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Illustration: Cover page of one of Norm Finkelstein’s latest books (one which Derschowitz tried to get Arnold Schwartzenegger to suppress. The book is brilliant and exposes Derschowitz’s absurdities and lies.
This is a fairly long issue – just advance notice. I was about to stop altogether, but the wise words of several of you leaves me somewhat abashed. After all, we all know that, realistically, there is no hope for our species and that life itself is doomed to end on this planet. But then, after all, as the bumper-sticker from the 60s said ‘REALITY IS A CRUTCH’. Furthermore, life is full of surprises.
For one thing, Paris Hilton said she couldn’t understand the attention given her by the media as she was being escorted back to court and stated that the media should focus on more important things like, for example, the fate of those in our army who are being killed. At the same time, she said she found God (this happened in the mental ward of a Los Angeles prison hospital).
News was released that the military is working on a “gay bomb.” That’s right, it would be loaded with hormones that could be dropped on the enemy and have them drop their guns and start screwing one another. Sure beats trying to get Castro’s beard to fall off, once a part of a CIA endeavor.
One the articles, De Paul University’s President said that one must not indulge in ad hominum attacks. This was a result of complaints by the dirty, dyspeptic, driveling, duplicitous, double-dealing, devious, disgusting, and disappointing Derschowitz. The chicken shit President caved in, shivering in fear. All that is discussed below, however.
If my sources are correct, students are protesting with a sit-in or teach-in. The faculty is going to take a vote of no-confidence in the President of De Paul. The President was caught between the forces of external pressure and academic freedom. He decided academic freedom is not that important.
Three articles follow. The first describes what happened at DePaul and then offers an extensive summary of Israeli actions. The second is a newspaper story about the case, showing that even a paper owned by Rupert Murdock has its integrity. The final one is from the world of academia, discussing the process of tenure in his case and others.
ZNet | Repression
DePaul Genuflects to Dershowitz
by Howard Friel; June 12, 2007
Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University on
June 8, 2007, despite votes in favor of tenure by the school’s
Political Science Department and a college-level personnel
committee. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education,
tenure was opposed by the dean of the College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences, the University Board on Promotion and Tenure, and
the university president, Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, the
ultimate decision-maker in the case, who reportedly told the
Chronicle that he found “no compelling reasons to overturn” the
tenure board’s recommendation.[1] <#_edn1>
In addition, Holtschneider reportedly told the Chronicle that he “decried the outside interest the case had generated” and stated for the record: “This attention was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no impact on either the process or the outcome of this case.”[2] <#_edn2> While the outside interference was both inappropriate and probably unprecedented, due on both counts to the prolifically public opposition to Finkelstein’s tenure by Harvard Law School’s Alan Dershowitz, it seems implausible that Dershowitz’s campaign had no impact at DePaul on the final decision to deny tenure to Finkelstein.
Because few assistant professors with books published by at
least three major publishers (in this case the University of
California, W.W. Norton, and Verso) are denied tenure, and
because even fewer with such books, a vote of support from their
department, and glowing student evaluations, are denied tenure,
it is difficult to imagine that anything other than outside
interference, almost all of it from Dershowitz, led to the
denial of Finkelstein’s tenure at DePaul.
Dershowitz’s intereference in the case was clearly extensive.
According to the Chronicle, “Mr. Dershowitz sent the DePaul law
school faculty and members of the political-science department
what he described, in a letter dated October 3 [2006], as a
‘dossier of Norman Finkelstein’s most egregious academic sins,
and especially his outright lies, misquotations, and
distortions.’” Dershowitz told the Chronicle prior to the tenure
decision: “It would be a disgrace to DePaul University if they
were to grant tenure. It would make them the laughing stock of
American universities.”[3] <#_edn3> In a Wall Street Journal
article titled, “Finkelstein’s Bigotry,” Dershowitz wrote about
the vote by Finkelstein’s department: “Mr. Finkelstein’s radical
colleagues voted for tenure, having cooked the books by seeking
outside evaluations from two of his ideological soulmates.”[4]
<#_edn4> In the New Republic, Dershowitz called Finkelstein (who
is Jewish) an “anti-Semite.”[5] <#_edn5> And a few weeks before
the tenure announcement was due, Dershowitz asked in print:
“Will [Finkelstein’s] bigotry receive the imprimatur of the
largest Catholic university in America?”[6] <#_edn6>
Anyone with even minimal awareness of the politics of
criticizing Israel in the United States understands the implied
threats against DePaul that such statements from Dershowitz
embodied. Clearly, Dershowitz sought to leverage Catholic
vulnerability about the Holocaust, given the “neutrality” of
Pope Pius XII in the midst of the genocide of European Jews, and
Finkelstein’s scholarship on the Holocaust, which argues that
it’s exploited by Israel to justify its otherwise illegal
occupation of Palestinian territory. Or perhaps President
Holtschneider happened to see the photograph of Pope Benedict
XVI placed next to one of David Duke on the homepage of the
Anti-Defamation League in January of this year—an apparent
co-conspirator (with the UN’s Kofi Annan) against Israel—and
imagined his own picture there pursuant to a grant of tenure to
Finkelstein. Or maybe he sought not to expose himself and his
university to the kind of Dershowitzian slander that Finkelstein
was subjected to, and which Holtschneider witnessed without a
public word to Dershowitz that his interference in the case was
improper and unacceptable.
Furthermore, by withholding tenure from Finkelstein while also
unconvincingly denying the public context of that decision,
Holtschneider sold-out long-standing Catholic “Just War”
doctrine to Dershowitz, which features the protection of the
rights of civilians in armed conflict.[7] <#_edn7> While
Dershowitz is in the vanguard, with the American Jewish
Congress, of a major effort to modify international humanitarian
law to further minimize the rights of civilians with the goal of
“unshackling” the United States and Israel in their various
military campaigns,[8] <#_edn8> Finkelstein supports
international humanitarian law and consistently applies it in
his scholarship, including to the Israeli occupation of
Palestinian territory.[9] <#_edn9> By, in effect, choosing
Dershowitz over Finkelstein, DePaul betrayed bedrock Catholic
principles pertaining to the protection of civilians in armed
conflict, and helped boost Dershowitz’s Medieval-dungeon views
about international humanitarian law and human rights. This is
easy to illustrate in the context of Dershowitz’s support of the
Israeli bombing of Lebanon in summer 2006.[10] <#_edn10>
On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah militants raided northern Israel
and, without provocation, killed three Israeli soldiers and
captured two. This attack was unjustified and a clear violation
of Israel’s territorial sovereignty; however, Israel’s survival
was obviously not endangered by the Hezbollah raid. Yet it
responded with extensive airstrikes and shelling inside Lebanon
that indiscriminately targeted civilians and civilian objects
(homes, bridges, hospitals, grocery stores, gas stations) and
far exceeded any legitimate requirement of self-defense.
