As reported by Campus Reform, Princeton’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) recently hosted a “Conversation on the Gaza Genocide with Norman Finkelstein & Chris Hedges.” I personally couldn’t pick either Norman or Chris out in a crowd of two, but Campus Reform noted this:

Finkelstein is a controversial anti-Israel speaker and the author of ‘The Holocaust Industry,’ a book asserting that Zionists ‘exploited the Holocaust’ for their own ends and ‘deploy it as a shield against any criticism.’

I’m sorry, say again?

CR also noted that Finkelstein took to X this past December to assert this:

Make no mistake about it.  In order to stifle dissent from Israel's genocidal war in Gaza, the Jewish billionaire class has launched the most concerted assault on academic freedom in the history of our country.

— Norman Finkelstein (@normfinkelstein) December 11, 2023

He added that “If the presidents at Ivy League universities are not safe from the wrath of these Jewish supremacists, then no one is, and academic freedom is dead.”

Wow, where to start?! First of all, I’m not sure anyone has ever used the words “Jewish” and “supremacists” together before. And I didn’t know there was a designated “Jewish billionaire class.” If there is, it certainly hasn’t launched any assault, concerted or otherwise, on academic freedom. Those who despise Israel and support Hamas, on the other hand, certainly have. On campuses across the fruited plain, pro-Hamas types have terrorized Jewish students, staged sit-ins, threatened college presidents, chased off and/or shouted down Jewish speakers, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Also, the Jews have been the victims of actual genocide, and are not engaged in that behavior themselves. In fact, the IDF has gone to such great pains to avoid civilian casualties (even though most “Palestinians” would like to see them wiped off the face of the planet) that it has achieved the lowest civilian to soldier casualty ratio in the history of urban warfare.

But the kicker, perhaps the most preposterous assertion in recorded history, is Finkelstein’s claim that Zionists have “exploited the Holocaust.”

Those dirty Zionist exploiters! It’s just like them to take advantage of 6 million of their own kin being exterminated! Two-thirds of them were wiped off the face of the earth and suddenly they get all defensive and uppity! I mean, the unmitigated gall!

Apparently Finkelstein and Hedges are unclear on the concept of “exploitation.” If the Jews/Zionists “exploited” the Holocaust, the U.S. “exploited” Pearl Harbor and the Baltic states exploited being forcefully occupied by the Soviet Union.

Image: Alisdare Hickson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr, unaltered.