[wvns] Students Support Prof Finkelstein
DePaul students sitting in for Finkelstein and Larudee
Victor Lang
DePaul University
DePaul Students Sit-In for Academic Freedom
Upset over DePaul University's denial of tenure to Professors Norman
Finkelstein, and Mehrene Larudee [the sister of the ISM's Paul
Larudee], and after a meeting between 30 student leaders and DePaul
President Fr. Dennis Holtschneider at his office, students have taken
action to defend academic freedom which is under attack at the
nation's largest Catholic institution. After an unsuccessful meeting
where their demands were ignored by the administration, DePaul
students are continuing their sit-in overnight and through this week
at the President's office and plan to escalate action among the
student body. Student leaders called for Fr. Holtschneider to grant
the professors tenure. They presented him with a petition of over 700
signatures calling for a reversal of the decision, and engaged in a
heated discussion on the legitimacy of the university's decision. The
decision made at the secretive University-level overturned the tenure
decisions made at the Departmental and College-levels, which approved
Finkelstein's position by votes of 9-3 and 5-0, respectively.
Students were surprised by Larudee's rejection as she was unanimously
approved by both the Departmental and University level tenure committees.
The student leaders cite Finkelstein and Larudee's positive peer
reviewed scholarship and flaws in the tenure process as reasons why
they should receive tenure. Denial of tenure to the professors means
their employment atDePaul will be terminated. Finkelstein, son of
holocaust survivors and outspoken critic of oppressive Israeli policy
in Palestine, has come under attack from detractors like Harvard law
professor Alan Dershowitz, who seeks to silence critics of Israel and
has successfully interfered in internal DePaul tenure processes.
Despite being in the midst of their hectic finals-week and upcoming
graduation, student leaders are currently sacrificing their time by
occupying the Executive Offices of DePaul University indefinitely
until their demands for the tenure of Professors Finkelstein and
Larudee are met.
===
Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg
05.21.2007
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1034
Q: You have famously argued that there were three solutions to the
Jewish problem: conversion, expulsion, and finally extermination.
Could you explain what you mean by that?
Raul Hilberg: This is an underlying pattern to which I came to early
on in my research. Looking through the sweep of history it is clear
that conversion was an object of the Christian world. The expulsions
began in the late Middle Ages when it would appear that the Jews were
not willing to become Christians. That pattern existed for several
hundred years in Europe. You could take it back to Oxford and then go
to Spain in 1492 and Portugal a few years later. So we are really
talking about the later Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times
for the expulsions.
Now, the business of a final solution, that permanent solution, is a
Nazi idea. You go back even to the beginnings of the Nazi party and
find that they are still thinking in terms of the emigration of the
Jews \—there was a plan called the Madagascar plan, which was actually
a thought in Poland and even in France (Madagascar was a French
possession), maybe all of the Jews could be shipped there. So this
idea was still floating in the German foreign office and all the way
up to Hitler as late as 1940, especially 1940 when France surrendered.
However, when the War did not end as the Germans had hoped it would
with the West (they were already making preparations to attack the
Soviet Union), the serious thought of annihilating the Jews emerged.
The earliest indication of this is a meeting Hitler had with a bunch
of party members early in February of 1941. He had by then not quite
formed the decision, but it was on the way.
Q: There was the revisionist conference in Iran several months ago.
How worried should scholars and the general public be about the
capacity of this kind of revisionism to engender anti-Semitism?
Hilberg: This revisionism began in the 1960s. It is not new. I
boycotted Germany for quite a while, but when I passed through a while
back Munich I went to a kiosk and bought a local right wing paper, a
German paper, I found to my great astonishment that I was mentioned on
the title page as a Zionist leader. Now, that was a big surprise to
me, but the headline was: "The Lie of the Holocaust". So, Germany in
the sixties had adherence to this belief, even though there they
should have known better than anywhere else. There was a Frenchman who
was already in print in the 1960s. Half of his book was devoted to me.
It was a neo-Nazi publication. As soon as my book, The Destruction of
the European Jews, was out in 1961, I became a target of these groups.
To me, the later developments in Holocaust denial were just a very
slow spread, not even a growth, but a spread from France/Germany to
the United States to Canada and ultimately picked up by the Arab
world. The Arab world is very disoriented when it comes to Europe
anyway. They are as confused about the West as we are about them. Even
so, the conference in Iran did not even succeed in Iran - it was
needless difficulty and trouble. There were Iranians who publicly
denounced this conference. So, I am not terribly worried about it even
though at the time that that conference took place last December I was
asked by the German government to take part in a counter-conference as
the keynote speaker that was held the same day in Berlin. I ordinarily
do not engage in debates with Holocaust revisionists. I did not do so
at the Berlin conference either, but the essence of my talk was that,
yes, there was a Holocaust, which is, by the way, more easily said
than demonstrated. I demonstrated this and people did come to it.