The Hezbollah raid into northern Israel occurred in the morning
in Israel on July 12. News outlets throughout the day reported
that Israel had bombed Lebanese civilians, villages, roads,
bridges, and Hezbollah positions, all preceding the firing of
rockets by Hezbollah into Israel the next morning.[11] <#_edn11>
Referring to the overnight bombing of Lebanon on July 12, the
Associated Press reported: “[Israeli] Air Force Gen. Amir Eshel
said the [bombing] campaign was likely Israel’s largest ever in
Lebanon ‘if you measure it in number of targets hit in one
night, the complexity of the strikes.’”[12] <#_edn12>
In response to these events Hezbollah fired its first rockets
into Israel, according to a /Ha’aretz/ report: “The [Hezbollah]
rocket fire began in the early morning hours of Thursday [July
13], after Israel Air Force jets struck targets across Lebanon
following cross-border attacks by Hezbollah….”[13] <#_edn13>
The Israeli airstrikes inside Lebanon in response to the
Hezbollah raid violated international law on at least four
counts: (a) they violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter—the
cardinal rule of international law—which prohibits the threat
and use of force by states without Security Council
authorization (the only exception being a use of force in
“self-defense” in response to an “armed attack,” when, in the
generally accepted formulation by Daniel Webster, “the necessity
for action” is “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of
means, and no moment for deliberation),”[14] <#_edn14> (b)
Israel’s military reprisals were illegal, given the broad
prohibition of the use of force in international affairs,
including as retaliation in response to an armed provocation,
© the massively disproportionate scale of the Israeli
reprisals, relative to any military necessity and the original
Hezbollah provocation, violated international humanitarian law
(“laws of war”), and (d) Israel’s failure to distinguish between
civilian and military targets in its air strikes and artillery
fire also violated international humanitarian law.
In addition, on July 12, Israel’s highest political and military
leaders indicated that they would punish “Lebanon” militarily
for the Hezbollah raid. For example, on July 12, /Ha’aretz/
reported that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “held the Lebanese
government responsible for the [Hezbollah] attack, vowing that
the Israeli response ‘will be restrained, but very, very, very
painful.’ ” The same article reported that “senior Israel
Defense Forces officers said Wednesday [July 12] that ‘if the
abducted soldiers are not returned we’ll turn Lebanon’s clock
back 20 years.’ ”[15] <#_edn15> It is clear from these
statements and others issued at the time, that the intent of
Israel’s highest political and military leaders was to punish
“Lebanon,” that is, its people and infrastructure, in response
to the Hezbollah raid on July 12.
Also, in the immediate wake of Israel’s July 31 bombing of a
three-story house in Qana in southern Lebanon (which killed 28
Lebanese civilians, including 16 children, and left 13
missing), the/ New York Times/ published arguably the single
most important fact in its coverage of the 2006 Lebanon
conflict. In the last paragraphs of a front-page story about the
Israeli airstrikes on Qana of the previous day, the Times
reported that Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz had “relieved
the [Israeli] army of restrictions on harming civilian
population [/sic/] that lives alongside Hezbollah
operatives.”[16] <#_edn16>
Indeed, on July 16, just four days after Israel initiated its
armed reprisals against Lebanon, IsraelNN.com reported that
Israeli “Defense Minister Amir Peretz said Sunday [July 16] that
IDF troops have been given the go-ahead to set aside routine
regulations not to harm civilians, according to Army Radio.
Peretz said that civilians in south Lebanon who assist Hizbullah
terrorists may also be targeted.”[17] <#_edn17> In its August 1
report, the /Times/ referred to a column by the prominent
Israeli commentator, Nahum Barnea, who wrote the following in
the Israeli newspaper /Yediot Ahronot/:
The most pressing question I have is: Did the government, the
army, the political echelon and the media not take to blind
cheerleading, a move that served only the enemy? The question
came up when I heard Defense Minister Amir Peretz explain
proudly that he had removed limits on the IDF regulating warfare
in areas where civilians live alongside Hizbullah soldiers. I
can understand accidentally hurting civilians while fighting a
war. But explicit instructions about the civilian population in
south Lebanon and the Shiite neighborhoods in Beirut is a rash,
fool-hardy action that invited disaster. We saw the results of
that policy yesterday, in the bodies of women and children being
carried out of the rubble in Kana.[18] <#_edn18>
A few days later, the Jewish-American newspaper, the /Forward,/
published an article about the instructions that Israel Defense
Minister Peretz had issued.
As Jerusalem defends itself against worldwide condemnation over
a deadly air strike that killed dozens of Lebanese children,
current and former Israeli officials acknowledge that the
Israeli military has loosened the restriction on targeting
militants in populated areas.
After an Israeli air force raid Sunday on the Lebanese village of Qana left dozens of civilians dead, many of them children, human rights groups accused Israel of committing a “war crime.”
Many critics—including Israeli ones—are questioning the
military’s policy of bombing in densely populated Lebanese
areas. As of earlier this week, more than 550 civilians had been
killed in Lebanon during the current conflict, with Lebanese
officials claiming that the civilian death toll has exceeded
750. Following the Qana deaths, Israeli authors and
intellectuals signed a petition calling for an immediate
cease-fire and protesting the killing of civilians. The
Association for Civil Rights in Israel called for an official
commission of inquiry to investigate the military’s bombing
policies in Lebanon.[19] <#_edn19>
The instructions by Israel’s defense minister to disregard
well-known rules in international law that protect civilians in
armed conflict, in addition to statements from Israel’s top
leaders that it would punish “Lebanon” for the Hezbollah raid on
July 12, clearly indicate that Israel, from the beginning,
rejected the civilian protections embodied in international
humanitarian law throughout its bombing campaign in Lebanon.
Two days after the July 31 Israeli bombing of the three-story
house in Qana, Human Rights Watch issued a report, which stated:
The Israeli government initially claimed that the [Israeli]
military targeted the house [in Qana] because Hezbollah fighters
had fired rockets from the area. Human Rights Watch researchers
who visited Qana on July 31, the day after the attack, did not
find any destroyed military equipment in or near the home.
Similarly, none of the dozens of international journalists,
rescue workers and international observers who visited Qana on
July 30 and 31 reported seeing any evidence of Hezbollah
military presence in or around the home. Rescue workers
recovered no bodies of apparent Hezbollah fighters from inside
or near the building. The IDF subsequently changed its story,
with one of Israel’s top military correspondents reporting on
August 1 that, “It now appears that the military had no
information on rockets launched from the site of the building,
or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.”[20] <#_edn20>
One day later, on August 3, Human Rights Watch issued a major
report on the Lebanon war. Not only did HRW state that Hezbollah
had no involvement in any of the Israeli attacks on Lebanese
civilians documented in the report, but the nature of numerous
attacks by Israeli war planes and helicopters clearly indicated
that Lebanese civilians were targeted by Israel. The HRW report
was very clear on these counts, beginning with the first page of
the executive summary:
The Israeli government claims that it targets only Hezbollah,
and that fighters from the group are using civilians as human
shields, thereby placing them at risk. Human Rights Watch found
no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as
shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack. Hezbollah
occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian homes and
fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas or near
U.N. observers, which are serious violations of the laws of war
because they violate the duty to take all feasible precautions
to avoid civilian casualties. However, those cases do not
justify the IDF’s extensive use of indiscriminate force which
has cost so many civilian lives. In none of the cases of
civilian deaths documented in this report is there evidence to
suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the
area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the
attack.[21] <#_edn21>
HRW’s more extended findings in the August 3 report were
presented as follows:
The [HRW] report breaks civilian deaths into two categories:
attacks on civilian homes and attacks on civilian vehicles. In
both categories, victims and witnesses interviewed independently
and repeatedly said that neither Hezbollah fighters nor
Hezbollah weapons were present in the area during or just before
the Israeli attack took place. While some individuals, out of
fear or sympathy, may have been unwilling to speak about
Hezbollah’s military activity, others were quite open about it.
