A vocal American critic of Israel met Monday with a senior official from the militant Hezbollah group and visited villages in southern Lebanon that witnessed heavy fighting in the 2006 war between the guerrillas and the Jewish state.[Insert favorite critique or parody of "resolute atheist" "Progressive" academic toadying to fanatical, violent religious extremists here.]Norman Finkelstein, who resigned last year as a political science professor at DePaul University in Chicago, met Hezbollah's commander in south Lebanon, Nabil Kaouk, in his office in the coastal city of Tyre.
He visited the border village of Maroun el-Rass where heavy fighting between Hezbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops took place during the two side's 34-day war in the summer 2006, according to the state-run National News Agency and Hezbollah's Al-Manar television.
Finkelstein also toured the border village of Aita al-Shaab, the location from where Hezbollah guerrillas triggered the war after they crossed the border, killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two others in hopes of trading them for Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails, according to the report....
"After the horror and after the shame and after the anger there still remain a hope, and I know that I can get in a lot of trouble for what I am about to say, but I think that the Hezbollah represents the hope."
Norman Finkelstein Update:
The president of DePaul must have no regrets that Finkelstein is no longer associated with the school.
I wouldn't want to cause trouble, but I don't even know what the heck that statement means.
And thanks to commenter David for "proving" Finkelstein's point about how one's Jewish origins and the Holocause are misused for political purposes. Always love it when Finkelstein's defenders use the tactics that Finkelstein accuses "Jewish elites" of using.
I heard that he was not given tenure at the end of his contract because his research is not highly regarded. He is hardly the first person to be denied tenure.
No, I do not. Your free speech ends on private property. I don't have the right to rant on your property. Finkelstein does not have the right to speak on DePaul's property.
You should really learn a bit more before you write.
Just follow the link in the main posting and you'll see.
Indeed. I learned very quickly that the way to get tenure is to shut up and do what you're told (as a bare minimum). It's ironic that tenure (the original purpose of which, IIRC, was to permit academics to espouse unpopular opinions without fear of retribution) is gotten (at least in my experience) by NOT exercising free speech. Having it, I damn well say what I please. Fair? Maybe not, but that's how it is. He should have known that.
Then their intentional targeting of civilians makes them war criminals as opposed to terrorists, no?
Hilberg and Shlaim were interviewed last year about Finkelstein, the quality of his scholarship, the denial of tenure. You can listen to their thoughts here:
radio interview
It is patently evident that those who denounce Finkelstein's scholarship (as opposed, say, to his provocative writing style) are not themselves scholars in the field and very likely haven't even read his works.
Then their intentional targeting of civilians makes them war criminals as opposed to terrorists, no?"
Well, aside from THAT, there are a couple of other issues. Armies must wear uniforms and be identifiable in order to be accorded status as lawful combatants under the Geneva Convention. Otherwise, their presence endangers civilians. Hez also likes to put their "fighters" and military hardware (missile launchers, etc) smack in the middle of civilian areas. Not just for concealment, either - they are hoping to bring down an Israeli attack on civilian areas.
So, targeting civilians, lack of uniforms, deliberately hazarding their own civilian population - that makes them "not soldiers". By most accounts it would make them terrorists.
So Barry P., you may choose to see Hezbollah, Iran's cat's paw and destabilizer of Lebanon, which has tortured and murdered a great many Americans, including 256 US Marines, as just "the guys on the other side," if not "freedom fighters," but Professor Bernstein is far from the only one who sees them very differently than you do.
http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/fs/37191.htm
2. DG: It is in extremely bad taste, when referencing the recent Lebanon war, to discuss "targeting civilians" when not referencing Israel. Motes and beams... [This is a brief response, DB, not an effort or desire on my part to move OT.]
Having been in on a number of tenure and promotion committee meetings, I can attest to the simple fact that it isn't just about the scholarship. See my above comment. There are people who will vote against your tenure because they don't like your politics, or your hair, or (most unforgivably) because you get better student evaluations of teaching than they do. I don't fool myself into believing ours is the only institution where such nonsense occurs. And I most certainly have made my feelings known to both my Dean and Provost. The bottom line is if you want tenure, shut up and do what you're told. And even that plus excellent scholarship might still not be enough. Fair? No. Fact of life? Yes. After high school, I spent 17 years of education and postdoctoral reserach just to make myself competitive for the position I now have. I would have been a total fool for not doing whatever it takes to get tenure (so long as it's ethical). Now, I can say whatever I want. As long as it isn't illegal to say. Plus I try not to offend people. Or inject topics into lectures that don't belong. But there are a few of my "colleagues" who give me a wide berth these days, because they know they no longer have me by the balls. It's sweet.
