JAMY IAN SWISS--THE HONEST LIAR This just in from my friend Jamy Ian Swiss, one of the greatest magicians of our time. He's got a new show in New York that I would encourage anyone in the area to see.
Greetings! I'm pleased to announce the debut of my one-man show as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. I encourage you to consult http://www.jamyianswiss.com/fringe.html for further updates, and to circulate this email. Many thanks in advance for your interest and support!
Vanity Fair (August 2000) proclaims: "Don't miss astonishing magician Jamy Ian Swiss at the New York International Fringe Festival."
Written and performed by Jamy Ian Swiss
Directed by Michael Wills
Six performances only!
The Kraine Theatre
85 East 4th Street
(Between 2nd and 3rd Avenues)
Jamy Ian Swiss, The Honest Liar, is a master of deception with "a finely tuned sense of the absurd," says the Washington Post. And according to Penn & Teller, "Jamy Ian Swiss makes one understand what a terrifying art form pure sleight of hand can be. He is James Bond with a deck of cards for a pistol!" Says Swiss, "I want to highlight the line between illusion and reality. The fantasy world I create as a magician is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."
Don't miss this opportunity to see Jamy's full evening one-man show - a unique and memorable theatrical event!
Show dates and times:
Wednesday, 8/16 5.15 p.m.
Friday, 8/18 3.30 p.m.
Saturday, 8/19 8.15 p.m.
Monday, 8/21 9.15 p.m.
Friday, 8/25 11.45 p.m.
Saturday, 8/26 4.00 p.m.
For ticket information:
Fringe NYC
The New York International Fringe Festival
A Production of The Present Company
August 16th - 27th, 2000 All tickets $12
INFORMATION/TICKETS
Inside NY: (212) 420-8877
Outside NY: 1-888-FringeNYC
www.FringeNYC.org
OVERLAND PARK, Kan., (Reuters) - Charles Darwin and his theory got revenge in Kansas on Tuesday as voters turned out two of three state education leaders who last year led an effort to downplay the theory of evolution in school science classes across the state.
By a wide margin, Kansas voters used Tuesday's Republican primary race to reject re-election efforts by state school board chairwoman Linda Holloway and board member Mary Douglass Brown, and embrace instead their opponents who pledged support for evolution instruction. Steve Abrams, another board member who voted against evolution teaching, handily won his district.
But the dismissal of the two members virtually ensures the controversial evolution decision will be revisited when the board reconvenes early next year, and should weight the board with enough support to return evolution theory to the schools, observers said.
"It is clear the complexion of the state school board has been changed," said University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis.
The three board members were key votes in the 6-4 decision in August 1999 to de-emphasize the theory of evolution in classrooms across the state and make room for other theories, including views linked to Biblical beliefs.
The action by the Kansas Board of Education shocked scientists and educators, but was notched as a victory for religious conservatives who increasingly have been challenging evolution instruction in science education in U.S. schools.
As the state school board chairwoman, Holloway has staunchly defended the board's action and said that it was not driven by religious motivations, but rather by concerns that many certain aspects of evolution theory were not true.
The board's 1999 decision allowed for local school districts to determine what, if anything, to teach science students about evolution, but stripped ideas like the estimated age of the earth and common ancestors between apes and man from state testing standards.
As a result, the state school board race, normally a snoozer that elicits little voter enthusiasm, this year was the source of nationwide attention.
"Voters felt that Kansas had been a bit made a fool of... that the board was out of step," said Loomis. "It is the genius of democracy that you can hold an office holder accountable for their actions."
The money and support flowing into candidates' coffers on both sides of the issue far outweighed a typical state school board race. And both sides pushed campaigning outside the typical boundaries of yard signs and fliers.
Last month, several organizations supporting evolution teaching held events across the state to raise awareness of the issue. And in Lawrence, Kan., actors re-enacted the famed 1925 Scopes "monkey trial" in which teacher John Scopes was convicted of illegally teaching 19th-century British scientist Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to high school students.
"People have made this a referendum on the evolution issue," said moderate school board member and Washburn University professor Bill Wagnon, who hopes to reverse the board de-emphasis of evolution.
"The sides see the stakes as very high and there has been a lot of very shrewd politicking on the part of folks on both sides of the issue," Wagnon said.
