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December 13, 2001
Trojanow and Hoskote:
Nonsense
Mantras of Our Times
Dr. A.
Tajudeen
Afghanistan
and Zaire
Michael Williams
Prohibit
Prohibition
December 12, 2001
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens,
Walker
and Osama's Tape
Laura W. Murphy
Ashcroft's
Jihad
Shahid
Alam
Race
and Visibility
December 11, 2001
Joshua Orton
University
of Wisconsin
Won't Aid FBI Interviews
Philip
Farruggio
Cleansing
the Nation's Soul
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
December 10, 2001
Robert
Dunham
Race
and the Death Penalty:
Partners in Injustice
Andy Kershaw
Chamber of
Horrors
Near the Garden of Eden
John Touchie
Isaac's
on Chomsky
December 9, 2001
Jo Dillon
Journalist:
The CIA Wanted
Me Killed
John Chuckman
High-Tech
Puritanism
December 8, 2001
Laurence Tribe
Military Tribunals
Undermine the Constitution
Patrick
Cockburn
The
End of a Strange War
December 7, 2001
John Troyer
Blacklist Me!
Sen. Edwards
v. Ashcroft
Military
Tribunals
George Naggiar
Occupation
as Terrorism
Hugo von
Sponek
and Denis Halliday
Iraq
the Hostage Nation
David Vest
The Coen
Brothers'
Minstrel Show
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon
or Arafat:
Who's the Terrorist?
December 6, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Hampshire
College the First
to Condemn the War
Robert
Jensen
University
Teaching After
September 11
Jack McCarthy
Does
Tom Friedman Read
the New York Times?
Sam and
Leila Bahour
The
Psychology of a Suicide Attacker
December 5, 2001
Edward Hammond
The Only
Real Way to
Prevent Biowarfare
Harvey
Wasserman
Atomic
Treason in the House
Carl Estabrook
America's
Israel
Don Williams
Questions
Barbara Walters Didn't Ask George Bush
Cockburn/St. Clair
Liberals
Hail War as
Return of Big Government
Robert
Fisk
The
Last Colonial War?
Bahour/Dahan
It's About
the Occupation
December 4, 2001
Dave Marsh
A
Plea for Byron Parker
Rep. Ron Paul
Keep Your
Eye on the Target
Susan
Herman
Ashcroft
and the Patriot Act
Tariq Ali
The Afghan
King and the Nazis
November 30, 2001
Jordan
Green
Disappeared
in the Southland
Willliam Blum
Rebuilding
Afghanistan?
November 29, 2001
Phillip
Cryan
Defining
Terrorism
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
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Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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December 13,
2001
A Conversation
with Professor Norman Finkelstein
How to Lose Friends and
Alienate People
By Don Atapattu
Professor Norman Finkelstein is one of a dying
breed of American mavericks that relentlessly defies any attempt
at easy categorization. He is the son of Holocaust survivors
but an unremitting critic of Holocaust reparation claims; a Jew
but is a life-long anti Zionist; and though very much a Leftist,
he is often praised by far Right revisionists of the Third Reich,
such as Hitler-admiring historian David Irving. He initially
made his name by revealing Joan Peter's massively successful
From
Time Immemorial (a book heavily promoted by the Israeli
lobby, that claimed there were no native Arabs before Zionist
immigration into Palestine), as a colossal fraud, and for 10
years he was a Professor of Political Science at New York University.
However, he is best known as the author
of four books, the  most recent being
The
Holocaust Industry, which has catapulted him into the
spotlight, due to its contention that American Jewry have ruthlessly
exploited the Nazi holocaust for political and financial gain.
Often lambasted for his intemperate approach, Finkelstein is
unlikely to win popularity contests in America for the language
he employs, as much as his arguments. Like his close friend and
mentor Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein is not one to mince his
words. In his eyes the mainstream Jewish organisations are 'hucksters',
'gangsters' and 'crooks'; Elie Wiesel (celebrity Holocaust survivor)
is the 'resident clown' for the Holocaust 'circus'; reparations
claims against Germany for Nazi era slave laborers are 'blackmail';
and he infamously dismissed Professor Goldhagen's critically
acclaimed Holocaust bestseller 'Hitler's Willing Executioners'
as the 'pornography of violence'. Small wonder then that he has
few friends amongst the American Jewish establishment, with Elian
Steinberg (World Jewish Congress Executive Secretary) stating
on TV that 'Finkelstein is full of shit', and the literary editor
of the pro Israeli New Republic describing him as 'poisonsomething
you would find under a rock'.
