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The Propagandist and the Prop: Owens and Finkelstein’s Moral Collusion
Candace Owens speaks at CPAC on March 2, 2023. Photo: Lev Radin via Reuters Connect
There are moments in public life when hypocrisy reaches perfect symmetry — when two people so warped by self-righteous delusion collide in mutual validation. The recent conversation between Candace Owens and Norman Finkelstein was one of those moments.
Owens — a professional provocateur who built her career on conspiracies — interviewed Finkelstein, the self-anointed warrior against Israel who insists he’s “not anti-Zionist, just anti-Israel.” She promoted their exchange on X with the line: “Zionism is an illness that perverts.”
However, the true illness that perverts is anti-Zionism itself: a moral virus that twists history, corrodes empathy, and reanimates ancient hatreds under the guise of virtue.
The Cynical Convergence
Norman Finkelstein, by his own account, is the child of Holocaust survivors. His mother endured the Warsaw Ghetto and Majdanek; his father survived Auschwitz. He has invoked that legacy for decades — wielding it as moral license to attack Israel and claim immunity from criticism. He says his parents’ suffering made him “hate injustice,” that he “abhors antisemitism,” and that his opposition is merely to Israel’s “occupation of land seized in 1967.”
That might sound principled — until you see him sitting across from Candace Owens, a figure who traffics in the very antisemitic conspiracies his parents barely survived.
Owens is not merely “controversial.” She has repeatedly flirted with Holocaust denial and revisionism. She once argued that Hitler’s only mistake was wanting to “globalize.” She’s defended Kanye West’s antisemitic tirades as “honest questioning.” She’s suggested that medieval blood libels — the slander that Jews murdered Christian children for their blood — “might not be myths.” She’s even referred to Gaza as a “real Holocaust,” trivializing the murder of over six million Jews, including nearly all of Finkelstein’s extended family.
Owens has also promoted the classic conspiracy that “Zionists control media and finance” — the same poison that fueled centuries of pogroms. And now, she calls Zionism “an illness.” If words mean anything, this is the language of dehumanization — the rhetoric that has always paved the road to persecution and genocide in Jewish history.
The Useful Survivor
Finkelstein, of all people, should know that history. Yet he willingly lent his name, his intellect, and his parents’ memory to a propagandist who is leading the way in making antisemitism fashionable again.
The man who has spent his career accusing others of exploiting the Holocaust handed moral credibility to a woman who treats Jewish suffering as a punchline and a political prop.
It’s a tragic irony. Finkelstein’s life’s work — railing against what he calls “the Holocaust industry” — has itself become an act of exploitation. His parents’ story has become his brand. And by sitting with Owens, he didn’t just betray that story — he turned it into content. He handed the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz to someone who denies what they meant.
Owens’s worldview is a conspiracy buffet: the “globalists,” the “elites,” the “Zionists,” the “Deep State.” Interchangeable villains for interchangeable hatreds. And now, the man who once prided himself on purportedly exposing propaganda has become its instrument.
The Familiar Script
Owens rails against Zionism, but the sickness isn’t in Zionism — it’s in the movement that demonizes it. Zionism is the national liberation movement of an indigenous people returning home. Anti-Zionism is the ideology that seeks to strip that people of sovereignty, identity, and safety — and to call that “justice.”
It’s the oldest trick in the antisemite’s book — a sleight of hand that turns survival into sin. For centuries, Jews were accused of being both cosmopolitan schemers and insular separatists, both capitalist exploiters and communist subversives. Now, they are labeled “invaders” and “colonizers” — in their own ancestral homeland.
The target shifts; the obsession endures. The aim is always the same: to make Jews and Jewish existence itself appear illegitimate.
When Owens speaks of “Zionism as an illness,” she echoes the language of Soviet propagandists and 20th-century autocrats who used “Zionist” as code for “Jew.” And when Finkelstein nods along, he ceases to be her foil. He becomes her accomplice.
Anti-Zionism’s Moral Collapse
This encounter underscores what has long been true: that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not distant cousins — they are twins. Anti-Zionism borrows antisemitism’s architecture — the myth of the uniquely evil, globally manipulative Jew — and transfers it from the individual to the collective, from the Jew to the Jewish State. The object of hate changes; the pathology remains.
Finkelstein insists he abhors antisemitism, yet he refuses to recognize it when it hides behind the language of “anti-imperialism” or “human rights.” He confuses moral inversion for moral insight. His blind spot isn’t ignorance — it’s arrogance. And Owens, ever the opportunist, exploited that arrogance to launder her bigotry through the mouth of a Jew.