Nevertheless, the German papers did not publicize the
counter-conference in Berlin because they could not resist publishing
the faces of the Rabbis who had gone to Iran.
I have come to the conclusion, not once but several times, that, as
far as I am concerned, I do not agree with legislation that makes it
illegal to utter pronouncements claiming that there was no Holocaust.
I do not want to muzzle any of this because it is a sign of weakness
not of strength when you try to shut somebody up. Yes, there is always
a risk. Nothing in life is without risk, but you have to make rational
decisions about everything.
Q: Many of the recent anti-Semitic incidents in Europe have led people
to talk of a new anti-Semitism. Is this really something we should
take seriously or is this simply a continuance of the older anti-Semitism?
Hilberg: It is not even that. It is picking up a few pebbles from the
past and throwing them at windows. I am old enough to remember what
the effects of an anti-Jewish attitude are. Here, at the University of
Vermont it was unthinkable, even in this liberal state, to have a Jew
as a dean as late as the seventies, let alone president. In other
words, there was still a lot of segregation in the United States. If
you go back and you pick up any New York Times in the thirties or even
the forties you will see ads for apartments in New York City and the
word "restricted". This is a Jewish owned newspaper and they printed
ads barring Jews. And this was an embedded anti-Jewish regime, which
the society itself supported and it's gone. It's simply gone.
We cannot even talk about restrictions on Jews in the Islamic world
because the Jews have left the Islamic world. They are not there
anymore except in Morocco and maybe some tens of thousands still here
and there, but that is a remnant of the two hundred thousand that were
still there when the state of Israel was created. So the anti-Semitism
of the past belongs to the past, and particularly the word
"anti-Semitism." There was an anti-Semitic party in Germany and there
was an anti-Semitic party in Austria. The leader of the Hungarian
regime, Admiral Horthy, who, when some extreme right wing guys were
trying to take over Jewish businesses shouted them down. He said, and
I am paraphrasing, "you are not going to take over these businesses
because the Jews at least know how to run them and who are you? And
don't you talk to me because I was an anti-Semite before you were
born." Adolf Hitler himself, and nobody reads Mein Kampf, makes a
statement that his father would not be an anti-Semite because it would
degrade him socially. Nietzsche's sister married an anti-Semitic
leader and he referred in letters to his sister in the whole
correspondence "to your anti-Semitic husband." Now, you can see that
anti-Semitism was somewhat correlated with some backward glance. It
belongs to the nineteenth century with its other "-isms," with
imperialism, with colonialism, with racism. It sounds bizarre if I
tell you that the Nazis did not call themselves anti-Semites. You do
not even find the word.
Q: Really?
Hilberg: Yes, there was a sense that Nazism was something new. The
anti-Semite had stopped at a certain point; the anti-Semite could talk
about eliminating Jews, but did not know how to do it. The anti-Semite
did not have the power, the anti-Semite was a propagandist. The Nazis
were serious and this was a far different proposition. When you see
the actual legislation in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere that states
that it is criminal to deny that there was a Holocaust, it is because
these governments have to distance themselves from Nazism. Nowadays of
course Nazism and anti-Semitism are conflated into one kind of
ideology, but it is a different phenomenon. There was an extreme
anti-Semitic newspaper in Germany, Der Stürmer, which was published by
Julius Streicher. I do not remember now whether it was Höss, the
Auschwitz commander, or somebody else who was asked, "Did you read Der
Stürmer?" He said, basically, "Look, I'm a lieutenant colonel of the
SS, I wouldn't be caught dead reading Der Stürmer." It was like
reading the lowest of the low gossip rags in the United States. There
was an issue of social standing.
Q: What are your thoughts on the rhetorical and symbolic usage of the
word "Holocaust"?
Hilberg: I resisted the use of the word "Holocaust" to begin with
because of its religious underpinnings. In the end, it is like
anything that becomes usage; you do not escape from it. But,
"Holocaust" becomes problematic in a number of ways, and the one which
is least discussed, because it's politically incorrect to do so, is
that everything is becoming a Holocaust. I will give you one example:
I was walking in Berlin one day and I see a sign "Holocaust" and saw
some street demonstrators with signs reading "Holocaust, Holocaust,
Holocaust." I could not figure out what they were demonstrating about
until I saw a cage and realized they were talking about cruelty to
animals. The word "genocide" is also being bandied about, and of
course the Genocide Convention has a definition which goes beyond what
they call a "Holocaust." So if you kidnap children in order to make
them do something that's genocide, if you use opium that's genocide,
etc. Because it's an international convention, the Greeks put
something in there, the Chinese put something in there and so on and
so forth.