In its initial hardback edition, The
Holocaust Industry was a tremendous success in many nations
(selling 130 000 copies in a few weeks on its publication in
Germany), but in America its sales were limited to a paltry 12000.
This relative failure stateside is attributed at least in part
by Finkelstein to a fatwah by the Jewish establishment--he notes
indignantly that the New York Times book review was much more
hostile toward The Holocaust Industry than it was even
to Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'. Now the revised paperback edition
has just been released many of these same periodicals are uncharacteristically
silent, perhaps thinking they can kill it more effectively through
lack of exposure rather than outright aggression. The following
is an interview conducted with Norman Finkelstein on 15 October
2001, on the eve of the paperback's publication.
It is generally considered that growing
up Jewish and growing up Zionist are mutually inextricable. What
made you break this link?
First of all, I don't agree that Zionism
and growing up in a Jewish household are inextricably linked.
It is fair to say that growing up Jewish and having a consciousness
about Israel are inextricably linked. As a Jew I felt that I
bore a certain amount of responsibility for the policies of Israel
because Israel claimed to speak in the name of the Jewish people,
and therefore they were using the history and suffering of the
Jewish people as a means to justify its policies. However, my
family were not Zionists, and therefore I see no special connection
between the two.
You stated in a BBC interview that
your radical politics have exacted 'a substantial personal cost'
to yourself. Have you found yourself alienated from mainstream
Jewish life?
I wouldn't say that alienation has been
the price because I have managed to find a crowd of people who
share my values in my life, which has been quite satisfying to
me. I'd say that without wanting to pose a martyr, that I've
paid a professional price for my views. Most recently I taught
at Hunter College, City University of New York, and every semester
I was the highest rated professor in my department on student
evaluations, I had also published in the last five years, four
books and I would say that in every reckoning I had proven myself
to be worthy as a professor. Nonetheless, I was always the lowest
paid by far, I had the heaviest teaching load, and this past
May after 10 years faithful service at slave wages, I was let
go and forced--at the ripe old age of 49--to relocate to Chicago
to find temporary work.
How have Jewish academics and Middle
East specialists reacted to the arguments that you have expanded
upon in your books?
The reviews of my first book (Image
and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict), were given
the content of the book remarkably favorable. I was quite surprised
by the positive reception of the first book. Generally speaking,
I don't have much contact with the mainstream. I don't publish
in mainstream journals, and have never been asked to publish
in them. It is also true that my name comes up quite a lot in
articles in mainstream publications; my writings on a variety
of subjects are quite frequently cited.
While researching your second book
(The
Rise and Fall of Palestine: The Intifadah Years), you lived
with Palestinian families in the Occupied Territories. How do
you regard this time in retrospect?
First of all, it's not looking back,
I still go fairly frequently, I was there in June and I stay
in close touch with the families of whom I write in the book.
When I first went it was a moral test of the values that are
meaningful to me, and I wanted to see if I could bridge the chasm
between a Jew and a Palestinian based upon our common humanity
and our shared commitment to justice and decency. To that extent
I would say that it was a satisfying experience, because I think
that we developed close and meaningful relationships.
Were conditions in the territories
as bad as you had anticipated?
I would say that the situation there
is horrible. Whenever I go I almost literally count the minutes
before I leave. I can't stand it there because you feel that
you are watching people endure a living death for no justifiable
reason people are suffering and they're wasting away a life.
It's very hard to bear, because it is impossible to rationalise
to oneself why you should have a meaningful and satisfying life,
and these people have to endure a meaningless and horrifying
life. It is impossible to rationalise, unless you consider yourself
a superior human being and deserve better, than maybe it would
be a tolerable situation. When you recognise your common humanity
and realise that for reasons for nothing to do with anything
these people have ever done that they should have to suffer this
way.. it's really hard.