In totality, the consistency, detail, and credibility of
testimony from a broad array of witnesses who did not speak to
each other leave no doubt about the validity of the patterns
described in this report. In many cases, witness testimony was
corroborated by reports from international journalists and aid
workers. During site visits conducted in Qana, Srifa, and Tyre
[in southern Lebanon], Human Rights Watch saw no evidence that
there had been Hezbollah military activity around the areas
targeted by the IDF during or just prior to the attack: no spent
ammunition, abandoned weapons or military equipment, trenches,
or dead or wounded fighters. Moreover, even if Hezbollah had
been in a populated area at the time of an attack, Israel would
still be legally obliged to take all feasible precautions to
avoid or minimize civilian casualties resulting from its
targeting of military objects or personnel.[22] <#_edn22>
HRW’s report was corroborated three weeks later by a report by
Amnesty International, issued on August 23, which stated:
During more than four weeks of ground and aerial bombardment of
Lebanon by the Israeli armed forces, the country’s
infrastructure suffered destruction on a catastrophic scale.
Israeli forces pounded buildings into the ground, reducing
entire neighbourhoods to rubble and turning villages and towns
into ghost towns, as their inhabitants fled the bombardments.
Main roads, bridges and petrol stations were blown to bits.
Entire families were killed in air strikes on their homes or in
their vehicles while fleeing the aerial assaults on their
villages. Scores lay buried beneath the rubble of their houses
for weeks, as the Red Cross and other rescue workers were
prevented from accessing the areas by continuing Israeli
strikes. The hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who fled the
bombardment now face the danger of unexploded munitions as they
head home.
The Israeli Air Force launched more than 7,000 air attacks on about 7,000 targets in Lebanon between 12 July and 14 August, while the Navy conducted an additional 2,500 bombardments. The attacks, though widespread, particularly concentrated on certain areas. In addition to the human toll—an estimated 1,183 fatalities, about one third of whom have been children, 4,054 people injured and 970,000 Lebanese people displaced—the civilian infrastructure was severely damaged. The Lebanese government estimates that 31 “vital points” (such as airports, ports, water and sewage treatment plants, electrical facilities) have been completely or partially destroyed, as have around 80 bridges and 94 roads. More than 25 fuel stations and around 900 commercial enterprises were hit. The number of residential properties, offices and shops completely destroyed exceeds 30,000. Two government hospitals—in Bint Jbeil and in Meis al-Jebel—were completely destroyed in Israeli attacks and three others were seriously damaged.
One paragraph later, the Amnesty report continued:
Amnesty International delegates in south Lebanon reported that
in village after village the pattern was similar: the streets,
especially main streets, were scarred with artillery craters
along their length. In some cases cluster bomb impacts were
identified. Houses were singled out for precision-guided missile
attack and were destroyed, totally or partially, as a result.
Business premises such as supermarkets or food stores and auto
service stations and petrol stations were targeted, often with
precision-guided munitions and artillery that started fires and
destroyed their contents. With the electricity cut off and food
and other supplies not coming into the villages, the destruction
of supermarkets and petrol stations played a crucial role in
forcing local residents to leave. The lack of fuel also stopped
residents from getting water, as water pumps require electricity
or fuel-fed generators.
Israeli government spokespeople have insisted that they were targeting Hizbullah positions and support facilities, and that damage to civilian infrastructure was incidental or resulted from Hizbullah using the civilian population as “human shields”.
However, the pattern and scope of the attacks, as well as the
number of civilian casualties and the amount of damage
sustained, makes the justification ring hollow. The evidence
strongly suggests that the extensive destruction of public
works, power systems, civilian homes and industry was deliberate
and an integral part of the military strategy, rather than
“collateral damage”.[23] <#_edn23>
The fact that such destruction was “deliberate,” as Amnesty
International reported, and “indiscriminate,” as Human Rights
Watch reported, is without question, given the documentation in
both reports. Israel’s highest political and military officials
at the time confirmed this intent in their statements, as did
the instructions by Israeli Defense Minister Peretz to the IDF
to disregard the legal protections of civilians. Yet, Dershowitz
supported Israel’s bombardment of Lebanese civilians and
infrastructure, despite its horrific effects, as reported in
detail by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in their
reports.
In addition, neither organization found evidence of Hezbollah
fighters implicated in Israel’s numerous aerial attacks on
Lebanese civilians fleeing southern Lebanon. In its August 3
report, HRW found that “on a daily basis Israeli warplanes and
helicopters struck civilians in cars who were trying to flee
[southern Lebanon], many with white flags out the windows, a
widely accepted sign of civilian status.” HRW also reported that
“Israel repeatedly attacked both individual vehicles and entire
convoys of civilians who heeded the Israeli warnings to abandon
their villages.”[24] <#_edn24>
Instead of censuring the Israeli government for these attacks,
Alan Dershowitz blamed Lebanon’s civilians. In commentary dated
August 7—that is, three days after the August 3 HRW report was
issued—and titled “Lebanon Is Not a Victim,” Dershowitz refers
to the Lebanese civilians killed by Israel as “civilians,” using
quotation marks as if to somehow indict the Lebanese men, women,
and children who were bombed and killed by Israel in their homes
and in their cars. Dershowitz also referred to Lebanese
civilians as “collaborators,” apparently because many voted for
or otherwise supported the Lebanese government current at the
time, which had nothing directly to do with the Hezbollah raid
of July 12. He then agued that these “collaborators”—that is,
Lebanese civilians—were Israel’s legitimate military targets.
And, according to Dershowitz, the hundreds of Lebanese children
who were killed and wounded were victims of their parents, who,
as he argued, used them as human shields in their own bedrooms
and kitchens:
It is virtually impossible to distinguish the Hezbollah dead
from the truly civilian dead, just as it is virtually impossible
to distinguish the Hezbollah living from the civilian living,
especially in the south. The “civilian” death figures reported
by Lebanese authorities include large numbers of Hezbollah
fighters, collaborators, facilitators and active supporters.
They also include civilians who were warned to leave, but chose
to remain, sometimes with their children, to serve as human
shields. The deaths of these “civilians” are the responsibility
of Hezbollah and the Lebanese government, which has done very
little to protect its civilians.
Lebanon has chosen sides—not all Lebanese, but the democratically chosen Lebanese government. When a nation chooses sides in a war, especially when it chooses the side of terrorism, its civilians pay a price for that choice. This has been true of every war.
We must stop viewing Lebanon as a victim and begin to see it as
a collaborator with terrorism. . . . People make choices and
they bear the consequences of choosing to collaborate with
terrorism. Lebanon has chosen the wrong side and its citizens
are paying the price.[25] <#_edn25>
Dershowitz also wrote, as if without humanity, in light of the
slaughter and destruction that Israel had already brought to
Lebanon by this time (August 7), including the killing of
literally hundreds of children with its daily airstrikes and
artillery:
Lebanon has now declared war on Israel and its citizens are
bearing the consequences. Lebanon is no more a victim of
Hezbollah than Austria was a victim of Nazism. In fact a higher
percentage of Lebanese—more than 80%—say they support Hezbollah.
The figures were nearly as high before the recent civilian deaths.
This is considerably higher than the number of Austrians who supported Hitler when the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938. Austria too claimed it was a victim, but no serious person today believes such self-serving historical revisionism. Austria was not “Hitler’s first victim.” It was Hitler’s most sympathetic collaborator.
So too with Lebanon, whose president has praised Hezbollah,
whose army is helping Hezbollah, and many of whose “civilians”
are collaborating with Hezbollah.[26] <#_edn26>
After blaming Lebanese civilians for their own deaths and
injuries from Israeli airstrikes, Dershowitz then sought to
punish Human Rights Watch for its August 3 report. About that
report, Dershowitz wrote:
“Who will guard the guardians?” asked Roman satirist Juvenal.
