Trial of Norman Finkelstein and Other Intellectual Outcasts (Part II)

…by Jonas E. Alexis

Norman Finkelstein has been a bad boy from time immemorial. As the Jewish magazine Tablet put it, “Finkelstein has been the American Jewish community’s problem-child…”[1]

If Finkelstein had never left the Maoist movement, if he had zipped his lips and sealed his pen and tried to play his cards right, he almost certainly would not have gotten into trouble with what J. J. Goldberg would have called “Jewish power.”[2] Finkelstein probably would have been a full professor at DePaul University.

But Finkelstein, like E. Michael Jones and Denis Rancourt and others, doesn’t seem to be good at playing cards, particularly when reason and the moral law are at stake. Jones had a great opportunity to make a name for himself when Stanley Fish, his then Jewish professor, told him that he was “brilliant.” Jones was flattered. Yet instead of returning the favor, Jones later told Fish that

“he wasn’t that much different than all of the people we had been criticizing. And not only that, I made the mistake of saying on in his class. You see I had heard all these rumors about academic freedom, not understanding, of course, that all of these considerations have to take a back seat to fostering one’s career.

“And the first rule in that regard is that when a professor says you are brilliant, you reciprocate. He would say you were brilliant and use his connections to get you a job, perhaps, if you would go off to that job promoting him in your own way, by mentioning his books in your articles, by inviting him to speak, etc. It is the way academic reputations are made these days, but I had to learn that the hard way.”[3]

Jones wrote the above statement around 1993, but his objections to Fish’s Reader-Response Criticism goes way back to 1976, when he wrote a final paper criticizing Fish’s own metaphysical substratum. Jones wrote,

“Stated in its simplest form, a form Fish used to repeat ad nauseam in class, the theory posits that ‘you can only read what you’ve already read.’ Now one needed be particularly ‘brilliant’ to see that this formulation is self-contradictory and just generally dumb.

“How did one get to the point where one can read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm as opposed to Finnegans Wake or ‘See Dick run,’ for that matter, if you can only read what you’ve already read? You can’t learn anything new, if that’s the case, which means you can’t learn how to read. Or, as I said then:

“How did we get the ability to see what we now see at, let us say, point B in our lives, if a point A we could only see what we could already see at point A? How is it possible, in other words, that things change, that yesterday’s New Critic is today’s Reader Response Critic?

“Fish, it seems, has given us a dialectical theory of reading in which change is impossible. This is not only a flat contradiction of what he describes as the reader’s progress from word to word through a line of poetry but a denial of all change and therefore all possibility of learning as well.”[4]

Fish, in a nutshell, was intellectually corrupt. By 1999, the scholarly world finally got their wake-up call and realized that Fish actually ruined English literature in academic circles such as Duke University. Fish helped hire queer theorists and feminists like Eve Kosofsky Sedwick and Jonathan Goldberg, but the result was obviously to deconstruct what the goal of a university should be, which is the pursuit of truth.

Sedwick in particular was a Jewish feminist. Her book, The Epistemology of the Closet, is “a collection of complex investigations of the logic of sexual desire and identity in the writings of Proust, Nietzsche, James, Wilde, and Melville” and “would consolidate her national reputation and help to inaugurate the ‘queer moment’ in the humanities. Today, when it seems every other paper at the MLA has a title like ‘Queering Ben Jonson,’ Sedgwick is the scholar most credited–or blamed–for queer theory’s ascendancy.”

External reviewers were completely shocked to learn that Duke was a complete mess by the time Fish began to implement his theory there:

“We find the Duke English department in a seriously weakened condition; more weakened, perhaps, even than its own internal critics realize. Its meteoric rise has given way to a relatively rapid descent. This is not to say that the department lacks excellent faculty; but the current department, except by virtue of its afterglow, cannot reasonably be considered top-ranked.”

Duke, according to the reviewers, had a “desperately low morale.” The English department, we were also told, became “‘a hodgepodge of uncoordinated offerings’ in which ‘broad foundational courses’ were few and evidence of collective faculty planning was scant.”

Scholar David Yaffe wrote,

“They also recounted hearing what amounted to ‘litanies of perceived deception and duplicity’ from disgruntled faculty. Even more disturbing, perhaps, the reviewers described a department in which basic services–like teaching–had become a random, arbitrary affair. ‘The department still finds itself without anything we would be disposed to describe as an undergraduate or a graduate curriculum,’ they wrote.

“Fish soon followed with a bombshell of his own: In July he announced that he and his wife, Jane Tompkins, were leaving for the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he would serve as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

“The revelation that Fish’s empire was in crisis provoked a wave of Schadenfreude through the literary profession and a front-page story in the New York Times.”

