Shoulda just put him back on a plane out of Israle quietly and discreetly. Finker would make himself out as aghast and melodramatize it either way... but this is what the loser wants the golden chance to take himself out of obscurity again and brand himself for 1000th time (after explaining how modest he is first) the "brave martyr for truth and justice" who does what he does not for attention, grandiosity or ego but for "you and I".... for the downtrodden...

Btw, while I'm at it did you see Buchanan's latest statement Charles cited... it's like his real colors are coming out with no dressing or compunction now in his old age and times more ripe for him again.. he's likely dying to just say it already.. ya think he's got a perfectly pressed Nazi authentic in his closet that he admires??

Yeah, I saw it. Pat has issues. I was going to mention the piece but didn't want to just do it in passing. What he talks about in that piece deserves some serious refutation.

That is good.

Do you have the details for the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, Congress and the State Department so we can send thanks?

Finkelstein's endorsement of Hezbollah, comparing them to the Anti-Nazi Resistance in WWII was an obscene and historically unsupportable last straw.

His work is on the bookshelf with pride of place in every Nazi and antisemite library on the planet yet he saves his venom for Israel.

You cannot hate him enough.

"Finkelstein, who is Jewish and the son of Holocaust survivors, has written critical books on Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories and on what he called 'exploitation' of the Jewish tragedy during World War II."

Note, he has written "critical" books. What a laugh! I guess saying that there is a "holocaust industry" and that Israel has no right to exist qualifies as "criticism."

This is good news, and it's a good idea not to give him any ammunition he can twist around. But, as bad as this sick perverted "Jew" is, the real threats are the corrupt Olmert, along with Barak and Livni, who are itching to give away the West Bank and the Golan. If they get their way, all of Israel will be turned into Sderot.

I wish there were a YouTube video of Kapo Norman Finkelstein being arrested and seeing him sputter.

He could have been kept in detention in Sderot.

I'm guessing that he may eventually show up in Hamasstan.

Joanne, note how every single story written by his supporters, this guy who never misses an opportunity to castigate others for abusing the Holocaust and undoubtedly has no current Jewish identity to speak of, every single one emphasizes that he's a Jew and son of Holocaust survivors.

Finkelstein’s main beef with Jews is that they cynically and dishonestly invoke the Holocaust, to promote their own interests. What would those interests be? Lining their pockets with German blood money and immunizing Israel from criticism about its treatment of Palestinians.

How do they achieve these aims?

By carping upon the horrors of the Holocaust, keeping the memory alive, emotionally blackmailing poor, guilt-stricken Germans into giving more money to Jewish claims.

In other words, he claims that these tactics are a fallacy, Argumentum ad misericordiam (argument or appeal to pity). There is nothing morally wrong in using appeal to pity in order to argue for the benefits of a certain policy. The Holocaust did happen, it was as horrendous as it is described, and seeking reparations is one way of addressing the injustice.

Finkelstein places the allegation that the Holocaust industry is based on a logical fallacy at the core of his thesis. Yet, in contradiction to his own declared distaste for the “appeal to pity”, he keeps referring, repeatedly, to the fact that his parents are Holocaust survivors.

Why does he do that?

Because in his opinion, it gives him moral authority or leverage: here is a son of Holocaust survivors who is brave enough to stare down Holocaust industrialists, like Elie Wiesel and his minions. As when he says in the following examples:

“[A]ny temptation to "indulge in a bout of self-pity," he [Finkelstein] said, was halted by thinking of his parents, who survived the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi death camps while the rest of his relatives were exterminated. "They survived," he said. "I'll survive."

"Because she's an Eichmann-like bureaucrat currying favour with the powerful while blandly following orders. Were my mother still around, I am quite sure - I mean this literally - she would have taken the first train to Cambridge and - just as she did with the Nazi guards from Maidanek when confronting them at the postwar trial in Dusseldorf in 1979 - called Kagan a whore to her face and then throttled her."

And then there is this:

“Afterward, Finkelstein says, he lost seventeen pounds. “People saw me wasting away,” he says. A student group held a hunger strike; Chomsky and others defended him. One of his colleagues made him a mix CD with tracks like “I Will Survive” and “What’s Goin’ On?” “I’m an old fan of the Negro spirituals,” Finkelstein says. “I was going around singing to myself, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there?’ That’s how I felt. I was being crucified by the end.”

His “persecution” manifests itself in physical symptoms, visually reminiscent of the extremely thin apparitions that greeted American liberators of the concentration camps. This is a pathological attempt to create equivalence between his situation and that of Holocaust survivors. It is the worst, most macabre kind of “fetishization of balance” that I have seen.

Why is he doing this? Why is he invoking his personal memory of the Holocaust when he so rigorously castigates others for doing the same?

Because it serves his interests, his quest for political and academic influence and a secure source of income, because he cannot discuss any aspect of Holocaust without this personal dimension.

An appeal to pity may not be aesthetically pleasing but it is morally acceptable. However, if you castigate others for resorting to that fallacy, you ought to make damn sure that your own discourse will be clear of any trace of that same distasteful practice. Which is where I locate Finkelstein’s hypocrisy.

I was going to e-mail you my thoughts on this, but you're way ahead of me.

Good, it's about time.

Israel shows once again it is a out of control criminal state with lots to hide. Nothing democratic about it.

This might be worth checking out.

Benny Morris .vs. norman finkelstein on "Democracy Now". MP3 and transcript.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/16/as_israelis_celebrate_independence_and_palestinians

Benny Morris takes norman to task on the ultra left wing "Democracy Now".

#9 Solomon

note how every single story written by his supporters, this guy who never misses an opportunity to castigate others for abusing the Holocaust and undoubtedly has no current Jewish identity to speak of, every single one emphasizes that he's a Jew and son of Holocaust survivors.

The claim of Jewishness is supposed to lend the speaker an air of authority and innoculate them against charges of antisemitism. The Finkster's acolytes cite his being Jewish and his 2g connection to the Shoah for precisely those reasons. As with the Fink, it's a fair bet they have no connection to the Jewish community or to Judaism. Their "Jewishness" is simply the accident of having been born to Jewish parents.

The Ha'aretz piece about this said that The Fink recently left DePaul University because of pressure on the university by Zionists, including Alan Dershowitz.

Makes it sound like he had to go because of a personal vendetta by his nemesis Dersh and the power of the Israel lobby. Gives a gloss of it having been his idea to leave. No mention of his being denied tenure, of his sloppy scholarship or of his badmouthing DePaul.

Sure, when he came up for tenure, lots of people piled on and sent opinions to DePaul's President, but it's absurd to suggest that DePaul caved into pressure from the Jews, that there weren't plenty of reasons to deny tenure and very few for granting it. Unless, of course, you believe that the nefarious Elders of Zion manipulated events behind the scene.

So it's really Finkelstein who abuses the Holocaust, by milking whatever moral capital he can from the fact that he's of Jewish descent and the son of survivors.

Well done to Israel