Number 6: 'Stormfront.org' ... I'd never heard of them until you mentioned them. Do you usually spend your time surfing white supremacist websites? Anyway I checked it out since you did mention it, and lo and behold, a white supremacist site. So there we go again. Anyone dares question 'official' history, and its hinted or implied they're a white supremacist / Nazi by association - a cheap shot. He has even anticipated this in his book, telling how he has been referred to as a 'self-hating Jew' by those who'd rather attack him than seriously consider his research. No doubt if he was not a Jew, he wouldn't even be tolerated that far, and people'd just go for the jugglar, calling him a fascist outright. Finklestein got rave reviews in 'the Times', too, I gather.

Peace: Finkelstein (and I) did not say 'Jews' appropriated history. He said that a section of the American Jewish elite (and how he defines that term you will see if you read his book) decided to use and adapt the history of the holocaust for their own ends. I don't intend to go through his book exhaustively, as I haven't the time, and if you're really interested you'll read it yourself. But by way of example he talks about how the holocaust memorial in Washington came to be an exclusively 'jewish' holocaust memorial, in that the other persecuted groups got barely a mention. This cast the holocaust as an exclusively jewish tragedy, which is not the case.

I remember when I was a child and it first began to filter through to me that something as awful as WW2 had happened. I was quite upset that humans could be so horrible to other humans. I was equally upset that it should have happened in living memory. I had taken it as axiomatic that such things could only have happened in ancient times when we were all barbarians. In later life I came to realise that many other horrible things had happened both before and after WW2. I felt very sorry for the Jews and their persecution during WW2. I couldn't help but empathise, given the history of my own country where we have experienced ethnic cleansing and racism and conquest etc., I thought, 'they're a lot like us'.

In later life again I got a bit annoyed though, when I realised that a large number of Jews who'd decided to settle in Israel were treating the Palestinians to their own chapter of persecution. I felt (and feel) that given their own history, Jews ought to have more been sympathetic to the humanity of their fellow man, but it seems that's not the case. Human nature never changes, whatever the lessons of history may be.

I also dislike what I call false consensus, where everyone agrees to believe a certain thing and won't allow it to be held up and examined in the light of day ( and implying someone's a fascist etc., is as good as trying to shut them up). For instance, growing up, I understood that the English and Americans were 'the good guys' who defeated the bad guys, and saved the Jews. But there were cracks in that theory from early days. It puzzled me how the English could be the good guys yet have behaved so awfully in my own country. Were we less deserving of 'being saved' than Jews? Then other fragments came in (and no, Number 6, not from surfing white supremacist sites or reading their literature, but from all kinds of sources, run-of-the-mill history books etc.,): the Americans fought WW2 to save the Jews and defeat the Nazis (this theme is thinly veiled in Band of Brothers 'Why We Fight' for example). But how can that be, I wondered, when I realised the US really dragged its heels about taking in even a few Jewish refugees, when Uncle Sam hired former Nazi scientists with very dubious backgrounds AFTER the war and Nuremberg and all that - quite happy to benefit from their expertise, however they came by it (as did the Soviets), how US banks also had numerous 'dormant' Jewish accounts that could be linked to holocaust survivors, yet only did the perfunctory search and compensation, whereas Swiss and German banks were turned upside down and shaken. Then there were the concentration camps.. only in Germany? No, it turned out the Brits basically invented them during the Boer War, though the Indian reservations were little better in many cases, not to mention the wholesale incarcertaion of US-Japanese citizens during WW2. Something was definitely 'rotten in the state of Denmark' to quote Shakespeare. So forgive me if I treat 'history' with some scepticism. More often than not what passes for history is social engineering. A typical line reagrding compensating victims of the holocaust is that there is no 'statute of limitations' on war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and illegal seizure of property. Fair enough. But where does that leave the American Indians and the Palestinians....? I look forward to their compensation in the near future by our principled civilisation....
but maybe we'd better start a new thread on this one?