Norman Finkelstein

MEE—In a fiery and deeply personal return to The Big Picture Podcast, professor Norman Finkelstein explains why Israel and its allies in the West have destroyed the international order, and how the election of a Muslim socialist in New York threatens their grip on power. Finkelstein is a political scientist and one of the world’s foremost scholars on Israel-Palestine, as well as a critic of culture and empire. He is the author of ‘The Holocaust Industry’ and most recently, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It.

EDITOR—Norman attempts a definition and description of the “real” left, which is essentially rooted in the tradition of broad progressive Western culture, and the willingness of militants to sacrifice, even their lives, for their ideals. He uses as an example Rosa Luxemburg, murdered by the Freikorps (a forerunner to the Nazis) in a viciously ghastly manner in the wake of a failed communist uprising (Spartacist rebellion) against the reformist German Social Democratic Party (SPD).

• Norman Finkelstein, probably the most qualified observer of the Palestinian genocide today, explains the cultural and political circumstances that underscore today the depraved violence unleashed by Israel (with complete impunity) on a basically defenceless population. Most Israelis, says Finkelstein, are celebrating and cheering this new holocaust, and some, not an insignificant minority, believe not enough cruelty is being inflicted on the Gaza population. He also reminds us that while some Orthodox Jews oppose the state of Israel on religious grounds (Neturei Karta, for example), the vast majority support the current extermination program. 

• Israel, both materially and rhetorically, has made their intent to destroy the Palestinian people clear. One of the most renowned and courageous Middle East scholars, Norman Finkelstein, has assiduously documented the Palestinian plight for decades and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. Finkelstein and Hedges assess the current state of the genocide in Palestine as well as how the media and the universities have all but abandoned their principles in servitude to the Zionist agenda.

The controversial positions taken by Jews in the midst of a literal genocide of Palestinians have re-ignited an old debate about the social power of Jews in regard to many issues of longstanding cultural and political interest. In Hollywood, notes Norman Finkelstein, it’s clear Jewish executives and studio owners gave preference to their ethnicity at the expense of others. Thus, in gangster films, most mobsters were Italian and possibly other nationalities, but rarely or never Jewish, despite the fact that Jews, like most immigrant groups, had a very developed crime subculture that often clashed or interacted with Italian and Irish gangs. Same preference is mirrored in the surfeit of films about the Holocaust, literally hundreds, while there is scarcely any movies about the Armenian holocaust, not to mention the fact that both China and Russia lost more than 60 million people in WW2, but that fact is infrequently mentioned in Western films.