The Light Shines Through: II

Yara G. Chiara is a 17 year old Jewish girl living in Brazil. Her moving, thoughtful, intelligent letters in response to Alan Dershowitz and Charles Edgbaston’s continued propaganda war against Norman G. Finkelstein, demolishes them both. But read for yourself … . Below is the correspondence from and to Edgbaston (with opening email to Finkelstein). Go here for the letter to Dershowitz.

Yara G. Chiara Speaks!

From: yaraginzburg[at]gmail.com
To: NormanGF[at]hotmail.com
Subject: sorry & answer to vicious mail
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 01:53:02 -0300

Professor Finkelstein,

I got a letter whose authors try to discredit your work and defame you, but I answered it point by point, including the remarks they do about the “content” of your book in the end of their message (I nummerated this chunk of the e-mail in order to make it more clear). There’s some irony in it, especially in the beginning where I play their game to see what’s the result; if you think it can be helpful to you and won’t harm your work, feel free to post it on the website, as well as their message, which is just below mine. The answer, sorry, is lenghty - I hope you won’t sleep as you go through it. (laughs) As a matter of fact, my mails are so boring and stupid - no one could expect anything different from an idiotic, dumb and mentally handicapped 17 year old - that I shouldn’t keep sending them to you. I just sent you this one because it concerns you in some way. It’s a message which is probably being spread throughout the web. Sorry for writing you once again. I have to learn stop doing this and respect both your time and your patience.

Best regards and I wish you good,

Yara G. Chiara.

From: “charles edgbaston” cedgbaston@hotmail.com
To: yara_chiara[at]yahoo.de
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 12:56 AM
Subject: Resignation of Norman Finkelstein
September 30, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEWS RELEASE

FORENSIC REVIEW OF HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY BOOK BY NORMAN FINKELSTEIN REVEALS UNCONSCIONABLE LIBELS OF HOLY JEWISH PEOPLE

PENTICTON, Canada — Christians for Moses Ministries Inc. of Penticton, British Columbia, Canada, with 55,000 members world-wide, today made public its forensic analysis of the antisemitic book entitled “The Holocaust Industry” authored by Mr. Norman G. Finkelstein, the fired assistant professor at DePaul University, America’s largest Catholic academic institution.

“The analysis shows quite clearly that the author has deployed an extensive barrage of invective to calumniate and delegitimize the holy Jewish people and their World War Two suffering”, said the Very Rev. Dr. Charles J. Edgbaston, D.D., Ph.D, Chairman of CFMM and Rector of Zion College of Canada.

“In the process, he has stoked the fires of antisemitism and discredited Chicago’s Depaul University long-known for its adherence to Vincentian values,” Dr. Edgbaston noted.

The report had been forwarded in confidence to the administration of DePaul last January. “We are exceedingly glad that DePaul made the sagacious decision to deny Mr. Finkelstein tenure following its review of this analysis,” Rev. Edgbaston said.

The first defense of a scoundrel is name-calling. Finkelstein specializes in this genre of discussion. Let it be known that the really great man, Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, never stoops this low. When the impudent Finkelstein dared to call him a “clown” (sic), Wiesel did not respond. He chose the holy way by adopting a position of total silence.

According to the report, Elie Wiesel is a Holocaust concentration camp survivor. So are the 60,000 Israeli Jews still receiving pensions from the German government as part of the 1953 reparations settlement. So are the 34,000 Jews of Canada, the United States, France, Britain, Australia and South Africa with such pensions. They all have children. But they are not virulently insane as Finkelstein is. They do not spit at Israel. They do not mock diaspora Jews. Rather, they serve the Jewish people with their blood and souls to ensure that the WWII Holocaust is never again repeated.

Finkelstein makes a business out of the Holocaust, the report states. He parades his survivor status on every occasion to deflect criticism against him. Why does he do this? Because he has been poisoned by a certain political agenda. But this transparent strategem is a failure. No rational person listens to him except the enemies of the Jewish people, namely Iran, the terrorist Arabs of Palestine and the neo-Nazis. These accursed enemies manipulate Finkelstein’s demented ravings for their own benefit. This is not the first time an apostate Jew has turned his back on his people. Impressionable students also absorb his hateful diatribes.