"Holocaust" is a misused word again and again because it means,
especially when it is capitalized, the Jewish catastrophe and once you
pin it on all sorts of things it loses its effectiveness. There are
now books being written that state the Armenians were not really
subjected to genocide or the Gypsies were not really subjected to
genocide - even though in my opinion both were - but it results in
these arguments and it's an unavoidable situation. As soon as the
President's Commission on the Holocaust was set-up—that's the same
President Carter who is now being called an anti-Semite who created
the Commission—everybody showed up: the Armenians, of course, showed
up, the Poles showed up, the Ukrainians showed up, the Czechs showed
up. There are all of these definitional problems and arguments that
emerge when using words like "Holocaust" or "genocide."
Q: Moving beyond the way these words are symbolically and rhetorically
employed, what do you see as the kind of relation of the Holocaust to
other historical and current genocides? How can we use the lessons of
it to confront the kind of violence and persecution of groups which
are occurring today, whether or not sociologically we consider them
genocides?
Hilberg: I did not know what to do with Cambodia or other events like
that, but Rwanda convinced me. That is why in the third edition of my
book I got Rwanda in there. Why I put it there is the answer to your
question. In Buchenwald and possibly some other camps as the war
ended, the inmates put up big signs that said "never again." I think
it was really the Communists who were behind that, but I am not sure.
The signs said "never again" in various languages because there was a
Babel of languages in these camps. Millions of people, men, women and
children killed only because they were classified as Jews. Now, that
should not happen again and that is the responsibility of the world.
The result was, in fact, the Genocide Convention. The word genocide
was a made up word by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from Poland
whose previous speciality was terrorism. When the Holocaust happened
he published a book in 1944, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In that
book he invented the word genocide because he argued that the law has
to have that concept as a crime. Of course the United States did not
want to sign the Genocide Convention because the State Department and
other representatives had their doubts. One major doubt was that if we
had a Genocide Convention, then the blacks in this country would
challenge all the segregation laws. The Genocide Convention is a
treaty, and if it's a treaty under Article six of the Constitution we
cannot sign this convention because it would override our sacred state
laws which discriminated against blacks. That was their argument.
Eventually that argument collapsed.
What remains today, however, is that the "never again" is implicit.
Yet, come Rwanda and President Clinton refused to call it genocide
when it really was! We said that we will never tolerate this sort of
thing again, but allow half a million people plus to be killed in
three or four months in Rwanda. After ten Belgians were killed
withdrawals began of the international peacekeeping force. It was the
same thing as in Germany, the Hutu decided now we are going to solve
the Tutsi problem like the Germans did with the Jews. It is even clear
that they decided it months before they started killing because they
imported machetes and made preparations like the Germans. So here we
were, the whole world, there's no World War II going on, there is no
excuse that we need all the aircraft we have, so we cannot bomb
Auschwitz because we need them on the Western Front, and nothing is
done. It's peace, it's the nineties, and nothing is done. So much for
"never again." So the problem has obviously not disappeared.
You have to make decisions. When you are sitting in the Defense
Department or the State Department in the White House you never can
predict exactly what configurations some happening will show you. You
have to think it through and these people haven't got any time to
think. They have to do all their thinking before they took office.
This is a major problem. Nevertheless, this is the first time in
history that we take a sort of global responsibility. I am not saying
we are alone, we have our partners doing this and the notion of a
gloabl responsibility is really brand new, it is post-World War II.
Q: What are your thoughts on the current debates over how to interpret
the Holocaust and its legacy in the work of people like Norman
Finkelstein or Daniel Goldhagen?
Hilberg: Well Finkelstein is now maligned all over the place. There
were obviously lobbies who tried to dislodge him from his position.
Finkelstein is a political scientist. I believe he has a PhD degree
from Princeton and, whatever you may think of Princeton, this is a
pretty strong preparation to be a professional political scientist. He
wrote to me a couple of times. He was the first one to take Goldhagen
seriously. He attacked Goldhagen in a very long essay which I could
never have written because I would have never had the patience.
Goldhagen is part of an academic group that in my kind of research is
a disaster...
Q: Why is that?
Hilberg: Because [Goldhagen] was totally wrong about everything.
