Norman Finkelstein's Fraudulent Scholarship
Deborah Passner
October 10, 2005
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=8&x_nameinnews=169&x_article=985

Campus anti-Israel activists copy many of their arguments from two main sources – MIT professor Noam Chomsky, and his acolyte Norman Finkelstein, a DePaul University political science professor who never misses an opportunity to inform readers that his parents were Holocaust survivors. For example, following the Palestine Solidarity Movement’s conference in October 2004 at Duke University, the student paper published a column that included anti-Semitic slurs such as “Jews must own up to their privilege in America, and use it more wisely” and “ ‘the Holocaust Industry’ uses its influence to stifle...the Israeli-Palestinian debate.” The student supported these canards by citing Finkelstein's book The Holocaust Industry. 

Anti-Zionists and anti-Semites often reference Finkelstein’s books despite the fact that they are marred by factual inaccuracies, omissions and selective mention of fact. Much of his work is seemingly shaped by his antagonism toward the Jewish establishment and his avowed anti-Zionism. Thus, he routinely accuses pro-Israel writers of being “frauds” and “plagiarists,” and labels their work “hoaxes.” 

In his controversial book The Holocaust Industry, Finkelstein argues that “Jewish elites” have created an “industry” to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust as a ploy to extort money and to gain influence, as well a tactic “to crush any dissent, any criticism, of the State of Israel.” The New York Times’ review of the book described its premise as a “novel variation” of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fraudulent essay concocted in the late nineteenth century by the Czarist secret police which purports to uncover a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Accordingly, the Times’ reviewer described Finkelstein as “juvenile,” “arrogant,” and “stupid” (Aug. 6, 2000). 

In Finkelstein's portrayal no one “unerringly articulates” the Holocaust “dogma” more than Nobel Laureate and human rights activist Elie Wiesel, who is himself a Holocaust survivor. Finkelstein mockingly describes Wiesel as the “resident clown,” and charges he is responsible for creating a “meaningless version of the Nazi Holocaust” and for only exposing “genocides that serve the interest of the US and Israel” (Salon.com, Aug. 30, 2000). While Wiesel’s work on behalf of those suffering around the world is generally well-respected, Finkelstein denounces his lack of “humanitarian commitments,” and his “shameful record of apologetics on behalf of Israel.” A more mainstream view was expressed by Ted Koppel of ABC’s Nightline, who called Wiesel “one of the most compassionate human beings alive.” Koppel specifically praises Wiesel for showing as much compassion for other people as he does the Jews (April18, 2002). 

Other Jewish leaders are similarly slandered by Finkelstein. For example, he calls Abraham Foxman, who heads the Anti-Defamation League, “the Grand Wizard,” a term typically reserved for a leader in the racist Ku Klux Klan. 

Finkelstein on Israel 

Finkelstein tries to convince readers that the “Holocaust Industry” exists as an ideological weapon to gain unqualified support for Israel against the Palestinians. He unconvincingly argues that both the Holocaust and Israel became important to American Jews only in 1967 because: 

Israel now becomes the United States' strategic asset in the Middle East. It's safe to be pro-Israel. And suddenly American Jewry, Jewish intellectuals and so forth, become fanatical towards the State of Israel. It's one of the enduring ironies of the whole conflict. That of all the Jewish intellectuals who are now fanatical stalwarts of the State of Israel, until 1967 there were only two public Jewish intellectuals who are publicly identified as supporting Israel. There are only two. And they were Hannah Arendt ... the second one was Noam Chomsky. 

Finkelstein's assertions are simply bizarre. In fact, many Jewish intellectuals supported the Jewish state before 1967. 

