Syndication
Norman Finkelstein
Hezbollah Is ‘Hatikvah’ To Norman Finkelstein’s Ears
Anti-Israel firebrand turned academic-freedom martyr Norman Finkelstein recently paid a visit to his favorite Lebanese extremist group.
The AP reports that the “Holocaust Industry” author and former DePaul University professor met with Hezbollah’s commander in south Lebanon and toured a village that was the scene of heavy fighting in the summer of 2006.
“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. They are fighting to defend their homeland,” Finkelstein told reporters.
UPDATE: At least Finkelstein apparently thinks Israel has a right to exist, as this bizarre debate lineup at the Oxford Union seems to suggest.
Hat tip: Solomonia
Norman Finkelstein in Coney Island: ‘It’s Like Death’
New York magazine catches up with anti-Israel polemicist and now ex-academic Norman Finkelstein. Having been given the boot by DePaul University, it turns out he’s now living in Coney Island!
Ben Harris reports for New York Magazine:
At 54, Norman Finkelstein is pretty much back where he started. This summer, the leftist scholar—who made a name for himself in 2000 with his book The Holocaust Industry, in which he called Jewish leaders a “repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums, and hucksters” intent on extorting war reparations from European governments—lost his job as assistant professor of political science at DePaul University. Fortunately, he kept the lease on his late father’s threadbare rent-stabilized apartment, on Ocean Parkway, and there he’s retreated.
“It’s like death,” Finkelstein says. “You keep saying you’re going to die, but you never really come to grips with it. And I can see I’m not going to get another job. I haven’t yet fully absorbed it.”
His days are now spent in solitary scholarly pursuits; his bookshelves buckle under the weight of tomes by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. Notes of support from his students sit on a piano; there’s a photo of him and Noam Chomsky (“my closest friend”) bare-chested on the beach at Cape Cod.