Ken Miller, whose "As I see it" (July 1) labeled the theory of intelligent design a "scientific imposter," apparently misunderstands the concept.
Miller writes that he "and many other religious scientists" would agree that "it is possible to see God's plan in the workings of natural history." The ability to see a plan in nature is precisely what intelligent design proposes.
It is also the view with which, according to Gallup polls, over 80 percent of Americans agree. Whether accomplished instantaneously or slowly, most of us believe that humanity was the product of a mind and that our existence is not an accident.
What intelligent design advocates reject, however, is the neo-Darwinian assertion that nature flowed from the meaningless motion of molecules and matter, with no purpose and no plan.
The real "scientific imposter" is Darwinism, a philosophy (world-view) masquerading as science. Ernst Mayr, Harvard professor and dean of evolutionary biologists, recently wrote in Scientific American magazine, "It (Darwinism) has become the basic component of the new philosophy of biology."
Mayr asserts that "no biologist has been responsible for more, and more drastic, modification of the average person's world view than Charles Darwin."
This world view "produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which have lasted until this day." A spiritual revolution indeed.
Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causation and "no longer requires God as creator or designer." It is the spiritual roots and implications of Darwinism that disturb so many Americans, especially when it is taught as a fully-documented truth, and significant, contradictory scientific evidence is ignored.
Indeed, it is the scientific evidence (especially from biochemistry) and not a religious text, that undergirds the intelligent design theory.
President Clinton proclaimed that the Human Genome Project, in deciphering the human genetic code carried in DNA, had revealed "the language in which God created life." This is intelligent design.
But the genetic code is like a cookbook -- it does you no good until you translate the instructions into something useful, like chicken cordon bleu, or in the case of DNA, proteins.
Clearly, minds produce cookbooks; intelligent design theory proposes in like manner that a mind produced the vastly more complex genetic code.
This is only logical since modern science has repeatedly failed to show that the interplay of chance and natural laws can explain the appearance of even the tiniest useful protein, equivalent to one word in the biological book of life.
If one protein cannot be thus formed, whence the thousands of functional proteins found in even the simplest cell? Now it is true that just because science cannot yet describe a natural mechanism for the unguided assembly of these mega-molecules does not mean that it will never discover such a mechanism.
But should our faith in this future discovery be the basis for teaching our children today the "scientific fact" that life and its diversity arose by the simple interaction of matter, time and natural law? Are we searching for truth or promulgating a world view?
William S. Harris is a frequent contributor to Opinion. He is a professor of medicine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is with the Intelligent Design Network Inc., a Kansas-based nonprofit organization that promotes understanding of the origins of life.
The Natural Selection Election
July 31, 2000 Weekly Standard
by Jack Cashill
As Sixty-Third Street crosses the state line from Kansas City, Missouri into Kansas, the speed limit drops from 35 to 25, stop signs pop up at every other corner, and police cars lurk behind the topiary.
Welcome to Johnson County, one of the most affluent suburban areas in America and the unlikely site for what a local columnist has aptly called "The Gettysburg of the culture war." In this war, as in most, propaganda has trumped truth at almost every turn.
In Mission Hills, the first and plushest town across the state line, a town that until recently banned "For Sale" signs, "Sue Gamble" yard signs sprout like wild flowers. The heretofore anonymous 58 year-old is challenging the incumbent for an unsalaried seat on the Kansas School Board. Despite her brief window of celebrity, Gamble has managed to attract the outspoken support of the local Republican establishment, the endorsement of The Kansas City Star, and the eager embrace of the rich and the scared.
As Sixty-Third Street quits Mission Hills and heads into the merely prosperous suburbs to the west, the green Gamble signs yield to the red signs of the incumbent School Board member, Linda Holloway. Holloway runs strong in these more modest quarters, but possibly not strong enough.
As "Chairman" (her word) of the School Board last August, Holloway committed the one unforgivable sin in the tonier confines of Johnson County. She embarrassed her betters by reminding them that they still live in Kansas.
Specifically, Holloway led a surprise counter attack against the science educators who attempted to impose new, evolution-heavy science standards on the state. The Board's move was hardly the "ban on evolution" that was widely reported. After much wrangling, Holloway's 6-4 majority merely referred the decision on how evolution should be taught to the local school districts and deleted a few contested theories from the state assessment tests, most provocatively the so-called big bang. The decision," Linda Holloway notes correctly, "was rather minor compared to the reaction it got."
