Friday, July 07, 2006

DePaul's Norman Finkelstein vents on Klocek and Irshad Manji, "a Salman Rushdie wannabe"

Grant Crowell, the northwest suburban Chicago documentary filmmaker and business man, is a busy person these days. While chasing the elusive Ward Churchill, Crowell also keeps DePaul University on his radar. Speaking from my own experience, as with Ward Churchill, there is plenty of material to comb through when fixing your journalistic sight on DePaul.

In June, Grant Crowell sent Professor Finkelstein an e-mail, Finkelstein wrote back. And a disturbingly entertaining mini-series of electronic exchanges resulted.

Arguably DePaul's best-known professor, Norman G. Finkelstein is on the political science faculty at DePaul.

He's intellectually cozy with such discredited holocaust-deniers such as David Irving. (Irving is discredited as a historian, his holocaust-denial credentials are still pretty solid.)

Here's what Alan Dershowitz wrote about Finkelstein last year in Jbooks.com (click the link to find the footnotes):

Finkelstein has said that he "can't imagine why Israel's apologists would be offended by a comparison with the Gestapo" and asserted that Israel's human rights record is "interchangeable with Iraq's" when it was ruled by Saddam Hussein. He has said that most alleged Holocaust survivors -- including Elie Wiesel --have fabricated their past, are "bogus," and that those seeking reparations are "cheats" and "greedy." Because of my support of Israel, he has compared me to "Adolf Eichman [sic]," and accused me of expressing "Nazi moral judgments." When challenged to defend his frequent comparison between Jews and Nazis, he has responded, "Nazis never like to hear they're being Nazis." He is a popular speaker among German neo-Nazis; one, Ingrid Rimland, whose husband, the notorious Ernst Zuendel, wrote The Hitler We Loved And Why, even referred to him admiringly as the "Jewish David Irving" ("Judischer David Irving")-- a reference to the British Holocaust denier and Hitler admirer. The comparison is apt because Finkelstein has reportedly praised the Holocaust-denying Irving as "a good historian!" and as having "made an indispensable contribution to our knowledge of World War II."

Naturally, Finkelstein's opinion of Dershowitz is unfavorable, but "Fink" has chosen to piggyback onto "Dersh's" fame by choosing Beyond Chutzpah as the title of his latest book, a dig at Dershowitz' best-selling Chutzpah.

About those e-mails:

What does Finkelstein think of the Thomas Klocek free speech case? Well, read for yourself here on the C-Spot blog, but nothing original is the short answer--Norman thinks that Klocek should've followed the grievance procedure at DePaul. Finkelstein doesn't seem to be aware of is the the DePaul administration "kept moving the goal posts" on the Klocek.

I haven't met Finkelstein, but based on his writing style and insulting word choices (he called Crowell "an imbecile") he has to be--even lowering the bar considering he's an an academic--one arrogant son-of-a-bitch.

It's not jusk Klocek they corresponded about, there's also "the Muslim Refusenik," Irshad Manji. This is from her web site:

Recently, I asked you to put your names on a petition to support the 12 signatories of the Manifesto Against a New Totalitarianism. The manifesto signatories included me, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasrin and Salman Rushdie. I explained that we received a serious death threat from the British-based Islamic website ummah.com, and that your signatures of solidarity with us would show that we are not afraid to defy Islamist radicals. Some 2000 of you signed - and the number is still growing!

Only one person emailed a disconcerting message. A gentleman named Norman Finkelstein wrote to say, "Is there a petition supporting the death threats?" Maybe he's just a researcher.

Or maybe he's an assistant professor of political science at a large, Midwestern university.

Here's an excerpt from a June 22 e-mail to Finkelstein:

Norman, I don't know if you're capable of really being honest of where you personally stand on this, but now I doubt it really matters. At least try being honest about this, since it doesn't involve Klocek but your direct name: Did you send in an e-mail to the Islamic feminist author Israd Manji, asking if there was a petition to support death threats against her person and her fellow free-thinking Islamist scholars? Your name is right up in there in the site saying you did.

http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/petition.html

I hope you'll at least consider it important enough to your reputation to clarify whether or not you sent such am e-mail and were serious, or if that was just your idea of a joke. Obviously they're suggesting that you align yourself with religious supremacist groups who believe in the brutal murder of independent thinkers in the name of Islam, which many would considered to be very defamatory if it were false. If you value your credibility as an anti-totalitarian protestor, you would do well to clear that matter up with them. And somehow, Norman, I doubt going through DePaul's grievance process will make you look any better on this one.

You have a good day and enjoy your freedom in America. (And for now, at DePaul.)


Finkelstein's response on the Manji question (I omitted the non-relevant portion for the sake of brevity, but this link has the entire e-mail, along with all of the others).

Regarding Martyr #2 Irshad Manji:

(1) Manji claims she was the object of a serious death threat;
(2) People who are the objects of serious death threats go to a law enforcement agency; they don't organize petitions;
(3) I've received many death threats. I consider them unserious and ignore them. Professor Said was the object of a serious death threat. He didn't ask friends to sign a petition stating: "Please do not kill Professor Said." He went to the FBI. A rational person would understand how preposterous Manji's latest stunt is; it seems you don't;
(4) The only one who organizes petitions for alleged death threats are desperate publicity-seekers and Salman Rushdie wannabes (photo-op #1 on Manji's website);
(5) Were you not an imbecile but a rational human being you'd understand what my point was: The only rational basis for a petition against a death threat is a petition for a death threat. But alas you can't understand this because in your demented universe Manji is an "Islamic feminist author," "free-thinking Islamist" and on and on. Did you happen to read the Times op-ed by this moral paragon titled "How I learned to love the wall" Oh, such courage - braving those alleged death threats as she sings the praises of Israel's little ghetto. I didn't know that "left-leaning libertarians" favored caging in human beings. Live and learn, I suppose.

I'm half-way through reading Manji's The Trouble with Islam : A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith, and I just got to the part about her visit to Israel.

As for that New York Times op-ed, here it is, judge for yourself if Manji praises "Israel's little ghetto."

As I blogged here, I was at Irshad's April presentation at a synagogue in Northfield, Illinois. There were two uniformed police officers in the audience. Were they dupes for Manji's publicity campaign? That thought didn't occur to me.

However, I felt more comfortable they--and likely some undercover officers--were there.

For a jihadist-bomber, there aren't many targets as enticing as a Muslim-lesbian critic of Islam speaking at a synagogue in one of Chicago's wealthiest suburbs.

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