Simon Wiesenthal

BBC

Simon Wiesenthal was known as a Nazi hunter, but his life's work went far beyond justice for justice's sake.

Interactivist Info Exchange

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.

Quite apart from this being a false accusation, and quite apart from the fact that Finkelstein's book is a rational, very well researched book, as anyone who has read it will know, quite apart from all that, Finkelstein was in this case being sued for expressing his opinion. It seems freedom of speech is fine for some, but not for all.