Now we must ask, who is watching Human Rights Watch, one of the
world’s best-financed and most influential human rights
organizations? It turns out that they cook the books about
facts, cheat on interviews, and put out pre-determined
conclusions that are driven more by their ideology than by evidence.
These are serious accusations, and they are demonstrably true.
Consider the highly publicized “conclusion” reached by Human Rights Watch about the recent war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel. This is their conclusion, allegedly reached after extensive “investigations” on the ground:
“Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.”
After investigating a handful of cases, Human Rights Watch found that in “none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this report [Qana, Srifa, Tyre, and southern Beirut] is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack.”
No cases! None! Not one!
Anyone who watched even a smattering of TV during the war saw with their own eyes direct evidence of rockets being launched from civilian areas. But not Human Rights Watch. “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” That’s not Chico Marx. It’s Human Rights Watch. Their lying eyes belonged to the pro-Hezbollah witnesses its investigators chose to interview—and claimed to believe. But their mendacious pens belonged to Kenneth Roth, HRW’s Executive Director, and his minions in New York, who know how to be skeptical when it serves their interests not to believe certain witnesses. How could an organization, which claims to be objective, have been so demonstrably wrong about so central a point in so important a war? Could it have been an honest mistake? I don’t think so. Despite its boast that “Human Rights Watch has interviewed victims and witnesses of attacks in one-on-one settings, conducted on-site inspections . . . and collected information for hospitals, humanitarian groups, and government agencies,” it didn’t find /one instance /in which Hezbollah failed to segregate its fighters from civilians.
Nor apparently did HRW even ask the Israelis for proof of its
claim that Hezbollah rockets were being fired from behind
civilians, and that Hezbollah fighters were hiding among
civilians. Its investigators interviewed Arab “eye witnesses”
and monitored “information from public sources including the
Israeli government statements.” But it conducted no interviews
with Israeli officials or witnesses. It also apparently ignored
credible news sources, such as /The New York Times/ and /The New
Yorker/.[27] <#_edn27>
This is what Dershowitz wrote, but it does not accurately
reflect what the HRW report actually said. With respect to HRW’s
“conclusion,” quoted by Dershowitz as follows—“Human Rights
Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used
civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF
attack”—the very next sentence in the HRW report, which
Dershowitz omitted, read:
Hezbollah occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian
homes and fighters placed rocket launchers within populated
areas or near U.N. observers, which are serious violations of
the laws of war because they violate the duty to take all
feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties.[28] <#_edn28>
Thus, it was not the case that HRW reported /no/ instances in
which Hezbollah may have used civilians or civilian objects to
store weapons or place rocket launchers; rather, HRW reported
that no such instances were implicated in the Israeli attacks on
Lebanese civilians that were documented in the August 3 report.
And this is obvious upon reading the report.
In addition, HRW investigated dozens of cases—not “a handful of
cases,” as Dershowitz wrote—in which it found no evidence of
Hezbollah involvement at the time of or prior to Israeli attacks
on the civilian targets. By inaccurately citing only “a handful
of cases,” Dershowitz conveys a false impression that HRW’s
finding of no Hezbollah involvement in Israeli attacks is less
significant than it actually was.
Dershowitz’s reproduction of a brief excerpt of what he
described as the report’s “conclusion” (see above) is also of
interest: he omitted the preceding two sentences in the report,
which were highly incriminating of Israel’s conduct, and which
were far more suitable to excerpt as representative of the
report’s conclusion:
Since the start of the conflict, Israeli forces have
consistently launched artillery and air attacks with limited or
dubious military gain but excessive cost. In dozens of attacks,
Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target.
In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the
absence of a military target, as well as return strikes on
rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted
civilians.[29] <#_edn29>
While accusing HRW of disingenuously failing to cite evidence of
Hezbollah involvement in Israel’s attacks on Lebanese civilians,
Dershowitz supplied his own evidence to make a case for their
involvement. For example, he wrote that HRW “ignored” a /New
York Times/ story about Hezbollah using civilian shields in
southern Lebanon. Here is how Dershowitz began his excerpt from
the /Times/ report that he accused HRW of ignoring:
“Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets,” said Fayad
Hanna Amar, a young Christian man, referring to his village.
“They are shooting from between our houses.”[30] <#_edn30>
Rather than ignore the /Times/ report, as Dershowitz charged,
Human Rights Watch in fact quoted these same words while citing
the same report from the /New York Times/:
Christian villagers fleeing the village of ‘Ain Ebel have also
complained about Hezbollah tactics that placed them at risk,
telling the /New York// Times/ that “Hezbollah came to [our
village] to shoot its rockets. . . . They are shooting from
between our houses.”[31] <#_edn31>
Dershowitz also cited eight other reports from other news
organizations that he claimed demonstrated the use of civilian
shields by Hezbollah; he produced these articles to demonstrate
that Human Rights Watch had “cooked the books” by ignoring them.
Here are the titles, sources, and dates of four of the eight
reports Dershowitz cited:
* “The Battle for Lebanon,” /New Yorker/, August 8, 2006;
* “Diplomacy Under Fire,” /MacLeans/, August 7, 2006;
* “Hezbollah’s Deadly Hold on Heartland,” /National Post/, August 5, 2006;
* “Laying Out the Qana Calculation: Disarming Hezbollah Prevents More Crises,” /Chicago// Tribune/, August 2, 2006.
The obvious problem with Dershowitz citing these four reports,
while arguing that HRW deliberately ignored them, is that all
four reports were published either after or nearly simultaneous
to the August 3 HRW report. Once again, one must ponder the
methodology and motivation applied by Dershowitz in his attacks
on Human Rights Watch—in this case accusing it of neglecting to
cite articles in its August 3 report that were published after
August 3.
The four remaining reports cited by Dershowitz also provided no
evidence that Hezbollah used Lebanese civilians or civilian
homes or vehicles as shields prior to or during any of the
Israeli attacks on civilians in southern Lebanon documented in
the HRW report. Looking at these four reports one report at a
time, here is the entire excerpt that Dershowitz uses from one
of them:
Days after fighting broke out between Israel and Hezbollah on
July 12, [Samira] Abbas said Hezbollah fighters went
door-to-door in Ain Ebel, asking everyone to give up their cell
phones. “They were worried about collaborators giving the
Israelis information,” she said.
While she was there, Abbas said, she heard from relatives that her house in Bint Jbeil had been destroyed. She said Hezbollah fighters had gathered in citrus groves about 500 yards from her home.—Mohamad Bazzi, “Mideast Crisis: Farewell to a Soldier;
Reporting From Lebanon; Running Out of Places to Run,”
/Newsday/, July 28, 2006.[32] <#_edn32>
Gathering in a citrus grove 500 yards from a civilian home that
had been destroyed by an Israeli airstrike hardly constitutes
Hezbollah culpability for the Israeli destruction of the house.
Dershowitz provided no additional information or excerpts from
this report.[33] <#_edn33>
This leaves three reports cited by Dershowitz. One of these
reports—“Revealed: How Hezbollah Puts the Innocent at Risk; They
Don’t Care,” /Sunday Mail/ (Australia), July 30, 2006—apparently
pertained to photographs of a single truck-mounted anti-aircraft
gun taken in “the east of Beirut.”[34] <#_edn34> While it may or
may not have been the case that Hezbollah used civilians as
shields in Beirut, the predominant geographic focus of Israeli
attacks on Lebanese civilians in HRW’s August 3 report was
southern Lebanon, which sustained most of the civilian
casualties. Thus, this report had little relevance to HRW’s
August 3 report. In addition, the placement of an anti-aircraft
gun in a neighborhood that is being bombed by Israeli aircraft
hardly constitutes an illegal or otherwise unethical placement
of a defensive weapon.