The True Illness
Despite what Owens may say about Zionism, her anti-Zionism is the true illness. It distorts truth, history, and conscience. It twists the children of survivors into apologists for those who seek their people’s destruction. It turns moral language into a weapon for erasure.
Candace Owens embodies that illness. Norman Finkelstein enables it. Together, they form the perfect symbiosis of hate and ego — the propagandist and the prop, each reflecting and amplifying the other’s lie.
The question isn’t whether they believe what they say. It’s whether the rest of us, knowing our history, have the courage to call their performance what it is: a collaboration in the oldest hatred — repackaged as moral critique, and streamed for profit.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.
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He photographed the defining image of 9/11 – and Jewish history for 50 years
Robert Cumins stood on his ninth-floor balcony in Verona, New Jersey, camera in hand, when he saw a plane heading toward Lower Manhattan. He figured it was just another flight out of Newark. He snapped two quick frames anyway — a plane against a skyline, nothing more — and kept watching.
Then came the fireball.
He had no idea, in that instant, that he had already taken the photograph that would define his career — that he was, in fact, photographing the last seconds of the 65 people aboard United Airlines Flight 175, en route from Boston to Los Angeles. He wouldn’t even remember the plane was in the frame until he saw the developed film an hour later. For that hour, he believed he only photographed the explosion, not the moments before.
Twenty-five years on, Cumins, now 78, still lives in that apartment. He still faces the same skyline — a skyline he has spent 25 years learning not to search for two towers that are no longer part of it.
That photograph made Cumins famous. It is one entry — the most-viewed one, certainly — in a career now entering its sixth decade, a career that has put him, again and again, at the edge of history he did not make.
He straightened Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s bow tie backstage, 10 days before the prime minister was assassinated, then flew to Israel to photograph his funeral. He spent 10 days documenting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. He stood close enough to photograph the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Camp David Accords, the Israel-Jordan peace treaty — three of the defining diplomatic moments of the modern Middle East.
Call him the Forrest Gump of Jewish history.
‘Turn around, kid’
Cumins’ workday on the morning of September 11, 2001, started with a red light.
He was driving down the hill from his apartment, headed out for coffee, when he stopped at the bottom and, out of habit, flipped on the radio. A WCBS helicopter reporter was already mid-report, something about a tower. By the time the light turned green, an anchor had cut in with the words: the World Trade Center.
Cumins turned the car around. He drove back up the hill. The elevator was sitting there, waiting. He rode up to the ninth floor. Before he was all the way inside his apartment, he could already see smoke pouring off the North Tower, 15 miles across the water. He ran for his camera, loading film and changing lenses as he crossed the living room toward the balcony.
He got there at 9:03 a.m. — four and a half minutes after the stoplight turned green. He’s gone over that stretch of time so often he can repeat it without thinking. A slower elevator, and he never gets the shot.
Cumins believes it was his mother, who died about a month before 9/11, who led the way. “Sometimes I say it was a spiritual thing,” he said. “She was watching over me at that red light. ‘Turn around, kid. This is big.’”
A convertible and a Kinko’s
By the time Cumins got his film to the photo lab in New Milford, he had already forgotten about the plane entirely. The fireball, he remembered — that part was impossible to forget. The plane itself, the thing he’d actually pointed his camera at, was gone from his mind completely.
Cumins stood over the technician’s shoulder as the scanner worked backward through the roll of Kodak film — 19 frames total — hunting for the explosion. They found it. Then he asked to see the beginning of the roll.
The first frame showed the plane against the skyline, smoke already rising from the first tower. In the next, a red dot flared just above the plane’s tail. Then came the explosion. The moment took three frames of film. Getting the picture to an editor took the rest of the day.
Cumins called his agent, who reached an editor at People — the magazine wanted the image immediately, as large as he could send it. Cumins had an AOL account with a 16-megabyte limit. Every file he tried to send bounced back, too big.
He hopped in his Audi TT convertible, top up, and sped to a Kinko’s on Route 3 in Clifton, and spent the day with a store clerk, the two of them trying to coax something too large through a connection too small. Confirmation came at 9 p.m., just ahead of deadline. The photo ran on People’s cover as a double-page foldout.
The top of his car stayed closed for weeks after that. “I could not bring myself to put down the roof,” Cumins said, “to enjoy the simple pleasures of light and fresh air during such a dark time.”