That reaction bordered on the hysterical. Governor Bill Graves, a moderate Republican, called the move, "a terrible, tragic, embarrassing solution to a problem that did not have to exist," a lament that has been echoed by one pol and pundit after another. Kansas is the "laughing stock of the world," wails the influential, if solipsistic, Mainstream Coalition on its web site. A billboard on I-35, as it approaches Johnson County, features a call to vote under one large word--"Embarrassed?"
So deep is the embarrassment that Republican Congressional candidate Greg Musil has chosen to exploit it and make evolution the dominant theme of his campaign. His radio ads, for instance, quote an outrageous string of Kansas-bashing editorials from the East Coast media and then, incredibly, present Musil as the only candidate bold enough to confront the Board and erase the shame.
This strategy might just seem eccentric and amusing were the seat not held by one term incumbent Democrat Dennis Moore in a district that should never have gone Democratic in the first place. Worse, Musil has raised as much money as his two conservative opponents combined, although each of them has better credentials and more hair than the amorphously moderate Musil.
To make their strategy work, Musil and Gamble are both counting on the emergence of one-day Republicans. Friends of their campaigns are openly targeting Democrats and Independents and teaching them how to vote Republican in the primary. This corrosive strategy is endorsed by The Star's lead Johnson County columnist, Mike Hendricks, who encourages the reader to "become an instant Republican" and tells him how to do so.
But in the same column, Hendricks gives away the game. In an oddly indiscreet moment, he discourages his readers from educating themselves on the issues. and urges them instead to just go vote
After all, why bother with education? The election's not about science. It's about self-image, a shaky thing hereabouts at least since Dorothy. To be sure, neither Gamble nor Musil ever talk about science. A ballroom full of their campaign contributors will not have read more than three books among them on either side of the unsettled evolution debate. For all they know or care, the "Cambrian explosion" could be a new French cheese dip.
Holloway supporters, on the other hand, read voraciously and care a lot. In the last decade the university-based movement organized under the rubric of "Intelligent Design" has given grass roots Creationism an intellectual shot in the arm. Although they differ deeply on their approach to evidence, the two movements share a keen knowledge of Darwinism and the holes therein. These holes are large and growing larger. Like Freudianism and Marxism before it, Darwinism may be on the verge of collapse.
It won't happen overnight. The science establishment and its friends in the media know they can evoke the Scopes paradigm and scare the elite with the bogeyman (bogeywoman?) of Christian fundamentalism. But Holloway does not stereotype easily. This artlessly handsome, former inner-city school teacher--perhaps the only woman in recent Johnson County history to let her hair go gray--begins her TV ads with the defiant line, "I want evolution to be taught in the schools."
Like 68% of Americans in a recent Gallup Poll, George W. included, Holloway would like to see evolution and design theories taught side by side. The self-declared "progressive" camp won't hear of it. As Robert Boston of Americans United for Seperation of Church and State pontificated during a recent visit, "A choice between truth and error is not a choice worth having."
As is evident here on the ground, the Scopes paradigm has shifted in Kansas. In their desperation to prop up Darwinism and shut intelligent design out of the classroom, in their blind submission to the authority of the science establishment and their willingness to sic the ACLU on those who would challenge it, local progressives and their influential friends have finally become what they long have ridiculed--the Tennessee legislature.
The recent news that scientists have completed a rough map of the human genetic code is fueling fresh speculation over the ancient question: How did human life begin?
President Clinton, speaking at the White House news conference,temporarily assumed the mantle of theologianinchief, musing that "Today, we are learning the language in which God created life."
One of the scientists, Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, detoured from the hard certainty of scientific discourse, describing the achievement in the poetry of religious language: " We have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God."
What does this all mean for those who speculate on how life was created, and who, if anyone, created it?
One of the first to jump in was David Baltimore, the Nobel Prizewinning president of the California Institute of Technology. The genome, he wrote in the New York Times, " confirms something obvious and expected, yet controversial: our genes look much like those of fruit flies, worms and even plants."
This shows that "we all descended from the same humble beginnings and that the connections are written in our genes."
In other words, Baltimore says, this confirms human beings are the products of evolution. "That should be," he wrote, "but won't be, the end of creationism."
In fact, many creationists are just as excited by news of gene mapping as is the rest of the scientific community. The genome project, they say, proves their case.
