In his recent book, 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real', famed Slovenian socialist intellectual Slavoj Zizek tackles the Palestinian question in a mo… - Joseph Massad

Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry is a short but important and necessary addendum that advances important critiques of Novick and makes its own contribution to the debate by discussing aspects that Novick did not include.

It was the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, who provided the Israelis with their best propaganda linking the Palestinians with the Nazis and European anti-Semitism. Fleeing British persecution, the mufti ended up in Germany during the war years and attempted to obtain promises from the Germans that they would not support the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Documents that the Jewish Agency produced in 1946 purporting to show that the mufti had a role in the extermination of Jews did no such thing; the only thing these unsigned letters by the mufti showed was his opposition to Nazi Germany's and Romania's allowing Jews to emigrate to Palestine.

In keeping with the Protestant Reformation's abduction of the Hebrew bible into its new religion and its positing of modern European Jews as direct descendants of the Ancient Hebrews, post-Enlightenment haters of Jews began to identify Jews as "Semites" on account of their alleged ancestors having spoken Hebrew. In fact the ancient Hebrews spoke Aramaic, the language in which the Talmud was written, as well as parts of the bible.