It sounds like the reviewers read E. Michael Jones’ Degenerate Moderns, in which Jones argues that Fish is much more of a superstar than a serious academic. The reviewers declared that Fish was “the epitome of the academic as showman, a new breed of superstar as much concerned with professional notoriety as with the humdrum details of scholarship.”

Despite the fact that Fish ruined the English department at Duke, he strongly believed that he did a great job! “If something endures for twelve or thirteen years in the academic profession,” he said, “if, as Yeats would say, the center holds for that long, then that is what should be marveled at, not that there is a loss of personnel now.”

In a similar vein, Kosofsky declared, “What I come away from this train wreck feeling is not, ‘Oh, what a terrible train wreck,’ but that it was a real accomplishment.”

No doubt that feminist professor Camille Paglia, whom we shall meet in a future, called Fish a “totalitarian Tinkerbell.” Yaffee wrote, “Looking for a savior, Duke has decided to stick with the devil it knows: Stanley Fish.”

By the time Fish got done destroying the English department at Duke, he swiftly moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was offered $230,000 a year!

In short, Fish destroyed the English department at Duke with what Jones later called “Talmudic exegesis.”[5] Talmudic exegesis, Jones continued,

“wasn’t racial; it wasn’t feminist; it wasn’t homosexual; it was Jewish and expressing Jewish culture at its worst. Political correctness was the final expression of the Talmudic redefinition of American discourse which had begun in the ‘70s under the direction of Jewish critical theorists like Fish and Derrida.”[6]

How did that come about? Jones argued that the Whig establishment brought this upon themselves:

“The traditional view claimed [free] speech was subordinated to the moral law, the good in question. The Whig Enlightenment claimed, in the case of speech, that the moral law was subject to individual freedom. This rallying cry allowed Jewish revolutionaries to take over the university. Once in power, they changed the rules.”[7]

If you do not think that Jones is right on target here, ask Denis Rancourt. Rancourt thought that he was academically safe at the University of Ottawa but later realized that this was not the case. Rancourt was a tenured professor and taught physics and applied sciences for more than twenty-five years at the university. Rancourt is not a crank or crackpot scientist out there who does not know his material:

But Rancourt’s stellar career did not stop the Zionist lobby in Canada from getting him fired. Perhaps the Zionist regime is telling Rancourt and Finkelstein and others that they need to start reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Going back to Norman Finkelstein. Alan Dershowitz realized pretty quickly that he needed to destroy Finkelstein before Finkelstein destroyed the Israeli project. After Finkelstein put Dershowitz’s feet firmly in midair, Dershowitz immediately went to work.

Dershowitz even tried to stop the University of California from publishing Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. Dershowitz was so desperate at the time that he even tried to get Arnold Schwarzenegger, then governor of California, involved in putting a price on Finkelstein’s academic career.

In 2007, Dershowitz

“sent members of DePaul’s law and political-science faculties what he described as ‘a dossier of Norman Finkelstein’s most egregious academic sins, and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and distortions.’”[8]

In the end, Finkelstein was basically fired from DePaul University. After the event, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Finkelstein could not find a serious academic job—“not even as an adjunct” professor—anyway on the planet.[9] Finkelstein lamented,

“I would ask faculty there about a position and was told it was out of the question. I can’t even get an adjunct appointment for one semester.”[10]

A high school teaching job seemed to be out of the question as well:

“The way they do background checks is to Google your name. With me, they would get 30,000 Web sites, one-third of them saying I am a Holocaust denier, a supporter of terrorism, a crackpot, and a lunatic.”[11]

To a serious academic who is in touch with the Western intellectual tradition, Alan Dershowitz’s behavior is completely unnecessary and dumb. This was probably one reason why John Quiggin of the University of Queensland declared that Dershowitz is “entirely deserving of a boycott.”[12] Robert L. Trivers, a biologist at Tufts University, also thought that Dershowitz’s behavior was quite weird. On one occasion, he told Dershowitz:

“Regarding your rationalization of Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians, let me just say that if there is a repeat of Israeli butchery toward Lebanon and if you decide once again to rationalize it publicly, look forward to a visit from me. Nazis — and Nazi-like apologists such as yourself — need to be confronted directly.”[13]

Trivers was supposed to deliver a lecture at Harvard, but Dershowitz thwarted the talk. The irony of all this is that Dershowitz sent a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2010 saying that he supported academic freedom![14]

Norman Finkelstein has recently been asked the question, “Do you have any opinion/observations on the recent sex-slave allegations against Alan Dershowitz?”  He responded,

“It’s caused me to doubt my atheism.”

How did Norman Finkelstein get involved in all this?

