Racists press DePaul University to deny tenure to Dr. Finkelstein
Dershowitz and other racists embarked on a program to press DePaul University to deny tenure to our friend Dr. Norman Finkelstein.
If you are not familiar with Finkelstein’s excellent work, take a look around his website. Anybody who read Beyond Chutzpah knows how meticulous is the research of Prof. Finkelstein. Dershowitz’s plagiarizing and garbage would not be tolerated if he was not part of an elite that were used to having their way in America. But above all, Dean Suchar should not accept the attack on free speech by these desperate, mean, and increasingly (if that is possible) fanatical elite. McCarthyism and witch hunts should not be tolerated in America! I hope you will take time to write letters especially if you are in academia (I am sure they are receiving letters from racists who do not like the facts articulated in Finkelstein’s books or his other scholarly work):
Dean Prof. Charles Suchar csuchar@depaul.edu
President The Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, CM president@depaul.edu
Also, read and sign the We Support A Fair Tenure Process for Dr. Norman Finkelstein Petition:
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?nf200704
Update: If you need some inspiration to write to DePaul University, here is a copy of a letter written by Prof. George Salzman - University of Massachusetts at Boston [Hat tip: Robin]
Monday, 9 April 2007
The Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., Ed.D.
President De Paul UniversityDear Reverend Holtschneider,
I write you regarding the effort of Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz to intervene in De Paul University’s tenure consideration of Professor Norman G. Finkelstein.
Setting aside for the moment which of these two bitter academic contestants is more accurate in portraying the true nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict, I urge a strong, principled stand by your institution, utterly rejecting the legitimacy of Mr. Dershowitz’s attempted intervention.
The Chronicle of Higher EducationI account at http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=tqyfjnxDdNnvzcffqm3kYcxKjWm3pgDH , on which I am relying, reports that your Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Faculty Governance Council, at its meeting on November 17, 2006, “voted unanimously to authorize a letter to DePaul’s president, Dennis H. Holtschneider, and the university’s provost, Helmut P. Epp, along with the president of Harvard University and the dean of Harvard Law school. The letter was to express “the council’s dismay at Professor Dershowitz’s interference in Finkelstein’s tenure and promotion case” which “Professor Dershowitz’s emails” violate.
Your Faculty Governance Council should be commended not only for the substance of its principled stand but for making available the minutes of its meeting at which its decision was taken.
The intervention of Alan Dershowitz in Norman Finkelstein’s tenure review is particularly egregious because Finkelstein has shown, with meticulous care, irrefutably, that Dershowitz, in his book The Case for Israel, plagairized substantial material from Joan Peters’ book, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. Peters’ book is well known to be a total fraud. Finkelstein, a skillful and committed scholar, has been relentless in uncovering the massively organized propagandistic misrepresentation of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The false, pro-Israel version held almost undisputed sway from 1948 until it began to be challenged in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon. Dershowitz used Peters’ material to help meet his own apparent psychological need to justify Israel’s actions. That he knowingly claimed the material taken from Peters’ book was his own historical research was, independently of the fraudulent nature of the material itself, surely grounds for Harvard to have revoked his tenure and fired him. Lying, as a faculty member, by claiming plagairized material to be his own academic research, is unacceptable academic conduct, tenure notwithstanding.
Dean Charles S. Suchar of your College of Liberal Arts and Sciences appears to have based his rejection of the unanimous recommendation by the College Personnel Committee in favor of Finkelstein’s tenure on his judgment: “I find the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein’s published books to border on character assassination and, in my opinion, they embody a strategy clearly aimed at destroying the reputation of many who oppose his views.” It is certainly true that Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky write very different kinds of polemics. However, Chomsky, like Finkelstein, exposes the shallow scholarly basis on which ‘the reputation of many who oppose his views’ are based, and in that way Chomsky acts to destroy their scholarly reputations. Among those ‘many’ are the uninformed but not malicious academics and others who honestly believe Israel is righteous. But Mr. Dershowitz is in a different category. He is not acting out of ignorance. His efforts to stifle open discussion and debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict are both legion, and undertaken with full readiness to lie. In this he acts as a lawyer, not a scholarly academic. His goal is to win ‘the case for Israel’, not to uncover the truth, and if besmirching Finkelstein and trying to destroy his livelihood and thus punishing him for not shutting up are, in Dershowitz’s belief, useful tools for his campaign, he seizes them without hesitation. In my opinion his efforts are despicable.
