZOA, only the testimony of the murderers has any validity. That is,
if the murderers are Jews.
If the Jews are the victims, these same American Zionist organizations spare no
effort in challenging revisionism. This morally dubious position was no doubt of
great comfort to those who gathered in Beirut. By their flawed logic, if the
Israelis are
telling a tall tale about what happened in 1948, perhaps the Jewish memories of
the Holocaust are also flawed. It is misplaced energy. Sure, they scored a few
hits, and the tales of soap manufactured from human fat or Wiesel's fiery
furnaces were laid to rest. But these Revisionists also question the actual
number of Jewish victims. If only a thousand Jews or Gypsies were murdered by
the Nazis, it was a thousand too many. It is hardly an important issue, as the
very definition of victim is based on interpretation.
A good example of "victim definition" was provided in last weekend's
Haaretz. When the Gulf war ended in 1991, there was one reported Israeli
victim of the war. Today, there are officially one hundred Israelis who are
recognized as victims of the Gulf war, and their dependents receive a pension at
Iraqi expense. Some of the victims died of stress, some could not remove
their gas masks and suffocated. The Haaretz article asserted that many more
claims were declined by the Israeli authorities. That is why Michael Elkins, the
ex-BBC Jerusalem correspondent and an Israeli citizen is correct in arguing that
the number of victims, whether there were six or three million dead is not an
issue.
The 'revisionists' risked their lives and fortunes trying to undermine what they
call 'the Myth of the Holocaust'. One can understand their interest.
dogma.
production could be very interesting, but they are quite irrelevant.Where then
is the matador?
A courageous step was taken by Dr Norman Finkelstein in his best-selling expose
"The Holocaust Industry". There is, however, an important distinction
between Dr Finkelstein and the 'revisionist historians' gathered in Beirut. Dr
Finkelstein, a son of holocaust survivors, stayed away from the possibly illegal
statistical controversy and
concentrated on the ideological construct of the Holocaust cult.
A fat lot of good it did him. A Jewish organization called 'Lawyers without
Borders' has already sued him in France. These lawyers were at perfect peace,
when the Israeli legal machine pronounced a six months probationary sentence on
a Jewish murderer of a Gentile child. They did not move a finger when a
15-year-old girl Suad was placed in solitary confinement, refused legal aid and
subjected to mental torture. They are visibly absent from Israeli military
courts where a single Jewish officer can mete out long imprisonment sentence to
a Gentile civilian based on undisclosed evidence. Apparently, these lawyers are
aware of certain borders.
Finkelstein set out to explore the secret of our discrete Jewish charm, a
charm that opens American hearts and the coffers of Swiss bankers. His
conclusion is that we do it by appealing to European and American guilt
feelings. "The Holocaust[1] has proven to be an indispensable ideological
weapon. Through its deployment, one of the world's most formidable military
powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a victim
state, and the most successful ethnic group in the US has acquired victim
status".
Finkelstein is not aware of the magnitude of his discovery, as he still
believes that the Holocaust cult is a great concept, second only to the
invention of the wheel. It solved the eternal problem of the rich and
influential, warding off the envy and hate of the poor and exploited. It allowed
Mark Rich and other swindlers to cheat and steal, it allowed the Israeli army to
murder children and starve women with impunity. His opinion is shared by
many Israelis. Ari Shavit, a well-known Haaretz writer, expressed it best in
1996, when the Israeli Army killed over a hundred civilian refugees in Kana,
Lebanon: "We may murder with impunity, because the Holocaust museum is
on our side". Boaz Evron, Tom Segev and other Israeli writers have
articulated the same notion.
One can sum up the thesis of Dr Finkelstein as follows. The Jews succeeded to
square the circle, and solved the problem that befuddled aristocracy and the run
of the mill millionaires. Namely, they disarmed their opponents by appealing to
their compassion and guilt feeling.
I admire Dr Finkelstein for his continued belief in the good heart of his fellow
Man. I trust he also believes in fairies. In my own estimate, compassion and
guilt feelings can maybe get you a free bowl of soup. Not uncounted billions of
dollars. Dr Finkelstein is not blind. He noticed that the Gypsies, another
victim of the Nazis, received next to nothing from a 'compassionate' Germany.
The capacity of Americans to feel collective guilt towards their Vietnamese
victims (5 million killed, one million widows, Coventry-style destruction laced
with Agent Orange) was recently expressed by Defence Secretary William Cohen:
'There is no place for apology (let alone compensation). A war is a war'.
Despite having all the facts at his disposal, Dr Finkelstein grasps his cross
and tries to frighten the vampire away.
What is the source of power that fuels the Holocaust Industry? This is no idle
or theoretical question. The making of yet another Palestinian tragedy is now in
high gear, with the slow strangulation of its cities. Every day, a tree is
uprooted, a house is
demolished, a child is murdered. In Jerusalem, the Jews celebrated Purim by
a pogrom of Gentiles, and it made page six in the local papers. In Hebron, the
Kahane boys celebrated Purim at the tomb of the mass murderer Goldstein.
This is no time to pussyfoot.
In The Sirens, Bloom expresses the feelings of his creator James Joyce towards
the bloody concept of Irish liberation by farting at the epitaph of an Irish
freedom fighter. My grandparents, my aunts and uncles died in the WWII. But I
swear by their memory, if I thought that guilt feelings over the Holocaust cult
caused the death of a single Palestinian child, I would turn the Holocaust
memorial into a public urinaire.
[1] Dr Finkelstein distinguishes between Ťholocaust", the historical
event, and The Holocaust, the ideological construct. I took the liberty to
rename it "the Holocaust cult" in the interests of lucidity.