This leaves the final two reports cited by Dershowitz. One of
these reports was an ambiguous one-line excerpt in a July 28,
2006, communication from a UN post in Naqoura in southern
Lebanon. Here is the entirety of what Dershowitz excerpted from
that communication:
It was also reported that Hezbollah fired from the vicinity of
five UN positions at Alma Ash Shab, AtTiri, Bayt Yahoun,
Brashit, and Tbinin.—United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon
(UNIFIL), Naqoura, July 28, 2006 (Press Release)
Presumably, for Dershowitz this single sentence constitutes
evidence that Hezbollah used UN positions at these locations in
Lebanon as shields that would justify Israeli attacks on those
positions. However, the four immediately preceding sentences in
the Naqoura communication, which Dershowitz omitted, read as
follows:
There were two direct impacts on UNIFIL positions from the
Israeli side in the past 24 hours. Eight artillery and mortar
rounds impacted inside an Indian battalion position in the area
of Hula, causing extensive material damage, but no casualties.
One artillery round impacted the parameter wall of the UNIFIL
headquarters in Naqoura. There were five other incidents of
firing close to UN positions from the Israeli side.[35] <#_edn35>
Thus, the same press release from which Dershowitz squeezed one
sentence to supposedly suggest that Hezbollah positions near
various UN posts might be implicated in Israeli attacks on such
posts in actuality suggests that Israel had attacked UN posts
without any reports of Hezbollah positions at the posts.
This leaves only one report left among the eight cited by
Dershowitz that were supposed to show that HRW had “cooked the
books” in its August 3 report. In this final instance, he cited
an article from the CanWest News Service in Canada that featured
an interpretation of an email written by Major Paeta Hess-von
Kruedener of Canada before he was killed by Israeli shelling at
the UN post near Khiam in southern Lebanon. Dershowitz excerpted
three paragraphs from the CanWest report which describe the
contents of the email, and two additional paragraphs with an
interpretation of that email by a retired Canadian general. The
email by Hess-von Kruedener was written on July 19. In it he
wrote: “What I can tell you is this. We have on a daily basis
had numerous occasions where our [UN] position has come under
direct or indirect fire from both (Israeli) artillery and aerial
bombing.” And: “The closest [Israeli] artillery has landed
within 2 meters (sic) of our position and the closest 1000 lb
aerial bomb has landed 100 meters (sic) from our patrol
base.”[36] <#_edn36> According to Dershowitz, the key evidence
of Hezbollah involvement—and thus a justification in his mind
for the Israeli attacks on the UN post—is this sentence in
Hess-von Kruedener’s email: “This has not been deliberate
targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity.”[37]
<#_edn37> CanWest then consulted Canadian Major-General Lewis
MacKenzie, who commented, as Dershowitz noted: “What that means
is, in plain English, ‘We’ve got Hezbollah fighters running
around in our positions, taking our positions here and then
using us for shields and then engaging the (Israeli Defense
Forces).’ ”[38] <#_edn38>
While it is possible that General MacKenzie’s interpretation is
accurate, there is no certainty that it is. One day after this
CanWest report was published on July 27, the /Toronto Star
/reported that MacKenzie had spoken “to a crowd of 8,000
supporters of Israel at a solidarity rally in Toronto two days
ago.”[39] <#_edn39> In addition, while the email by Hess-von
Kruedener was dated July 19, the UN post at Khiam was fatally
attacked by Israel on July 25, killing Hess-von Kruedener and
three other unarmed UN observers from Austria, Finland, and
China; assuming that MacKenzie’s interpretation of Hess-von
Kruedener’s email message was correct with respect to events on
July 19 or earlier, they were not necessarily applicable to
events on July 25. Furthermore, Dershowitz omitted an important
response to Hess-von Kruedener’s email that was printed in the
last three paragraphs of the article he cited:
A senior UN official, asked about the information contained in
Hess-von Kruedener’s e-mail concerning Hezbollah presence in the
vicinity of the Khiam base, denied the world body had been
caught in a contradiction.
“At the time [July 25], there had been no Hezbollah activity reported in the area,” he said. “So it was quite clear they [Israelis] were not going after other targets; that, for whatever reason, our position was being fired upon.
“Whether or not they thought they were going after something else, we don’t know. The fact was, we told them where we were.
They knew where we were. The position was clearly marked, and
they pounded the hell out of us.”[40] <#_edn40>
In its August 3 report, Human Rights Watch also reported that
the UN post was attacked by Israel on July 25 with “no Hezbollah
presence or firing near the U.N. position during the period of
the attack.” Finally, referring to the same incident, Reuters
reported on September 29 that “Israel used a precision-guided
bomb to launch a direct hit on four U.N. peacekeepers killed in
southern Lebanon last July, the United Nations said on Friday of
its probe into the incident.” According to Reuters, the
“U.N.-appointed board of inquiry could not affix blame because
Israel did not allow the access to operational or tactical level
commanders involved in the July 25 disaster at Khiam,” but the
UN did provide a senior official who briefed reporters, saying
that the Israeli munitions were “precision-guided and meant to
hit the targets they hit, which was the United Nations.”[41]
<#_edn41>
In summary, Dershowitz cited nine news articles as evidence—the
only so-called “evidence” that he produced—that Human Rights
Watch had “cooked the books” against Israel in its August 3
report. As it turned out, there was no such evidence in these
articles to support his charge. Nevertheless, Dershowitz
concluded: “Human Rights Watch no longer deserves the support of
real human rights advocates. Nor should its so-called reporting
be credited by objective news organizations.”[42] <#_edn42>
While seeking to further discredit the August 3 report by Human
Rights Watch, Dershowitz appeared to impugn HRW’s witnesses,
apparently on the grounds of their ethnicity or nationality,
since most HRW witnesses were Arab Lebanese nationals. This
apparently is why Dershowitz placed the words “eye witnesses” in
parentheses below:
[HRW’s] investigators interviewed Arab “eye witnesses” and
monitored “information from public sources including the Israeli
government statements.” But it conducted no interviews with
Israeli officials or witnesses.[43] <#_edn43>
In this passage Dershowitz asserted that HRW conducted no
interviews with Israeli officials or witnesses, yet, in its
August 3 report, HRW stated: “Human Rights Watch also conducted
research in Israel, inspecting the IDF’s use of weapons and
discussing the conduct of forces with IDF officials.”[44]
<#_edn44> This is the second instance—in addition to the /New
York Tim/es article that HRW supposedly did not cite—where
Dershowitz falsely accused HRW of ignoring sources that were in
fact cited in its report.
While continuing to impugn HRW’s methodology, Dershowitz wrote,
perhaps mistakenly, the word “for” instead of “from” in a key
sentence pertaining to that methodology. Here is what Dershowitz
reproduced as an excerpt from the HRW report, with his mistake
highlighted: “[HRW] collected information */for /*hospitals,
humanitarian groups, and government agencies.” However, the HRW
report in actuality stated that Human Rights Watch had
“collected information /from/ hospitals, humanitarian groups,
and government agencies.” Thus, according to the
Dershowitz-generated text, HRW’s sources for its report
consisted only of Arab “eye witnesses” (quotation marks added by
Dershowitz). In one way or another, he eliminated the /New York
Times/, Israeli officials, hospitals, humanitarian groups, and
government agencies from the list of sources used and cited by
HRW in its report.