I know full well that universities are not isolated from the society at large, and are subject to political and financial pressures, but I hope that you and your university will not be influenced by Dershowitz’s attempted intervention.
Very sincerely,
George Salzman
Prof. Emeritus
University of Massachusetts at Boston
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3 Comments on “Racists press DePaul University to deny tenure to Dr. Finkelstein”
Hello,
Judeo-terrorist Dershowitz also led the campaign to prevent Professor Juan Cole from getting a post at an Ivy League college.
You can perhaps see why at Cole’s blog.
http://www.juancole.com/2006/07/dershowitz-and-grades-of-human-beings.html
Dershowitz is a racist, a liar, and a fraud. He should be fired for gross violation of academic norms.
Here is a comment on the Cole case.
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/003311.html
Thanks for sharing this, Bernarda. I received many emails of copies of letters and messages sent to support Professor Norman G. Finkelstein. It makes one feel safe that racists like Dershowitz won’t run with it.
Thank you for the incredible humourous way that you depicted a very serious situation - your cartoon is far more memorable in its depiction of the matter than mere any words. But we do our best with our limited skills.
Just fyi - this is one of two letters I wrote to Depaul President and Provost. I present them here for your readership as this is isn’t a time to relax but to keep the pressure up on the DePaul administration to let them know how the world feels about this. The tenure committee is meeting as we speak and will be making their decision before May 11, 2007. Especially if you are in the United States, even if you are not in the academe, as members of civil society, please analyze what’s at stake and participate. This letter presents the big picture analysis of what’s at stake, and the two letters that this letter points to provide further perspectives. If you don’t wish to write to DePaul, you can at least add your signatures to the petition here if you agree with the analysis:
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?nf200704&1
Thank you,
Zahir
Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
— begin letter —
Second Letter to the Leadership of DePaul University
On deconstructing the hullabaloo surrounding Finkelstein’s tenure
The Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., Ed.D.
President
DePaul University
55 East Jackson Boulevard, 22nd Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60604 U.S.
Phone: +1.312.362.8000
Fax: +1.312.362.6822
president@depaul.edu
Dr. Helmut Epp, Ph.D.
Provost
DePaul University
55 East Jackson Boulevard, 22nd Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60604 U.S.
Phone: +1.312.362.8760
Fax: +1.312.362.6822
hepp@depaul.edu
Subject: On deconstructing the hullabaloo surrounding Finkelstein’s tenure
April 29, 2007.
Dear DePaul U. President and Provost,
I hope you won’t mind if I summarize what this issue is really all about rather straightforwardly. After this summary, I include below the open letter that I had emailed you on April 10, 2007, as well as a letter to the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education that I had emailed them on April 13, 2007. I was notified by the Chronicle this past Friday, when the letters on this topic were finally published in the Friday April 27, 2007 issue, that my letter was not among the two that they printed. Hence you can read this letter here.
What this issue is not about is Norm Finkelstein. And all this talk of suitability of scholarly credentials, etc., is entirely a clever red herring. So for instance, had NF only written about, say, the native American Indians’ theft of their ancestral home lands of thousands of years of continuous inhabitation at the hands of the foreign settlers to the New World, or the military acquisition of California from Mexico - since these momentous events are now irreversible faits accomplis that we all recognize today as history long past, and which only serve the interest of torturing high school students in getting them to nod their heads in profound wisdom of how cruel some constructions of nations can be - this would not be an issue.
What this issue is in fact about is to continue permitting the full faits accomplis of a new settlement of another peoples’ brutally usurped land that is now very much in progress, even as I write this in April 2007, in the supposed ‘enlightened’ modernity of the 21st century.