Finkelstein became morally and intellectually sick with what happened in China during the Maoist devastation and left the movement once and for all. As he put it,

“I was bedridden for three weeks, [and] it was a very painful experience for me. Not only because I had been wrong, but because I felt really embarrassed that I had been lecturing and pontificating with such self-confidence.”[15]

After the publication of Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial, Finkelstein got his wake-up call. However, Finkelstein thought that he ought to be a little careful in committing himself to a position particularly because he did not want to be disappointed once again. Peters’ fraudulent book changed all that:

“So, when the book came out, I went at it. It was Captain Ahab and Moby-Dick. I went down to the New York Public Library, and they had a special section at that time where they kept all the League of Nation and Permanent Mandate Commission reports on Palestine, and I went through everything.

“The core of the book was chapter 13, the demographic study, and in the back were the tables that corresponded with the text. I would come home from work each night, lie down on my bed, and go through the numbers, I do everything with paper and pad, and I’m doing it and I’m doing it and I’m doing it.

“And then one night, it was 1:30 in the morning, I suddenly discovered the fraud, the fake numbers. I got goose pimples. I’ve discovered a fraud!

“I got up and, in that tiny little studio in Washington Heights, and I’m pacing back and forth, I did it! I did it! I couldn’t believe it. I was just a graduate student, I was working in a daycare center in Chelsea to make ends meet while writing my dissertation.

“And so I first went to one of the—now he’s turned out to be one of the leading computer scientists in the world, then he was the head of the theory section at Bell Labs, to make sure the math was right, and he confirmed it.”[16]

Finkelstein was happy because he found the truth about Peters’ lies and hoaxes, but that meant that he would be in constant battle with the people who allowed such a fraudulent book to be published.

“So, I wrote up my findings, and I sent it to 25 of the leading scholars in the world who are knowledgeable on the subject. Twenty-four never replied.”[17]

Perhaps those scholars knew what would happen to them if they replied to Finkelstein’s request. Perhaps they knew that in the “Jewish Century,” it is hard to produce serious history and scholarship without getting into trouble.

Perhaps those scholars knew what happened to former Stanford historian Norman Davies, who almost went head to head with a member of the Dreadful Few by the name of Lucy Dawidowicz. Perhaps they knew what happened to Paul Gottfried, whose academic career has been destroyed by “polite” people in this world. Years later, Gottfried lamented,

“Political correctness has permeated the historian’s craft to such a degree that honest historians must reinvent the wheel. PC has infected German history in particular. The doctrine of German ‘collective guilt’ is often held as a precondition for German good behavior.

“Established historians in the US, England, and especially Germany must assume their subjects’ general wickedness since at least the 1871 unification. The German Republic’s leading social theorist, Jürgen Habermas, has argued repeatedly that viewing Germans as less than responsible for all of modern European history’s major catastrophes is ‘pedagogically dangerous.’”[18]

In the old tradition—that is before the Dreadful Few took over the historical and scholarly pursuit—a statement or theory or hypothesis was judged against rational historical evidence. From Plato to Kant and beyond, we constantly see ideas are discussed within the parameters of free inquiry and to a large extent within the moral order.

In any event, the only one person who actually answered Finkelstein’s call with respect to Peters’ book was Noam Chomsky. Finkelstein asked, “Here’s what I found in this book, do you think it’s worth pursuing”? Chomsky responded,

“I told him, yeah, I think it’s an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you’re going to get in trouble—because you’re going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they’re going to destroy you.

“So, I said: if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you’re getting into…Your life is at stake too, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.”[19]

Chomsky turned out to be right because Peters’ book was endorsed by thought-police such as Saul Below, Barbara Tuckman, Daniel Pipes, Lucy Dawidowicz, etc. Perhaps Finkelstein was a little naïve about the twentieth century; perhaps he was willing to challenge the establishment; perhaps he was just too young at the time to understand how political correctness works in the academe. Chomsky continued,

“Well, he didn’t believe me. We became very close friends after this…He went ahead and wrote up an article, and he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn’t even bother responding…

“Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn’t make appointments with him, they wouldn’t read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.”[20]

Chomsky suggested that Finkelstein “shift over to a different department, where I knew some people and figure he’d at least be treated decently. That turned out to be wrong. He switched over, and when he got to the point of writing his thesis he literally could not get the faculty to read it, he couldn’t get them to come to his thesis defense. Finally, out of embarrassment, they granted him a Ph.D…but they will not even write a letter for him saying that he was a student at Princeton University.”[21]

Peters’ book turned out to be one of the major events in the twentieth century because it revealed that the Dreadful Few are not interested in serious scholarship, historical enquiry, and ultimately the truth. As Chomsky himself put it,

“Finkelstein was being called in by big professors in the field who were telling him, ‘Look, call off your crusade; you drop this and we’ll take care of you, we’ll make sure you get a job.”[22]

What those professors were indirectly saying was,

“Hey, we got into the school not because of scholarship but because we play the Jewish game. In fact, thought police like Deborah Lipstadt got into Emory University because she is a member of the Dreadful Few, not because she has produced serious scholarly studies.