Similarly, when Amnesty International issued its report on
August 23 documenting Israel’s destruction of Lebanon’s civilian
infrastructure, Dershowitz called the report “biased,” and wrote
that Amnesty was “in a race to the bottom” with Human Rights
Watch to see “which group can demonize Israel with the most
absurd legal arguments and most blatant factual misstatements.”
In a manner similar to his charge that Human Rights Watch had
“cooked the books” in its August 3 report, Dershowitz described
Amnesty as a “once-reputable organization” and asserted that it
was “sacrificing its own credibility” when it “misstates the law
and omits relevant facts” in its reports on Israel.[45]
<#_edn45> Like his attack on the August 3 HRW report,
Dershowitz’s assault on Amnesty’s August 23 report was designed
to discredit the report so that the press and public would
disregard it; instead, it highlighted Dershowitz’s own penchant
for (in his words) “misstating the law and omitting relevant
facts” when arguing on behalf of Israel’s illegal policies.
Finally, in the Wall Street Journal on July 19, 2006, that is,
one week into Israel’s military campaign against Lebanon,
Dershowitz wrote: “Israel must be allowed to finish the fight
that Hamas and Hezbollah started, even if that means civilian
casualties in Gaza and Lebanon. A democracy is entitled to
prefer the lives of its own innocents over the lives of the
civilians of an aggressor, especially if the latter group
contains many who are complicit in terrorism.”[46] <#_edn46>
Whatever rhetorical indiscretions that Norman Finkelstein may
have committed, which were cited by his dean as contrary to
“Vincentian personalism” as the basis for the dean’s
recommendation to deny tenure,[47] <#_edn47> Finkelstein has
never advocated the killing of one group of civilians over
another, and has deployed both his scholarship and public
rhetoric in a determined defense of international humanitarian
law. Thus, Finkelstein’s scholarship and public rhetoric, much
of it mischaracterized and misquoted by Dershowitz, is in
reality more closely aligned with root Catholic doctrine on
“just war” and the protection of civilians, it appears, than the
president, dean of humanities, and the members of the tenure
committee at DePaul, all of whom chose to align themselves
instead, at least in the public eye, with the Dershowitzian
rejection of international humanitarian law and its legal
protection of civilians in armed conflict.
In order to deconstruct Dershowitz’s serial misrepresentations,
one must painstakingly review them, which explains why he is
able to make one ludicrous charge after another about Norman
Finkelstein’s scholarship, and thus influence the public, and
thus DePaul, with respect to the recent tenure case. For
Dershowitz, no target, and no charge, is out of bounds. Recall,
for example, that Dershowitz accused both the political science
department at DePaul and Human Rights Watch of “cooking the
books”—a charge that he did not substantiate in either case, and
with respect to Finkelstein’s department, was totally out of
line and hideously unprofessional. How is it that Dershowitz’s
McCarthy-like public rampage against Finkelstein’s tenure case
was apparently tolerated by Dershowitz’s dean and Harvard’s
president? And by DePaul’s president and Finkelstein’s dean?
The tenure process for Norman Finkelstein at DePaul was almost
certainly, in fact, most evidently, was tainted by Dershowitz. A
review of that process would seem to be in order by both DePaul
and Harvard.
[1] <#_ednref1> “DePaul Rejects Tenure Bid by Finkelstein and
Says Dershowitz Pressure Played No Role,” The Chronicle of
Higher Education, June 8, 2007.
[2] <#_ednref2> Ibid.
[3] <#_ednref3> Ibid.
[4] <#_ednref4> “Finkelstein’s Bigotry,” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2007.
[5] <#_ednref5> “Correspondence: Match Point; by Alan Dershowitz and Noam Chomsky,” The New Republic, June 1, 2007.
[6] <#_ednref6> “Finkelstein’s Bigotry,” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2007.
[7] <#_ednref7> See “Pacem in Terris: Encyclical of Pope John Paul XXIII on Establishing Universal Peace in Truth, Justice, Charity, and Liberty,” April 11, 1963; “The Church’s Teaching on War and Peace: The Harvest of Justice is Sown in Peace; A Reflection of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on the Tenth Anniversary of The Challenge of Peace,” November 17, 1993;
“What Is ‘Just War’ Today?” americancatholic.org, May 2004.
[8] <#_ednref8> See Alan Dershowitz, /Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways/ (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); “AJCongress Applauds House Approval of ‘Human Shields’ Bill,” American Jewish Congress, April 25, 2007; “AJCongress Says Proposed Geneva Convention Update Affords An Opportunity to Unshackle Anti-Terrorist Forces,” American Jewish Congress, November 6, 2002.
[9] <#_ednref9> See Norman Finkelstein, /Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History/ (Berkeley:
University of California, 2005).
[10] <#_ednref10> See Alan Dershowitz, “Hezbollah’s Triumph:
Israeli Rockets Hits Lebanese Children,” Huffington Post, July
31, 2006; “Lebanon Is Not a Victim,” Huffington Post, August 7,
2006; “The ‘Human Rights Watch’ Watch, Installment 1,”
Huffington Post, August 21, 2006; “Amnesty International’s
Biased Definition of War Crimes: Whatever Israel Does to Defend
Its Citizens,” Huffington Post, August 29, 2006.
[11] <#_ednref11> “Hezbollah Kidnaps 2 IDF Soldiers During Clashes on Israel-Lebanon Border,” /Ha’aretz/, July 12, 2006;
“Israelis Attack Just 10 Miles From Beirut,” Associated Press,
July 12, 2006; “Nahariya: Woman Killed in Katyusha Attack,”
/Yediot Ahronot/, July 13, 2006.
[12] <#_ednref12> “Israel Claims Hundreds of Hits in Lebanon,” Associated Press, July 13, 2006.
[13] <#_ednref13> “One Killed, Dozens Hurt as Katyushas Rain Down on Northern Israel,” /Ha’aretz/, July 13, 2006.
[14] <#_ednref14> See The Consultative Council of the Lawyers Committee on American Policy Towards Vietnam, Richard Falk, chair, John H. E. Fried, rapporteur,/ Vietnam and International Law: An Analysis of International Law and the Use of Force, and the Precedent of Vietnam for Subsequent Interventions/ (Northampton, Mass.: Aletheia Press, 1990), p. 22. The Consultative Council of the Lawyers Committee on Vietnam, which, in addition to Falk and Fried, included Richard J. Barnet, John H. Herz, Stanley Hoffman, Wallace McClure, Saul H. Mendlovitz, Richard S. Miller, Hans J. Morgenthau, William G. Rice, Burn H. Weston, and Quincy Wright, explained further (p. 22): “In [UN Charter] Article 51, legal authorities usually invoke the classical definition of self-defense given by [U.S.] Secretary of State Daniel Webster in /The Caroline/. Mr. Webster’s description of the permissible basis for self-defense was relied upon in the Nuremberg Judgment in the case against major German war criminals. This judgment was, of course, based upon pre–United Nations law and, in turn, was affirmed unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly at its first session (Res.
95(I)).” The Lawyers Committee then noted “Mr. Webster’s
generally accepted words, [that] the right of self-defense is
restricted to instances ‘when the necessity for action’ is
‘instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no
moment for deliberation.’ ”
[15] <#_ednref15> “PM Olmert Calls Hezbollah Border Attack an ‘Act of War,’ ” /Ha’aretz/, July 12, 2006.
[16] <#_ednref16> “Israel Pushes on Despite Agreeing to Airstrike Lull,” /New York// Times/, August 1, 2006.
[17] <#_ednref17> “Peretz: Okay to Harm Lebanese Civilians If Necessary,” IsraelNN.com, July 16, 2006.