We all must surely remember the late Soviet Communist dictator Joseph Stalin, the report warns. He had a whole bevy of Jewish intellectuals pay him fealty, shouting: ” Comrade Stalin, you are the reddest sun in our hearts.” When their utility to him as international front men attesting to the glorious Jewish state Stalin had built in Siberian Birobidjan had lapsed, he promply dispatched them to the NKVD secret police firing squads.

Rev. Edgbaston called on Finkelstein’s supporters to be honest with themselves. “Pick up Finkelstein’s writings. Read the vile slander of the heroic Holocaust survivors he spews out. Weep at his sneering of their suffering. Scream to the heavens as he humiliates their existence. Vomit at the way he belittles their unspeakable torment.” Finkelstein’s students have been officially requested to read his filth in his book entitled “The Holocaust Industry.” Samples of his mocking the Holocaust survivors and his Jew-hatred follow:

On page 33 Finkelstein writes that Jews promote Holocaust remembrance because “it validates Jewish chosenness.”

On page 38 he accuses the Jews of bullying the Blacks.

On page 43, he says the Holocaust is not unique.

On page 53 he asserts hostility to Jews is not so bad, that Jews provoke antisemitism.

On page 59 he states that the Holocaust memoirs of survivors are fraudulent and that few German concentration camp guards were sadists.

On page 81 he continues his lying by claiming that many Jews fabricated their past to get German reparation money.

On page 135 he accuses Jews of seeking “Holocaust booty.”

On page 138 he exclaims: ” The Holocaust may yet turn out to be the greatest robbery in the history of mankind.”

On page 137 he dismisses the slaughter of over 1 million Jewish children in the Holocaust by calling attention to a non-sequitur i.e. “many more children die of malnutrition and disease in the world.”

Dr. Edgbaston said that all the above libels of the Jewish people are uttered daily by the neo-Nazis and the right-wing Islamic fundamentalists among the Arabs of Palestine and in Iran, where a Holocaust denial conference was recently held. To these people , Finkelstein is a hero. To certain professors at DePaul University, Finkelstein is a hero. For shame! These libels are justiciable in the human rights tribunals of Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Australia, with penalties ranging from prison sentences up to 10 years and/or fines up to $500,000.

Christians for Moses Ministries is now working with the World Association of Bergen-Belsen and Treblinka Concentration Camp Survivors on a possible classs action lawsuit against the Finkelstein’s publishers for reading these anti-Jewish libels and inciting contempt for the Jewish people of America and Israel.

- 30 -

For further information:

Rev. Antoine Habib, B.D.
Director of Communications
CFMM Inc.
email: cedgbaston@hotmail.com

From: Yara G. Chiara yaraginzburg@gmail.com
To: charles edgbaston
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 1:26 AM
Subject: Re: Resignation of Norman Finkelstein

Mr. Rev Edgbaston and Rev. Antoine Habib, B.D,

First of all, let me plainly express my distress at the way I have been approached. Not only both of you failed to introduce yourselves as to give me enough reason of why I should be receiving this message and what was your purpose in sending it to me, but you didn’t even addressed by my name, which is extremely rude considering that I don’t know you, we don’t have any intimacy at all and, above all, I have both a Jewish and a German background and I don’t like it when people, whom I don’t know or never heard of, fail to mention my name as a way of respectully greeting me and recognizing that I’m a human being, not a target for propaganda.

Names are of the utmost significance in Judaism. Not only His name, but also our’s, which since the characters of the Torah have a meaning and convey a person’s identity, essence and singularity. As I can see, you both are Christians, not Jewish, and maybe that’s why you acted in such a gross violation of Jewish traditions and, if it was not by simple recklessness or neglect, it was a counscious anti-semitic act; if it was uncounscious, it was also an anti-semitic act, since you both agree that anti-semitism can be express consciouslly or uncounsciouslly.

Up until the fourth paragraph, you just feigned outrage and diverted the attention of the reader from the content of Finkelstein’s book, which has not even been touched with a dove feather, let alone really debated and discussed.