“Alan Dershowitz stayed at Harvard until he was retired not because he produced historically truthful work but because no one could tell him what to do. In fact, Dershowitz produced The Case for Israel, a book that should really embarrass a lazy high school student. If you want to make it big, Norman, you have to join the crew. After all, life is short. You might as well enjoy the short time while you can. If not, you will be an outcast and we do not have enough political firepower to redeem you.”

Finkelstein was somewhat focused, despite the fact that no publisher or reviewer in the United States wanted to take a look at his findings. But things blew out of proportion when respected journals in England saw Finkelstein’s treasure. They began to openly say things like Peters’ From Time Immemorial “doesn’t even reach the level of nonsense, of idiocy.”[23]

The Zionist media such as the New York Review of Books finally started to pay attention to Finkelstein. But they did what a covert assassin would have done:

“See, there’s like a routine that you go through—if a book gets blown out of the water in England in places people here will see, or if a book gets praised in England, you have to react.

“And if it’s a book on Israel, there’s a standard way of doing it: you get an Israeli scholar to review it. That’s called covering your ass—because whatever an Israeli scholar says, you’re pretty safe: no one can accuse the journal of anti-Semitism, none of the usual stuff works.

“So after the Peters book got blown out of the water in England, the New York Review assigned it to a good person actually, in fact Israel’s leading specialist on Palestinian nationalism [Yehoshua Porath], someone who knows a lot about the subject.

“And he wrote a review, which they then didn’t publish—it went on for almost a year without the thing being published; nobody knows exactly what was going on, but you can guess that there must have been a lot of pressure not to publish it.

“Eventually it was even written up in the New York Times that this review wasn’t getting published, so finally some version of it did appear. It was critical, it said the book is nonsense and so on, but it cut corners, the guy didn’t say what he knew.”[24]

Chomsky concluded,

“Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support. But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they’re likely to be kicked out.

“The standard thing, though, is that they won’t make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young—they’ll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line.

“So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it’s not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that’s how they got there. And that’s pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools—that’s the basic story of how it operates.”[25]

Perhaps it is time for Chomsky to pick up Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, in which it is stated on the very first page that

“The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century…Modernization is about everyone becoming Jewish.”[26]

In any event, Finkelstein was cast out. But the truth was not. Dershowitz and the powers that be thought that the Zionist project would have peace on earth it they could just silence the man once and for all. Yet they were completely deceived by their own Talmudic craftiness.

Virtually every serious person who is interested in the Israel/Palestine conflict has heard of Finkelstein. He probably would not have gotten that far had he not been rejected by the Dreadful Few. Finkelstein can freely say that Benjamin Netanyahu is a maniac—and for good reason.

Here again we see that Hegel was right: wicked men cannot stop ultimate reason and purpose.  In other words, truth will win in the end, and it is only a matter of time.

[1] David Samuels, “Q&A: Norman Finkelstein: The intellectual pariah, author of two new books, on Noam Chomsky, BDS, the Holocaust, and Whitney Houston,” Tablet, June 11, 2012.

[2] J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

[3] E. Michael Jones, Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2012), 76.

[4] Ibid., 76-77.

[5] E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 1000.

[6] Ibid., 1001.

[7] Ibid.

[8] “DePaul Rejects Tenure Bid by Finkelstein and Says Dershowitz Pressure Played No Role,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 8, 2007.

[9] “Closed Out? Norman Finkelstein, Controversial Scholar Denied Tenure, Can’t Find a Job,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 7, 2008.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid. Many of those who supported Finkelstein were also denied tenure at the same university. “Finkelstein Supporter Was Also Denied Tenure,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 18, 2007.

[12] “The Ubiquity of Alan Dershowitz,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2007.

[13] “Rutgers Professor’s Harvard Talk Is Canceled After Verbal Attack on Dershowitz,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 27, 2007.

[14] “Speech Defended Academic Freedom, Writes Dershowitz,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, 2010. Perhaps Dershowitz needs to talk to philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt about his book entitled On Bullshit. Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

[15] Samuels, “Q&A: Norman Finkelstein: The intellectual pariah, author of two new books, on Noam Chomsky, BDS, the Holocaust, and Whitney Houston,” Tablet, June 11, 2012.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Paul Gottfried, “The Eternal German Guilt Trip,” Taki’s Magazine, January 11, 2012.

[19] Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (New York: The New Press, 2002), 245.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] ibid., 246.

[23] Ibid., 247.

[24] Ibid..

[25] Ibid.

[26] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1.

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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