Alan Dershowitz: Finkelstein's Bigotry
In her 1951 best seller, "The Groves of Academe," Mary McCarthy fictionalized a failed academic who, realizing he wouldn't get tenure, became a communist so that he could claim that he was being denied tenure because he was a Red rather than a lousy scholar.
A version of that ploy is being used today. Norman Finkelstein brags that "never has one of [his] articles been published in a scientific magazine." By his own account he has been fired by "every school in New York," including Brooklyn College, Hunter and NYU. His chairman at one of these colleges said that Mr. Finkelstein was fired for "incompetence," "mental instability" and "abuse" of students with politics different from his own. His prospects seemed bleak, so when radical Islamist Aminah McCloud -- a follower of Louis Farrakhan -- helped him land a job at DePaul, a school that Mr. Finkelstein describes as "a third-rate Catholic university," he accepted "exile."
His prospects did not improve when he wrote a screed against Holocaust survivors called "The Holocaust Industry." The scholar whose work on the Holocaust was the "stimulus" for this volume, University of Chicago professor Peter Novick, warned that: "No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites. . . .[S]uch an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention." Nor was he helped when New York Times reviewer Prof. Omer Bartov, an authority on genocide, characterized his book as "a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' . . . brimming with indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics . . . [I]ndecent . . . juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid."
On the other hand, Mr. Finkelstein is supported by hard-leftists like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn. They regard him as a scholar in a class with Ward Churchill (the Colorado professor who called the 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns") -- a characterization with which I would not quarrel.
Facing tenure denial, Mr. Finkelstein opted for a tactic that fit the times. He expressed views so ad hominem, unscholarly and extreme that he could claim the decision was being made not on the basis of his scholarship, but rather on his politics....
Read entire article at WSJ
A version of that ploy is being used today. Norman Finkelstein brags that "never has one of [his] articles been published in a scientific magazine." By his own account he has been fired by "every school in New York," including Brooklyn College, Hunter and NYU. His chairman at one of these colleges said that Mr. Finkelstein was fired for "incompetence," "mental instability" and "abuse" of students with politics different from his own. His prospects seemed bleak, so when radical Islamist Aminah McCloud -- a follower of Louis Farrakhan -- helped him land a job at DePaul, a school that Mr. Finkelstein describes as "a third-rate Catholic university," he accepted "exile."
His prospects did not improve when he wrote a screed against Holocaust survivors called "The Holocaust Industry." The scholar whose work on the Holocaust was the "stimulus" for this volume, University of Chicago professor Peter Novick, warned that: "No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites. . . .[S]uch an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention." Nor was he helped when New York Times reviewer Prof. Omer Bartov, an authority on genocide, characterized his book as "a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' . . . brimming with indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics . . . [I]ndecent . . . juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid."
On the other hand, Mr. Finkelstein is supported by hard-leftists like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn. They regard him as a scholar in a class with Ward Churchill (the Colorado professor who called the 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns") -- a characterization with which I would not quarrel.
Facing tenure denial, Mr. Finkelstein opted for a tactic that fit the times. He expressed views so ad hominem, unscholarly and extreme that he could claim the decision was being made not on the basis of his scholarship, but rather on his politics....