The sheer complexity of the genome, they argue, points to divine authorship a theory some prefer to call "intelligent design."
"I hate to use that word, 'creationism' because it's such a buzz word. It carries a lot of baggage with it," said Phillip E. Johnson, a UC Berkeley law professor and author of "Darwin on Trial."
"But the question is: Is there a creator?" he said. With the genome, "You're talking about an instruction book written in language, and that points to an author, which suggests a creator."
That language is not just complex but is nonrepetitive and is not random, signs of intent, Johnson said.
"There's no machine, natural selection or whatever that can produce the kind of complex information in that instruction book," he said. "It shows by its very nature it's the product of a designer."
And this stage in mapping the genome is just the first step. The sequence of genes must now be located, their functions determined, and that will further buttress the case for intelligent design, its proponents hold.
"As we develop all this information, it will reveal the complexity, the interdependence of all this material," said Duane T. Gish, a biochemist with the El Cajon, Calif.based Institute for Creation Research. "It will point to the origin as the result of an intelligent creator, an intelligent agent. I believe when that work is done, as it begins to cumulate it will strengthen our position as creationists, that it's there for a purpose and shows the compelling necessity for an intelligent agent for its origin."
"Professor Baltimore has it completely wrong," Johnson said. " And certainly in no way are believers in intelligent design going out of business. They are gaining confidence with each new discovery."
Kenneth R. Miller, a Brown University microbiologist, looks at the same genome data and sees irrefutable evidence of evolution.
"Clearly those sequences showed we share a common ancestry with other mammals, and specifically other primates," said Miller, author of "Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution."
There are places in the genome where mistakes occurred, an error in copying the genes, that has inactivated them.
"We and some of our primate relatives have exactly the same mistakes in exactly the same place," Miller said. "If our ancestors were not the same, that would not happen. It would have been random.
"This is a very clear indication that the copying error occurred in a common ancestor."
"This tells us, in a sense, how the creator made us," Miller said. "And quite specifically, the creator made us by the process of evolution."
The notion of our similarity to primates, and even lower forms of life, isn't troubling to a theologian like John Haught of Georgetown, who specializes in the intersection of science and religion. It "brings out the continuity we have with the rest of life," he said.
"There's a paradox here," said Haught, author of "God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution."
"Our knowledge of genetics on the one hand has linked us much more intimately with the story of life than we perhaps previously had been aware of," he said.
"But a knowledge of genetics also allows us to emphasize our discontinuity, because of the fact that each organism has a specific sequence that is not shared with others. So in a way it satisfies the need on the part of religion and theology to emphasize our distinctiveness."
"We all use the same code and that's an important idea," he said. "But it also allows for us to preserve the notion that some forms of life are distinct from others, and there's a qualitative difference along with the qualitative similarity."
The problem with creationists, Haught says, is that they're looking for evidence of divine design on too small a level.
"I don't want to pin the whole notion of God and cosmic purpose down to DNA, but I want to say that religious ideas and theological explanations are relevant when we ask the question, 'Why do we have a lifebearing universe?' he said.
"I don't want to make God into a tinker, someone who comes down and stitches together nucleic acids. ... I want to think about God in the widest possible sense. Otherwise, the notion becomes too small, the notion of God becomes a magician."
That's not only bad theology, Haught says, it's bad for science.
"If you bring in the notion of God every time you ask, 'How did things get that way?' it becomes a science stopper," he said. "God did it. That makes science somewhat irrelevant."
And while the genome project is a triumph for science, Ian Barbour, a physicist and theologian and a pioneer in the field of linking science and religion, warns against overenthusiastic optimism that the code to the makeup of humanity has been broken. The genome can tell us a lot, he said, but it can't tell us everything.
"There's a temptation to think that we're just molecular machines, and I think human experience and religious tradition say we're a lot more than our genes, we're a lot more than molecular machines," he said.
"There are higher levels of organism in which very wonderful things occur," Barbour said. "We're social beings. We are who we are in relationship to other people. We are who we are in relationship to God. We are who we are in relationship to our neighbor.
"And those relationships are part of our being," he said. "And you can't describe them in the vocabulary of chemistry."
It is just a Kansas school board election, a primary election at that. But no one in Kansas or anywhere else is taking this race for granted.