I suggested that Finkelstein might want to put his money where his mouth and heart are and give at least a token sum to Hezbollah, showing "solidarity" with the organization. Or maybe he will visit one of their training camps in the Bekaa Valley and send back pictures of himself firing an AK47. I would love to see that.
Professor Bernstein, physicians are often asked questions outside their particular areas of specialization, and they may attempt to answer or beg off for any number of reasons. Because you are a professor law, and you have blogged about Lebanon's Islamofascists (Hezbollah/ Hizbollah), and see Finkelstein as deserving of attention even now, I thought you might care to speculate about the possibility of criminal prosecution, or even better, find someone knowledgeable about these matters to tell us if Finkelstein is inviting trouble for himself.
Oh please. Do you realize what you are saying? You can't discuss targeting civillians unless you're accusing Israel of it? That's not even saying that we should discuss targeting of civillians by both sides, but rather that it can only be discussed in reference to Israel.
And this is coming from someone who is a frequent critic of Israel.
"...because the stakes are so low."
If you only knew...
Hopefully (for your sake) you don't. Of course, I am pulling in that fat salary, so maybe the stakes aren't so low.
I'm being sarcastic, of course.
As for Finkelstein being a "scholar" on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Finkelstein, as I recall, speaks neither Hebrew nor Arabic, which would make him an odd "scholar" on that subject indeed, given that the vast majority of primary sources are in one language or the other. (Not that Finkelstein is equivalent to David Irving, but Irving, before revelations from his trial with Lipstadt, used to have many more and more prominent academic defenders than does Finkelstein).
This is a good summary of the material support clauae of the Patriot Act. The courts have generally ruled against any interpretation that impinges on free speech. Thus, saying "We are All Hizbollah Now" is probably not subject to prosecution, but giving money or advice on how to conduct attacks is.
I think the USDOJ has more important targets to bother with than NGF.
Am I reaching when I try to find a basis to prosecute Finkelstein criminally for consorting with Hezbollah? Sure, but if there might be a basis, it would be a shame to overlook it. (Hey, those 5 Yemeni-Americans from Lackawanna, NY may be going to prison for doing no more than attending a "camp" like those Hezbollah runs.)
Well it's a damned sorry fascist state we've got going here. One would think he'd be in Gitmo by now.
Neurodoc, you appear to beleive that I am some sort of Hezbollah supporter or advocate. I'm not. But I actually lived in the Middle East for several years, as opposed to merely commenting from half a world away, and have thus had the oportunity to talk to actual Arabs instead of merely parroting State Department documents. Maybe you gain some comfort from chanting "terrorist, terrorist, terrorist", but Hezbollah is far more than a military orgnization. Many Arabs support Hezbollah because Hezbollah clothes, feeds and educates a lot of people a lot better than the Lebanese government. Maybe they're only doing so for propaganda reasons, but they do it nonetheless. Yes, Hezbollah is in an armed struggle with Israel (futile as that may be), and yes, they choose to not follow European-scripted "rules of war". They believe that anything goes in war, and if this wounds our sensitive Western "fair play" sensibilities, well, they don't really care. They're true believers in their cause, and they honestly believe they've gotten the shitty end of the "fairness" stick more than a few times.
Yes, it's sad that Arabs refuse to choose to see the world the same way we do (and I actually spent several years there trying to get them to do so, so I take that personally), but wishing that they would and calling them names isn't going to change things.
Anyway, my point is that when DB labels Hezbollah as "fanatical, violent religious extremists" he may be telling the truth, but only a small part of it. What is good and what is evil is in the eye of the beholder, and there are many different beholders.
I dislike much about Arabs, but not for the same reasons as you, I imagine.
"DG: It is in extremely bad taste, when referencing the recent Lebanon war, to discuss "targeting civilians" when not referencing Israel."
I normally stay out of the Israel/Palestinian mess, as there is often blame on both sides, but you don't have much of an argument here. Aside from its initial kidnapping incursion, Hezbollah deliberately avoided attacking Israel's military and directed 100% of its fire at Israeli population centers. Israel attacked infrastructure, yes, but first, it did so in retaliation, and second, if it had deliberately targeted civilians the death toll would have been over 200,000, or more, very quickly. One can often see through the propaganda by watching the reactions of the people on the ground, and what did we see? Lebanese standing in the open, watching the Israeli planes, and if they showed any concern at all it was to wave white flags or other symbols to identify themselves as civilians. Now, have you ever seen an Israeli confidently identify himself to a Hezbollah combatant to convey, "I'm not the guy you want -- I'm a civilian?" Of course not, because everyone knows (you do, too) that he'd be a dead Israeli. Assuming, of course, that he was an Israeli Jew. Hezbollah did apologize for one and only one rocket attack: the one that accidentally fell short and hit an Israeli Arab town.
