2008 Woodie Awards
Amicus Curiae: Justice for Palestine or Jew-Baiting?
The Record Editorial
Issue date: 10/20/05 Section: Opinion
We recently learned that Harvard Law School's student organization Justice for Palestine has invited Norman Finkelstein to speak on campus on November 3. We urge the group to reconsider.
Third-year students may remember Finkelstein as the man who, back in 2003, accused Professor Dershowitz of signing his name to books written by the Israeli Mossad. (More on that shortly.) But there's much more to Norman Finkelstein than batty conspiracy theories about Alan Dershowitz. Finkelstein advances batty conspiracy theories about lots of people, and especially about one particular type of people - that is, Jews.
Norman Finkelstein, a political science professor at DePaul University, has earned notoriety for his three main positions.
First, Finkelstein accuses Jews - individually and as a group - of being greedy money-grubbing "shakedown artists" who have "finagled," "blackmail[ed]" and "exploited" innocent Europeans. Finkelstein's big break came in 2000 with his book, The Holocaust Industry, which purported to document the Jewish "shakedown" of European governments and companies complicit in the Holocaust. Jews, according to Finkelstein, only care about the Holocaust for the sake of "power and profit" and "Jewish aggrandizement." Brown University Professor Omer Bartov, reviewing The Holocaust Industry for The New York Times, called Finkelstein's book a "conspiracy theory," "verg[ing] on paranoia" that amounted to "a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'" The Washington Post wrote, "Norman Finkelstein [is] a writer celebrated by neo-Nazi groups for his Holocaust revisionism and comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany."
Which brings us to Finkelstein's second line of writing. Along with his Holocaust/ Shakedown pieces, Finkelstein writes books whose primary object is to analogize Israelis to Nazis. A sample Finkelstein witticism: "I can't understand why Israel's apologists would be offended by a comparison with the Gestapo. I would think that, for them, it is like Lee Iacocca being told that Chrysler is using Toyota tactics."
Third-year students may remember Finkelstein as the man who, back in 2003, accused Professor Dershowitz of signing his name to books written by the Israeli Mossad. (More on that shortly.) But there's much more to Norman Finkelstein than batty conspiracy theories about Alan Dershowitz. Finkelstein advances batty conspiracy theories about lots of people, and especially about one particular type of people - that is, Jews.
Norman Finkelstein, a political science professor at DePaul University, has earned notoriety for his three main positions.
First, Finkelstein accuses Jews - individually and as a group - of being greedy money-grubbing "shakedown artists" who have "finagled," "blackmail[ed]" and "exploited" innocent Europeans. Finkelstein's big break came in 2000 with his book, The Holocaust Industry, which purported to document the Jewish "shakedown" of European governments and companies complicit in the Holocaust. Jews, according to Finkelstein, only care about the Holocaust for the sake of "power and profit" and "Jewish aggrandizement." Brown University Professor Omer Bartov, reviewing The Holocaust Industry for The New York Times, called Finkelstein's book a "conspiracy theory," "verg[ing] on paranoia" that amounted to "a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'" The Washington Post wrote, "Norman Finkelstein [is] a writer celebrated by neo-Nazi groups for his Holocaust revisionism and comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany."
Which brings us to Finkelstein's second line of writing. Along with his Holocaust/ Shakedown pieces, Finkelstein writes books whose primary object is to analogize Israelis to Nazis. A sample Finkelstein witticism: "I can't understand why Israel's apologists would be offended by a comparison with the Gestapo. I would think that, for them, it is like Lee Iacocca being told that Chrysler is using Toyota tactics."