Right.
Finkelstein detailed his mother's experience in a concentration camp in his memoir - mentioning how she told him as a boy that she had to cross moral lines to survive the camps.
Still, if she didnt cross fundamental moral boundaries, I glimpsed from her manner of pushing and shoving in order to get to the head of a queue, which mortified me, how my mother must have fought Hobbess war of all against all many a time in the camps. Really, how else would she have survived? Nothing in the piece even remotely insinuates that he thought that of his mother. In fact, in the same piece he goes on about how his mother was angry about the "ghetto police" - the jewish police guards complicit in places like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. See if anyone can find the admission of his mother being a nazi:
Except for allusions to relentless pangs of hunger, my mother never spoke
about her personal torments during the war, which was just as well, since I couldnt
have borne them. Like Primo Levi, she often said that, being too delicate and refined,
the best didnt survive. Was this an indirect admission of guilt? Much later in life I
finally summoned the nerve to ask whether she had done anything of which she was ashamed. Calmly
replying no, she recalled having refused the privileged position of block head
in the camp. She especially resented the dirty question How did you survive? with
the insinuation that, to emerge alive from the camps, survivors must have morally
compromised themselves. Given how ferociously she cursed the Jewish councils, ghetto
police and kapos, I assume my mother answered me truthfully. Although acknowledging that Jews initially
joined the councils from mixed motives, she said that only scum,
reaping the rewards of doing the devils work, still cooperated after it became clear
that they were merely cogs in the Nazi killing machine. When queried why she hadnt
settled in Israel after the war, my mother used to reply, only half in jest, that I had
enough of Jewish leaders! The Jewish ghetto police always had the option, she said, of
throwing off their uniforms and joining the rest of us a point that Yitzak Zuckerman,
a leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, made in his memoir. (It was always gratifying to
find my mothers seemingly erratic or harsh judgments seconded in the reliable testimonial literature.) Still
shaking her head in disbelief, she would often recall how, after Jews
in the ghetto used the most primitive implements or even bare hands to dig bunkers deep
in the earth and conceal themselves, the Jewish police would reveal these hideouts to the Germans,
sending their flesh-and-blood to the crematoria in order to save their own skins. One of the first acts of the
ghetto resistance was to kill an officer in the Jewish police.
On a sign posted next to his corpse my mother would recall with vengeful
glee read the epitaph: Those who live like a dog die like a dog. Still, if she didnt cross fundamental
moral boundaries, I glimpsed from her manner of pushing and shoving in order to
get to the head of a queue, which mortified me, how my mother must have fought Hobbess war of all against all
many a time in the camps. Really, how else would she have survived?
(
www.NormanFinkelstein.com, Haunted House)
Dershowitz told the Front Page magazine that
"Youve probably never heard of the author, unless you travel in neo-Nazi, radical Islamic or hard left circles. His name is Norman Finkelstein. Yes he is a Jew. His parents were even Holocaust survivors, though he suspects his mother of having been a kapo (really, how else would she have survived? he asks rhetorically)"
and
He suspects his own mother of being a kapo and cooperating with the Nazis during the Holocaust
Dershowitzs official Harvard University Law School website profile
and
Finkelstein even doubted his own mothers denial that she was a kapo, asking whether her frequent statements that the best didnt survive constituted an indirect admission of guilt? The most he was willing to do was assume that his mother answered him truthfully. But he questioned even that assumption: Still, if she didnt cross fundamental moral boundaries, I glimpsed from her manner of pushing and shoving in order to get to the head of a queue, which mortified me. . . . Really, how else would she have survived? (p. 174)
The Case for Peace
and Steven Plaut, Dershowitz partner in crime..
Apparently relying on information supplied to him by Dershowitz, Professor Steven Plaut of Haifa University has recently stated:
While Finkelstein likes to defend his own anti-Semitic ravings by claiming his parents are themselves Holocaust survivors, Dershowitz recently revealed that Finkelsteins mother was in fact a collaborator with German Nazis during the war. (DePaul U Confronts Amerikan Empire, FrontPageMag.com (3 January 2006); posted on this web site under The New Year Begins)
When I was in college in 2005 I was in a Mid-East non-partisan peace group where we would organize meetings with both jewish and palestinian groups inside and outside of the school to have civil non-incendiary debate. A Jewish friend of mine mentioned that there was a talk about peace in the middle east going at our campus. I went in intent to take some notes for our group and learn something. It was Alan Dershowitz, before I knew who Alan Dershowitz was, in a room full of clapping automatons, nodding along to him spouting off half-truths that anyone with any actual information on the context of the situation could see through -- included Alan himself. He is a grade-A scumbag. At the end of his lecture (seminar), he invited questions from the audience: "How do we get more people to see this sort of thing?" "Can I invite you to speak at my son's high school?" were most of the questions, however I distinctly remember someone coming up to the microphone, skeptical, asking a seemingly benign question regarding one of the "facts" he spoke of and the room erupted in boo-ing.
Here is the kicker: the event was sponsored by AIPAC - something called the AIPAC Advocacy Institute. I was surprised, but thinking back, I don't understand why. I knew AIPAC ran congressional seminars. Even then, I read reports that said those congressional seminars ran counter to international intelligence information. I think it was just being there, that made the whole situation bizarre. Anyone who walked into the place that had no pretensions of bias or wanted to learn something substantive or important about the situation could have walked away a zealot. I was a lot more lenient with Israel back then. Trying to bring in jewish groups at the school into our group to talk about the issues in a non-partisan way. That leniency had been smashed in lieu of more study into the overwhelming evidence regarding Israel's crimes. This was Boston University back in 2005, I believe.
This world will get visibly worse when smart people like Chomsky are gone and nobody can call these cretins out on their lies.
See the debate at Harvard (on youtube) for what I mean.
TLDR: I'm Spiderman.