Thus, Albert Einstein, perhaps the preeminent intellectual of the 20th century, co-wrote an article in the 1944 Princeton Herald strongly supporting a Jewish state: 

In speaking up for a Jewish Palestine, we want to promote the establishment of a place of refuge where persecuted human beings may find security and peace and the undisputed right to live under a law and order of their making. The experiences of many centuries have taught us that this can be provided only by home rule and not by a foreign administration. This is why we stand for a Jewish-controlled Palestine, be it ever so modest and small. (Jews Among the Nations, pg. 137) 

Several American-Jewish intellectuals were deeply involved in the Zionist movement even before the Holocaust. In 1915, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote about the importance of a Jewish state for the Jewish people: 

The glorious past [of the Jews] can really live only if it becomes part of a glorious future; and to this end the Jewish home in Palestine is essential. We Jews of prosperous America above all need its inspiration. (Menorah Journal, January 1915) 

Even before Brandeis became chairman of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs, he proclaimed in a 1913 speech that “we should aid in the efforts of the Jews in Palestine. We should all support the Zionist movement.” In many of his speeches in that period he stated “to be good Americans we must be better Jews and to better Jews we must become Zionists.” 

Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter also actively promoted the establishment of a Jewish homeland. In an article for the April 1931 Foreign Affairs magazine, he wrote that he supports a Jewish state: 

not only as a Jew. But as one who believes in the wisdom of the policy embodied in the Palestine Mandate for the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. 

Finkelstein in particular singled out Norman Podhoretz, the former editor-in-chief of Commentary, as a Jewish intellectual who did not support Israel before 1967: 

What is very striking is everyone says, everyone says Israel played no role in my life up until '67. . . . Take the editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz. . . . He writes a famous memoir called Making It. I reread Making It. Israel gets exactly four words in the whole book, it's nothing. 

Finkelstein is once again sloppy in his research. A full 10 years before the Six Day War, Podhoretz wrote a well-known article for the Zionist magazine Midstream about the importance of American Jews making the case for Israel. He wrote: 

Failing active restraint by America, the Arabs will continue to provoke, and Israel, under the inalienable right of self-preservation, will be forced to move. It is in the interest of the United States to insure that justice is to be done to Israel, and American Jews, who should be alerted by their interest as Jews to the special danger of the situation in the Middle East. . . are the ones to make that point clear to their fellow Americans. 

Support for Zionism by such luminaries as Brandeis, Franfurter, Einstein, and Podhoretz, all apparently missed by Finkelstein, exposes his shoddy research and proves just how unreliable he is when it comes to Zionism and its history. 

Flawed Book 

Just as inaccurate as the Holocaust Industry is Finkelstein’s book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Dedicated to the proposition that Israel and Zionism are illegitimate, the book relies largely on anti-Israeli secondary sources and virtually ignores contrary evidence. 

For example, Finkelstein’s chapter “Born of War, Not by Design,” about the 1948 Palestinian refugees, relies almost exclusively on Benny Morris’s book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which has been seriously challenged by mainstream historians for selectively using Israeli archival material. Finkelstein relies on information found in The Birth, but often distorts already questionable material. For example, Morris claims in one of his endnotes that Ben-Gurion said: 

[a return] is out of the question until we sit together beside a [peace conference] table...and they will respect us to the degree that we respect them and I doubt whether they deserve respect as we do. Because, nonetheless, we did not flee en masse. [And] so far no Arab Einstein has arisen and [they] have not created what we have built in this country and [they] have not fought as we are fighting...We are dealing with a collective murderer. 

Rather than checking the original source, Finkelstein distorts the secondary source. In order to demonstrate Ben-Gurion’s “extreme” “racis[ism],” he shortens Morris’s citation to read, “Arabs were not entitled to the same respect accorded to Jews because ‘so far no Arab Einstein has arisen...We are dealing with a collective murderer.’ ”

Benny Morris himself has long been critical of Finkelstein’s scholarly research as it relates to his [Morris’s] work. He criticizes Finkelstein for “selectively quot[ing]” from his book and for not knowing “anything ...beyond what is found” in his books. His sources, according to Morris, are “dubious,” and he adds that Finkelstein fails to marshal “sources or materials from elsewhere that could serve to contradict my findings” (Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1991). According to Morris, “for Finkelstein the only good Israeli is an evil Israeli.” 

