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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
Alexander
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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