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Whenever the media takes note of the antics of Norman Finkelstein, the former DePaul University professor and anti-Israel activist, a flood of disinformation seems bound to follow. Finkelstein’s arrest in Israel last week was no exception. The facts of the case are clear. Finkelstein had attempted to enter Israel last Thursday to travel into the West Bank. There he would likely have lent support to Palestinian extremists. Unquestionably, he would have caused trouble. And while Israel generally does not prevent foreign trouble makers from entering the country (a highly naive and short-sighted policy), it made an exception this time: Finkelstein...

A professor whose views on the Holocaust irked critics plans to risk arrest by showing up on the first day of classes next week at DePaul University after officials canceled his courses, took away his office and put him on leave. The private Chicago Catholic university recently informed professor Norman Finkelstein that his three courses were canceled after a dispute over tenure that drew charges of anti-Semitism against him. Critics find issue with Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, who believes that some Jews have exploited the Holocaust. Finkelstein is the author of five books, including "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections...

So now it turns out that the martyr of the academic hard left, Norman Finkelstein, was denied tenure at DePaul University not so much because of my critique of his non-scholarship, but in large part because of his overt sexism. According to a news story in today’s Chicago Sun-Times, a report filed against his tenure by three members of the Political Science faculty “claims that Finkelstein allegedly called a female staff member a ‘bitch.’” The report also claimed that Finkelstein “shunned” colleagues who disagreed with him and that his boorish conduct extended to “dramatically closing his office door when his...

On May 4, 2007, Professor Dershowitz took his campaign against Norman Finkelstein to the Wall Street Journal, publishing an Op-Ed there entitled "Finkelstein's Bigotry". In it Dershowitz again explains why no self-respecting university should employ a fraud and pseudo-scholar like Finkelstein, especially one with widespread ties to Islamic terrorists and anti-Semitic neo-Nazis. Dershowitz notes that Finkelstein brags that "never has one of [his] articles been published in a scientific magazine." By that he means academic journals. Yes, Finkelstein has yet to publish a scholarly article in a refereed academic journal, the sine qua non for tenure at any serious university....

Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris and Peace not Apartheid Brandeis University’s Radical Student Alliance has invited anti-Israel activist Norman Finkelstein to speak on campus, a university newspaper reports. The precise topic of the lecture was not described in the article; but when the DePaul University assistant professor last spoke—at Stanford University on Jan. 25, 2007—he added to his typical Israel-bashing diatribe a defense of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine Peace not Apartheid.It seems somewhat appropriate that, in the wake of widespread condemnation of Carter’s numerous misrepresentations, the former president has found a supporter in Finkelstein. Like Carter, Finkelstein has been criticized...

(Norman Finkelstein has been urging people to write to Alan Dershowitz. Mr. Dershowitz's reponse to them is as follows. To visit Alan Dershowitz's website, (click here). Dear Correspondent, You have written to me claiming an interest in free speech and urging me to make full disclosure of the correspondence between me and the University of California Press and the Board of Regents, including Governor Schwarzenegger. I am certainly interested in the full truth coming out, because I never tried to censor anything that Finkelstein wrote, as you have already seen and will see again. As I repeatedly wrote, "I have...

Last month I wrote an article called “Norman Finkelstein’s Obscenities,” a response to Finkelstein’s latest screed, “Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?” As the title of the article suggests, Finkelstein puts forward in his article what he believes to be a justification for my assassination as a war criminal, based on my support for Israel. Nor was this the only obscenity in the article. Not by a long shot. As I wrote in my article, Finkelstein piece was accompanied by a: cartoon drawn by “Latuff”, a frequent accomplice of Finkelstein. The cartoon portrayed me as masturbating in rapturous joy...