Finkelstein routinely compares Israelis with Nazis and told the Jeruslem Post that he “can’t imagine why Israel’s apologists would be offended by the comparison” (Aug 28, 2000). 

While Finkelstein expresses nothing but contempt for Israel, he lavishes praise on the terrorist group Hezbollah. In a letter posted on his Web site he states, “I did make a point of publicly honoring the heroic resistance of Hezbollah to foreign occupation ...Their historic contributions are...undeniable.” He appeared on the official Hezbollah television network al-Manar, because, he said, “If I’m willing to appear on CNN – the main propaganda organ for America’s terrorist wars–why shouldn’t I appear on al-Manar?” 

Al Manar’s expressed mission is to wage “psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy.” Al Manar producers boast of creating programming to recruit Palestinian suicide bombers. In addition, Ibrahim Mussawi, director of English-language news for al Manar, in an interview with the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg, labeled Jews “a lesion on the forehead of history.” Al Manar TV was banned by European Union satellites for airing racist programming such as the series “The Diaspora” based on The Protocols. 

Attacks on Pro-Israel Writers 

Finkelstein routinely calls those he disagrees with “frauds” labeling their work “hoaxes.” Alan Dershowitz, a renowned Harvard lawyer and author of the best selling book The Case for Israel, is his latest target. Finkelstein claims Dershowitz’s book is “sheer, unadulterated, complete, total, comprehensive, from beginning to end, from the first uppercase letter to the last period, a complete fraud” (March 8, 2005, lecture at the University of Illinois Law School). He accuses Dershowitz of plagiarism and has said that Dershowitz “almost certainly didn’t write the book and perhaps didn’t even read it prior to publication.” The allegations were investigated and rejected by former Harvard President Derek Bok. In an upcoming book on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Finkelstein was going to accuse Dershowitz of plagiarism, but, under threat of lawsuit, he was forced to omit the allegation from his book. 

In March, CAMERA asked Dershowitz why he thought professors are reluctant to publicly defend Israel. He said they fear: 

Finkelstein going all over campuses of the world making up stories about them. The whole Finkelstein-Noam Chomsky-Alex Cockburn attack team has succeeded in intimidating many young professors around the country and around the world. Because if you write a pro-Israel article or book, they will call you a plagiarist...They will make up quotes about you...The hit team claims that they already prevented and destroyed the reputations of two pro-Israel writers. 

It’s hardly surprising that Finkelstein’s fabrications and attack strategy intimidate. All the more reason that the facts about his reckless charges be widely disseminated. Finally, the grossly flawed writings of the DePaul “professor” point to yet another example of the failure of the academic world to uphold genuine standards of scholarship–such as accuracy, truthfulness and rigorous sourcing. 

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What Lies Beyond Chutzpah?
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com  October 4, 2005

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. 

The book, released in August, is typical of Finkelstein’s oeuvre. Bristling with invocations of the supposedly nefarious influence of “Jewish elites,” the book contains passages like the following:

Jewish elites in the United States have enjoyed enormous prosperity. From this combination of economic and political power has sprung, unsurprisingly, a mindset of Jewish superiority. Wrapping themselves in the mantle of The Holocaust, these Jewish elites pretend—and, in their own solipsistic universe, perhaps imagine themselves—to be victims, dismissing any and all criticism as manifestations of “anti-Semitism.” And, from this lethal brew of formidable power, chauvinistic arrogance, feigned (or imagined) victimhood, and Holocaust-immunity to criticism has sprung a terrifying recklessness and ruthlessness on the part of American Jewish elites. Alongside Israel, they are the main formentors of anti-Semitism in the world today. Coddling them is not the answer. They need to be stopped.

