Norman Finkelstein’s Distorted Comparisons and Holocaust Denial
Israel-Hamas War: Douglas Murray Responds To Norman Finkelstein Calling Gaza a “Concentration Camp” on Piers Morgan Uncensored. The following is an adapted transcript of that interview.
Norman Finkelstein is notorious for having destroyed his career by among other things weaponizing his parents being in the Holocaust to use his career to attack Israel in particular. All societies produce a type of sociopath and psychopath and Norman Finkelstein is just such a person. If I can give just one example, he repeatedly in that interview referred to Gaza as a concentration camp. Gaza is no such thing as a concentration camp and Norman Finkelstein knows that very well.
Every single Jew was removed from Gaza forcibly in 2005 by the Israeli government. In 2006 the people of Gaza had an election, and they elected Hamas. Hamas proceeded to kill Fatah and other Palestinians who did not agree with Hamas. If anyone is responsible for making Gaza into a prison camp, it is Hamas, which uses places like the Shifa Hospital as torture chambers for Palestinians.
Do you know anybody who got out of a concentration camp in 1945 and proceeded to go next door and behead and rape everyone they could find?
Now, here’s another oddity about it: he kept saying ‘concentration camp’ about Gaza. Do you know anybody who got out of a concentration camp in 1945 and proceeded to go next door and behead and rape everyone they could find? I don’t, but only Norman Finkelstein finds these kinds of comparisons to make and makes them willfully. And, by the way, shame on him for this.
What we just heard was Holocaust Denial in real time. He pretends we don’t know what happened on the 7th of October. We do know! And if he doesn’t believe the reports he reads or the international media, he should have come with me this morning to the Pathology Department in Tel Aviv where they are still trying to work out who the bodies are that are arriving. I was standing this morning in Tel Aviv in the morgue with the doctors who are trying to work out the identities still of the people killed that day. There is so little of some of the bodies, that they can’t even extract DNA from them. There is so little of them that sometimes it turns out what was thought to be the charred remains of one person is the remains of two people. People arrive in bags. They arrive in bags with little bits of what is left of their body and maybe a bit of a mobile phone.
There was the skull they were examining and — I said — ‘that must be a child’s skull,’ and one of the experts there in the morgue said, ‘Actually, we don’t know because the fire in the house that Hamas lit was so intense in its heat it could have been a young man’s skull that was warped into a smaller size by the heat.’
All societies produce sick individuals, but very few people have been produced who are quite as sick as Norman Finkelstein.
If Norman Finkelstein, practicing his Holocaust denialism, in real time, actually wants to pursue any of the academic pursuits he has spent his career not pursuing, then I would urge him to go and see the body bags in the morgue in Tel-Aviv to see what Hamas did that day. It is disgusting that Norman Finkelstein uses his late parents to defame Israel, to pretend that Israel are the Nazis in this situation. All societies produce sick individuals, but very few people have been produced who are quite as sick as Norman Finkelstein.
Would you ever debate with him?
I refuse for one straightforward reason: that is, there are very few people I wouldn’t debate with, but Norman Finkelstein is one of them. Most people in academia stopped having anything to do with him many decades ago when he wrote his book ‘The Holocaust Industry’ in 2000, claiming that the Jews were using the Holocaust to make money from it.
Like most people, I don’t want to be anywhere near such an individual. I do not want to debate with a Holocaust denier in real time any more than I would debate with a Holocaust denier who was denying the last Holocaust. This was the biggest murder of Jews since the Holocaust, and shame on Norman Finkelstein for trying to pretend that didn’t happen or happened differently in real time. It’s disgusting.