Tens of thousands of dollars have been raised, some from out of state, whereas previous board candidates raised only a few hundred dollars. Candidates are taking the unusual step of running television commercials and are printing up leaflets and yard signs by the thousands.
Democrats are switching their party affiliation just to vote for school board candidates in the Republican primary. And in what political observers consider extraordinary, Kansas's highestranking Republicans the governor and a United States senator have not only weighed in on the races, but have also endorsed opposing candidates in their own party.
"When was the last time you were even aware who was running for your state board of education?" asked Michael Davis, a law professor at the University of Kansas.
The frenzy is the upshot of a vote last August by the Kansas Board of Education, which removed evolution as an explanation for the origin of species from the state's science curriculum.
The decision, a 6to4 vote with conservative Republicans in the majority, reverberated around the country, where other states have faced recent battles between evolution and creationism. Kansas did not ban the teaching of evolution, leaving that option to local school districts. But its decision meant that evolution would not be included in the stateassessment tests that evaluate student performance, which may discourage teachers from devoting time to the subject. The board also removed from the curriculum the big bang theory of the origin of the universe.
Now, 5 of 10 board seats are up for election, and in races for 4 of the 5 seats there is a primary faceoff on Aug. 1, with conservative Republicans who favor the new science standards being challenged by moderate Republicans who oppose them and who are expected to try to overturn the standards if elected. In heavily Republican Kansas, the primary winners will be heavily favored in November.
More than a decade after the Supreme Court said states could not compel the teaching of creationism, opponents of evolution have begun pressing state and local school boards to play down the importance of evolution by presenting it, alongside creationism and other theories, as just one unproven explanation.
Last October, state officials in Kentucky eliminated the word "evolution" but not the scientific theory from the school curriculum, substituting the phrase "change over time." In Oklahoma, officials recently ordered that textbooks carry a disclaimer about the certainty of evolution, a step similar to one already taken by Alabama.
Evolution's defenders have been active, too, winning last fall when New Mexico banned creationism and endorsed evolution in the science curriculum. New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and other states considered, but defeated, proposals by critics of evolution.
"It strikes me that evolution is even more of a litmus test than abortion now, courtesy of the Kansas Board of Education," said Burdett Loomis, a University of Kansas political scientist. "It is really the defining characteristic of Kansas politics now."
At the time, the board's vote raised an outcry among many Kansans and guaranteed that the issue would be revisited in this year's election. No reliable polls have been released suggesting what might occur on Tuesday, though conservatives are typically better organized and have a better turnout in primaries.
The issue also figures in a hotly contested Congressional race in the district bordering Kansas City. Among the three Republicans seeking the right to take on the Democratic incumbent, Greg Musil, a moderate, has run television commercials mentioning the evolution vote and saying, "I'm embarrassed that Kansas is now being called a backward state."
Since the board's vote, local school board members say, more districts are talking about teaching creationism or the "intelligent designer" theory, which holds that the universe is so complex that some intelligent being must have created it. The vote also emboldened some teachers who had been quietly teaching alternatives to evolution.
Other districts have resolved to teach evolution exclusively.
In the school board races, Gov. Bill Graves, who last August called the board's decision "terrible" and "tragic," has endorsed moderate Republicans. Senator Sam Brownback has endorsed conservatives.
Groups like People for the American Way sponsored a reenactment of the Scopes "monkey trial" at the University of Kansas this month, starring Ed Asner, a native Kansan. Proponents of nonevolutionary theories, like Phillip Johnson, a University of California law professor who believes in "intelligent design," have donated money to conservative candidates. Local groups have formed to defend or attack the board's vote, including a political action committee helping conservative candidates.
Some Democrats have switched parties just for Tuesday's primary.
"I think this election is so critical to Kansas children that I was compelled to suck it up and change parties," said Lois Culver, 69, of Overland Park. Mrs. Culver, who said she saw the new standards as an effort to put religion in the schools, plans to vote for Sue Gamble, a moderate Republican, and then rejoin the Democratic Party.
Mrs. Gamble, a member of the Shawnee Mission school board, said the new standards could "put students at a disadvantage on a national level."
"You need to know about dinosaurs, the age of the earth," she said.
She said she worried that "students from out of state won't want to come here and study because they feel the standards won't be up to snuff."
