Norman Finkelstein's view of the Holocaust is but a micromillimetre away from that of the Nazi Revisionists.

Local Arab sponsors of this week's UW lecture by Norman Finkelstein describe him as "a Jew but…a life-long anti-Zionist; and though very much a Leftist…often praised by far Right revisionists." And they are correct in their description. "Revisionists" is the current term for those who deny that the Holocaust happened. Most Revisionists are neo-Nazis like the British David Irving or the Frenchman Robert Faurisson, with whom Finkelstein's mentor Noam Chomsky has made common cause. Finkelstein, though indeed "very much a Leftist" and supporter of Hizbollah among other "leftist" causes, has written a book called THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY which has made him a hero in extreme right-wing circles in Europe and also America and a best-selling author in Germany. This is partly because he blames Jews for antisemitism, but also because his look depicts German industrialists and Swiss bankers and wealthy East European owners of looted Jewish property not as beneficiaries of the enslavement and destruction of European Jewry but as the helpless victims of Holocaust survivors, whom Finkelstein usually refers to in quotation marks as "survivors" of "The Holocaust," which he calls, with typical understatement, "the greatest robbery in the history of mankind." (His mother, a person Finkelstein exploits endlessly and shamelessly as virtually the only genuine survivor of the Holocaust, told him that Jewish "survivors" were the cause of much of the world's present misery, and that "If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one…whom did Hitler kill?"

Finkelstein's view of the Holocaust is but a micromillimetre away from that of the Nazi Revisionists. They deny it ever happened; he claims that if it had not happened the worldwide multibillion dollar Jewish ring of "Holocaust" extortionists would have invented it in order to "justify criminal policies of the Israeli state" (which Finkelstein would like to dismantle as quickly as possible).

At no point does Finkelstein allow that anybody might have legitimate moral or religious or ethical or historical reasons to remember the Holocaust. Memory, which (again) he renders as "memory," is "the most impoverished concept to come down the academic pike," yet another instrument of the worldwide Judeo-Zionist conspiracy. In the Finkelsteinian ethical system, Jews–alone among the peoples of the earth–are prohibited from remembering their martyrs; for them compulsory amnesia is the rule.

Finkelstein's HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY may be, as the review in the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW called it, "juvenile, self-contradictory, arrogant and stupid," but its author is nevertheless the antisemites' dream come true: a Jew who regurgitates all of their most demented and evil fantasies. Arabs who think Finkelstein is their dream-Jew too may one day discover that people who encourage the Arab world's all-consuming obsession with Israel and Jews–an obsession that has retarded its progress, poisoned its life and given its autocratic leaders a handy explanation for all that is wrong in their countries–are not in fact their true friends.