Then, in the fifth paragraph, in what I take to be a clear violation of Christian morals, especially Christ’s message for people to respect and love both their friends and enemies, you called Finkelstein a “scoundrel”. So I’ll assume that you are scoundrels: “the first defense of a scoundrel is name-calling”, and that’s a perfect depiction of your message which, unfortunately, didn’t address any of Finkelstein’s arguments in Holocaust Industry. So, before condemning people for engaging in “name-calling”, maybe you could, as Christ often suggest, look at the mirror and avoid the hipocrisy. Shall I quote for you the Bible? St. Mark (7,6), a beautiful passage followed by a little poem.

Adopting total silence, I guess, have been Wiesel’s stance for years - he’s, afterall, the one who keeps saying that the only thing we can say about the Holocaust is that we shouldn’t talk about the Holocaust, because “silence”, in some mystic way, is the only reasonable approach to the subject; contrary to Wiesel’s unproductive, to say the least, approach to the subject, people like Christopher Browning and Saul Friedländer have been out there fighting the Holocaust deniers and documenting the Final Solution, step by step: that’s a commendable work, done by great scholars: Browning, in particular, much differently from Goldhagen’s fantasy about German History or Wiesel’s “silence”, has written a particular book called “Ordinary Men” in which he, yes, tries to document an act of atrocity by a Police Battalion as well as interpret and explain the genocide and find its roots and causes. That happens to be a very useful approach and the most efficient against Holocaust Deniers. But then, there’s something umcofortable about all this: the fact that both Christopher Browning and Ian Kershaw, who documented as few have done, the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, rendered enthusiastic praise for Finkelstein’s and Rutina’s “Nation on Trial”. I think it’s clear, both by the praises - mostly coming from experts on the Final Solution (Raul Hilberg, Kershaw and Browning) and Jewish scholars (Daniel Boyarin, Noam Chomsky and Avi Shlaim) - and by his background - Finkelstein’s parents were real holocaust survivors - that there’s no way, as hard as you may try, to prove that Finkelstein, even if subjected to a forensic analysis, as you desperatly try to do, is a Holocaust Denier. If it were so obvious, you wouldn’t have to base your arguments on the sand deposits of the uncounscious and the forensic analysis.

Well, I agree with you: why would this 69,000 survivors spit at anyone if they’re getting the money from Germany? That’s what YOU said: they’re getting the money from the German government, not from Israel’s (which has not a very good record when it comes to Holocaust survivors), the U.S or the Jewish Organizations Finkelstein quoted in the book. As Finkelstein himself said, the Germans did pay, in due time, the reparation for his father, up until his death. Germans are not the subject of debate here: Holocaust Industry makes claims against the U.S and some Jewish Organizations. Allas, if there are no more than 100.000 survivors alive, to be optimistic, why are the Jewish Organizations so worried about raising billions of dollars for them? What would they do with so much money in the end of their lives? Maybe the problem is, as Finkelstein has documented, that Jewish Organizations, with the help of the U.S government, have raised money in the name of the survivors, but not for them - using a name to get personal beneficts is a despicable violation of Jewish morals. Names are sacred. You shouldn’t use them to support people who make money out of them and their suffering.

Mr. Rev. Edgbaston, before finally getting to the content of Finkelstein’s book, incurs in what seems to be a language quite familiar to that of the Inquisitor’s and the Rabbis who issued Spinoza’s “Herem”. The grafic imagery in all its vulgarity, even as intent on appealing to people’s moral outrage or emotion, ends up being a quite ridiculous and pathetic exercise in rudeness and anachronism: if the language were in a vitriolic Herem, I’d be able at least to understand it; but in an open society where freedom of speech and inquiry must be the standard, this kind of behavior seems to me, I’m sorry, a bit pathological. ]

The content:

1) People who don’t think that Jews are the chosen ones are all anti-semitic loonies? What about Hindus, Budhists, Atheits who don’t believe in it? Are they all anti-semitic puppies? Richard Dawkins, for instance, happens to say that, although the description of the animals entering Noah’s ark is quite beautiful, its morality is, at the very least, questionable: Has the divinity, by so doing, condemned all other human beings, including animals, and all children to the most tormented and terrifying death? The drowned have not been chosen, it seems. There are people, still according to Dawkins, who blamed the Tsunami on the violation of some “idiot/stupid rule regarding the Shabat”. It’s all in his last book - God’s delusion. Why don’t you call him, who’s clearing attacking Jewish religious beliefs, an anti-semite? Maybe because it’s not that easy to deal with Dawkins who’s a distinguished scientist and teaches at Oxford. You may run the risk of ridicule while you tell him the biblical stories: by the way, he says that Noah’s legend was not original, but inspired by the babilonic myth of Up-Napishtim. Did they believe they were the chosen ones too? The book of judges in a Jewish translation, for example: chapter 19, that’s the one Dawkins tell us to read carefully: and it’s true, there it is - in order to save the life of a man, a levite, who hosted him (Jebu, who had a concubine), says: “‘Nay, my brethren, I pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into my house, do not this wanton deed. Behold, here is my daughter a virgin, and his concubine; I will bring them out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you; but unto this man do not so wanton a thing.” Quite good, isn’t it? But it does get better: ” But the men would not hearken to him; so the man laid hold on his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning; and when the day began to spring, they let her go. Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her lord was, till it was light. And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way; and, behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, with her hands upon the threshold. And he said unto her. ‘Up, and let us be going’; but none answered; then he took her up upon the ass; and the man rose up, and got him unto his place. And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her throughout all the borders of Israel”

As to the the free-will, Dylan summarized it quite well in Highway 61: “G-d said to Abraham, kill me a son; Abe said, man, you must be putting me on; G-d said no; Abe said what?; God said you can do what you want, Abe, but next time you see me coming you better run.” Of course, Abe, out of his free-will, says: “Where do you want this killing done?”. It’s all there, in the Bible and the Torah, and Dylan’s depiction of the scene kind of gets the point. I mean, I have to quote these passages because we regard ourselves as the top of the cultural everest.

2) In page 38, where you said Finkelstein claims that Jews were bullying the blacks (which could not, a priori, be disregarded as a hypotesis; I knew Jews, including in my neighboorhood, who did act in such a way), the picture is quite different: “This reorientation of American Jewry was clearly evident in growing tensions between Jews and Blacks. Traditionally aligned with black people against caste discrimination in the United States, many Jews broke with the Civil Rights alliance in the late 1 960s when, as Jonathan Kaufman reports, “the goals of the civil rights movement were shifting - for demands for political and legal equality to demands for economic equality.” “When the civil rightsmovement moved north, into the neighborhoods of these liberal Jews,” Cheryl Greenberg similarlyrecalls, «the question of integration took on a different tone. With concerns now couched in class rather than racial terms, Jews Red to the suburbs almost as quickly as white Christians to avoid what they perceived as the deterioration of their schools and neighborhoods.” The memorable climax was the protracted 1968 New York City teachers’ strike, which pitted a largely Jewish professional union against Black community activists fighting for control of failing schools. Accounts of the strike often refer to fringe anti-Semitism. The eruption of Jewish racism - not far below the surface before the strike — is less often remembered. More recently, Jewish publicists and organizations have figured prominently in efforts to dismantle affirmative action programs. In key Supreme Court tests —DeFunis (1974) and Bakke (1978) — the AJC, ADL, and AJ Congress, apparently reflecting mainstream Jewish sentiment, all filed amicus briefs opposing affirmative action.”

Now, instead of moaning and crying and complaining about the closed gates of Eden, do you actually dispute the facts presented by Finkelstein? If not, you’re just shooting your mouths of about a book you don’t like, but can’t debunk.

3) About the Holocaust uniqueness. Finkelstein is talking about the moral uniqueness; there’s no such thing for him because, if it were so, it’d me tantamount to saying that Jews suffered more or their suffering had more value than that of other people. The Holocaust, one may say, is indeed unique in the way it was conducted and in terms of opening up our eyes for something we might have deemed unthinkable. But no Historian can argue that because History relativizes everything: nothing is “unique” in history for the simple fact that all events, from a historian’s approach, have the same value - it’s not up for the Historian to judge if an event is “unique” in the moral sense. Of course, History relativizes everything also for the simple fact that, putting events in perspective, analogies and similarities arise and other episodes of atrocities spring up out of the historical record. Finkelstein is a Historian, not a Theologian: if you want to defend the “uniqueness” of the Nazi Holocaust in a moral sense (Jews suffered more, etc.) you have to join your fellow theologians, not the historians.