Did you ever experience any hostility
because of your background (as an American Jew)?
Quite the contrary. The first couple
of years, I was treated like royalty and people were gracious
and wonderful, by the third year no one could care less that
I was Jewish. It was not even a topic of discussion. Even this
summer I spent time in Gaza, where the people knew I was Jewish,
and they didn't care. It's not an issue; the issue is whether
you are for or against the occupation.
'Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine
Conflict' is a radical reinterpretation of Israeli-Arab history,
turning on its head the standard Western notion of Israel being
the constant victim of Arab aggression. How have historians reacted
to the arguments contained within it?
As I said earlier it does get frequently
cited. The chapter on Joan Peters--the hoax about Palestine being
empty on the eve of Jewish colonization--is considered a standard
text, everybody cites it. The chapter on Benny Morris and the
Palestinian refugee question (in which Finkelstein dismisses
Morris' claims that there was no overall plan by the Zionists
to expel the Arabs from Palestine), is considered the definitive
critique on the Morris book, and nowadays most scholarship agrees
that I'm closer to the truth than Morris. The last chapters on
the `67 and `73 wars...they're pretty much ignored.
Regarding your most recent work, The
Holocaust Industry, can you explain who the Holocaust Industry
(according to your interpretation) are and what their goals might
be?
The Holocaust Industry, is as I conceive
in the book, is institutions, organisations and individuals who
have put to use Jewish suffering for political and financial
gain. Throughout the little book, I am not at all shy of naming
names, so large numbers of organisations and individuals are
cited for their activities in the exploitation of the Nazi holocaust.
It is hard to say the main ones, but the mainstream Jewish organisations
and individuals such as Elie Wiesel, they feature prominently
in the book.
Do you believe the 'Holocaust Industry'
were responsible for the poor sales of the book in the US in
comparison with its spectacular success elsewhere?
First of all, I do name names and a lot
of these individuals and organisations have a huge vested interest
in the Nazi holocaust. It's a political weapon, but it's also
plainly a financial weapon, and it's unsurprising that the book
would die an early death in the United States. Given those facts,
it would be shocking were it otherwise.
Do you believe these people were involved
in your dismissal from New York University?
I think it works much more subtly in
our system. Sometimes phone calls are made, no doubt about it,
but I think things work through a crystallising of a consensus--in
the sense of 'this guy is more trouble than he is worth, and
so it is time to let him go'. I think this is what happened at
Hunter College, that yes I had an excellent teaching record,
yes I had an excellent publication record, but it's also true
that 'a lot of people are complaining about him and we do get
all these phone calls and there are faculty members who are very
uncomfortable with him because he is just not professional' and
so on and so forth. Finally, a consensus crystallises that it
is time to let him go.
A spokesman for the World Jewish Congress
suggested that you should be grateful to organisations such as
themselves, for the compensation that your parents received.
Is there not some truth in that were it not for the awareness
raising campaigns of these bodies, Holocaust survivors would
not have been compensated at all?
These organisations frankly, bring to
mind an insight of my late mother, that it is no accident that
Jews invented the word "chutzpah". They steal, and
I do use the word with intent, 95% of the monies earmarked for
victims of Nazi persecution, and then throw you a few crumbs
while telling you to be grateful. It is very hard to sink much
lower than to turn the colossal suffering of the Jewish people
during World War Two into an extortion racket. I really think
that not even Julius Streicher (leading anti Semitic publisher
in 1930's Germany) were he editing Der Stuermer today, could
have conjured up the image of Jews huckstering their dead, but
that's exactly what this gang of wretched crooks have done. They
have disgraced the memory of the Jewish people's suffering on
the one hand by turning it into an extortion racket. If there
were any doubt left, I would point to the recent London Times
article headlined 'Swiss Holocaust cash revealed to be a myth',
that is all the claims against the Swiss banks were a fantastic
concoction of the Holocaust hustlers. But then after turning
Jewish suffering into an extortion racket.to then deny the actual
victims these monies extorted..it is very difficult to imagine
sinking any lower on a moral level than that. If they were all
put behind bars, it wouldn't be yet, in my opinion, be a just
punishment.