C'mon, be serious. Hezbollah kills every Jewish civilian it can; only its military tactical incompetence prevents genocide. (It has political and strategic competence in spades, but military tactic wise, it is ineffective.) If Israel's policy were Hezbollah's, the summer war would have looked very different. I don't know whether individual Israeli soldiers or pilots targeted the occasional civilian qua civilian but wholesale killing of civilians was not Israeli policy. It was and is Hezbollah policy. Try to keep the debate honest.
Do you think that Hezbollah and Hamas don't deserve their places along with the 31 other organizations, including Al Qaeda and the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade (a Fatah affiliate), designated as "foreign terrorist organizations"? Or do you think all of them are someone's "freedom fighters," if not ours?
You note that Hezbollah (and Hamas) enjoys great popular support. The Taliban does too, doesn't it? And Osama and his merry band of men are lionized by many in the Arab world, aren't they?
You say you are not "some sort of Hezbollah supporter or advocate," so do you have anything bad to say of them, or do you think the "good" is balanced" by the "evil"? ("What is good and what is evil is in the eye of the beholder, and there are many different beholders." - is that anything different from "one man's 'terrorist' is another's 'freedom fighter'? Something other than moral relativism, if not simply amoral?)
Anything to say about the death of 256 US Marines on what amounted to a peacekeeping mission in 1983, or the subsequent kidnapping, torture, and murder of William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Lebanon? (Unfortunately, I can't for the moment remember the name of the US colonel serving with UNFIL who met the same terrible fate at their hands.) Help us put all this in proper perspective, if you will.
These are the people Finkelstein has gone off to play with.
DB: Well, you certainly seem to have not bothered to listen to Hilberg in the reference I gave, or read the accompanying transcript. You claim Hilberg's work didn't overlap Finkelstein's, the implication apparently being that his endorsements are worthless (and unprofessional? please go on the record if you wish to besmirch the reputation of a recently deceased high praised scholar.) Turns out his and Finkelstein's work overlapped significantly. Hilberg was researching the efforts to extort billions of dollars from Swiss banks on spurious Holocaust charges when Finkelstein's book on the subject "The Holocaust Industry" came out. Hilberg thoroughly endorsed it, finding Finkelstein's research largely matched his own findings. (This sort of thing will keep happening, David, as long as you persist in contributing without ever showing evidence of reading Finkelstein. But to be fair, I don't want to presume you didn't read Hilberg's comments solely on the basis of logical implication. Please feel free to state for the record whether or not you read them.)
Neurodoc: as a physician myself, I know that neurosurgeons are often very certain of their beliefs, even when wrong, so forgive me if I doubt your sincerity when you claim you'd read Finkelstein's scholarship if only I gave you a reference. But, to take you at your word, his dissection of Joan Peter's fraudulent "From Time Immemorial" was the first to demonstrate in detail the gross fabrications and other scholarly failings of that initially highly acclaimed work, now widely recognized by scholars in the field as worthless. His even more devastating analysis of Dershowitz's "The Case for Israel" demonstrates the detailed factual knowledge and analytical skills typically associated with scholarship. And contrary to the claims of many uninformed posters on this blog in the past, Finkelstein has published in peer-reviewed journals, including The Journal of Palestine Studies. (You might feel, of course, that the journal is biased, as I'm sure you and I both occasionally feel JAMA and NEJM are biased, but the claim that he didn't get tenure because he never published in peer-reviewed journals is simply rubbish.)
Now perhaps, Neurodoc, you think a professional career devoted to debunking the unscholarly work of others does not perforce make one a scholar oneself. I disagree, and assume you find medical papers that correctly analyze the errors of previously published work scholarly.
Enough for now. Such major responses from such minimal commentary is itself evidence that on this subject emotion rather than reason rules.
What I find amusing is your need to try and get me to utter some concordance with your position. Is my opinion really that important to you?
For the record, I take no side in that conflict. However, when engaging Arabs in discussion of this matter, my default tactic is to avail them of my considered opinion that continuing to resist or fight Israel is pointless and futile, and simply accepting it as a extant, ongoing reality and peacably getting on with their lives in a more productive and forward-looking manner would be the happiness-maximizing choice. To my utter amazement and disbelief, this hyper-rationalistic anglo-saxon utilitarian position garners remarkably little traction. It appears that the average Arab that I know has a rather different utiliy function to me. But, you know, they *really* believe what they believe. Just like you. And they really, really believe that they are *right*. Just like you do.
Me, I could never convince myself of my own infallibility.
