O Let the Mainstream Media Shine Its Everlasting Light on Me!

God bless atheist Norman Finkelstein. I used to think he was too pallid, I wondered about his health. But having been expelled from DePaul and Israel, he looks tan, rested and fit, in this piece and foto in the NY Jewish Week. Says he's jogging a lot in Sheepshead Bay. Finkelstein bravely agreed to talk to reporter Stewart Ain, who tries to make the scholar look pitiful and fails, seeks to recredit the discredited Joan Peters, and uses Peter Novick, author of The Holocaust in American Life, to trash Finkelstein. Finkelstein says his new book about Israel losing its grip on American Jews is coming along fine, but no publisher yet. He'll find one, I'm sure.

It's too bad about Novick, who wrote a great book. What is it about being marginalized that when the Midnight special of the mainstream media just shines its everlasting light on me for one second, we promptly disassociate ourselves from anyone to the left of us, lest we be marginalized further? We are so desperate to crawl back inside the good graces of conventional wisdom, so we promptly declare, Everyone else out there is a nutjob, not me. Novick got attacked for his book. His tone was a little off. He used terms like the Holocaust sweepstakes, as I remember anyway, and it annoyed Michiko Kakutani. (Oh, it says, "victimization Olympics," that bugged Kakutani.) But now he has to pee over Finkelstein to get a little street cred in the mainstream community. What happened to intellectual freedom and embracing diverse ideas? Finkelstein is a powerful original thinker whose tone is often too stridently moralistic for me. But he's done great work, and been censored for it. Just listen to Mearsheimer here, speaking of Finkelstein as a scholar, a citizen of the university, and a teacher. Mearsheimer disagrees with stuff Finkelstein has said. So what. What happened to intellectual fortitude?

Comments

[LanceThruster]

Norm rocks!

The histrionics directed at Dr. Finkelstein have always been an attempt at misdirection. Otherwise, they would actually address the issues he raises.

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. ~ M.K. Gandhi

[Joachim Martillo]

Is Norman Finkelstein's disagreement with the W&M thesis pilpul or quodlibet for the Roman Catholics among us?

[Ed]

One characteristic I’ve noticed about many diaspora Jews is their proclivity towards throwing one another under the bus when things get stressful. It must be a function of their innate ruthlessness, but they will quickly turn on their own.

This is one reason I support the existence of Israel (but not the supremacist political ideology of Zionism): it forces them to stand shoulder to shoulder, as a chain, and account for themselves and each other as adults. Essentially, it forces them to grow up.

The problems is the perpetually stunted diaspora Jewish Zionists who, as always, want it all. They want Israel, but they don’t want to live there; they want America to wage wars against Israel’s enemies, but they don’t want to do the fighting themselves; they want the American taxpayer to underwrite Israel to the tune of billions, but they don’t want to part with their own fortunes to support it.

Jewish Zionists should either emigrate to Israel, or cease being Zionists. Their childish duel-identity must come to an end. If this was done, American underwriting, enabling and goading of Israel towards its own (murderously) immature behavior would also cease. And those Jews that stayed would have to start taking accountability for ALL of their own fellow Americans instead of existing in this stunted kind of no man's land of conflicted and divided loyalties.

[MRW]

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"O Let the Mainstream Media Shine Its Everlasting Light on Me!"

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[MRW]

I wrote "grin" in between carets and it didn't take.

[Crimson Ghost]

Jimmy Carter says no politician can openly defy Israel and still get elected.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBuua8z_jFc

[Richard Silverstein]

What trash Stewart Ain wrote. Just stupid & petty & so typical of provincial American Jewish journalism. And to think that he actually had the balls to ask Finkelstein whether his mother was a kapo. A vile accusation first raised by that filth, Dershowitz. If I were Ain's editor I'd chastise him severely. But I'll bet Gary Rosenblatt told Ain to ask the question. How sad.

Larry Cohler Esses is the only reporter for that paper who could've done that interview justice.

[LeaNder]

"whose tone is often too stridently moralistic for me"

That's probably what attracts me, Phil. It seems from very opposite camps our mothers taught us similar lessons. Must have drawn similar conclusions from our past???

I know, I shouldn't compare them, but then.

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What puzzles me most, is that he is tainted via his reception on the right up to the point of being called a Neo-Nazi. Kept me from touching his books.

But at the same time the main propaganda assault is against the left as being the "real" successor of the Nazis, and I think here Norman is "the" central figure.

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That said: From a German point of view Zionism is very, very understandable. It didn't start with the Nazis. Both in Austria and here there were other parties that played with antisemitism, long before the Nazis. ... There doesn't seem to be much awareness over in the US about these facts.

[LeaNder]

"... His thesis sought to expose as a shoddy piece of research Joan Peters’ best-selling book, “From Time Immemorial,”"

I suspect this is a mistake that is repeated over and over again.

Anyway the title of his thesis is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein#Bibliography

From the Jewish Question to the Jewish State: An Essay on the Theory of Zionism

He returns to the subject of his thesis in: "Image and Reality", as the title suggests (I haven't read it yet). In his thesis he studies the "theory" of Zionism only.

Admittedly I wonder about the "mistake" concerning his thesis in the Israeli database (follow link in bibliography). The obvious mistake would have made it 123 pages instead of 213.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein#Bibliography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Norman_Finkelstein#thesis_-_Time_Immorial

[Jim Haygood]

.

The verse from 'Midnight Special' is usually rendered as "ever-loving" light ... though Wikipedia cites an alternate reading of "ever-living" light.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Special_%28song%29

[Charles Keating]

"...if Jews act out a Jewish stereotype, it plainly doesn't follow that they can't be committing the stereotypical act. Can't they commit a vile act even if conforms to a Jewish stereotype? It is perhaps politically incorrect to recall but nonetheless a commonplace that potent stereotypes, like good propaganda, acquire their force from containing a kernel – and sometimes even more than a kernel – of truth. "--http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/02/finkelstein-antisemitic-stereotypes.html

[David Green]

Novick's book was decent, but he refused to acknowledge the relationship between the Holocaust Industry and support for Israel. He reduced it to a cultural phenomenon, and resents Finkelstein for not going along with it. During his visit to Urbana-Champaign in September 2001 (just before 9/11) he made himself into quite the obsessive fool by attacking Finkelstein without his name being brought up by anyone else. I asked him for specifics regarding Finkelstein's arguments and scholarship, and he flatly refused. He just wanted to vent. Really childish and unprofessional, as is so often the case in these issues.