Norman G. Finkelstein > Quotes

“My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein

“Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and—most unforgivably—increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, Goldstone Recants: Richard Goldstone Renews Israel's License to Kill

“Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“Manifest Destiny anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler's Lebensraum policy. In fact, Hitler modeled his conquest of the East on the American conquest of the West.* During the first half of this century, a majority of American states enacted sterilization laws and tens of thousands of Americans were involuntarily sterilized. The Nazis explicitly invoked this US precedent when they enacted their own sterilization laws.'' The notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of the franchise and forbade miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews. Blacks in the American South suffered the same legal disabilities and were the object of much greater spontaneous and sanctioned popular violence than the Jews in prewar Germany.
To highlight unfolding crimes abroad, the US often summons memories of The Holocaust. The more revealing point, however, is when the US invokes The Holocaust. Crimes of official enemies such as the Khmer Rouge bloodbath in Cambodia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo recall The Holocaust; crimes in which the US is complicit do not.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“it must be shown to American Jews that the choice between Israel’s survival and Palestinian rights is a false one; that it is in fact Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights and reflexive resort to criminal force that are pushing it toward destruction; that it is possible to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict so that everyone, Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab, can preserve their full human dignity; and that such a settlement has been within reach for decades, but that Israel—with critical U.S. backing, largely because of the Israel lobby—has blocked it.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much

“Do not compare” is the mantra of moral blackmailers.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian youngsters is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to horror. Their homes are demolished, their parents are humiliated in front of their eyes, soldiers storm into their homes brutally in the middle of the night, tanks open fire on their classrooms. And they don’t have a psychological service. Have you ever heard of a Palestinian child who is a “victim of anxiety”?”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History

“One can imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to find refuge in another country able to accommodate it; one is hard-pressed, however, to imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to politically and perhaps physically displace the indigenous population of another country. Yet, as Shapira [Zionist] forthrightly acknowledges, the latter was the actual intention of the Zionist movement.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

“The day after, bloody revolutions seem always to disappoint, and in the scramble to the top, those with the most blood on their hands seem always to get there first.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, What Gandhi Says

“So the ultimate question is, Do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres, or is it incumbent upon them to lie down and die?”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom

“The shakedown of Switzerland and Germany has been only a prelude to the grand finale: the shakedown of Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, alluring prospects opened up in the former heartland of European Jewry. Cloaking itself in the sanctimonious mantle of “needy Holocaust victims,” the Holocaust industry has sought to extort billions of dollars from these already impoverished countries. Pursuing this end with reckless and ruthless abandon, it has become the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you. You must be living an awfully precious life if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“And still another lesson is to keep vigilant for crimes against humanity – except those committed by your own government.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“if the Americans do not launch a conventional attack Israel would be compelled and justified in launching a nuclear strike to prevent a “second Holocaust.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much

“At its worst, the woke cult of transgenders is a cross between voyeurism and morbidity, a fascination with the sexually bizarre, a politically correct version of snuff pornography. It’s at the “intersectionality” of the lassitudinous culture of the Hamptons and the depraved sexual ennui of Hollywood.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“Where was the Congressional hue and cry over “perfidious” American bankers? One member after another of the Senate and House banking committees clamored for the Swiss to “finally pay up.” None, however, called on the US to do so. Rather, a House Banking Committee member shamelessly averred – with Bronfman agreeing – that “only” Switzerland “has failed to show the courage to confront its own history.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“If Gandhi preached simultaneously the virtues of nonviolence and courage, it was because he believed that nonviolence required more courage than violence.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage

“So you have a maniac who says he's representing all of World Jewry, and people say "okay, if he represents all of World Jewry, then the Jews are a problem”
― Norman G. Finkelstein