Finkelstein also revisits some of the themes of The Holocaust Industry, claiming that 

Like the Holocaust, “anti-Semitism” is an ideological weapon to deflect justified criticism of Israel and, concomitantly, powerful Jewish interests. In its current usage, “anti-Semitism,” alongside the “war against terrorism,” serves as a cloak for a massive assault on international law and human rights.

Jewish leaders like Abraham Foxman, Edgar Bronfman drive Finkelstein’s into paroxysms of anti-Semitic rancor. At one point in Beyond Chutzpah, he claims that these Jewish leaders “resemble stereotypes straight out of [the Nazi newspaper] Der Stürmer.”

Finkelstein knows whereof he speaks: Rehashing a classic bit of anti-Semitic propaganda, Finkelstein’s asserts that Jewish leaders are “de facto agents of a foreign government,” namely Israel, and are “in service to their Holy State.” But Finkelstein’s reserves his most strident contempt for Alan Dershowitz, who has authored several books supportive of Israel’s right to exist—an unpardonable sin in Finkelstein’s view.

True to form, Finkelstein pointedly declines to engage Dershowtiz’s arguments. Instead, he opts for a relentless barrage of slander and outright distortion; analogies to Nazis abound. “It is hard to make out any difference between the policy [of collective punishment that] Dershowitz advocates and the Nazi destruction of [the Czech village of] Lidice, for which he expresses abhorrence—except that Jews, not Germans, would be implementing it,” Finkelstein writes. Apart from its grotesque reference to the Nazi extermination of civilians, the claim is in violent conflict with the facts: Dershowitz has never supported collective punishment. What he has done is proposed the destroying houses used by Palestinian terrorists to stage attacks on Israel, and then only so long as residents are first given sufficient warning and accommodated with alternative housing. “To equate the destruction of an empty house with mass murder is obscene,” Dershowitz tells Frontpagemag.

Especially on the subject of Israel, Finkelstein does not even attempt to do his due diligence to Dershowitz’s contentions. He insists, for instance, that Dershowitz provides “no evidence or argument for” his view that the International Court of Justice has an animus against Israel. A more fair-minded observer—or at least one unmotivated, as Finkelstein seems to be, by unalloyed malice—would at least have acknowledged that Dershowitz has provided ample justification for his claim. For instance, Dershowitz points to the fact that Israeli judges are debarred from serving as permanent members of the court, even as the heads of nations expressly committed to Israel’s destruction—and ungoverned by the rule of law—are unquestioningly accorded the distinction. 

Tellingly, Finkelstein devotes much of Beyond Chutzpah to countering Dershowitz’s indictment of Palestinian terrorism. Of the Israeli security fence, Finkelstein insists, in all apparent seriousness, that is not “designed to fight terrorism.” Similarly, he takes indignant issue with Dershowitz’s statement that that Palestinian terrorists have exploded “an antipersonnel bomb made of nails soaked in rat poison.” According to Finkelstein, Dershowitz has never provided any evidence for the claim. In fact, as Dershowitz notes, just prior to publishing his book The Case for Israel, he had sent a research assistant to corroborate it. Emergency room doctors had confirmed that Palestinian suicide bombers had indeed availed themselves of rat poison, which prevents blood from coagulating. 

Unable to disprove Dershowitz’s arguments, Finkelstein resorts in Beyond Chutzpah to impugning his integrity. He suggests, for instance, that Dershowitz plagiarized his book The Case for Israel. To be sure, Finkelstein doesn’t use those exact words. There’s a reason for that: After learning of Finkelstein’s spurious charge that he had “no idea what was in the book,” Dershowitz, who writes his books freehand, sent the press handwritten pages of the book. Along with his lawyers from the New York firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, Dershowitz also wrote letters to the press’s board of directors as well as the University of California administrators, threatening to sue for libel and calling on the press to rethink its publication of Beyond Chutzpah. In a December 2004 letter to the press, Dershowitz wrote:

“I have no interest in censoring or suppressing Finkelstein’s freedom of _expression, but merely in assuring that maliciously false statements about me, about other Jews, and about some supposed international Jewish conspiracy, are not published by a responsible press, especially at a time of spreading anti-Semitism around the world.” 