Mrs. Gamble's opponent, Linda Holloway, a conservative who headed the school board when the evolution decision was made, has raised $90,000, an extraordinary sum in such races. Mrs. Gamble has raised $36,000.
Mrs. Holloway, a former teacher, said she supported the new science standards because she believed evolution had been made to seem too important to science.
"I believe we should teach evolution in the schools," she said, "but I also believe that if local districts want to teach that or other theories, that should be up to them. Gosh, there could have been a lot bigger things that we could have done. This was pretty mild."
In Wichita, the conservative incumbent, Mary Douglass Brown, said the new standards "put a little crack in the foundation" of evolution scientists, "their money, their books, their schools."
"There's a lot of money in evolution," Mrs. Brown, a former teacher, said. "To me, it's pseudoscience."
Mrs. Brown said the board left in references to "microevolution," changes within organisms that "people can see," like bacteria becoming diseaseresistant.
"I don't believe that humans descended from apes, no," she said. "How come there's still apes running around loose and there are humans? Why did some of them decide to evolve and some did not?"
Such ideas propelled people like Bill Skaer, a veterinarian, and Burt Humburg, a medical student, to switch to the Republican Party to vote against Mrs. Brown.
And they spurred Carol Rupe, a former Wichita school board member, to challenge her.
Ms. Rupe said she was "embarrassed when suddenly, after the vote last summer, we were called by our friends and relatives in other states wondering what kind of state we lived in."
"We said it was just a few people," she said. "But, my goodness, if those few are reelected, then it reflects on the entire state."
When Norman Finkelstein's flight from New York touched down last week in London, it landed the Brooklyn-born writer and Holocaust academic in the middle of a huge storm. Finkelstein arrived to address "Remembering for the Future", an Oxford conference that is one of the largest gatherings of international Holocaust scholars ever held. Also speaking at the conference was one of Finkelstein's many enemies in the Jewish establishment, and one of many targets in Finkelstein's latest book - Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the Nobel-prize-winning author whose book, Night, is held as one of the most important of Holocaust texts. Finkelstein calls Wiesel a hypocrite, responsible for the "sacralisation of the Holocaust... for his standard fee of $25,000 (plus chauffeured limousine)".
The fierce foes did not come face to face in Oxford, but, as Finkelstein's new book, The Holocaust Industry, is published, the storm rages. The book has been condemned as "nauseous". Some British columnists branded Finkelstein "extreme" and a "conspiracy theorist". Others damned him for giving succor to anti-Semites and manipulating the facts.
Norman Finkelstein, the son of concentration camp survivors, has launched a personal pogrom with The Holocaust Industry, attacking almost every tenet of the study of the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis.
And an awful lot of people now hate him for it.
"His approach is totally destructive," says Greville Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust. "I find it revolting." Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress in New York, agrees: "I believe he is pathetic. I simply don't accept him as a researcher."
Finkelstein's incendiary book argues that interest in the Holocaust arose after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, not because survivors found a voice, but because an all-powerful American Jewish lobby realised it could now be used to lend a kind of moral victimhood to an Israeli state engaged in criminal acts against the Palestinians. Further, he says, efforts have been made to stress the "uniqueness" of the genocide of the Jews, not for any moral reason, but simply to protect its power as a symbol.
Most recently, he says, it has been used to extort money from Germany, Switzerland and others in the name of Holocaust survivors who do not need it, the funds staying with Jewish institutions and not those very few living survivors who might need it. He adds the number of Holocaust survivors has been grossly inflated, and that there are now more survivors than at the end of the war.
"The current campaign of the Holocaust industry to extort money from Europe in the name of `needy Holocaust victims' has," he writes, "shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom to that of a Monte Carlo casino."
What really defines the short, footnoted text is its style. Intoning the memory of his Holocaust-survivor parents, and raging about thepaltry $3500 compensation that his mother received, Finkelstein lashes out in all directions with a torrent of invective. He has many targets: the World Jewish Congress, the Claims Commission, the Israeli Government and almost every other academic in the field of Holocaust study.
The Holocaust Industry began its turbulent life as a review in the London Review of Books of a highly regarded work by Peter Novick, an academic at Chicago University, called The Holocaust in American Life. Novick was trying to explain why the Holocaust suddenly became a subject for discussion and study in the late '60s after so many years of silence. He concluded that the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 had led to concerns that a second Holocaust could occur and that there was a duty to remember the events of the Second World War to stop such an atrocity occurring again. In his review, Finkelstein argued his entirely opposing thesis that it was a reaction to Israeli strength.
