Norm Finkelstein is a writer, lecturer, and academic. He is also the author of the best selling book, The Theory of Zionism and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Forward, and the Wall Street Journal. In this episode, he shares his story of growing up in a Jewish family in the late 20th century, and how he became interested in the pro-Israel movement.
01:13:14.180And the judge ruled, Reagan appointee, he's 85 years old.
01:13:19.080He says, by not letting them speak, rounding them up, sending them off to strange places, he says, quote, you're terrorizing, that's the word he used, you're terrorizing people's right to free speech.
01:13:35.840He said, when ICE puts on the masks, you know what he said?
01:13:58.400No, the Trump administration, you could say broadly, but on the specific issue of the encampments and Israel and Palestine, that was the Jewish billionaire class.
01:17:43.600Let me get you this platform, that platform, fly you here.
01:17:46.920And then when I was like, oh, yeah, and I know this is going to be hard for you, but you guys are not going to have to stand up to the Jew.
01:17:59.660And I'm going, so what was I to you, actually?
01:18:03.300I was never there was something there was a difference here.
01:18:05.860We didn't believe we didn't you didn't agree with me principally on BLM stuff.
01:18:09.920Because if the principles held, if you said, I believe in free speech and you have to sometimes stand up in your own identity box and say something is wrong, they didn't agree with me principally.
01:21:38.840So, on this, you know, John McWhorter, he says, every day these poor Jewish students, they have to hear all of this anti-Semitism at Columbia University.
01:21:52.820So, just as a factual matter, all this anti-Semitism, first of all, legally, even if they were being anti-Semitic, they have the right.
01:23:05.840For the purposes of this report, we are going to define anti-Semitism as any time Jews, Jewish students, in particular, they said, Israeli Jewish students,
01:23:21.980every time they feel that they're being excluded in the classroom, or being excluded in extracurricular activities, or they're being excluded in social life.
01:23:36.780That's going to be the definition of anti-Semitism.
01:25:46.140And, another woman who I absolutely like, her name is Nadine Strassen, the former executive director of the ACLU.
01:25:55.640And, we got into, I wouldn't, there was no animus hostility, but it was intense.
01:26:02.560Because, Dr. West's argument was, if we excluded everybody who had blood in their hands, or who propagated ideas that cause blood to be on your hands, he said that would exclude a large part of the Harvard faculty.
01:26:24.920You know, they're advisors to governments, and they write books which influence public opinion.
01:26:33.340He said, that's a slippery slope if you start that kind of exclusion.
01:26:42.140And, Nadine Strassen, she said that we have to invite everybody, because the only way you can get a truth is hearing out all opinions.
01:26:55.660And, I have to say that they can defend themselves, and they did in the course of the exchange.
01:27:06.060But, to me, because I do tend to, like yourself, I gather, I do tend to personalize things.
01:27:13.820So, let's say, after World War II, there's a Nazi concentration camp guard.
01:27:21.220Because, those are perfectly ordinary people who were guards in the camp.
01:27:26.020And, one of them is an exchange student at Harvard.
01:28:59.080That's why I always say you got to get over their game of ad hominem attacks because if we've got to be called names, not hang out with murderers, we've got to get comfortable with that real fast.
01:29:07.280That's exactly, you've got to get comfortable real fast with murderers.
01:29:16.000A large, a large, I wouldn't, certainly not a majority, but a significant number of the campus protesters were Jewish.
01:29:24.900How is it that they didn't detect this rampant anti-Semitism?
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01:31:31.240Visit tnusa.com slash Candace or call 1-800-958-1000.
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01:32:31.800So I wanted to actually, because one of your books, and this one I have not read, is called The Holocaust Industry.
01:32:39.500I want to talk to you about the Holocaust.
01:32:41.000And please allow me to be offensive as I've been learning a lot about the Holocaust and why it is such a precious area where you are not allowed.
01:34:03.520And so he then spent the rest of his life, Nicholas Gruner, dedicated to telling people that this man was effectively a gypsy who stole the identity of a real person.
