"I sometimes think," writes Norman G. Finkelstein, whose parents survived the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps, "that American Jewry 'discovering' the Nazi Holocaust was worse than its having been forgotten. True, my parents brooded in private; the suffering they endured was not publicly validated. But wasn't that better than the current crass exploitation of Jewish martyrdom?"
That is the first bombshell in Finkelstein's acrimonious new book, in which he declares the recent successful pursuit of multibillion-dollar reparations from German industrial giants and Swiss bankers "an outright extortion racket." Finkelstein's downright pugilistic book delivers a wallop — mostly because few authors have had the courage or nerve to say, as he does, that the Nazi genocide has been distorted and robbed of its true moral lessons and instead has been put to use as "an indispensable ideological weapon." It's a provocative thesis that makes you want to reject it even as you are compelled to keep reading by the strength of his case and the bravura of his assertions. What Finkelstein calls "The Holocaust" — the packaged story as distinguished from the actual historical events — has become a "prize alibi" for Israeli war crimes, a cudgel for money-hungry Jewish organizations and profiteering lawyers, and a spark plug for the recrudescent ranks of anti-Semites in Europe.