The level of “academic” discourse on the Middle-East reached a new low—quite a feat considering some of the old lows—when the notorious Jewish anti-Semite and Holocaust-justice denier Norman Finkelstein wrote a screed suggesting that I be targeted “for assassination” because of my views on Israel. The obscene article was accompanied by an obscene cartoon drawn by “Latuff”, a frequent accomplice of Finkelstein. The cartoon portrayed me as masturbating in rapturous joy while viewing images of dead Lebanese civilians on a TV set labeled “Israel peep show,” with a Jewish Star of David prominently featured. The cartoon aptly represents the content...

The uniqueness of the Holocaust was not the Nazi's determination to kill the Jews of Germany and even of neighboring Poland. Other genocides, such as those by the Cambodians and the Turks, sought to rid particular areas of so called undesirables by killing them. The utter uniqueness of the Holocaust was the Nazi plan to "ingather" all the Jews of the world to the death camp and end the Jewish "race" forever. It almost succeeded. The Nazis ingathered tens of thousands of Jews (including babies, women, the elderly) from far flung corners of the world--from the Island of Rhodes from...

Lebanon's New TV: 'Contradictions, Lies, and Exaggerations' in Number Killed in 'Jewish Holocaust' On June 21, 2006, Lebanon's New TV aired an interview with U.S. author Norman Finkelstein, who wrote the book The Holocaust Industry. In the introduction to the interview, the New TV narrator asserted, "Never has there been an issue subject to as many contradictions, lies, and exaggerations regarding the number of victims as the issue of the Jewish Holocaust." In his interview, Finkelstein stated that the number of the Jewish survivors from the Holocaust had been grossly inflated by the "Holocaust industry" in order to blackmail Europe....

Some recent news items about Jews aiding enemies of the Jews: Last week, professor Noam Chomsky went to Lebanon to speak at the headquarters of Hezbollah. As described by the BBC, not a media friend of Israel, "Hezbollah's political rhetoric has centered on calls for the destruction of the state of Israel," and Hezbollah has been "synonymous with terror, suicide bombings and kidnappings." The terror group's views on the need to annihilate the Jewish state are identical to those of Hamas and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chomsky announced his support for Hezbollah and its need to be militarily strong. Also...

DePaul U Confronts Amerikan "Empire" By Steven PlautFrontPageMagazine.com | January 3, 2006Q: How do you know when America has crossed the line into an oppressive, occupational empire?A: When DePaul University begins studying it. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at DePaul and its Dean, one Chuck Suchar (a sociologist), have officially announced a “College Theme Series” entitled “Confronting Empire” for the 2005-6 academic year. This is a DePaul faculty initiative involving the participation of various departments and programs throughout the college. The organizers call themselves the “Empire Committee,” sounding like something out of Star Wars. Naturally, the evil...

The Tehran Times, in my opionion, could be the world's worst newspaper. As far as I know, the Times has no official link to the Islamic Republic of Iran, but it sure acts as if it does. From Monday's front page editorial: The United Nations General Assembly has voted to designate January 27 as international Holocaust Remembrance Day. The UN resolution to commemorate Jews who lost their lives in Europe during the Second World War was introduced by Israel and approved on Tuesday by most UN member states. What’s behind this resolution and the Holocaust remembrance effort? Whose interests does...

Thomas Klocek was, until September 2004, a popular adjunct professor in the School of New Learning at DePaul University in Chicago. A private university linked to the Vincentians, DePaul may not be prestigious, but it is one of America's fastest-growing universities. Many readers will recognize it as the home of the notorious anti-Zionist, Norman Finkelstein. Klocek taught at DePaul for fourteen years until his dismissal on what I can only describe, not merely as the flimsiest, but as the most prejudicial of grounds. During a Student Activities Fair, a group of eight students representing Students for Justice in Palestine and...