01:34:11.140And he said, he rolled up, Nicholas rolled up his sleeve.
01:34:26.940Robert Maxwell wrote about it in his own book, uh, his, his authorized, uh, biography.
01:34:31.660And we know Robert Maxwell, obviously who everything about there is no about him.
01:34:36.320And I, I was fascinated by this idea that there were people who were stealing the identity, whether dead or alive of people who had actually been in the Auschwitz camps,
01:34:46.980building on their stories in whatever way.
01:34:49.300And it's sad that nobody knows Nicholas Gruner's name.
01:34:51.620People should know his name because he, he, it was a, um, it was a, uh, a valiant fight.
01:34:57.160And he, uh, to the, to the very end said, there are people who are stealing our identities.
01:35:01.560And I go, I've got this feeling that that happened a lot more than we think it happened.
01:35:07.580And by the way, Robert Maxwell then purchased a massive stake early on in, in McGraw publishing, McGraw Hill, which means that, and then his wife was traveling around
01:35:16.880with Ellie Wietzel and this guy was like, this was not prisoner number, whatever it was, he took his identity.
01:35:22.480And that's a really terrifying thing to think about that people with power saw, okay, these people were in camps.
01:35:30.660We can take their identities, take their stories, whatever it is.
01:35:32.960He never found out what happened to his friend.
01:35:34.580Uh, he assumes he died sometime after the camp and, uh, he did write, it was his friend who wrote the manuscript in Yiddish.
01:35:41.420And then, and then Ellie Wietzel adopted that.
01:35:44.200And now we have today, as you determine a Holocaust industry, I'd like you to describe that, but just what I'm telling you, I mean, is that, isn't that just the most terrifying thing ever?
01:35:54.420Um, we don't really know each other and we're having a serious conversation now and we should try to parse it.
01:36:08.900So let me give you, as I understand it, the situation, not just from family history, but from having read quite a lot in the subject at a certain point in my life, having read quite a lot, I would say almost obsessively because of my family history and having written on aspects of it.
01:36:30.280Um, the estimates are, there was an extermination campaign by the Nazis.
01:41:03.040I actually think they were, but I fear they were survivors of another Holocaust that was going on at the same time, and they may have been, in part, executing it.
01:41:12.480But, which is a question that Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes, which is, where did all the Bolsheviks go?
01:41:21.280And I think, and this is, again, a theory, while we're allowed to think, well, this is a good opportunity right now to take on the identity of people who perished and just rewrite history of ourselves as the victims.
01:41:35.100And when I saw that Nicholas Gruner story, I was like, that's so terrifying because it's required reading coming up in schools.
01:41:41.960There's tons of Holocaust people that we could be reading your books, talking about your parents and what they lived through, and they picked this man.
01:41:48.120There was, look, I will get to the Elie Wiesel.
01:43:33.280And there was something that really more than grated on her, when people who didn't pass through what she passed through claimed to have passed through it.
01:43:49.220And she once exclaimed, in a kind of bitter irony, she said, if everybody who claims to be a Holocaust survivor actually is one, who did Hitler kill?
01:44:10.040Everybody's claiming to be a Holocaust survivor.
01:44:13.460There are very few, a handful survived that ordeal.
01:44:19.220Now, especially particularly in Auschwitz, because there's so many were like, well, I was, you said the tattoo.
01:44:25.580There were all the, all the death, all the, there were the death camps, and then there were the concentration camp death camps.
01:44:33.060There were both work camps, and Auschwitz and Majdanek.
01:44:36.400I once spoke to the world's leading authority in the Nazi Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, who was very kind to me.
01:44:43.580He was like, he was of your political persuasion.
01:48:05.000When Wiesel was confronted with Hilberg saying they happened, he doubled down and said they did happen.
01:48:15.700Wiesel, I speak to, I knew some, not many, I knew some first-ranked Holocaust historians.
01:48:25.220And they told me he was deported in 1944 from Hungary.
01:48:31.740That was one of the last deportations from Hungary.
01:48:35.480And he maybe passed through Auschwitz en route to a labor camp.
01:48:42.920That may have happened, uh, according to the people I talked to.
