Disgrace at De Paul

Bad news. Professor Norman Finkelstein has been denied tenure by De Paul University.

A professor and scholar as widely published and famous as Finkelstein would ordinarily have achieved tenure without a ripple on the sea of academe. In this case, however, a routine tenure proceeding was transformed into a cause celebre by Zionists -- in particular the infamous Alan Dershowitz -- who hate Prof. Finkelstein because he, although a Jew, has been openly critical of Israel and of the misuse of the "holocaust industry". What makes the thing even more appelling is that neither Derschowitz nor his confederates, if any, were connected with De Paul University!

The tenure proceeding became, pure and simple, an ideological battleground between a fanatically pro-Israel propagandist and the voices of truth and reason. It is astonishing that although the advocates of truth and reason far outnumbered the intruding Zionists, and the Zionists blatantly mischaracterized Prof. Finkelstein's writings, the Derschowitz pressure, or extortion, or whatever it was, caused a top man or two at De Paul to cave in and deny Prof. Finkelstein a permanent position.

The result is a total defeat of academic freedom. Shame on those at De Paul University who brought this disgrace on their institution!

Below I re-post my explanation of the case:


'Alan Dershowitz, the fanatically pro-Israel Zionist activist operating out of Harvard, has been outrageously intervening to prevent Professor Norman Finkelstein from successfully obtaining tenure at De Paul University.

'Dershowitz has no connection with De Paul, just as he had no connection with Brandeis University when he undertook to sabotage former President Jimmy Carters’ scheduled speech there. Dershowitz’s motivation in both cases was the same: Prof. Finkelstein and Carter wrote books criticizing Israel.

'I can say from reading both Dershowitz and Finkelstein that Finkelstein is far more honest and scholarly than Dershowitz. Indeed the words "honest" and "scholarly" do not apply to Dershowitz at all. The libelous things which Dershowitz has been saying about Finkelstein in his campaign to prevent the professor's tenure make me smile because they are all applicable to Dershowitz himself!

'Unfortunately, although the whole acadamic world (except Zionists) seems to be expressing support for Finkelstein and disgust with Dershowitz, my impression is that the only person at De Paul University who is opposed to the tenure is one of the two individuals who can prevent it.'

Back Again to More of the Same

After an unplanned and unintended leave of absence from VIEW FROM THE MOON, I find that nothing has really changed in the Wonderland of U.S. news except that, since my last report, Paul Wolfowitz has attained a few headlines on wire services and has even been mentioned on at least one evening television report. Of course he is still a great guy as far as the United States government is concerned, in spite of his having engineered a disastrous U.S. war, for which he was rewarded with promotion to the presidency of the World Bank. I get the impression that although his popularity with the Zionists and the mass of Israel supporters (and therefore most of the American press) is undiluted, the great reservoir of enmity toward him has reached the overflow point. Along with case histories of Jewish malefactors who have been supported by influential Jews, it would be interesting to analyze the rare cases in which someone like Wolfowitz begins to be abandoned by his tribe and the communications media. Has something made Paul Wolfowitz less immune to public criticism than other Jewish men in comparable cases? Whatever the answer, I predict that if Wolfowitz is forced to leave the World Bank he will be provided with a well-feathered nest in another place.


The question of Paul Finkelstein’s tenure is still up in the air as far as I can tell. As I reported, the fanatically Zionist showboater Alan Dershowitz has made every effort to interfere in the affairs of a university with which he has no connection by opposing Professor Finkelstein’s tenure in the most outrageous and inappropriate ways. The reason, of course, is that Finkelstein, even though Jewish, has written books criticizing Israel. If he is refused tenure, he faces – because of his defiance of Jewish causes – the possibility of being fired . . . an avenue down which Dershowitz is sure to lead a loud parade. Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz himself, far from suffering job insecurity, will in addition to his Harvard law professorship be rewarded with a job at an Israeli educational institution. Dershowitz will be joining The Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya during the 2007-2008) academic year. (Herzliya is a town in Israel near Tel Aviv.) Dershowitz will teach a special class entitled "Law & Terrorism" at IDC Herzliya's Radzyner School of Law. He will, according to an Israeli newspaper, join some of “the greatest legal minds in Israel”, while the U.S., I venture to add, will lose one of its more feeble legal minds.

