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Controversial Professor Loses Battle for Tenure
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More in NewsA controversial Jewish professor who claims that Israel and Jewish organizations have exploited the Holocaust for political and financial gain was denied tenure at DePaul University following a long-simmering feud that played out in the pages of the national media.
Norman Finkelstein, an assistant professor of political science who makes regular appearances on American campuses decrying Israel’s human rights record, lost his battle for tenure this week when the president of the nation’s largest Catholic university, the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, accepted the “no” vote of the institution’s promotion and tenure board. The decision comes after a widely publicized battle between Finkelstein and Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School professor and vociferous defender of the Jewish state, and after a raft of petitions — both for and against Finkelstein’s tenure — circulated around the country.
Finkelstein, who has taught at DePaul since 2001, maintains that the Chicago-based university succumbed to political pressure after Dershowitz and Jewish groups made their views on him known.
“Had I been judged strictly according to the criteria of tenure, I would have sailed through the process,” Finkelstein said in an interview. “But I simply was not able to summon up the kind of political force that was required to overturn the political pressures inflicted on this university.”
Finkelstein also said that the university made a “rational” decision from its point of view, given its fear that if he became a permanent faculty member, his activities might hurt the school’s fundraising ability.
The university, however, vigorously denied that external pressure or financial considerations played any role in its decision. “The president felt that at every level of the review, they all stuck to the facts,” said Denise Mattson, a spokeswoman for the school, referring to the faculty members who reviewed Finkelstein’s application for tenure. “The outside influence had no influence on either the process or the final outcome,” she said.
Mattson also described the unsolicited input from those on both sides of the debate as “unwelcome and inappropriate.”
In the lead-up to the decision, petitions with thousands of signatures from concerned college students and faculty were delivered to DePaul in an effort to sway the school’s verdict. StandWithUs, a pro-Israel activist group, gathered 8,131 signatures for its petition to deny the 53-year-old professor tenure. Another well-circulated petition, in support of tenure for Finkelstein, collected 5,273 signatures.
Finkelstein, a Brooklyn native who previously taught at New York University, has raised the ire of mainstream Jewish leaders who look askance at his scholarship and viewpoint. Finkelstein’s 2000 book, “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering,” characterized the Swiss banks settlement, which garnered $1.25 billion for Holocaust survivors, as the work of Jewish “hucksters” out to make a buck. Finkelstein has argued that Israel inappropriately invokes the Holocaust as a moral defense for mistreating Palestinians.
Finkelstein also has launched attacks on Dershowitz, accusing him of plagiarism. The DePaul professor essentially devoted an entire book, “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History,” to poking holes in Dershowitz’s pro-Israel tome, “The Case for Israel.”
In recent months, articles and opinion pieces about the nasty imbroglio between Dershowitz and Finkelstein have appeared in the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Dershowitz himself penned a May 4 opinion piece in the Journal, titled “Finkelstein’s Bigotry,” which concluded: “But for the time being, the question remains: Will his bigotry receive the imprimatur of the largest Catholic university in America?”
In an interview, Dershowitz denied having waged a campaign against Finkelstein’s tenure, despite a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education to that effect. Dershowitz said that Finkelstein had manufactured the public fight so as to deflect attention from the fact that he has not published anything in a peer-reviewed journal.
“He’s responsible for himself not getting tenure, because his whole body of work consists of ad hominem attacks on his ideological enemies,” Dershowitz said.
Comments
You should also have noted that the Christian Zionist movement led by Dr. Charles J. Edgbaston played a major role in this tenure denial. It commissioned a forensic study of Finkelstein's books exposing hundred of factual errors. This was forwarded to DePaul management last January. One of the most egregious errors was Finkelstein's claim that Israel was the only country in the world occupying territory. It was demonstrated that China occupies Tibet, India occupies Kashmir, and Russia occupies Chechnya. 49 other countries occupying territories were cited. This error led to the discovery of the multiple falsehoods in his books including the statement that all holocaust survivor accounts were made up. With such "scholarship", it was easy to deny him tenure because he falsely paraded as an academic. Moral of the story? everyone should read his books and ralize what a monumental hoax this evil man has perpetrated.
Get your facts straight. Finkelstein is a malicious anti-Semite who is regarded as a Holocaust Denier by the ADL and the Wiesenthal Center. Hilberg, whose "scholarly quality" is at best questionable, is shilling for Finkelstein out of petty anger at the "Jewish Establishment", which he despises far more than the Holocaust Deniers and Neo-Nazis, and because Finkelstein attacked Hilberg's nemesis Goldhagen. This is juvenile behavior by Hilberg and borders on academic prostitution. Finkelstein has never published a single academic article in an academic journal. He simply turns out gutter hatred in the form of "books". Finkelstein supports Islamofascist terror and wants Israel destroyed. Hilberg seems unsure whether he would get upset if Finkelstein's terrorist friends had their way and perpetrated a second Holocaust.
There is no questiont that Norman Finklestein, the darling of the neo Nazi right, was using his position at DePaul to advance his bizaare anti-semitic views that Jews were exploiting the holocaust in order to advance their political and economic ambitions. Rather than providing insight and offering a solution to the complex issues involved in the Arab Israeli conflict, his tomes merely added confusion to this contentious debate and added fuel to their fire. Furthermore, his work was also extremely offensive to the vast majority of Jewish holocaust survivors whose cause he ostensibly represented. It is a pleasure to see this tenure denied and one can only hope that Mr. Finklestein will no return to the margins of society to which he belongs.
You might mention the praise Prof. Finkelstein received from Raul Hilberg. Professor Hilberg is widely recognized for his scholarship and is respected for his devotion to Israel.