01:48:48.580But there was clearly, if you, I discussed it at some length in that little book, Wiesel figures, not in a cameo role, but he has a major, uh, he's a star of the Holocaust industry.
01:49:01.480Yeah, I mean, I, I, I'm glad that I put Nicholas Bruner on your radar because he just knew the guy, he literally stole his identity.
01:49:08.360I mean, it's like, it's, it's, it's a crazy, he knew him because, you know, obviously when you're in a camp together and he was like, just so excited to meet, to re-meet this someone who had had this experience with him.
01:49:18.140And described the march, everything, and, you know, the soles of his feet.
01:49:21.120And he just was like, he's, what he did was the real person wrote the manuscript and this gypsy just took on his identity.
01:49:28.320And when he describes that moment of being on the plane, what am I going to say to him?
01:49:39.940That is, and he said, but he had cameras ready and they, like, shook hands.
01:49:43.340And then he even said, what's even crazier is the real Holocaust survivor spoke Hungarian.
01:49:50.280And Ely couldn't speak Hungarian at this time when this happened.
01:49:53.400And so he starts, he's like, he says, let's speak in English.
01:49:56.200It's an incredible, it's just an incredible thing to comprehend that.
01:50:00.080And I think the best that I can guess is that you had these psychopaths, like, you know, true Bolshevik psychopaths who were like, well, we can't just walk in and be like, well, you know, I was just kind of running the Bolshevik camp over here, mass murdering Christians.
01:50:12.260So what better way to reinstate yourself into society than to be like, hmm, I'm the ultimate victim.
01:50:22.420I think they laundered, they laundered through.
01:50:25.860And that's why there's so much confusion.
01:50:27.180And people are like, you're denying that people died here because there's some people that are like, well, nothing ever happened, you know?
01:50:32.700And it's like, no, something definitely, you read this guy, Nicholas Gruner, and you're like, this happened.
01:50:37.840And there are some people who never lived a day in their lives of that.
01:50:40.880And I say Elie Wiesel is one of them who took their personalities, took their identities.
01:50:46.380I actually, regrettably, I read a lot on the Elie Wiesel case.
01:50:53.660And I tend to defer to Hilberg's judgment.
01:51:01.580And I think the judgment that there were in his so-called memoir, there were fabricated scenes is correct.
01:51:12.440However, I also believe that, you know, when you explore any concrete situation, any concrete situation, there are going to be things that are inexplicable.
01:51:26.720And you have to accept that in any historical reconstruction, there are going to be inexplicable, enigmatic phenomenon.
01:51:47.680And I think in the case of the Nazi Holocaust, it's sort of like the flat earth society.
01:51:59.380When you want to deny a certain phenomenon, of course, you have the right to deny it.
01:52:05.820That's as to deny a person the right to deny is what the great British philosopher John Stuart Mill called the presumption of infallibility, that you know the truth and nobody else can know the truth.
01:52:25.060No, we're fallible creatures, we're capable of error, and we always have to leave some corner of our mind open to the possibility that our deepest, most sacred beliefs, our foundational beliefs, could be wrong, could be wrong.
01:52:48.700However, if you're like in the flat earth society, and you say the world is not round, in order to be credible, you have to respond to the mountain of evidence that's accumulated that shows the world is round.
01:53:14.040You have the right to say the earth is flat, but you also, if you're responsible, have to respond to a massive accumulation of evidence to the contrary.
01:53:30.580If you can't respond to it or don't respond to it, in my opinion, you're not entitled to be taken seriously.
01:53:44.040So, my parents could be iconoclastic, they could be very bitter, by the way the Nazi Holocaust has been not just misused, but weaponized to justify all sorts of things,
01:54:12.680which in many places, which in many places are not just deplorable, but abominations.
01:54:20.840However, in all their anger and indignation, which was transmitted to me,
01:54:31.120it never would have occurred to them to deny the horror that they endured.
01:54:44.880So, when I wrote the little book, which caused me a lot of public grief and defamation.
01:58:16.180So it's very important to study the Bolsheviks, right?
