Robert Sungenis posted a glowing, unreserved recommendation for Norman Finkelstein's book, The Holocaust Industry. Along with the facts that Sungenis has apparently never even read the book and once again posted someone else's material as though it were his own (the original source is a review from Amazon.com: read here) criticism of this book has a very familiar ring to it. While the entire article is interesting, below is an excerpt:
The very scholar whose work on the Holocaust was the "stimulus" for this volume [Finkelstein's book], University of Chicago professor Peter Novick, warned that: "No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites. . . . Such an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention ." Nor was he helped when New York Times reviewer Prof. Omer Bartov, an authority on genocide, characterized his book as "a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' . . . brimming with indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics . . . indecent . . . juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid."
Source
By way of full disclosure, the article above was written by Alan Dershowitz, a well-known, Jewish lawyer with a reputation for having extremely liberal views. But the most eye-opening parts of the article are the quotes from the well-respected scholars mentioned above and even arguably from Finkelstein himself.
Two other noteworthy quotes:
Mr. Finkelstein does not do "scholarship" in any meaningful sense. Although his writings center on Israel (which he compares to Nazi Germany) and the Holocaust, he has never visited Israel and cannot read or speak German--precluding the possibility of original scholarship.
and
Like other anti-Semites, Mr. Finkelstein generalizes about "the Jews"; for example: "Just as Israelis . . . courageously put unruly Palestinians in their place, so American Jews courageously put unruly Blacks in their place."
As one Traditionalist Catholic apologist recently put it upon reading this information, "Wow, do birds of a feather flock together, or what?"