I will try to attune myself again to world events and write something interesting for this blog, but meanwhile it does seem that we are in a slow period in which the U.S. news simply repeats the same predictable tales every day: Democrats too cowardly to stop Iraq war funding; Republican administration too dastardly to allow a law which might end the war next year. Court Jester and titular Attorney General Alberto Gonzales still clowning, taking his act to the Senate Judiciary Committee where laughter at his performance could be heard even in the corridors outside the hearing room. Israel continuing to murder, kidnap, and torture Palestinians every day without American publicity or protest. An Iranian diplomat released after being kidnapped by American force in Iraq bearing clear marks of torture, including holes drilled into his feet, but dropping from the U.S. news in about twenty minutes. Iran for some reason being allowed a quiet period, but the Wolfowitz/Bush war in Iraq unfailingly killing large numbers of people every day – including more and more of those American troops we are supposed to “support” by keeping them there to be killed.

Speaking of stopping funding of the Iraq war, which the American voters have said they want ended immediately, how much money can it take to carry out the order, “Turn around the tanks and trucks and head for the nearest border”?

Darth Dershowitz Returns

I just learned when I looked at the blog Filasteen that Alan Dershowitz, the fanatically pro-Israel Zionist activist operating out of Harvard, has been outrageously intervening to prevent Professor Norman Finkelstein from successfully obtaining tenure at De Paul University.

Dershowitz has no connection with De Paul, just as he had no connection with Brandeis University when he undertook to sabotage former President Jimmy Carters’ scheduled speech there. Dershowitz’s motivation in both cases was the same: Prof. Finkelstein and Carter wrote books criticizing Israel. (Please click on "Finkelstein" and "Dershowitz" in this blog's Labels to see all that I've already written on Dershowitz.)

If you are interested in academic freedom and freedom of speech generally, please look at this story and support Prof. Finkelstein in any way you can. I can say from reading both Dershowitz and Finkelstein that Finkelstein is far more honest and scholarly than Dershowitz. Indeed the words "honest" and "scholarly" do not apply to Dershowitz at all. The libelous things which Dershowitz has been saying about Finkelstein in his campaign to prevent the professor's tenure make me smile because they are all applicable to Dershowitz himself!

Unfortunately, although the whole acadamic world (except Zionists) seems to be expressing support for Finkelstein and disgust with Dershowitz, my impression is that the only person at De Paul University who is opposed to the tenure is one of the two individuals who can prevent it. The decision may already have been made. Let's hope that it is a favorable one.

Here is a >link to a relevant portion of Prof. Finkelstein’s website. There’s also a link to his webpage on my blogroll.

A Solidarity Campaign” “in favor of Professor Finkelstein is online with links to a lot of information.

Another informative article

The Persistence of Dishonesty

The advertisement below sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it? But read on. The ad is an astonishing piece of misrepresentation:

****
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53865

“Jan 27, 2006

“JOAN PETERS TO MAKE RARE APPEARANCE

"Author of 'FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL' to address myths of Mideast

“WASHINGTON – Joan Peters, author of the best-selling, critically acclaimed history of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine, 'From Time Immemorial,' is confirmed as a presenter at News Expo 2007 – the Washington, D.C., conference like no other ever produced.
Peters joins WND Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein, columnist Ann Coulter, WND founder and Editor Joseph Farah and managing editor David Kupelian, author of the best-seller, 'The Marketing of Evil.'
Peters' book struck the world like an earthquake when it was first published in 1984 – shattering many of the myths and misconceptions involving the origins of the Mideast debate. Based on seven years of meticulous research and fearless reporting, Peters documented the complex history of the region and in so doing deftly and authoritatively contradicted common misperceptions about the role and strategy of each side of the struggle.”
****

No wonder it’s a “rare” appearance. Her book is a fraud.