The University of California Press, for its part, preferred to paper over these specific objections, as well as Dershowitz’s stipulation that he would have no problem with the book’s being published by a less august press. Instead, it dishonestly denounced Dershowitz’s “letter-writing campaign” as “an attack on academic freedom” and forged ahead with the publication. Significantly, however, the press asked Finkelstein to exorcise the plagiarism accusation. 

Not that the press has been entirely candid about the redaction. This past June, Lynne Withey, director of the University of California Press, disingenuously told Inside Higher Education that “It was unclear the point [Finkelstein] was trying to make and he couldn’t document that, so we asked him to take it out.” In the final edition of Beyond Chutzpah, the word “plagiarizes” has been removed in favor of the milder “appropriates from without attribution,” an accusation that, as Dershowitz proves in a forthcoming article, is equally groundless. Indeed, the only “expert” willing to vouch for Finkelstein’s allegation is Alexander Cockburn, editor of the far left journal Counterpunch, who entertains his own perfervid notions of an all-powerful “Jewish lobby.” 

In view of the numerous distortions and flagrant falsehoods collected in Beyond Chutzpah, to say nothing of its extended flirtation with sundry anti-Semitic tropes, it might be asked why the University of California Press, heretofore a distinguished publisher, assented to lend its seal of approval to Finkelstein’s book. 

For one thing, the press feels that the book passes the test of meticulous scholarship. “We do believe that Beyond Chutzpah is historically and factually accurate and we did employ a very thorough fact-checker,” Niels Hooper, Finkelstein’s editor at the University of California press, told Frontpagemag. (Dershowitz rejects the charge that the press employed a fact-checker for the book; despite being the main target of the book, he recalls receiving only one call from the press, during which he was asked about an issue unrelated to Beyond Chutzpah.) Hooper is similarly dismissive of charges of anti-Semitism, explaining, “[W]e would never publish something that we felt was anti-Semitic and we actually feel that it is disingenuous for Alan Dershowitz to try to discredit a book that attacks his scholarship, not his ethnicity or religion, as such.”

Dershowitz begs to differ. By way of example, he points to Finkelstein’s likening of his views on the destruction of evacuated terrorist residences to the Nazi slaughter of civilians in the village of Lidice. Hooper stands by the press’s decision to publish such claims. It is “noteworthy,’” he contends, that Dershowitz “does not disavow the main charge of that chapter, that he supports collective punishment in the form of house and village destruction that violates international law. I might add that those laws were established precisely because of what happened in World War II.” Dershowitz calls the comparison “obscene and mendacious” for its equation of Israeli self-defense policies with Nazi genocide. Beyond that, he stresses that it is inaccurate: he supports the destruction only of those houses that serve as terrorist bases of operation, and only after the residents have been relocated. Related examples abound in the book. Notwithstanding the abundance of evidence to the contrary, the press vigorously rejects charges of anti-Semitism. Director Lynne Withey, who declined to be interviewed for this story, said in June that it was “outrageous” to accuse Beyond Chutzpah of being anti-Semitic, adding that, “To say that the book is anti-Semitic is to say that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.”

That suggests another reason that the press decided to publish Beyond Chutzpah: its political composition. As John Braeman recently pointed out in Frontpagemag, the press publishes a number of books distinguished less by their scholarship than their adherence to left-wing politics. (It bears noting in this context that Niels Hooper, who played an instrumental role in getting the University of California press to publish Beyond Chutzpah, is an alumnus of the leftist publishing imprint Verso, where he collaborated with Finkelstein.) Indeed, Lynne Withey routinely justifies the press’s publication of these transparently polemical works by citing its right to publish “controversial books.” 

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.” 

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.”

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