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.
Mr. Finkelstein does not do “scholarship” in any
meaningful sense. Although his writings center on Israel (which he compares to
Nazi Germany) and the Holocaust, he has never visited Israel and cannot read or
speak German -- precluding the possibility of original scholarship.
Prof. Bartov characterized
his work as an irrational Jewish “conspiracy theory.” The conspirators include
Steven Spielberg, NBC and Leon Uris. The film “Schindler’s List,” Mr.
Finkelstein argues, was designed to divert attention from our Mideast policy.
“Give me a better reason! ... Who profits? Basically, there are two
beneficiaries from the dogmas [of Schindler’s List]: American Jews and American
administration.” NBC, he says, broadcast “Holocaust” to strengthen Israel’s
position: “In 1978, NBC produced the series Holocaust. Do you believe, it was a
coincidence, 1978? Just at this time, when peace negotiations between Israel
and Egypt took place in Camp David?” He argues that Leon Uris, the author of
“Exodus,” named his character “Ari” in order to promote Israel’s “Nazi”
ideology: “[B]ecause Ari is the diminutive for Aryan. It is the whole
admiration for this blond haired, blue eyed type.” (Ari is a traditional name
dating back to the Bible.) He has blamed Sept. 11 on the U.S., claiming that we
“deserve the problem on our hands because some things Bin Laden says are
true.”) He says that most alleged Holocaust survivors -- including Elie Wiesel
-- have fabricated their past.
Like other anti-Semites, Mr. Finkelstein generalizes
about “the Jews”; for example: “Just as Israelis ... courageously put unruly
Palestinians in their place, so American Jews
courageously put unruly Blacks in their place.” He says “the main
fomenters of anti-Semitism “are ‘American Jewish elites’ who need to be
stopped.” Normally, no one would take such claims seriously, but he boasts that
he “can get away with things which nobody else can” because his parents were
Holocaust survivors.
And then, of course, there is
me. In a recent article, “Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for
Assassination?” Mr. Finkelstein commissioned a cartoon by a man who placed
second in the Iranian Holocaust-denial cartoon contest. The Hustler-type cartoon portrayed me as masturbating in
joy while viewing images of dead Lebanese on a TV set labeled “Israel peep
show,” with a Star of David prominently featured.
Mr. Finkelstein has accused me of not having written “The
Case For Israel” but when I sent his publisher my handwritten draft, they made
him remove that claim. He has accused virtually every pro-Israel writer,
including me, of “plagiarism.” I asked Harvard to conduct an investigation of
this absurd charge. Harvard rejected it, yet he persists.
The final part of Mr. Finkelstein’s quest for tenure
is to blame his tenure problems on “outsiders.” He
claims that I intruded myself into the DePaul review process, neglecting to
mention that I was specifically asked by the former chairman of DePaul’s
political science department to “point [him] to the clearest and most egregious
instances of dishonesty on Finkelstein’s part.” I responded by
providing hard evidence of made-up quotes and facts -- a pattern that should
alone disqualify him from tenure.
Nevertheless, Mr. Finkelstein’s radical colleagues
voted for tenure, having cooked the books by seeking outside evaluations from
two of his ideological soulmates. The dean, however, recommended against
tenure. Mr. Finkelstein then used my letter to stimulate a “Solidarity with
Finkelstein” campaign.
Like the character in the “Groves of Academe,” Mr.
Finkelstein generated protests by students and outsiders. He has encouraged
radical goons to email threatening messages; “Look forward to a visit from me,”
reads one. “Nazis like [you] need to be confronted directly.” He has threatened to sue if he loses -- while complaining
about outside interference. No university should be afraid of truth -- regardless of its
source -- especially when truth consists of Mr. Finkelstein’s own words.
Whether or not he receives tenure, Mr. Finkelstein
will persist in his unscholarly, ad hominems against supporters of Israel,
Holocaust survivors and the U.S. But for the time being, the question remains:
Will his bigotry receive the imprimatur of the largest Catholic university in
the America?
Mr. Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard, is the author, most
recently, of “Preemption: A Knife that
Cuts Both Ways” (Norton, 2006).
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