Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Was DePaul's Norman Finkelstein invited to the Tehran Holocaust conference?

Noted holocaust minimizer Prof. Norman G. Finkelstein of DePaul may--or may not have been--invited to the recently concluded Tehran Holocaust conference.

From an Alan Dershowitz Huffington Post article:

A neo-Nazi website has published the schedule of speakers at the Iranian Holocaust denial conference. (His name was mysteriously removed from the schedule Tuesday morning.) Prominent among the speakers in the schedule was assistant professor Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University. His name appeared along with Professor David Duke of the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management in Ukraine and other assorted nuts, neo-Nazis, Islamo-fascists, and America- and Israel-bashers.

It is unclear whether Finkelstein actually attended the conference, since the identify of many of the attendees has been kept secret, and the media office at DePaul says it doesn't know. But Finkelstein certainly fits comfortably into the hate club, since he has allied himself closely with the Holocaust denial movement by trivializing the suffering of its victims and denying that many of them were victims at all. It would be natural for the rulers of Iran to have invited this Jew-hater to their hatefest. I don't know if they did, or if Finkelstein accepted any such invitation. But the burden is now on him to explain why his name appears in the schedule and to produce all correspondence with the sponsors of the conference. It should make interesting reading.

Of course the listing by that group might've been a mistake. No matter what, Finkelstein needs to speak up on this situation.

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