4) He never once says that hostility towards Jews was not so bad; it’s not bad at all nowadays in the U.S and Europe, and I hope U.S/Israel’s policies won’t help changing this scenario. Anti-semitism, that’s what he meant, is not pervasive in the U.S and Europe.

5) About the Nazis not being sadists. Well, that’s not what Finkelstein said, but what President Reagan said, remember? He said that the SS soldiers as well as the Jewish people were victims of the Second World War. Finkelstein, who’s not as radical as Reagan or Berlusconi, is just referring to a study conducted by prominent historian Christopher Browning where the author argues that the Germans of the Police Battaillons who commited a horrendous atrocity were ordinary men - much like the new pictures of Auschwitz in display at the Holocaust Museum in Washington show: the banality of evil. SS soldiers and women talking, having fun, playing and listening to music, relaxing, taking pictures, smiling, just like any other human being. Is the Washington Holocaust Museum anti-semitic?

6) Jews can provoke anti-semitism, no doubt, especially if they chose to act exactly in the way their grotesque stereotypes suggest.

7) Finkelstein, again, is a Historian: it’s a FACT, a DATA, not undisputed and easily avaiable at the World Bank Website, that more children die of malnutrition every year than all the victims of Auschwitz. Yes, as a historian, he relativizes Auschwitz: it was an atrocity, but there are other atrocities, as despicable as the old ones, which are happening now, under our own eyes. He doesn’t deny that Auschwitz was a dark chapter in history; and he won’t deny that the figures cited by the World Bank or other atrocities feature in the same league.

The low-level of your attacks on Professor Finkelstein is such and the intellectual basis is so shallow that a 17 year old girl is able to debunk each of your arguments without even having to do a minor research or reaching out for a book. It’s enough to say that your bias prevent you from reading what Finkelstein actually says; and, when you do realize and understand what he says, you don’t dispute it, so I have the right to assume that you agree with him.

Lastly, I’d like to be addressed in a more Jewish way - I don’t like spam and, if people want to pour texts in my mailbox, they’ll either have to accept debating them with me or accept having their mail addresses blocked, especially when it comes to cheap spamming and defamation. In my country, I’d tell you that you acted against my cultural background, which happens to be formal and a little bit more elevated than what you showed in your e-mail (I have a name, the right to know why the message was sent to me, with what purpose, who are the people sending the messages - I won’t do a google search, you must present and introduce yourselves as a matter of a fundamental politeness). As you don’t know me, and if you want to go on with the debate, I ask you, first of all, to treat me by my surname; this time, you failed to mentioned even my name, which is an offense by both German, Brazilian and Jewish standards.

If you keep conducting your jihad like this, I’ll be oblige to block your e-mail addresses because I work all day and have a daughter to take care of. I don’t have time for idle chatter. If I answered this mail, it’s just because I can’t let people tell lies about an outstanding scholar, recognized as such by De Paul’s administration itself, whose book has just been published by a major University Press (a public one, if I’m not in the wrong). Is the U.S anti-semitic too? Well…then there’s the hatred which stems from envy. How many people can claim to have their works praised by: Eric Hobsbawm, Raul Hilberg, Noam Chomsky, Ian Kershaw, Christopher Browning, Arno Mayer, Avi Shlaim, Sarah Roy and Daniel Boyarin? Very few. So, when you come with this nonsense that Finkelstein is used by anti-semites, I’m happy to tell you that his supporters are some of the best scholars of the 20th Century in their own fields - what’s a marginal neonazi website compared to moral and intellectual authority of Hobsbawm and Hilberg? Sorry, you’ll have to do much better than that to discredit Professor Finkelstein: Forensic Analysis proved inefficient, perhaps because Finkelstein’s “body” is alive and well. Before getting to Finkelstein’s uncounscious, you had better cope with his writings. It’s an easier way to start.

Yara G. Chiara.