Quotes from Norman Finkelstein

My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and U.S. support for these policies.

I think that people like Bloomberg, they're complete thugs. No question about it. But on the other hand, it must be said that they are politically savvy. They don't get into those positions of power - in the case of Bloomberg, both economic and political power - by being anybody's fool.

There is no way a non-Jew could say what I did in 'The Holocaust Industry' without being labelled a Holocaust denier. I am labelled a Holocaust denier, too.

You know, frankly speaking, money just doesn't figure largely in my world view.

Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread?

No conditions justify torture.

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.

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

International law says people fighting for self-determination can use force in order to achieve their independence.

The Zionists indeed learnt well from the Nazis. So well that it seems that their morally repugnant treatment of the Palestinians, and their attempts to destroy Palestinian society within Israel and the occupied territories, reveals them as basically Nazis with beards and black hats.

September 11 was a godsend for Israel. It could now conjoin its merciless persecution of the Palestinians with Bush's War against Terror. But my impression is that it wasn't altogether successful.

Everybody wants peace. That's a truism. There is no point in accomplishing through war what you can accomplish through peace.

War is not a means to an end, it is the end, whereas politics is merely the hiatus between wars.

As one Israeli said, "It's a big mistake for Israel to say it 'won' the war, when there was no war. There were no battles...no military enemy in the field."

I don't want to become a rhetorical speaker. My effectiveness is mastering all of the data and being able to respond.

I don't think it's a good thing to have Christian states, Muslim states, or any kind of ethnic states.

No doubt one can, in light of further study and life experience, come to repudiate past convictions.

The Zionists indeed learnt well from the Nazis. So well that it seems that their morally repugnant treatment of the Palestinians, and their attempts to destroy Palestinian society within Israel and the occupied territories, reveals them as basically Nazis with beards and black hats.

I'm not a good writer, and I don't care. Unfortunately, after I left college, I didn't have time much for literature. I wish I did. Most of the time I read documents, and that's not going to help your writing. But I'm a very logical writer, and you can't get out of me. Once I've nailed you, you're finished.

Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became 'pro'-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.A.' s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive.

I focus on my work. If I let myself get distracted by the insults and slanders I wouldn't get anything substantive done.

The moment you have massive social and political commentary trying to explain a phenomenon, then you know we are no longer dealing with a strictly psychiatric question.

I am opposed to any state with an ethnic character, not only to Israel.

Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense if not sheer fraud.