01:58:18.940Because that means at the same time, you had Jewish people who were suffering, actually and legitimately,
01:58:26.340and you had Jewish psychopaths, okay, who were mass murdering, Henrik Yagoda, okay, mass murdering Christians.
01:58:35.700The same thing is happening right now, okay?
01:58:38.440You have literal psychopaths, and I would describe them as Zionists, okay, Zionist psychopaths who are happy to oversee the slaughter of children.
01:58:48.220Some people who I think actually look happy when you talk about it.
01:58:50.500It's so disturbing spiritually to see people who can joke about suffering and things of that nature.
01:58:55.600And then you have people who are dealing with the kickback of those people who don't have platforms,
01:59:00.320who are being treated as if, and it's because both of, everybody around the world needs to understand,
01:59:05.040it is possible for, you can be any identity and to have multiple things going on at once.
01:59:11.980And I truly believe that the Zionist ideology is an evil.
01:59:17.420It is this idea that you are, it's an evil because it's a supremacist ideology that says you can trample over anybody's rights
01:59:25.960as long as it is like, you know, you serve Israel.
01:59:29.680And that's what I have seen in my experience is that even people who I thought were fundamentally good,
01:59:35.360when it came down to it, turned into and celebrated the death of children
01:59:38.960because those children were Palestinian and were not Israeli.
02:07:09.800But number two, it was because a large number of media outlets, in particular on the web, were out of control.
02:07:19.920And now there is a retrenchment, an attempt to control TikTok, control CBS News, control CNN.
02:07:31.100They're trying to now methodically gain control again of, as the expression has it, gain control of the narrative.
02:07:42.200And there's a real problem on our college campuses right now.
02:07:46.980There are students, professors, in fact, tenured professors, are terrified of saying anything supportive of the Palestinians or critical of Israel.
02:08:02.960You remember, in the spring of 2024, there were all the encampments.
02:08:10.640And the next, a whole academic, a whole academic year passed without anything.
02:08:19.600It was like this eerie silence had descended on the college campuses because the students were terrified.
02:08:29.340And so the media, academia, they're trying to regain control right now.
02:08:40.640And so I believe that people have, in particular on the college campuses, have to find, you know, like you said earlier, it takes a lot of courage.
02:08:52.380You know, there were a lot of students who were suspended because of the encampments.
02:08:59.140They weren't allowed to attend graduation because of the encampments.
02:09:03.820And then if you were foreign students, you were rounded up because of the encampment.
02:09:45.680Do you continue to be a part of the apparatus of the academia, which lies routinely?
02:09:50.620That's why I say people should read Thomas Sowell and he will tell you that every bad idea comes from academia, comes from the cult of academia.
02:09:56.980They will always publish the books and lie about what's happening.
02:09:59.780And it's because actually it's always been controlled.
02:10:02.160So we're trying to achieve academics when in reality it's a small club and you got to have the right perspectives if you want to stay in it, no matter how accomplished or if you're brighter.
02:10:11.260And I really challenge people to recognize that.
02:10:14.460So you are talking about maybe losing, you know, money.
02:10:19.860You know, for a young person, I try to be sympathetic.
02:10:24.340For a young person, it is a big price.
02:16:23.260And then if you read in yesterday's New York Times, you know what actually happened?
02:16:28.400There was an Israeli student who came up to the encampment, and he was photographing it and videotaping it.
02:16:39.700And the folks in the encampment got nervous that they were going to be, you know, it's the younger people's expression, I don't use it, doxing.
02:16:50.100They were afraid because of those trucks going around that he was filming them to dox them.
02:16:58.080We called in my day to blacklist them, but your generation, or within the younger generation, call it doxing.
02:17:04.420And so they held up their kathiyas to block him from filming.
02:17:13.220And then there was some moment where he might have been tapped.
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02:27:01.320It was, whether it was money, I honestly can't say in her particular.
02:27:08.380It's a guess for me that usually when somebody comes to a conclusion like that, there's a fellowship, there's just something there that you'll find.