“My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies. There is a personal motive as well. 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. Even”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“It is important to recognize that our efforts at communal property restitution,” Stuart Eizenstat told a House committee, “are integral to the rebirth and renewal of Jewish life” in Eastern Europe. Allegedly to “promote the revival” of Jewish life in Poland, the World Jewish Restitution Organization is demanding title over the 6,000 prewar communal Jewish properties, including those currently being used as hospitals and schools. The prewar Jewish population of Poland stood at 3.5 million; the current population is several thousand. Does reviving Jewish life really require one synagogue or school building per Polish Jew? The organization is also laying claim to hundreds of thousands of parcels of Polish land valued in the many tens of billions of dollars. “Polish officials fear,” Jewish Week reports, that the demand “could bankrupt the nation.” When Poland’s Parliament proposed limits on compensation to avert insolvency, Elan Steinberg of the WJC denounced the legislation as “fundamentally an anti-American act.”80”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“True, the annals of humankind appear rife with violence. But, Gandhi contended, this was an optical illusion fostered by scribes and scholars who, by virtue of their profession, took note of the exceptions to the rule: “History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul.”3”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, What Gandhi Says

“In the face of the sufferings of African-Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians, my mother’s credo always was: We are all holocaust victims.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“A mathematician I consulted, Dr. Sanjeev Mahajan, had this to say: Crenshaw’s axiom can be rephrased as follows: Two categories of oppression when combined yield an entirely new, irreducible category of oppression. This seems a fair reading of her contention that the discrimination suffered by a Black woman is distinct from the sum of the discrimination that a Black person suffers plus the discrimination that a woman suffers. Let’s then consider a single individual who suffers four categories of oppression: Black (B), Female (F), Paraplegic (P), Lesbian (L). But then, per Crenshaw, we can form entirely new categories such as {BF}, {BP}, and {BL}. Then these categories can be combined to form yet another irreducible category such as {{BF}{BP}} or {{BL}{BP}}. These categories can be further combined to yield entirely new categories of oppression such as {{{BF}{BP}} {{BL}{BP}}}, etc. Now let us, per Crenshaw’s axiom, enumerate all possible irreducible categories of oppression. Given the 4 options, B F P L, there are 15 non-empty subsets, each of which is an irreducible category. Since these 15 categories are irreducible and independent, they can be combined every which way to give us 215-1= 32,767 non-empty subsets of the set of the 15 categories. Each of these 32,767 categories is an irreducible category of oppression. But then again, applying Crenshaw’s axiom, since we now have a set of 32,767 categories of oppression, we can combine them in all possible configurations to get 232767-1 non-empty subsets of a set of 32,767 categories. Repeating this process, ad infinitum, we get infinitely many categories of oppression.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“For the “new democracies” in Eastern Europe, meeting this standard “would be commensurate with their passage from totalitarianism to democratic states.” Eizenstat is a senior US government official and a prominent supporter of Israel. Yet, judging by the respective claims of Native Americans and Palestinians, neither the US nor Israel has yet made the transition.85”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“Everything changed with the June 1967 Arab–Israeli war. By virtually all accounts, it was only after this conflict that The Holocaust became a fixture in American Jewish life.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“Manifest Destiny anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler’s Lebensraum policy. In fact, Hitler modeled his conquest of the East on the American conquest of the West.6”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“(The Catholic Church was the first institutional bastion in the U.S. to oppose eugenic sterilization, not just on account of its opposition to birth control, but also because of its theological commitment to the sanctity of all human life regardless of eugenic “fitness.”)”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

“American Jewish organizations (as well as Israel) rallied behind the Bush administration’s criminal aggression against Iraq, with Elie Wiesel declaring that “the world faced a crisis similar to 1938” and “the choice is simple,” and with self-promoting “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal proclaiming that “you cannot wait indefinitely on dictators. Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, but for six years the world did not act.” Critics of the war stood accused of everything from Chamberlain-style “appeasement” to “an anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West,” while even prominent American poets opposing the Iraqi war and Israel’s occupation were chastised for playing “on the edges of 1930s-style anti-Semitism.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“a counterculture tabloid that “portrayed Kissinger as a fawning sycophant, coward, bully, flatterer, tyrant, social climber, evil manipulator, insecure snob, unprincipled seeker after power” – in the event, an understatement”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

“When a place becomes unlivable, people move,” the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has observed. “This is the case for environmental disasters such as droughts, or for conflicts, such as in Syria. Yet this last resort is denied to the people in Gaza. They cannot move beyond their 365 square kilometers territory. They cannot escape, neither the devastating poverty nor the fear of another conflict. Its highly educated youth . . . do not have the option to travel, to seek education outside Gaza, or to find work, anywhere else beyond the perimeter fence and the two tightly-controlled border-checkpoints in the north and south of the Gaza Strip.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom