NY Times Book Review article re Holocaust

[Doug Millison]

"There is something sad in this warping of intelligence, and in this perversion
of moral indignation. There is also something indecent about it, 
something juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid. As was shown 
in Peter Novick's far more balanced (though not entirely 
satisfactory) book, ''The Holocaust in American Life,'' the changing 
perception of the Nazi genocide of the Jews has also opened the way 
for a variety of exploiters and small-time opportunists. Yet to make 
this into an international Jewish conspiracy verges on paranoia and 
would serve anti-Semites around the world much better than any 
lawyer's exorbitant fees for ''shaking down'' a German industrialist. 
[....] What I find so striking about ''The Holocaust Industry'' is 
that it is almost an exact copy of the arguments it seeks to expose. 
It is filled with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that 
Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current media hype over 
the Holocaust; it is brimming with the same indifference to 
historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics and dubious 
contextualizations; and it oozes with the same smug sense of moral 
and intellectual superiority.  This book is, in a word, an 
ideological fanatic's view of other people's opportunism, by a writer 
so reckless and ruthless in his attacks that he is prepared to defend 
his own enemies, the bastions of Western capitalism, and to warn that 
''The Holocaust'' will stir up an anti-Semitism whose significance he 
otherwise discounts. Like any conspiracy theory, it contains several 
grains of truth; and like any such theory, it is both irrational and 
insidious. Finkelstein can now be said to have founded a Holocaust 
industry of his own. "
--from "A Tale of Two Holocausts," Omer Bartov's review of
_The Holocaust Industry_ by Norman G. Finkelstein
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/reviews/000806.06bartovt.html