Many of the same adjectives crop up
in the hostile reviews of The Holocaust Industry, such as 'bitter',
'angry', 'shrill', and 'polemical'. Do you think this is because
you are breaking a hereto untouchable taboo?
Only one of the many reviews I have read,
made the comment that the book was very funny, and I think that
there is a certain amount of humour in the book. I didn't note
personally any intimation of a rant or shrillness. You find humour
there and irony there, but I should point out that the book went
through several editors who were quite exacting and wherever
it did go over the top, they pulled me back. I think a lot of
reviews stem from the fact that most people (including myself),
tend to defer to authority, and the first reviews the word that
was constantly used was 'rant' and before you knew it everyone
began to pick up on that, and so that became the drum beat theme
of the negative reviews. Therefore, I don't think it is so much
that I broke a taboo; I think the initial negative reviews set
a tone for what followed.
One extraordinary fact that I learned
in your book was that former President Reagan, and his UN ambassador
Jean KirkPatrick, received the Simon Wiesenthal Center humanitarian
of the year award (for their staunch support of Israel) despite
providing political, financial and military support to extreme
Right terrorist groups in Central America. Do you agree that
it is an incredible perversion of history that the racism and
violence of the Nazi holocaust, is now used to justify turning
a blind eye to racism and violence?
Well that is what you would expect from
the Simon Wiesenthal Center. This is really a gang of heartless
and immoral crooks, whose hallmark is that they will do anything
for a dollar. As I point out in the book, the guy who runs their
headquarters in Los Angeles, runs it as a family business, and
in the mid 1990's they were collectively raking in $525 000 a
year.
Do you think The Holocaust Industry
would have been published were you not the Jewish son of Holocaust
survivors?
(Laughs) No, I have no doubt about that.
First of all, it just got barely published as the son of Holocaust
survivorsIf I weren't, there would be no chance at all.I would
have been buried alive. Just the other day I was speaking to
someone who I cannot name for this interview, who met with a
high government official in Germany who we both know. My friend
asked him about the questions raised in my book concerning the
number of surviving slave labourers, and whether the German government
knew that the numbers had been grossly inflated to justify the
extortion of huge amounts of money. His response was that 'of
course we knew what he was saying was true', but a decision was
made early on to go on with the blackmail because 'we were afraid
of a huge anti Semitic reaction being unleashed in Germany',
and the attitude was Germany was rich enough to pay the ransom.
But, if you go to Germany and try to say the things that I did,
the so called 'Left' become absolutely hysterical as they have
this huge vested interest in being professional anti anti-Semites
and semophiles. It's this huge identity that they have carved
out for themselves, and when I go out there and say that of course
be anti Nazis but a lot of what is being done in the name of
anti anti-Semitism, is in fact a gross falsification of history
.and unless exposed will do huge damage to the Jewish people,
these people go berserk. It is one of the peculiarities of this
whole industry, in that it has created an alignment between the
Left in Germany and the Right-wing Jewish establishment in the
US. They sing the praises of people like Israel Singer (disgraced
executive V.P. of the World Jewish Congress), a complete and
total hoodlum - something that crawled out of the sewer.and they
sing the praises of him! You would think he was Demetrios
the way they talk about him.
Another matter that puts you at odds
with the Jewish establishment, is your rejection of the uniqueness
of Jewish persecution compared to the suffering of other peoples.
What is the position of groups like the World Jewish Congress
on financial reparations for the Indo-Chinese, Black slavery,
the slaughter of the American Indians etc?
They don't say anything, well I shouldn't
say they don't say anythingDuring the US Congressional
hearings on the Holocaust compensation, Maxine Waters (US Congresswoman)
raised the issue with the special US envoy on Holocaust compensation,
and of course he responded in exactly the way you would expect--he
said you can't compare and it is not the same thing, and that
is the standard view of these organisations. Nothing compares
to the Jews. Everything that the Jews endure, everything that
the Jews achieve, is special, because we're the 'chosen people',
so don't compare us with garbage like the Tasmanian savages (the
entire indigenous population of Tasmania were exterminated under
British colonial rule), or don't compare us with the Gypsies.