[18] <#_ednref18> “Inquiry Commission That Wasn’t: Politicians, Army Officers and Journalists Who Spend Their Time Covering Their Hide Should Be the First to Testify,” /Yediot Ahronot/, July 31, 2006.
[19] <#_ednref19> “Israeli Military Policy Under Fire After Qana Attack,” /Forward/, August 4, 2006.
[20] <#_ednref20> “Israel/Lebanon: Qana Death Toll at 28,” Human Rights Watch, August 2, 2007.
[21] <#_ednref21> Human Rights Watch, “Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon,” August 3, 2006, www.hrw.org <http://www.hrw.org/>.
[22] <#_ednref22> Ibid.
[23] <#_ednref23> Amnesty International, “Israel/Lebanon:
Deliberate Destruction or ‘Collateral Damage’? Israeli Attacks
on Civilian Infrastructure,” August 23, 2006, www.amnesty.org.
[24] <#_ednref24> Ibid.
[25] <#_ednref25> Alan Dershowitz, “Lebanon Is Not a Victim,” /Huffington Post/, August 7, 2006, www.huffingtonpost.com <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/>.
[26] <#_ednref26> Ibid.
[27] <#_ednref27> Alan Dershowitz, “The ‘Human Rights Watch’ Watch, Installment 1,” /Huffington Post/, August 21, 2006, www.huffingtonpost.com.
[28] <#_ednref28> “Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon.”
[29] <#_ednref29> Ibid.
[30] <#_ednref30> “The ‘Human Rights Watch’ Watch, Installment 1.”
<#_ednref31>
ZNet | Repression
DePaul denies tenure for controversial professor
*by Maudlyne Ihejirika and Dave Newbart; Sun Times
<http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/421003,CST-NWS-depaul09.article>;
June 11, 2007*
<http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/421003,CST-NWS-depaul09.article>
For a man who has just lost his job after a highly public
battle, DePaul University assistant political science Professor
Norman Finkelstein is calm and accepting.
That’s because Finkelstein, whose tenure bid drew widespread
interest because of the Jewish professor’s blunt criticism of
Jews and the state of Israel—and the attack on those views
waged by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz—stands firmly
on the beliefs that may have got him fired.
“There is a song by the folk singer Keith [sic] Seeger, ‘Die
Gedanken sind frei,’” the controversial academic reflected in a
rare interview with the Sun-Times.
“That means, ‘thoughts are free.’ No one can deny that ‘die
gedanken sind frei.’ They can deny me tenure, deny me the right
to teach. But they will never stop me from saying what I believe.”
What Finkelstein—the son of Holocaust survivors—believes
is that his people are culpable in the plight of the
Palestinians. He drew wrath from prominent Jewish leaders when
he accused some of exploiting Jewish suffering to block
criticism of Israel, and made other enemies when he accused some
survivors of conducting a “shakedown” to get payments from Germany.
Dershowitz, author of The Case for Israel, called Finkelstein’s
writings full of distortions about Jews in general and himself
in particular, and was one of many weighing in on a normally
closed-door process. He implored DePaul to reject Finkelstein’s
tenure.
A debate over Finkelstein had raged among students and faculty,
including universities nationwide and internationally.
“Over the past several months, there has been considerable
outside interest and public debate concerning this decision,”
DePaul’s president, the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, said Friday.
“This attention was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no
impact on either the process or the outcome of this case.”
DePaul said the political science department and the College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences recommended tenure for Finkelstein,
but the college’s dean and the University Board on Promotion and
Tenure recommended against it and were upheld by Holtschneider.
“I would be disingenuous if I said I were not disappointed,”
Finkelstein said.
“On the other hand, both of my parents survived the Nazi death
camps. Growing up, what I remembered most was my late mother
used to say, ‘Some people are beasts, and there’s nothing to be
done with them. But what about the silence of everyone else?
That I cannot understand.’ Those were thoughts that left a deep
mark on me.”
Finkelstein has a year left at DePaul. “I met the standards of
tenure DePaul required, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the
political opposition to my speaking out on the Israel-Palestine
conflict,” he said.
“As it happens, I was just this past week teaching about Paul
Robeson in my political science class. When Robeson was
crucified for his beliefs, he said, ‘I will not retreat
one-thousandth part of one inch.’ That’s what I say to the thugs
and hoodlums who are trying to silence me. They don’t want to
talk about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. So they
make Norman Finkelstein the issue.”
Inside Higher Ed
June 11
DePaul Rejects Finkelstein
DePaul University on Friday formally denied tenure to Norman G. Finkelstein, who has taught political science there while attracting an international following — of both fans and critics — for his attacks on Israeli policies and the “Holocaust industry.”
Finkelstein’s tenure bid has attracted an unusual degree of outside attention and his research has been much debated by scholars of the Middle East. In evaluating his record, DePaul faculty panels and administrators praised him as a teacher and acknowledged that he has become a prominent public intellectual, with works published by major presses. But first a dean and now the president of DePaul — in rejecting tenure for Finkelstein — have cited the style of his work and intellectual combat. Finkelstein was criticized for violating the Vincentian norms of the Roman Catholic university with writing and statements that were deemed hurtful, that contained ad hominem attacks and that did not show respect for others.
Given that line of criticism, the Finkelstein case is emerging as a test of whether a range of qualities grouped together as “collegiality” belong in tenure cases. Many colleges and universities consider collegiality — perhaps not surprising given that a positive tenure vote can make someone a colleague for the duration of a career. But many experts on academic freedom, as well as the American Association of University Professors, view skeptically the practice of treating collegiality as a major, independent factor in the tenure process. They fear that collegiality can provide cover for squelching the views of those who may hold controversial or cutting edge views or who just get on their colleagues’ wrong sides.
Adding to the tensions over the Finkelstein case is another element to it. His tenure bid was backed by his department and a collegewide faculty committee, and hit roadblocks when a dean weighed in against him. <http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/03/finkelstein> And the same day DePaul’s president denied Finkelstein tenure, he also denied tenure to another professor — who had backing from her department, the collegewide faculty panel, and the dean who weighed in against Finkelstein.
While most tenure processes are layered, several people at DePaul said it was unusual for tenure candidates there to advance several steps in the review process — only to be rejected — and that the cases raise questions about how much deference should go to a department.
“The real responsibility for assessing someone’s scholarship and teaching and service rests with the department. Your closest colleagues are expected to understand what you do more precisely than an upper level body,” said Anne Clark Bartlett a professor of English and president of the Faculty Council at DePaul. In the aftermath of Friday’s announcements, she said that “people are very concerned.”
That concern extends beyond DePaul. “This is a very important case not just for DePaul, but for the country as a whole,” said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. He declined to offer an opinion on the case because the AAUP could become involved. The Illinois conference of the association already has, objecting to some of the arguments used against Finkelstein.
Finkelstein meanwhile does not plan to take his loss of tenure quietly. He said via e-mail, with more than a little irony, that “it’s gratifying to see that the system works.”
What are his plans? “I’m unemployed and unemployable at 53,” he said. “I accumulated an impressive teaching record yet will never again be able to step foot in a college classroom. I’ve written five books to considerable scholarly acclaim and that have gone into 46 foreign editions, yet I won’t have access to a good research library with borrowing privileges. Like I said, the system works. Do I have any regrets? None at all. To quote my childhood hero Paul Robeson when he was being crucified in the 1950s: I will not retreat one thousandth part of one inch.” (Actually, Finkelstein isn’t unemployed; as is standard in tenure denials, he is employed at DePaul for the next academic year.)
