WTF!!??! NORMAN FINKELSTEIN calls anti-Israel BDS movement a cult of liars who want to destroy Israel!!

Full version here:


Arguing the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Campaign with Norman Finkelstein from HuffPoMonitor on Vimeo.


Bonus (an oldie but a goodie):





h/t Blazing Cat Fur

Anti-Semitic Jew Norman Finkelstein gets facts wrong and jokes about Holocaust (again)

Norman Finkelstein, the former De Paul University professor who is known primarily for his obsessive hatred of Israel, is the modern anti-Semite's favorite Jew. He appeals to both neo-Nazis for his sinister criticisms of  Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust, and to Islamists for his efforts to de-legitimize the Jewish state.

He possesses Naomi Klein's gift for distorting isolated, anomalous pieces of information into conspiratorial, overarching theories.  But unlike Klein, Finkelstein has a reputation for a comprehensive, indeed compulsive need for factual accuracy, even if his interpretation of fact is sometimes suggestive of a mental disorder.

However recently, he seems to have even lost that one vaguely redeeming component of his credibility.

Finlelstein has the habit of posting stories to his website, prefaced by his own acerbic comments.
Recently, Finkelstein posted a report of a talk with the noted author and commentator Mark Steyn in Toronto, with the notation, "Jewish writer warns of Third…or is it Fifth?…or maybe its the Seventh?…Holocaust!"

It would appear that in Finkelstein's mind, the notion that concerns about contemporary anti-Semitism could only be a by-product of some sort of hysterical thinking on the part of a Jew.

Except, Steyn, a best-selling author, syndicated columnist, and frequent host of one of America's most popular radio talk-shows is an Anglican who was baptized as a Catholic.

In his rush to attribute all the evils of the world to Jews, Finkelstein's intemperance got the better of him.  Speaking of intemperance, Finkelstein is sounding more and more like Mel Gibson did a few years ago. At least Mel had the reasonable excuse of being plastered out of his mind on tequila and had the decency to apologize. The humourless Finkelstein doesn't have that to fall back on.

Norman Finkelstein: The Anti-Semites' Favorite Jew

The documentary film American Radical is a sympathetic look at Norman Finkelstein, the former DePaul University professor who was denied tenure after a very public spat with renowned Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.

The whole film is now available to be viewed online at Al Jazeera English.

Finkelstein is notorious as a vociferously anti-Israel Jew who published The Holocaust Industry, which accused Jews of not being interested in Holocaust remembrance so much as manipulating the Holocaust to extort money and support for Israel from Europe. That work solidified Finkelstein as the favorite Jew of the neo-Nazi movement. His shameless, ongoing use of his family's suffering in the Holocaust as validation of his one-sided critiques of Israel earned Finkelstein contempt and discredit as a propagandist.

The documentary is a fascinating look at a fanatic who was raised in an environment of activist extremism. The product of a hysterical mother was a dogged researcher who is less an academic than a polemicist. His  presented facts frequently lack context, but there is an indication that Finkelstein is well aware of that. His work is to serve a cause, and that cause is Palestinian activism, not the truth of the complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian and Israeli/Arab conflict.

One of the ironies of Finkelstein's life, which the film demonstrates, is that Finkelstein was both made and undone by his obsession with one particular book: From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine.

That book, by Joan Peters, was intended to bolster the Jewish claim to both Historical Palestine and modern Israel by denigrating the Palestinian claim to that land. Finkelstein's doctoral thesis was able to establish that this popular best seller was based in part on shoddy, if not fraudulent scholarship. That exposé propelled Finkelstein to prominence as a critic of Israel. It was also his undoing, when he accused Alan Dershowitz of plagiarizing from Peters' book by using the same Mark Twain contained in From Time Immemorial. Dershowitz was cleared of plagiarism, but the spruious accusation and the acrimony that Finkelstein incurred  from making it irreparably damaged his reputation and made him persona non grata to university administrators across America.

At about 90 minutes, American Radical is a worthwhile glimpse at one of the stranger personalities in the world of grievance politics. You can see it here. 

Banal anti-Americanism and Zionist Conspiracy Theory Night at the Munk Centre

The Munk Centre is the University of Toronto's showpiece for Global Studies and frequently features brilliant speakers and fascinating presentations. But as Johnny Carson used to say when one of his jokes bombed, "they can't all be gems."

Case in point, a dual program on Tuesday evening called, "In Conversation with Brian Stewart."

In fairness to The Munk Centre, it did provide one thoughtful speaker that evening who provided pertinent facts and intelligent analysis in the person of Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance.

Stewart is a former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reporter who is now affiliated with the Munk Centre. There were two parts to the program. The first was billed as "Canada and Afghanistan" and was an hour of Stewart posing questions to Vance, who is Chief of Staff, Land Strategy for the Canadian Armed Forces.

Vance offered insights into the Afghanistan situation and Canada's military role that are worth noting.  Aside from the obvious fact that the rights and lives of most Afghans have improved since the removal of the Taliban, it's critical to note that despite the implications by friends of the Mullah-ruled Iranian dictatorship, like the Canadian Peace Alliance's James Clark, most Afghans want NATO to be there. They don't want NATO to stay forever, but they do want them to remain until Afghanistan is secure enough to prevent a resumption of Taliban rule. The voices of Afghans who condemn NATO's presence in their country are almost always those who don't live in Afghanistan.

To illustrate that, while millions of Afghans left the country as refugees during Taliban rule, millions are now returning since the NATO intervention. That fact alone should be ample testimony to the benefit of NATO's role in Afghanistan.