I mean God forbid those uncivilised savages be compared with
us. You have to understand that the great tragedy of the Second
World War, was not that Jews per se were killed, but such a cultured
people were killed--if you kill uncultured people, who cares?
What is your position on the comparison
between Israel and the Occupied Territories and South Africa
under apartheid (as raised during the recent UN convention on
racism in Durban)?
I don't think the comparison with South
Africa is exactly precise for a number of reasons. Israel proper--pre
June `67 Israel, is a fairly lively democracy, Palestinian Arabs
do enjoy rights of citizenship (as) second class citizens, it
is probably similar to the situation to Blacks in the American
South before the civil rights movement. The difference is that
in the US South, Blacks did not have the right to vote, but that
question is due to numbers, where American Blacks were the majority
in several states in the South and that is why they were disenfranchised,
whereas Israel's unstated official policy is that they will tolerate
a minority of approximately 15%, so long as the Arabs remain
around this percentage its OK to give them the right to vote
because it won't affect the Jewish majority. In addition to the
second-class citizenship of the Israeli Arabs, there is also
the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and that too is not
really comparable to South Africa because I think it is much
worse.
Dr David Rabeeya (Iraqi born American
rabbi), talks of a caste system in Israeli society, where the
Arabs are clearly at the bottom, but also the non European Jews
are considered to be of lesser value. He claims that the wholesale
importation of Russian Jews was to ensure the demographic majority
of secular European Jews over their Sephardic countrymen for
generations to come.
There is some truth to that, because
a large percentage of the so-called 'Russian Jews' are not Jewish.
In recent years, it has been more than 50%, and the reason why
is because the Israeli establishment likes the blue eyed, blonde
haired Aryan types as a racial group. The Russians look right
even if they are not Jewish, and they preserve the Ashkenazi
elite's dominance.
You argue in The Holocaust Industry
that if it were no longer in America's interest to support Israel,
the Jewish elites would quickly forget about the Jewish state.
Is this really tenably considering the huge emotional attachment
American Jewry has to Israel?
Generations of Americans Jews have not
been brought up on Zionism. Before 1967, Israel barely figured
at all in American Jewish life, as anyone who goes back and reads
the publications of the US Jews before then will tell you. Even
nowadays people are not Zionist by conviction, they are Zionist
because it is useful for their political and more recently financial
self-interest. The guiding light is what serves their self-interest,
not ideological commitment.
Raul Hillberg (leading Holocaust academic)
says that he hopes you will expand on your work in The Holocaust
Industry. Are you currently working on anything?
No. I suffered the blow of losing my
job so I have to make ends meet to survive.
Did you not receive a substantial
sum from the spectacular success of The Holocaust Industry in
Germany and elsewhere?
No, that is science fiction. You don't
receive substantial sums. I received a $5000 advance for the
book, and in total I have received about $50 000. You are not
going to get rich out of this...I mean $50 000 is the average
annual salary in the United States, I have never made more than
$22,000 in a year, so it is about two years salary. OK, I am
not a kid anymore, but I expect to be living more than two more
years.
I noticed that the publication of
the paperback of The Holocaust Industry has been delayed in the
UK
(Interrupts) No, no it's been published
but I don't expect it to get any kind of publicity. It's not
a bad paperbackthere is a lot of new material in it.
You dismiss entirely Professor Daniel
Goldhagen's argument that the German public were collectively
responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis, yet you seem to hold
the Jewish people collectively responsible for the policies of
Israel. Is this not a case of double standards?
Collective responsibility is not a term
that is devoid of any meaning, whether or not it's true depends
on the circumstances. In the case of Germany you were dealing
with a fascist, terrorist state in which the population had relatively
speaking no say in the making of policy and no say in the crimes
committed. In other circumstances depending on which a collectivity
influences policy and shapes criminal actions, it does bear a
responsibility, so you have to examine each individual case for
how much collective responsibility is applicable.
