Wednesday, April 11, 2007
There is a petition circulating to deny tenure to Norman Finkelstein, an academic whose support for terrorists and hatred for the United States and Israel (much like his mentor, Noam Chomsky) borders on the pathological, and whose rhetoric is so extreme that were it not for the way he hides behind the quirk of his Jewish family background he would have been written off as a neo-Nazi crank long ago. Among certain sectors of the Left, however, status is everything, and anything can be overlooked if your background and extremist politics mesh. Finkelstein should be producing ideological hand-bills on a hand-cranked printing press in someone's basement, not be up for tenure.
No Tenure for Dr. Norman Finkelstein
We Urge DePaul University not to grant tenure to Dr. Norman Finkelstein.
Academics across the political spectrum have demonstrated that Dr. Finkelstein’s work does not meet even elementary academic standards.
His “assertions are pure invention… 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.†[University of Chicago historian Peter Novick, ‘Offene Fenster und Tueren,’ Sueddeutsche Zeitung, February 7, 2001]
“Finkelstein’s work is, from beginning to end, a tendentious series of inventions…†[Historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, at www.goldhagen.com/csiz2.html.]
Instead of engaging in reasonable and respectful debate, Dr. Finkelstein defames and demonizes scholars and others who disagree with him. He called Holocaust survivor, Nobel Prize winner Ellie Wiesel a ’resident clown of the Holocaust circus†and “a ridiculous character.â€
In our opinion, Finkelstein’s association with DePaul University will damage DePaul’s reputation. DePaul will be seen as a school that fosters irresponsible scholarship, extremism and childish, hateful debate.
We will be very troubled if Dr. Finkelstein’s coterie of supporters intimidates DePaul into granting an undeserved tenure.
We trust that DePaul will reach an informed decision.
Sincerely,
Shouldn't a University strive to build a faculty of the best and the brightest? If so, why would you give tenure to a Holocaust denier, unless you too deny or trivialize the Holocaust.
Sol, how do I sign this petition? By the way, NF was raised by a mother who was a Communist, according to my info. Naturally, Commies are going to support Nazis [as in the Nazi-Soviet Pact] and smear Jews as Nazis.
To Olga Felmanova, NF does not exactly deny the Holocaust. Rather, he claims that Jews "exploit" it for Zionist purposes against the ever innocent panamanian [palestinian?] Arabs. One problem with that argument --besides its cruelty and moral ugliness-- is that most of the Arab nationalist movement in the Nazi period were pro-Nazi [including Nasser & Sadat] and that the leader of the palestinian Arabs, Haj Amin el-Husseini [British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem], lived in the Nazi-fascist domain during WW2 and collaborated with the Nazi, raising troops among Muslims [also in the USSR & Yugoslavia] and making propaganda over the radio. He also urged the Germans to kill more Jews faster, prevented the release of Jewish children from the Nazi-fascist domain, and urged Hitler to extend the Holocaust to the Jews in Arab countries.
Getting back to the NFinkelstein dispute, Prof Ralph Luker [at History News Network site's Cliopatria blog] has been giving NF the martyr sympathetic coverage. When I called NF a Nazi Luker accused me of libel, and disputed me, saying that NF had not called for killing Jews. I said that that was immaterial, since Hitler and the other German Nazis did not call for killing Jews either. What they did was to defame and smear Jews. They portrayed Jews as quintessentially evil, and therefore as a group that could justifiably be slaughtered. NF does the same. So if it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, then what is it? After several days of exchanges on this issue, Luker removed all comments on the matter, mine, his own, and those of others. He also threatened to exclude me from commenting on the HNN site. He repeated this threat when I called Tariq Ramadan "disingenuous" in a response to another of Luker's posts. Luker complained that that too was "defaming." Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, had claimed in a televised lecture for persons at Georgetown U [I believe it was Georgetown] that Islam agreed with the five basic principles of democracy. Luker thought that TR should be allowed into the USA to preach. But my comments on NFinkelstein were erased.
It's been my impression in the past that Luker probably feels he's protecting the ivory tower from the rabble.
You should be able to use either link in the entry to go to the petition and click the button that says, "Click Here to Sign Petition".
http://www.petitiononline.com/SWU1234/petition.html
Dr. Finkelstein, having been stymied in his attempt to be promoted, has turned the entire promotion process into an internet circus. Whatever the merits of his promotion qualifications may be, he has chosen to use a campaign of online intimidation to achieve his goal. This alone is sufficient to make it clear that he is not worthy of promotion, and frankly should be dismissed from the faculty.
I heartily endorse tenure for Dr. Norman Finkelstein as he is one of the few academics with the courage and integrity to speak the truth about the Middle East conflict in regards to Israel and Palestine.