Totally wrong. Exceptionally wrong. In other words, this whole fury of
his anti-Semitism was, at the root, that it was especially
eliminationist anti-Semitism, was totally absurd. He talks about
anti-Semitism among Germans, Estonians, Ukrainians, Latvians, and
Lithuanians, but where did this unique eliminationist anti-Semitism
come from? It is just totally absurd. I mean, totally off the wall,
you know, and factually without any basis. Finkelstein took this
seriously. I took it less seriously, but I was a latecomer in
attacking this Goldhagen fellow.
Now Finkelstein had a second point, which, in my opinion, was one
hundred percent correct and that is that the response to the issue of
the Swiss banks and German industry, which had coincided during the
War, was not only coercive on the part of the Jews who mobilized, but
also on the part of all the insurance commissioners, the Senate, the
House, and the critical committees. The only thing they could not
break through was to the courts, which still have independence. So
they lost at court, but they threatened people like Alan Hevesi in New
York. They could make threats because Swiss banks wanted to expand
here. For Finkelstein, this was naked extortion and I'm not sure who
agreed with him except for me and I said so openly. In fact, I said so
to the press in maybe seven countries.
The press did not expect my answer. The World Jewish Congress was led
by a man who was appeared to be from his own autobiographical
statements to be totally, not even average, but like a child almost.
What this tycoon, who took over the World Jewish Congress, was saying
was totally preposterous. The claims lawyers, joined by the World
Jewish Congress, made an incredible display of totally inappropriate
behavior.
Now when he talks about the Arabs, some Jews feel that he is also
anti-Zionist, that he is anti-Israel; that he seems to always
emphasize the suffering of the Arabs. I do not join him in this
particular venture because I have my own view, but you cannot say he
is altogether wrong either. Would you like to be an Arab citizen in
Israel? Think of the doors that are closed. You may eat better and
have a better income than if you lived in a slum in Cairo. The great
irony is that the economic condition of Israeli Arabs is considerably
better than the proletariat in some other Arab countries, but a person
needs something more. A person needs a feeling of dignity. Think of
the security check points. It is a life that certainly something ought
to be done about it in one way or another. This particular battle
cannot be fought forever. It cannot be. The Israelis will tire of it.
The Israelis will simply tire of mistrusting people. It is not
possible to go on this way forever. Finkelstein has the corner on the
germ of correct vision in these matters because he is pretty sharp.
More often than not, especially with regard to these other matters
like Goldhagen and the Swiss banks he has been right.
Q: One last question, as time goes on in the twenty-first century what
direction should research on the Holocaust take now?
Hilberg: Well, if you had asked that question first, it would have
needed a half hour. Rightfully so, the research today is oriented
towards finding out details and especially what happened at the local
level. This research has already started. It is not very well
developed in this country, but it is very much in progress in Europe.
The principle researchers of the Holocaust today are Germans and
Austrians. There are also some French and Italians. There are not many
Holocaust researchers worth mentioning in this country.
The second thing that we should and must do is look at those aspects
of what happened which are still taboo. What is taboo is the life of a
terminal Jewish community in some ghetto and the notion that some
people died first, then other people died next, still other people
died last, and then, better yet, some of them survived. What accounts
for these very discernible developments? Example: the first to die
were the poorest of the poor. We have got to face this issue. We have
got to realize that it will not do in the academic world to call all
of the Jewish dead – as I have heard one Rabbi call them, Kedoshim,
which means holy people. This is not my language. We cannot do that.
We have to see them as they were and we have not done this. We have
had the lectures. This is one aspect in which I do not agree with Elie
Wiesel although I have known him for a long time. He says "listen to
the survivors and listen even to their children." I say, yes, we will
listen to the survivors. We have listened for quite a long time, but
it is not enough. It will not tell us what happened to the people that
did not survive. You are not a random sample. This requires a lot of
assiduous research through a lot records that have been buried and
have not been examined.
The third thing that needs to be done is: you have to identify more
clearly who the neighbors of the Jews were. How they were impacted if
at all? How their reactions were motivated, be it to join the
perpetrator or help the victim or, in most cases, remain neutral.
Neutrality does not mean ignoring something. It means a decision not
to do anything. We have to examine that as well. So we have to examine
the Holocaust in all ways and it boils down to doing a lot of local
research because at the local level are the records that tell us
something. For example, if I read in local records that the
Byelorussians are not delivering enough grain to the Germans because
they secretly steal it to make vodka and in such huge quantities under
the German occupation, you would have to begin to ask the question
what percentage of that population was perpetually drunk? Now these
are very, very important questions and that is the direction the
research needs to go in. It is not for amateurs, it is not for
untrained people, it is not for philosophers, it is for people who
know languages, who know history, who know political science, who know
economics, etc. At the root they must be well trained. The Holocaust
is not today, as it might have been in the beginning, a subject for
the laymen.
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