02:28:09.960And he did get caught, by the way, that he did specifically share, and this was a part of the BB trials, which are now, I don't know what the update on that is,
02:28:18.260but that he, a team of propagandists moved to spread lies to the Western public.
02:30:51.400So, I think, rather than cast it as no evidence of rape, I think it should be cast as overwhelming evidence that there was no rape.
02:31:05.500But that doesn't stop the top student in her year in the Harvard Economics Department from making a documentary claiming there was mass rape on October 7th by Hamas.
02:36:41.020That's your, that's your job title as of now.
02:36:48.560You know, it's something that I want to reiterate as we close here.
02:36:52.260And I want to basically direct people where they can find your book.
02:36:54.940But I have said this over and over again, and I think it's starting to register with people.
02:37:00.300If you side with evil, you should remember that evil is always an orphan.
02:37:04.880If you are finding someone that feels nothing when they kill a child, you are dealing with somebody that has a capacity for evil that you mean nothing.
02:37:12.840They will, they won't even flinch if they have to kill you too.
02:37:15.580And this is something that I have really taken the time to explain to people.
02:37:21.000Like if you will, and that includes you, Jewish Americans, right?
02:37:24.020When we're speaking about BB Day at Yahoo and people with that capacity for evil, there is nothing to those individuals but themselves.
02:37:32.500And you have to be very careful when you're allying with evil to realize that it will, it will snap in two seconds and take you out.
02:37:46.420One of the questions that's always been asked is, is it possible for a person to be evil, a mass murderer, in so to speak, one compartment of his or her life, and then be just a very...
02:39:53.120No, it'll be out hopefully in January.
02:39:55.300So in the interim, you guys, all of these topics that we covered today are really important.
02:39:59.320So the Holocaust industry, we all know it's happening.
02:40:02.180Finally, we were at a circumstance where the people can go backwards and understand more about how that happened.
02:40:08.220And also Gaza, an inquest into its martyrdom.
02:40:10.760If you are just starting to realize something is very wrong and you need to independently educate yourself, that is a good place to start.
02:40:18.060And lastly, I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.
02:40:22.840And these are his heretical thoughts on identity politics, cancel culture and academic freedom.
02:40:26.740I'm sure some of this he and I disagree on and agree on.
02:40:30.620But what I will say is that one of my favorite things is that this issue is bringing people together from other sides and that that needs to happen.
02:40:40.120And we need to start allying ourselves and recognize whether you view yourself on the left or the right, doesn't matter.
02:40:45.460Do you follow goodness or do you follow evil at your core?
02:40:49.160Anything that you would like to add before we get you out of here?
02:41:19.060And there are many things I said today we didn't agree on.
02:41:22.700But I respect the fact that you were a good listener.
02:41:27.760And I would also say that if you disagree with me, Mr. Shapiro, Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, Van Jones, if you disagree with me, stop trying to, not in the case of Van Jones, but the others.
02:41:49.920Come up and just talk about, try to be Candace Owens.
02:41:57.880Listen, and then you can respond just like she did.
02:43:08.580And I'm appreciative, even though we come from very different corners of the political universe, that you gave me the time.
02:43:19.100And I remember somebody once said to me, she's a senior historian of Nazi Holocaust.
02:43:29.440She says, in judging a person, character is much more significant than ideology.
02:43:39.860You can have nasty people across the political spectrum.
02:43:46.420Character is a much better indicator of a person than his or her ideology.
02:43:54.360And I discovered that with Raoul Hilberg.
02:43:59.040Ideologically, polar ends of the spectrum.
02:44:02.200But the guy, he came out slugging for me.
02:44:06.380And that was a real, it was an epiphany for me.
02:44:11.400And I'm grateful that you gave me the time as well.
02:44:16.600And I'm grateful that we were able to do this in person.
02:44:19.620And I think there's going to be so many people who challenge themselves and make sure that they have the courage of their own convictions.
02:44:25.560So, you guys, so much to learn, so much to process, all of us just trying to make sure we know what we are saying and that the facts are on our side.
02:44:33.880So, thank you for joining us in this discussion.