Documenting modern Jewish history
Cumins built a career on trust. At 14, he sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy’s press secretary asking to visit Washington. The press secretary said yes. It wouldn’t be the last time a powerful person said yes to him.
It was almost by accident that his persuasiveness led him into Jewish photography at all. In 1970, a colleague asked him to shoot a Jewish Federation breakfast in Miami. His first Jewish communal assignment — a parlor meeting in a private home in Elizabeth, New Jersey — followed a few months later. It was the first of hundreds. Over the next five decades, he photographed scores of events and made roughly 250 trips to Israel, building trust as he went.
In 1988, that trust bought him 10 days inside Yitzhak Shamir’s daily life — meetings and meals, including moments when no one else was in the room. “He was very kind to me,” Cumins recalled. The photographs ran in The New York Times Magazine, in Life and in newspapers across the globe.
In October 1995, Cumins was backstage at a black-tie reception in Washington when he noticed Yitzhak Rabin’s borrowed bow tie had come loose from his collar. Cumins walked over and fixed it. “I had spent a lot of time previously with Rabin,” he said. “Otherwise, I would never have gotten near his neck.”
Ten days later, Rabin was assassinated. Cumins flew to Israel and back in a single day to photograph the funeral — soldiers saluting the casket, an aide reading from the blood-stained speech recovered from Rabin’s jacket. Two weeks before, at that reception in Washington, he’d photographed President Bill Clinton and Leah Rabin laughing together. Now he photographed Clinton consoling her as a widow — two photos, worlds apart, taken by the same man.
Even after 9/11 made him famous, Cumins kept doing what he had always done. He signed on as one of Hillary Clinton’s photographers during her first Senate campaign. After she won, he asked to come along, at his own expense, when she made her first trip to Israel as senator. He wanted total access. He got it, as he generally did.
On that trip in 2002, in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s office, Clinton introduced Cumins to those gathered: “Mr. Cumins, he took the great picture of 9/11,” she said. Later that trip, at a dinner in Tel Aviv, Cumins caught a quiet moment between Clinton and Shimon Peres, one of his more striking portraits.
‘Split second of innocence’
Somewhere along the way, the work of chronicling history gave way to the work of storing it.
What’s left of his archive now sits in a couple of private storage units in New Jersey — roughly 600 square feet of file cabinets and boxes, labeled by project, holding a record of Jewish and Middle East history that exists nowhere else. It has cost what Cumins describes as “a fortune” over the years. He’s hoping a philanthropist will buy the collection and gift it to an institution built to care for things longer than any one person can. He hasn’t found one yet.
In the meantime, he’s still in the same ninth-floor apartment in Verona, still facing the same Manhattan skyline. He photographs it constantly — beautiful sunrises and sunsets, weather rolling in over the water — and he says there’s almost always a plane somewhere in the frame, whether he’s trying to catch one or not.
Cumins has a phrase for what he photographed 25 years ago: “the final split second of innocence” this country ever had. Between the first plane and the second, there were 17 minutes in which the country still believed, or wanted to believe, that this might be an accident.
Then reality hit. The U.S. was under attack. Life would never be the same, especially for the man who captured that moment in history.
Some photographs you take. Others, it turns out, take you — and don’t ever quite let go.
The post He photographed the defining image of 9/11 – and Jewish history for 50 years appeared first on The Forward.
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Portuguese artists pull out of Jerry Seinfeld-headlined festival
(JTA) — Several Portuguese artists have dropped out of a comedy festival in Lisbon headlined by Jerry Seinfeld, citing their support for Palestinians and implying opposition to Seinfeld’s support for Israel.
At least six acts over recent days have canceled their appearances at the MEO Commedia a La Carte Fest, a new international comedy festival in the Portuguese capital. The event from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1 has advertised that it will host Seinfeld’s first live appearance in Portugal.
Though none of the artists who withdrew mentioned Seinfeld by name, some hinted at a boycott against his pro-Israel views. The Jewish comedian has become one of Hollywood’s most prominent advocates for Israel since October 2023.
Actress and comedian Inês Aires Pereira announced on Instagram on Saturday that “one of the names” featured at the festival “persistently defends ideas and acts that I consider indefensible,” adding, “We cannot relativize or normalize a genocide.”
The comedy duo Cebola Mol posted a graphic of themselves with a watermelon, widely recognized as a symbol of solidarity with Palestinians. “We will celebrate justice, freedom and joy with you on another occasion,” they said on Instagram.