Following the tragedy on September
11, Left-wing writer Christopher Hitchens, criticised people
like yourself and Noam Chomsky for their 'masochistic' response
to the 'Islamic fascism' practised by Bin Laden and his followers.
What do you think an appropriate response would be to the destruction
of the World Trade Center?
(Incredulously) Well, my views are so
conventional it is hard to understand why Christopher Hitchens
would point to me at all, and frankly what Noam Chomsky had to
say on the topic was interesting in its insights, but his general
view was utterly banal. You have to look to the social and political
roots of what happened, because if we were just dealing with
a bunch of lunatics on the loose, then the whole question would
be just a psychiatric and security question. We would bring to
psychiatrists to explain what is the source of this lunacy, and
we would rely on our security services to correct the problem.
But plainly, no one really believes this is strictly a psychiatric
or a policing problem, because there has been massive social
and political commentary trying to explain it. The moment you
have massive social and political commentary trying to explain
a phenomenon, then you know we are no longer dealing with a strictly
psychiatric question. When there were the Jim Jones mass suicides
there was no such commentary, as everyone knew they are a socially
and politically marginal cult, but nobody in their right mind
would say the Bin Laden phenomenon is something marginal. Everyone
understands that this is rooted in a deeper problem.
The next question is what are the sources
of the problem? If you are a mainstream conservative the usual
answer is that the fundamental source of the problem can be located
in the Arab--Islamic world loathing of modernity, freedom and
all the virtues of enlightenment and capitalist industry that
the US stands for. If you are off the mainstream, or on the Left
end of the political system, you say the main source of the problem
is US foreign policy in the Middle East which has evoked hatred
among Arab-Islamic society because of US crimes in Iraq, the
US backed Israel crimes against the Palestinians, and so forth.
(Angrily) My point is that everyone, from whatever end of the
political spectrum, tries to locate the Bin Laden phenomenon
in some deeper social and political current, so for Mr. Hitchens
to come along and say that to explain (the attacks) is a form
of rationalisation--this is sheer idiocy! There is literally
not a single person, apart from Mr. Hitchens who tries to explain
it in a deeper social and political current, we may disagree
on what this current is, but we all realise that this is not
Jim Jones, or the Branch Dravidians.
What do you think of America's moral
authority to spearhead a crusade against terrorism?
If you understand terrorism to mean the
targeting of civilian populations in order to achieve political
goals, then plainly the US qualifies as the main terrorist government
in the world today, if only because of the sheer force it has
at its disposal. I am not claiming that another government were
it to be in the position of the US would act better, but given
the predominant material and political weight of the US today,
means that they are going to be the main terrorist state in the
World today, and I think that's true.
I think I can safely assume that you
are not a supporter of George Bush, so did you vote for Ralph
Nader or Al Gore in the last election?
I voted for Nader, and I have no doubts
at all that it was the right thing to do because the Nader candidacy
was extremely energising and a terrific phenomenon in American
life, and I hope he continues.
What do you think of the prospects
for the Green Party to become a genuine Third Force in US Politics?
I think we are now heading for very dismal
time. It seems like Bush is launching a perpetual war. We endured
the nightmare of the destruction of Iraq, but at least that had
a beginning and an end. This current 'war' does not seem to have
an end, and I think it is even conceivable that it going to endure
the remainder of my lifetime and in this political climate it
is very speculative to make any meaningful predictions for the
future.
How democratic is America given the
enormous financial and media powers with a vested interest in
maintaining the status quo?
There are contradictory tendencies in
American society. There's a huge range of activities that one
can engage in that mark it as a quite free society. It's also
true to say that the powers that be have so much control over
how people think that there are fewer and fewer people make use
of the rights and information available to them. So I think that
both are true. The amount of control exercised by the ruling
elites over the decisions, choices, lifestyles, and so forth
of American society mean that many of the rights and information
that is available are not accessed. I can say what I wantthe
worst that is going to happen to me is that I lose my job. I
am not going to get shot or put in a psychiatric hospital..though
it is also true to say that if a movement developed which actually
tried to use on a mass level the rights available, I suspect
there would be substantial repression.
