Moron DePaul's Norman Finkelstein

With all this Ward Churchill stuff going on, somehow this FrontPage Magazine article about DePaul's Norman Finkelstein escaped my usually attentive eyes.

But Sol at Solomonia posted it. His is a good blog.

From Jacob Laksin at FrontPage:

The name Norman Finkelstein is not exactly synonymous with serious scholarship. A professor of political science at Chicago’s DePaul University, Finkelstein has been widely denounced as a flamboyantly anti-Semitic crank for writing books like The Holocaust Industry, his 2000 jeremiad alleging that Holocaust survivors were “cheats” who had fictionalized their past out of a “greedy” desire to collect reparations. When not calumniating against Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein actively promulgates his theory about a global Jewish conspiracy, its alleged initiates running from the late Leon Uris to Stephen Spielberg. He counts neo-Nazis among his staunchest defenders. Even a passing familiarity with Finkelstein’s resume suggests that no publisher of any repute would publish his books.

There are, as it turns out, exceptions. The largest academic publisher on the West Coast, The University of California Press, has not only signed off on the publication of Finkelstein’s latest effort, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, but it has been unstinting in its defense of the book, hailing the virulent broadside against defenders of Israel and Jews generally and the liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz specifically as a model of scholarly achievement.

There's more...

Nothing fits the mold better than the anti-Israel prejudices of the hard left. On the press’s website, the endorsements for the book read like a who’s who of the Israel-bashing far left. There’s a glowing tribute from the dean of academic radicalism, Noam Chomsky, who calls Beyond Chutzpah a “very solid, important and highly informative book,” filled with “considerable historical depth and expert research.” Meanwhile, the far-left academic Avi Shlaim, who has likened Sharon to a terrorist and lauded Yasir Arafat for fighting Islamic extremists, hails Finkelstein’s book for its meticulous attention to detail. That both are Jewish has not escaped the press’s attention. In an interview with Frontpagemag, Hooper hastened to note “that in fact we have only received high praise so far from very many distinguished Jewish scholars.”

(Alan M.) Dershowitz is impatient with that line of defense. “One of the most offensive things they are saying in their defense is that they have the support of Jews. Our staff is Jewish, the people who endorsed the book are Jewish, some of our best friends are Jewish. Well, Norman Finkelstein proves that a Jew can be an anti-Semite,” he says. In the end, Dershowitz has little doubt about why the press published Beyond Chutzpah. “I think they have a double standard for judging the hard anti-Zionist right than they would for David Duke and the far right. But David Duke and Norman Finkelstein are the same,” he says. “Except that Duke is slightly brighter."

Bold print emphasis is mine.