Simon Wiesenthal Centre Testifies in Paris Libel Suit Against Norman Finkelstein

From Wiesenthal Center Los Angeles 

Paris, 26 March 2004 

Norman Finkelstein, the American author of The Holocaust Industry, and his publisher, are being sued under French law against libel. The French edition (based on the English-language original) is considered actionable and replete with Holocaust revisionism and incitement to antisemitism.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Liaison, Dr. Shimon Samuels, who three years ago publicly debated Finkelstein when the book was first published in London, presented the following testimony for today's Paris hearing:

"The Holocaust Industry presents a great danger. Mr. Finkelstein's thesis is an extremist attack on Jews in general, and American Jews in particular, accusing them of exploiting the suffering of the Shoah as 'a pretext for their crimes in the context of the Middle-East conflict. This thesis, so close to that of Roger Garaudy [a condemned French Holocaust denier and anti-Jewish hate-monger] today constitutes the principal credo of modern antisemitism. With particularly acute intellectual perversity, Finkelstein exploits his own Jewish antecedents in order to attack, as 'racist,' specific Jewish leaders, their organizations and the Jewish people.

I am convinced that, as in the aforementioned Garaudy trial, only a judicial penalty will contain the damage wreaked by this particularly offensive libel." 

"die jüdische" 25.03.2004 20:17 
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