If you attended Nader's rallies and speeches
as I did, he was delivering a very hard-hitting critique of US
capitalism, I mean it is as tough as you can really get and he
was able to pull it off. No one prevented him from holding his
mass rallies. They prevented him from appearing on TV, they excluded
him from appearing on the (presidential candidates) debate, but
he was able to organise in constituencies around the country.
If it ever became a bigger phenomenon, what would have happened
. I don't know.
The Pro Israeli lobby has had spectacular
success in getting its version of events picked up by the media,
with even the openly anti Arab / pro Israel polemic 'Exodus'
on the US school curriculum. Noam Chomsky has even criticised
liberal publications such as the New Republic for being openly
racist toward Arabs, and Rana Kabbani has said that hating Arabs
(and Muslims in particular) is the last acceptable form of racism,
would you agree?
I think that they are openly racist in
that they say things about Arabs that would not be permitted
about other ethnic groups. These people are not pro-Israel, but
Israel serves an interest to the US ruling elites and by that
fact it serves a useful interest to American Jewish organisations.
The moment that Israel ceases to be an interest, Israel will
no longer be a concern of these organisations.
You said in your second book that
one small Palestinian boy asked you if it was true that Americans
believed all Palestinians to be animals, and you didn't answer
not having the heart to tell him it was. Yet you also said that
Arabs should reach out to America to try and build a counter
consensus to Hollywood demonisations. Is this really plausible
given the perceptions in American of Arabs and Muslims?
Nowadays nothing is possible with the
events of September 11, a lot of hard work over many years to
try to build a counter consensus disappeared in the rubble of
the World Trade Center. I am utterly pessimistic about the prospects
now, but I did not think it was impossible (before). Israel was
suffering quite a number of major public relations disasters,
beginning with the Lebanon War, the first Intifadah, and then
the second Intifadah. As much as the mainstream media tries to
depict the reality in a manner that suits US-Israeli interests,
enough of the truth was coming through that Israel was suffering
a public relations disaster. There were some prospects, how significant
the prospects were we don't know, because not enough effort was
made in trying to exploit those prospects, but after September
11 I don't think there is much hope.
I get the impression that you think
that the West was in some way responsible for the tragedy of
September 11.
Lets put it this way. The so-called West,
and really we're talking about the United States, and to a lesser
extent its pathetic puppy dog in England, have a real problem
on their hands. Regrettably, it's payback time for the Americans
and they have a problem because all the other enemies since the
end of World War Two that they pretended to contend with .. were
basically fabricated enemies. The Soviet Union was a conservative
bureaucracy by the end of World War Two, which apart from the
sphere of influence it carved out--mostly for defensive reasons--was
plainly in retrospect a stabilising force in international affairs.
Then the enemies that the US conjured up as the Soviet Union
fell into decline beginning in the early 1980`senemies like Libya,
Iraq, narco-terrorists and so forththese were basically enemies
created by the United States to--among other things--justify
repressive policies around the world, and to inflate its military
budget. Now they do have a problem on their hands, and its going
to exact a cost from Americans. The American elites can talk
about honour and creativity until the cows come home, but it's
not going to be like the Iraq shooting fish in a barrel situation,
like they did when they destroyed Iraq in 1991. Frankly, part
of me says - even though everything since September 11 has been
a nightmare--'you know what, we deserve the problem on our hands
because some things Bin Laden says are true'. One of the things
he said on that last tape was that 'until we live in security,
you're not going to live in security', and there is a certain
amount of rightness in that. Why should Americans go on with
their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss,
while other people are worrying about where they are going to
get their next piece of bread? Why should we go on merrily with
our lives while so much of the world is suffering, and suffering
incidentally not with us merely as bystanders, but with us as
the indirect and direct perpetrators. So that I think that you
can summon up all the heroic and self-aggrandizing rhetoric you
want, but there is a problem facing all of us now, and maybe
it's about time that the United States starts having to confront
the same sort of problems that much of humanity has had to confront
on a daily basis for God knows how long.
Don Atapattu
lives in Manchester, England.
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