The festival announced on Friday that performances by the groups Tributo Pop and Conjunto Cuca Monga were also canceled, but did not provide reasons. Two other acts, comedian Pedro Tochas and visual artist Vhils, shared their cancellations on Instagram without further details.
Seinfeld has aligned himself with Israel during its current conflict in Gaza, following decades of largely avoiding commenting on political issues. He visited Israel in December 2023 to meet with the families of hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7 of that year. Since then, he has attracted attention for a series of dismissive remarks toward pro-Palestinian advocates.
During an appearance last year at Duke University, Seinfeld compared pro-Palestinian activists with the Ku Klux Klan, saying, “The Klan is actually a little better here because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ OK, that’s honest.”
Representatives of Seinfeld and producers of the MEO Commedia a La Carte Fest did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The post Portuguese artists pull out of Jerry Seinfeld-headlined festival appeared first on The Forward.
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UK, France, Canada to ban goods from Israeli settlements
(JTA) —
The United Kingdom, France and Canada will ban goods produced in the West Bank settlements and Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Parliament on Tuesday, explaining that all such communities were deemed by his country to be illegal.
The declaration exacerbated the rising tensions riling the traditionally strong Israel-U.K. alliance. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned that these steps stoked antisemitism against British Jews in an on-camera statement to reporters in Jerusalem.
Sa’ar charged that the measures were a politicized hostile action deliberately taken ahead of Friday’s Jewish New Year holiday, with an eye toward influencing the country’s Oct. 27 elections.
Israel, he said, is responding by closing the British Consulate in Jerusalem that services Palestinians. It will also remove British representatives from the International Gaza Support Center in Kiryat Gat and halt the British training of Palestinian Authority security forces. He added that Israel would bar the entry of 12 British politicians and other nationals involved in anti-Israel activity.
France and Canada have also announced a ban on the import of settlement goods, Miliband told parliament. He noted that the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Spain and Norway have either banned goods or in the process of doing so.
In the same address, Miliband affirmed Israel’s right to exist, reflected on his own Jewish roots and rejected the notion that there was a connection between the policy steps against West Bank settlement activity and the safety of British Jews.
What is motivating the U.K., Miliband said, is “a deep sense of shame about what has unfolded in Palestine under the eyes of the international community” as well as Israel’s “clear intent to bury the Palestinian state.”
In response, he said, the U.K. “will introduce an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied [Palestinian] territory” as part of a “new comprehensive sanctions regime” that will be put in place within nine months.
This will include, he said, “action against specific companies and individuals who provide services, such as construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.”
To those who “finance or facilitate illegal settlements, let me say this, you will face the full force of U.K. sanctions,” Miliband warned.
Miliband clarified that the ban would not affect the export of religious items or life-saving Israeli medications. He explained that trade with the settlements was minimal and that the greater impact would be the sanctions on services.
As part of declaring the ban, Miliband said that the British government is also adopting the International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion that all Israeli settlement activity over the pre-1967 border was illegal.
But others in Parliament pushed back against Miliband’s declaration. MP Richard Tice of Britain’s right-wing Reform party said that the sanctions were a grave mistake that would “embolden the scourge of antisemitism against British Jews on British streets,” endanger ties with the United States and lead to “tit for tat” sanctions from Israel.
Miliband shot back that “no British Jew is responsible for the policies of the Israeli government and it behooves all of us to make sure that there can be no confusion about that,” saying that Tice’s statement “fell foul” of that goal.
The U.K. action is the latest escalation in tensions between Israel and the Labour-led British government headed by Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who took power in July.
The prior government, led by former Labour Premier Keir Starmer, had already angered Israel by recognizing Palestinian statehood in 2025, suspending licenses for the export of arms to Israel and freezing talks toward a free-trade agreement.
France and Canada are also announcing a ban on the import of settlement goods, Miliband told parliament. He explained that the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Spain, and Norway have either banned goods or in the process of doing so.
In concert with Miliband’s appearance at Parliament, Britain and 11 other countries issued a joint statement pledging “their intention to introduce national and/or support European restrictions on trade in goods with settlements which are illegal under international law.”
Those other countries were Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.
The 12-country bloc said it was taking this step to maintain the viability of the two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, describing the situation in the West Bank as “rapidly deteriorating.”
In its statement, the bloc stressed that it was taking this step amid an “unprecedented level of settler violence and settlement expansion, including the unacceptable decision to publish tenders for the E1 settlement project.” That project is seen as cutting through land that would render a Palestinian state unviable.
The post UK, France, Canada to ban goods from Israeli settlements appeared first on The Forward.