The Furor Over Finkelstein
At DePaul, Finkelstein has been well regarded as a teacher and until his tenure case, he was not at the center of campus political debates. He is probably best known as a critic of Israel and of Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard University law professor. (Among Finkelstein’s controversial books is one, published by the University of California Press, <http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10505.html> devoted to attacking Dershowitz.) While many of Finkelstein’s strongest critics are not surprisingly supporters of Israel and of Dershowitz, not to mention Dershowitz himself, there are also plenty of scholars who are critical of Israel and Dershowitz on various issues, but who find Finkelstein’s work ill informed or offensive. Likewise, there are a number of scholars who don’t necessarily share Finkelstein’s analysis, but who think his treatment by DePaul raises issues of academic freedom.
Much of the criticism from the dean focuses on Finkelstein’s book /The
Holocaust Industry./ <http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/content.php?pg=3>
The book argues that supporters of Israel use the Holocaust unreasonably
to justify Israel’s policies. While the book does not deny that the
Holocaust took place, it labels leading Holocaust scholars “hoaxters and
huxters.” A review of the book in /The New York Times/
called it full of contradictions and full of “seething hatred” as he
implies that Jews needed the Holocaust to justify Israel. The reviewer,
Brown University’s Omer Bartov, a leading scholar of the Holocaust,
described the book as “a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery,
‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ “
Finkelstein maintains on his Web site
<http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/index.php> a bibliography, links to
many of his writings, and much of the hate mail he receives. Dershowitz
also maintains a Web page about Finkelstein,
<http://www.alandershowitz.com/news.php#1> featuring the “most
despicable things Finkelstein has said” (attacks on Elie Wiesel, for
instance) and the “stupidest things Finkelstein has said” (quotes about
Jewish influence, for instance).
What DePaul’s President Said
After two faculty panels backed Finkelstein’s tenure bid, and the dean came out against it, the case went to a universitywide faculty panel, which made a recommendation by a 4-3 vote against tenure. In his letter to Finkelstein rejecting him, DePaul’s president, the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, quoted at length from that faculty panel’s memo to him. (The university released only a brief statement on the tenure case, but Finkelstein put the letter from the president
The universitywide faculty committee report from which the president quoted called Finkelstein “an excellent teacher” and “a nationally known scholar and public intellectual, considered provocative, challenging and intellectually interesting,” but also noted that some researchers find his scholarship faulty. The focus of the committee’s criticism was “the intellectual character of his work and his persona as a public intellectual.”
The committee added that “some might interpret parts of his scholarship as ‘deliberately hurtful’ as well as provocative more for inflammatory effect than to carefully critique or challenge accepted assumptions.”
Father Holtschneider, the president, in his letter to Finkelstein, stressed similar concerns about which he read in the record of the case. “I have considered the fact that reviewers at all levels, both for and against tenure, commented upon your ad hominem attacks on scholars with whom you disagree,” Father Holtschneider wrote. “In the opinion of those opposing tenure, your unprofessional personal attacks divert the conversation away from consideration of ideas, and polarize and simplify conversations that deserve layered and subtle consideration. As such, they believe your work not only shifts toward advocacy and away from scholarship, but also fails to meet the most basic standards governing scholarship discourse within the academic community.”
He then went on to cite various responsibilities outlined in DePaul’s faculty handbook that he said Finkelstein didn’t follow. “I cannot in good faith conclude that you honor the obligations to ‘respect and defend the free inquiry of associates,’ ’show due respect for the opinions of others,’ and ’strive to be objective in their professional judgement of colleagues,’ ” Father Holtschneider wrote. “Nor can I conclude that your scholarship honors our university’s commitment to creating an environment in which all persons engaged in research and learning exercise academic freedom and respect it in others.”
In his letter to Finkelstein and in the statement released to the press, Father Holtschneider said that outside pressure (from Dershowitz or others) had no impact on his decision. “Over the past several months, there has been considerable outside interest and public debate concerning this decision. This attention was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no impact on either the process or the outcome of this case,” the president said in his press statement.
He added: “Some will consider this decision in the context of academic freedom. In fact, academic freedom is alive and well at DePaul. It is guaranteed both as an integral part of the university’s scholarly and religious heritage, and as an essential condition of effective inquiry and instruction.”
Why Some Are Concerned
While Finkelstein’s anger and Dershowitz’s satisfaction with the decision are to be expected, others see broader significance to the case.
“This case is important because we must allow an academic to speak with emotion and to speak freely,” said Peter N. Kirstein, a professor of history at Saint Xavier University and a leader of the Illinois conference of the AUUP. Kirstein’s blog <http://english.sxu.edu/sites/kirstein/> frequently focuses on academic freedom and he has broken the news of several of the developments in the Finkelstein tenure case.
Kirstein said that the criticisms of Finkelstein in the president’s
letter all amount to collegiality questions of the sort that AAUP
recommends shouldn’t be the basis of tenure decisions
<http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/1999/99so/SO99CRPT.HTM> and
that aren’t appropriate to raise. “He has scholarly credentials that
have been vetted by elite university presses” but DePaul seems worried
about issues of tone and assertiveness, Kirstein said.
If such collegiality issues are allowed into tenure cases, Kirstein said, academics of a wide range of politics and personalities can unfairly lose tenure bids. He cited as an example the case of KC Johnson, <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/tenure.htm> who won tenure on appeal — but who had offended some of his Brooklyn College history colleagues despite an unquestioned record as a teacher and a prolific author with top publishers.
Bartlett, the Faculty Council president, said that while the Finkelstein case raises governance issues, she didn’t think it should be portrayed as a case of the administration reversing the faculty generally. She noted that the committee on which the president relied was a faculty panel. The issue that is more appropriately raised, she said, is one of what appropriate review should happen after a department votes on a candidate.
She said that she viewed the universitywide panel’s job as one of reviewing “the way the process was carried out,” not “retrying the case.” She said she wasn’t sure that this time there wasn’t a retrying of the case.
Concerns over that issue are reinforced by Friday’s tenure denial to Mehrene Larudee, who teaches international studies at DePaul, and whose work is in economics (and on issues having nothing to do with Finkelstein’s research). Larudee had strong backing throughout the process, until the final committee review and presidential decision to reject her. Via e-mail, she said that many at DePaul are wondering about the “startling departure” from university principles in her case and Finkelstein’s.
“I personally support, and have always supported, the right of every faculty member, including Norman Finkelstein, to fair and equitable treatment by the university, and in particular to fair and equitable treatment in the tenure process,” Larudee said. “DePaul University claims to have a deep commitment to social justice. The decisions handed down on Friday, June 8 to deny tenure to Norman Finkelstein in no way reflect any such commitment.”
Bartlett said she was worried about some of the standards being suggested in terms of causing offense and engaging in contentious debate.
A scholar of women in medieval times, Bartlett said that when she started her career, and challenged assumptions about the limited role of women at the time, she angered people “and it even got heated sometimes.”
Is the difference between her career and Finkelstein’s that she was controversial in a different way, or just that her debates “weren’t played out on the world stage”?
Some topics are “highly flammable, so when you participate in them, you get a more flammable context and that needs to be understood,” she said. “I think it’s really really important to acknowledge that all new contributions to the production of knowledge are controversial or they wouldn’t be new,” she said.
That doesn’t mean that the ideas are good, she said, but intense anger doesn’t mean that they are bad. Bartlett said she’s concerned about, but not certain about, the impact the case could have on faculty members who hope to earn tenure. “I think we as faculty need to come together and figure out exactly what kinds of messages are being sent, if any,” she said.
— Scott Jaschik <mailto:scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com>
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