As evidence of the unimpeachable veracity of this statement, may I humbly point to the vehement attacks on the distinguished former American President Jimmy Carter by this same antagonist from Harvard Law School and his equally distinguished coterie of fellow intellectuals, 14 of whom presumably resigned in protest from the Carter Center, when the former American President dared to even speak out, as anemically as he did, against this new settlement in progress. A monumental crime against humanity that the world not only spectates silently at the expense of a suffering peoples, but the American public directly aids and abets in its commission by virtue of permitting their super power nation - a “populist democracy” - to financially, politically militarily, and culturally support it by being deliberately kept uninformed about it by their institutional ruling elite.
So if this wasn’t Norm Finkelstein, but say Zahir Ebrahim, the plebeian ordinary me, and my heritage had as much distinctive weight to give my voice of conscience against this monumental crime any credibility before the American public, I would have experienced the same fate. As did Jimmy Carter. And so does Norman Finkelstein. Nothing either of them has written is so intellectually profound that one can not know simply by examining the thousands of books and documents that exist in the Israeli Government’s own archives, in the victims’ own archives, and by simply visiting the Holy Land of oppression - not the Tel Aviv side, but the West Bank side. Or simply by reading a narrative in a Palestinian victim’s own voice who is born on that soil, whose father, grandparents, and great… were all born on that soil, such as the notable and heart wrenching “Refugees in our Own Land” by Muna Hamzeh, that one can purchase in any American book store. The best $25 you can spend in easily acquiring first hand knowledge of the incredible veracity and brutal honesty of the scholarship of Norm Finkelstein - his main and courageous virtue - of exposing simple moral truths in a mainstream of deception.
So what is Finkelstein’s crime? It has to be examined in the light of his very first crime - a challenge to Joan Peters who had reproduced the Zionist narrative of “A land without a people for a people without a land” in pseudo scholarship and largely for consumption in this nation for the benefit of its gullible and uninformed peoples. For elsewhere, the people of the world are indeed allowed to hear the passionate narratives of the indigenous natives of the ‘land without a people’ themselves. But in America, such narratives are not permitted to be heard in the voices of the victims themselves - the unfortunate and forgotten children of a ‘lesser god’, the P-A-L-E-S-T-I-N-I-A-N-S - within the mainstream discourse!
So it falls to the lot of men and women of uncommon conscience, and uncommon moral courage, like Norm Finkelstein, to provide them a voice before the peoples of his own nation.
But that voice is very inconvenient while the fait accompli is still incrementally in progress, and the support of American peoples - who know the history of how their own land was settled by the slaughter of 10 million indigenous natives very well - is crucial in achieving that fait accompli. As one of the main thinkers and former National Security Advisor of this august nation had candidly noted in his book: “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization”.
Thus that’s what this hullabaloo is all about.
And as you will surely notice, the accomplishment of this fait accompli to its fullest realization is of such pressing concern to this antagonist from Harvard University Law School, that it does not even prevent him from usurping and mowing down the mandates of the most important contribution to the modernity du jour that this nation has made - her 2000 schools and colleges of higher learning, and their much coveted academic freedom of thought. For what was the battle that Socrates willingly drank the hemlock, and Galileo suffered?
Thus who is traitor and who isn’t, who needs to be tried for treason against his own peoples for keeping them misinformed, and who needs to be awarded not just the simple tenure, but other distinguishing position in the university and other fair compensation for outlandishly being made to suffer this calumny simply for standing up to uphold the honor of his peoples by keeping them informed, I will let your own good conscience be the fair judge.
I don’t know Norm Finkelstein personally. But as the moral voice of conscience, I claim him as my teacher, no differently than I claim Socrates as my teacher.
Thus in humble defense of my uncommonly courageous teacher, I hope you can lend due consideration to the following two letters and this summary analysis which has outright dispelled all the red herrings of this case.
Sincerely
Zahir Ebrahim
Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
PrisonersoftheCave.org
This letter was first submitted via http://www.normanfinkelstein.wordpress.com on April 29, 2007.
URLs of the two cited letters:
http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/04/letter-chronicle-dershowitz-finkelstein.html
http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/04/open-letter-to-president-of-depaul.html
— end letter —