"I saw the piece in the LRB," says Colin Robertson, managing director of Verso books, publisher of the Finkelstein volume, "and I thought there could be a book in it." Did he not think it might cause a row? "We're an unashamedly radical publisher. It's our stock in trade. But our main thing was that, as a left-wing publisher, we should not be seen as anti-Semitic. With Norman's background as the son of Holocaust survivors, we could refute any such allegations."
Finkelstein is more than used to taking on the Holocaust establishment. In the mid-'90s, he published a scathing critique of Hitler's Willing Executioners, a book by Daniel Goldhagen, Harvard professor of Jewish history, which claimed the entire German nation had, through ingrained anti-Semitism, been eager accomplices in the genocide of the Jews.
As Finkelstein gleefully recounts, he became the target of abuse and hate mail. At one point in The Holocaust Industry he quotes a letter from Leon Wieseltier, influential literary editor of the US magazine New Republic, to his publisher. "You don't know who Finkelstein is," Wieseltier wrote. "He's poison, he's a disgusting self-hating Jew, he is something you find under a rock."
While Finkelstein's style is unique, the arguments in his book are not. This newspaper echoed his views on the problems of overstating the uniqueness of the Holocaust when the Imperial War Museum opened its permanent Holocaust exhibition a few weeks ago. Likewise journalist Tom Bower, who has written extensively on attempts to get compensation from the Swiss over the Holocaust, says some of what Finkelstein claims about the machinations of the international compensation process are correct.
The idea of a Holocaust racket surfaced years ago when Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban quipped: "There's no business like Shoah business"
("Shoah" is Hebrew for Holocaust).
Rabbi Julia Neuberger says: "There is a sort of industry going on around the Holocaust which grows on itself. Elie Wiesel does charge a fortune and do the wide, sad eyes thing. But because Finkelstein does it as a rant, the validity of those points get lost.
"He's so angry with the American Jewish establishment that he doesn't listen to real people. You can't just think in terms of systems with the Holocaust."
Others are more vicious. "The language he is using is anti-Semitic," says Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress. "His facts are wrong. His language is intemperate. He quotes me, but he never spoke to me."
Deborah Lipstadt, the US expert on Holocaust denial and a defendant in David Irving's recent failed libel trial has similar complaints. "In the book he says that by writing about Holocaust deniers I give them credence. That's ridiculous. I didn't create them." At one point he accuses Lipstadt - also in the UK for the Oxford conference - of saying that doubting the testimony of survivors is a form of Holocaust denial. "I never said that," she said. "It's ridiculous. It makes me wonder how accurate he is on other things."
It is certainly true that Finkelstein only emphasises that which suits his case. He mentions repeatedly that his mother received only $3500 in compensation, but buries in a footnote the fact that his father received a monthly pension of about $600 for years.
Indeed, gripes about money, and the Byzantine compensation claims that procured it, appear to lie at the heart of Finkelstein's argument. In 1998, Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion in settlement of a class action brought by Jewish claimants.
Finkelstein complains that no money reached the victims. Tom Bower, who has written extensively on Swiss compensation to the Jews, disagrees. "None of the Swiss' $1.25 billion has been transferred to any Jewish organisation," he says. "So far, the American courts have not approved a system for distributing the money and no money has been transferred from Switzerland."
Finkelstein claims that the World Jewish Congress now has a fund of $7 billion. "The $7 billion fund is a myth," says Bower. Finally, Finkelstein states that half a $200 million fund set up for immediate distribution to victims has not been handed out and will end up going to Jewish groups and lawyers. Elan Steinberg of the WJC says this is rubbish. Only on one claim, that there are tens of millions of dollars in German compensation funds languishing in bank accounts, does Bower say that Finkelstein's account comes anywhere near the truth. Even so, he says Finkelstein's interpretation of those events is "flawed".
Finkelstein is unrepentant. "When I want to invoke the memory of my parents, I am accused of using it. There is something plainly revolting going on. There are people claiming to be working in the name of Holocaust victims, getting money on false pretences and then not distributing it.
"I was probably unusually close to my parents so I do what I can now to preserve the integrity of their memory. The Holocaust deserves to be remembered." He just hates the way the remembering is done.
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