One year ago today, DePaul Professor Thomas Klocek had a discussion with some Muslim students... ....and was suspended because his ideas didn't match the PC groupthink found on almost all college campuses today. On September 15, 2004, Klocek, an adjunct professor at Chicago's DePaul University for 14 years, was walking through a campus cafeteria where a student activities fair was taking place. He noticed a couple of display tables staffed by United Muslims Moving Ahead (UMMA) and the DePaul Chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) More on Students for Justice in Palestine here, courtesy of Frontpage Magazine's Discover...

But for Dershowitz to try to stop publication of the book is simply unacceptable. The appropriate response to speech that is wrong is not to silence it, but to argue against it — because nobody has a monopoly on the truth. Dershowitz, of course, knows all this. He has said he doesn't want to suppress Finkelstein's freedom of speech, but that he wants to ensure that "maliciously false statements about me … are not published." In fact, he says he supports publication of Finkelstein's book — by some publisher other than UC Press, which, he told me, should not "give...

In the latest chapter of a fierce academic feud, Alan M. Dershowitz, the celebrity Harvard Law School professor, tried to pressure the University of California Press not to publish a book critical of Israel that also attacked his scholarship. The press is publishing the book despite Dershowitz's efforts, but with significant changes. The book will no longer include author Norman G. Finkelstein's claim that Dershowitz did not write, ''The Case for Israel," nor will it use the word ''plagiarize" in its argument that the Harvard law professor inappropriately borrowed from another work, according to the director of the press. An...

Why would the University of California Press (UCP) be publishing a sequel to a book that several distinguished historians have compared to the notorious czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? It is by an author whose previous works were eliminated from the curriculum by the Toronto School Board because they were “anti-Semitic.” This author has also been characterized as a “writer celebrated by neo-Nazi groups for his Holocaust revisionism…,” and as a purveyor of “crackpot ideas, some of them mirrored almost verbatim in the propaganda put out by neo-Nazis….” Imagine if a university press were publishing an...

Under the title of "DePaul's predicament: The choice--Stop--or stop justifying--anti-Israel sentiment," the Chicago Jewish Star returns to the issues haunting Chicago's DePaul University. In its previous edition, the Star summarized Thomas Klocek's free speech struggle against DePaul, and it included this quote from Klocek, "I stood for Israel, because it is in the right. I paid the price at a Christian University." The Chicago Jewish Star is not available online, it's a free-weekly. If you're in Chicago's Loop, look for a Jewish Star newspaper box and pick up a copy to see the entire editorial. Here are some excerpts: During...

Publication of The Case for Israel has made me the target of vicious personal attacks. A systematic effort to discredit the book, and me, has been undertaken by a well-organized group of Israel bashers led by Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and Alexander Cockburn. As soon as the book reached the bestseller lists and began to get good reviews around the country, this triumvirate went to work. They had a model for their attack going back 20 years. The mode of attack is consistent. Chomsky selects the target and directs Finkelstein to probe the writings in minute detail and conclude that...

Catholic universities in the United States have in recent years shown a weakness for cultivating far-leftist anti-Semites and haters of America. Perhaps the best known has been Notre Dame, home of the extremist Kroc Institute, which attempted to sponsor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Arab with ties to Al Qaeda, for a three-year professorship. But in many ways, DePaul University is even worse. DePaul is a large, if not particularly academically renowned, Catholic college in Chicago, nominally associated with “Congregation of the Mission,” more popularly known as the Vincentians. Until recently, the main cause of controversy surrounding DePaul was its insistence...

It might be best not to invite DePauw University professor Norman Finkelstein and Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School to the same dinner party anytime soon. Finkelstein, the author of several controversial books on the Middle East and the Holocaust, has baldly accused the law professor of plagiarizing in portions of Dershowitz's recently published "The Case for Israel." The always diverting and generally unreliable Nation magazine writer Alexander Cockburn has joined the fray in a just-published diatribe, "Alan Dershowitz, Plagiarist: Will Lawrence Summers Take Action?" You can read their indictment of Dershowitz on Finkelstein's website, www.normanfinkelstein.com. Before letting the fur...