Cockburn Defends An Anti-Semite, a Disciple of David Irving

The myrmidons over at Counterpunch, led by Alexander Cockburn, have a new cause and a new Enemy of the Week. The target of leftist wrath this week is professor of history at Brown University Omer Bartov. His crime? Bartov dared to criticize anti-Semite Norman Finkelstein. Cockburn runs a column crayoned by one David Green, who savagely attacks Bartov for denouncing the pseudo-scholar and crackpot Finkelstein.

Let us back up a little and explain. Norman Finkelstein is the darling of every neonazi Holocaust Denial web site on earth. He is a pseudo-historian who is a follower of Holocaust Denier David Irving, and regards Irving as a great and authoritative scholar. Nominally Jewish, he is every stormtrooper's dream, cheered by them as the "Jew who proves there was never any Holocaust of Jews by Nazi Germany."

Finkelstein kept getting fired from his adjunct teaching jobs in New York, and when he realized he could not get any job at a real university, he took a gig at Depaul "University" in Chicago as an Assistant Professor. By comparison with Depaul, Ward Churchill's University of Colorado maintains the highest academic standards of hiring!

Anyway, there Finkelstein continues to produce his anti-Semitic diatribes, which routinely get gobbled up by the world's neoniazis. Finkelstein constantly denounces all Holocaust survivors as frauds, thieves and liars, refers to the six million Jews murdered by Hitler as the "Six Million" in quotation marks, and mass produces anti-Israel pro-terror propaganda from his perch at Depaul. He has endlessly libeled Nobel Prize laureate and Holocaust survior Elie Wiesel for many years. A couple of years ago he tried to engage Alan Dershowitz in a battle of wits, except Finkelstein was only half equipped. Dershowitz made wiener shnitzel out of him. Finkelstein has been denounced as a neonazi, anti-Semite, or Holocaust Denier by virtually every Jewish group from any political corner anywhere on the planet. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and all other serious historians have dismissed Finkelstein as a crackpot anti-Semite and fraud.

Bartov's sin, in the "minds" of the Counterpunch team, is that he also considers Finkelstein a fraud and a neonazi. Bartov in the NY Times compared Finkelstein's scurrilous "book" about the "Holocaust Industry" to the Czarist anti-Semitic forgery "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Cockburn's magazine has not yet reprinted the Protocols, although it has produced an equally anti-Semitic book by Cockburn himself that is just as full of rants and it also openly endorse Finkelstein's ravings about a "Holocaust Industry."

Bartov has given a series of lectures and published several articles debunking the lunatic ravings of Finkelstein. And that seems to be what has upset Herr Cockburn, who runs Green's pitdog attack against Bartov in this weekend's Counterpunch. Green and Finkelstein belong on the same plane that carried deported nazi Ernst Zundel back to their Fuhrer's fatherland.

What really arouses the Counterpunch ire is this quote from Bartov:

"For one of the most frightening aspects of Hitler's book is not that he said what he said at the time, but that much of what he said can be found today in innumerable places: on Internet sites, propaganda brochures, political speeches, protest placards, academic publications, religious sermons, you name it. As long as it does not have Hitler's name attached to it, this deranged discourse will be ignored or allowed to pass. The voices that express these opinions do not belong to a single political or ideological current, and they are much less easy to distinguish than in the 1930s. They belong to the right and the left, to the religious and the secular, to the West and the East, to the rabble and the leaders, to terrorists and intellectuals, students and peasants, pacifists and militants, expansionists and anti-globalization activists. The diplomacy advocated by Hitler is no longer relevant, but his reason for it, his 'worldview,' is alive and kicking, and it may still kick us."

Green goes on to libel Alan Dershowitz and Elie Wiesel on the same page.

I have always suspected that Alexander Cockburn wakes up each morning, gives himself a Heil with raised arm in the mirror, goosesteps to the breakfast room, and then asks himself which act of outright anti-Semitism he can perform today to outdo even yesterday's.