Too late for me to look now, but I am quite sure that Finkelstein has boasted that he never published an article in a scholarly journal. Perhaps he himself doesn't count the Journal of Palestine Studies as a scholarly journal, and saying that a publication is a peer-reviewed one can be remarkably meaningless. (I know a group of out and out medical charlatans who "publish" one another's anecdotal reports of miraculous cures in the form of an electronic journal, which is truly "peer-reviewed.")
When was the last time that you came across a scientific article in the NEJM or JAMA that you regarded as biased, and what was it? I'd like to see for myself (sincerely) what you consider biased in what those journals publish. (BTW, what would "biased" mean for purposes of the Journal of Palestinian Studies?)
"you think a professional career devoted to debunking the unscholarly work of others does not perforce make one a scholar oneself" - right, I don't think a professional career devoted to debunking the unscholarly work of others...perforce make(s) one a scholar oneself." Is Finkelstein sui generis as such a "scholar," one whose professional career is devoted to tendentious engagements with those not themselves engaged in scholarship, or can you name other such "scholars"?
What I find amusing is your need to try and get me to utter some concordance with your position. Is my opinion really that important to you? No, it is of zero importance to me for other than debating purposes here. Now, I understand that you adopt the stance of a moral "neutral, if not someone who is simply amoral.
For the record, I take no side in that conflict. By "that conflict" I suppose you mean the Arab-Israeli one. (Hezbollah is not a Palestinian faction.) Do you take any position in the larger conflict between the West and the Islamofascists? (Let's not argue over terminology, I'm sure you have a pretty good idea of who warrants the label "Islamofascist.") Or "neutral" there too, holding that no side ever is pure Good and the other pure Evil. (Nazis?)
...
Me, I could never convince myself of my own infallibility. As a world famous mathematician told me many years ago, "Any statements about the null set are always true." Since you refuse to stake a position, how could you ever be wrong (or right). Do remember, though, the final fate Dante imagined for such positionless people.
No, I wrote, "Raul Hilberg is a scholar of the Holocaust. Norman Finkelstein is a polemicist about what he perceives as the political misuse of the Holocaust. The fields really don't overlap." The only reason anyone cares what Raul Hilberg thinks of Finkelstein (or more precisely, the only reason Finkelstein's defenders constantly point out that Hilberg has praised him) is because of Hilberg's reputation as a Holocaust scholar.
Here's Hilberg: "And I was struck by the fact, even as I, myself, was researching the same territory that Professor Finkelstein was covering, that the Swiss did not owe that money, that the $1,250,000,000 that were agreed as a settlement to be paid to the claimants was something that in very plain language was extorted from the Swiss. I had, in fact, relied upon the same sources that Professor Finkelstein used, perhaps in addition some Swiss items. I was in Switzerland at the height of the crisis, and I heard from so-called forensic accountants about how totally surprised the Swiss were by this outburst. There is no other word for it.
Now, Finkelstein was the first to publish what was happening in his book The Holocaust Industry. And when I was asked to endorse the book, I DID SO WITH SPECIFIC REGARD TO THESE CLAIMS." All when and good, but not the source of the controversy over Finkelstein.
The reason that people attack Finkelstein is not because he raised doubts about the size of the Swiss claims and settlement (which many people, including Hilberg, have done without being subject to the same attacks) but (a) the fact that he uses conspiratorial tones, assumes bad will on the part of people he doesn't like, and otherwise uses inappropriate rhetoric that many people think at best plays to anti-Semitic sentiment, and at worst is evidence of Finkelstein's own anti-Semitism; and (b) has a crazed overarching theory that just every action taken to memorialize the Holocaust is motivated by the Jewish establishment's desire to politically benefit Israel.
Hilberg consistently notes that his "tone" and "style" isn't the same as Finkelstein's, but it's the "tone" and "style" that accounts for 80% of the controversy over The Holocaust Industry, with the allegations that it's all a Zionist plot accounting for almost all of the rest.
BTW, I'm going off-topic, but the emphasis by the Jewish establishment on the Holocaust strikes me as largely demand driven, and is certainly independent of pro-Israel sentiment. My alma mater, Brandeis, had a very active Jewish studies curriculum, and by far the most popular class, drawing in the least Jewishly engaged (and least pro-Israel) Jewish students, was a course on the Holocaust.
Wasn't it Finkelstein who persisted in charging that the book was not written by Dershowitz, even after Dershowitz produced his original hand-written drafts? And who branded the book as plagiarized because Dershowitz cited other authors, with full attribution?
That's helpful. So NF's suggestion is that Israel may live free when Hezbollah achieves its aim of an Islamic state in heterogeneous Lebanon.
I think such counterintuitive theories should be grounded on something more substantial than conversations with regional military commanders.
Sure. Right after we give up junk food, pornography and rubber-necking at freeway collisions.