I wrote about Joan Peters on VIEW FROM THE MOON on January 18, and some of what I’m publishing today is lifted from that earlier post. The point is that her book, “From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine”, published in 1984, has been widely acknowledged for years to be inaccurate, even fraudulent.

Her book tries to justify Zionism (the takeover of Palestine by Jews from other countries) by proving the constant presence of Jews in Palestine, contrary to the truth. As one critic put it:

“The thesis of this book is that when the state of Israel came into existence Palestine was largely unpopulated, except for a few Jews who had been there for many centuries; just a desert really, made to bloom by the ingenuity and hard work of Jews who subsequently arrived. Consequently the Palestinians we find there today must have arrived recently, freeloaders, no doubt attracted by the modern state built by the efforts of said hard-working Jews. And consequently Israel has a right to send them back where they came from.

“In fact, the book is rubbish. It was exposed as a fraud by several critics, including Norman Finkelstein (whose exposé is included in Blaming the Victims, edited by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, also available via Amazon) and later Oxford University's Albert Hourani.”

A less forthright reviewer explained: “Much of Mrs. Peters's book argues that at the same time that Jewish immigration to Palestine was rising, Arab immigration to the parts of Palestine where Jews had settled also increased. Therefore, in her view, the Arab claim that an indigenous Arab population was displaced by Jewish immigrants must be false, since many Arabs only arrived with the Jews." Peters concludes, therefore, that many of the refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war were not native Palestinians. She has repeatedly been proven wrong.

Professor Norman Finkelstein (see “Links” on this blog) calls Ms. Peters’ book a “monumental hoax,” and “the most notorious source of historical bias on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever published in the English language . . . “

Not one critic now accepts her thesis as valid.

“The New York Review of Books”: “Everyone familiar with the writing of the extreme [Zionist\ nationalists of Zeev Jabotinsky's Revisionist party would immediately recognize the tired and discredited arguments in Mrs. Peters's book. I had mistakenly thought them long forgotten. It is a pity that they have been given new life."

Even a friendly reviewer, Daniel Pipes, wrote: “‘From Time Immemorial’ quotes carelessly, uses statistics sloppily, and ignores inconvenient facts. Much of the book is irrelevant to Miss Peters's central thesis. The author's linguistic and scholarly abilities are open to question.”

For a lengthy discussion of the criticisms of Joan Peters' book, see Paul Blair's six-part article published in 2002 beginning at http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2135.

Blair writes in his Conclusion:

“From Time Immemorial is work of propaganda, with all the bad connotations that term carries. Peters' case rests upon distortion and fabrication. Time and again, she misconstrues sources in a tendentious manner. She cribs uncritically from partisan works. She conceals crucial calculations, and draws hard conclusions from tenuous evidence. She speculates wildly and without ground. She exaggerates figures and selects numbers to suit her thesis. She adduces evidence that in no way supports her claims, sometimes even omitting "inconvenient" portions of the citation. She invents contradictions in sources she wishes to discredit by quoting them out of context. She "forgets" undesirable numbers in her calculations. She ignores sources that cast doubt on her conclusions, even when she herself uses those sources for other purposes. She makes baseless insinuations and misleading claims.”

Noam Chomsky wrote in his 2002 book, “Understanding Power”:

“From Time Immemorial ... was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants ... And it was very popular — it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it. Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there's no moral issue, because they're just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. ... That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake. Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He's a very careful student, and he started checking the references — and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency ... [The Mossad?]

“Every major journal, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review, the Observer, everybody had a review saying, this doesn't even reach the level of nonsense, of idiocy.”

How strange, then, that on January 22, 2007, Joan Peters’ discredited propaganda hoax should be trumpeted as “critically acclaimed” and “based on seven years of meticulous research”.

Joseph Farah, director of “News Expo 2007” and co-founder of the website which published the advertisement, WorldNetDaily, says:

“We're very excited about the appearance of Joan Peters. This presentation alone will make News Expo a spectacular, one-of-a-kind, can't-miss event.”