The best answers are often elicited from a questioner who challenges the person being questioned. Because an idea or proposition is offered doesn't mean it should be accepted. However there was something about Stewart's questioning, having alternated between cynical and uninformed, which brought to mind the worst practices of the old CBC. Stewart made weird allegations parroted from a group of communists about "the militarization" of Hockey Night in Canada and concluded with a condescending congratulation of Vance for his "honesty," as if anything less could have been expected.

Stewart's position couldn't have been made more apparent than by his shift to the role of obsequious acolyte in the second part of the program called,  "Obama Watch: Historians Review the Obama Foreign Policy Record"

One of the secrets of academia is that a PhD is no guarantee of great intelligence. Sometimes all it means is that an individual who possess one is better trained to articulate banal ideas than the average person. Historians John Milton Cooper and Robert Bothwell provided ample reminder of that. They shared the stage with the Munk Centre's Ronald Pruessen and what was supposed to be a critique of US President Obama's foreign policy instantaneously descended into Cooper bloviating about a Zionist takeover of American politics, only to be echoed by Bothwell's conspiratorial assertion that Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu is more powerful in American politics than Obama.

Pruessen seemed embarrassed by his colleagues and while he sensibly (sanely) stayed away from that delusional line of distraction, he did not challenge it. That is understandable since it might have inspired ostracism given the the anti-Zionist zealotry often prevalent at U of T, which includes entire departments devoted to it.

While it was shocking to hear an outburst from Cooper and Bothwell that could just as easily have been a recital from a neo-Nazi website or a squawk from a Maoist nut like Norman Finkelstein, what was most surprising about the hour-long panel was that among all the many assertions, not once was a single historical fact introduced by any of the historians to substantiate them. Finkelstein routinely presents facts and data out of context, but at least he actually uses facts on occasion.

Such was not the case with the historian's panel. A panel that was ostensibly about Obama, overwhelmingly became just a group denunciation of George W Bush. Cooper and Bothwell seemed personally affronted by the popular conception that Bush's push for democracy in the middle east could in any way be responsible for the wave of pro-democracy rebellions spreading across the region. Cooper appeared to revile Bush to the extent that he could barely bring himself to say his name, almost always referring to him as "the last president," bringing to mind the way that Islamist fanatics cannot bear to say "Israel" and refer to it as "the Zionist entity."

Cooper's oft-repeated use of the term "right-wing", spitting it out as if it were a diabolical curse, implied an ideologically-inspired intellectual vacuity, as if by virtue of an idea's being from a particular part of the political spectrum, it was automatically disqualified from any validity. The best US president of the last two decades was Bill Clinton, whose success was in no small measure derived from his ability to recognize good ideas and adopt them, regardless of their source. The reason the Republicans were so frustrated by him, and their attacks against him so personal, was because it is almost impossible to attack the politics of someone who appropriates your best ideas and implements them as his own policies.

Of course, Bill Clinton possesses one of the most politically astute minds in the world, and Messieurs Cooper and Bothwell, to put it politely, do not.

It was staggering to hear the panel unanimously postulate something that should be discouraging for any supporter of Barack Obama as it is for anyone who welcomes global stability: their positive assessment of an Obama presidency leading to a weaker America. At that point, I realized I was listening to a panel of 20th century historians who have learned absolutely nothing from the history of the 20th century.

They all agreed that America, in the absence of another superpower, was too strong, and it's weakening would be a good thing for the world and the USA . What they didn't say was who they assumed would fill the power vacuum left by a debilitated United States. Unless they meant a nuclear Iran or authoritarian China, the natural assumption would be Europe.

If nothing else can be learned from the history of Europe over the last 100 years, it is that Europe is incapable of functioning for any length of time without a strong America. Cooper, who wrote a well received biography of Woodrow Wilson, the US President at the close of World War 1, seemed to have forgotten the cause of that war was European instability. It took a strong America to end that conflict, since Europe was unable to solve its own problems. History repeated itself with the American intervention needed to end World War 2. It was America's support for western Europe that prevented the Soviets from dominating that continent during the cold war. And if any further reminder was needed, though it shouldn't be, it is the resolution of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, which threatened to turn into a regional war while Europe criticized and ineffectually dithered until an American bombing campaign ordered by President Clinton concluded that crisis.

Given their other proclivities, maybe it should not have been surprising that those obvious facts didn't factor into the assessment of the historical trio.

The Munk Centre provides a tremendous service in presenting different voices and divergent views so that students, academics, and the public can be exposed to a variety of ideas. A moderator who challenges the preposterous rather than allows his own prejudices to be reinforced would provide a good enhancement for these events.

One consolation from the historian's panel is that it conclusively proves that Linda McQuaig is full of..hot air.

Jewish anti-Semite Norman Finkelstein to ooze into Hamas U on Wednedsay

Yuck!

I hope the slimeball doesn't forget to remind people that he's the child of Holocaust survivors like he always does, because desperate for credibility, he'll have to grasp at his usual straw.

Maybe he can recite a poem in memory of his hero, Chairman Mao.

Always lookin' for a murderous dictator to love, huh, Normie?

Unhinged ex-Professor Norman Finkelstein calls Israel "Nazis" again..

Former DePaul University professor and noted Jewish anti-Semite Norman Finkelstein routinely posts news stories on his websites appending them with his own comments.

There's something about being an anti-Israel Jew that seems to correlate to lacking a sense of humour and no one is a better example of that trend than Finkelstein.

Finkelstein always identifies himself as a the child of holocaust survivors, as if it gave some particular credibility to his bigotry against Israel and his anti-Jewish comments. I guess that's another trend for this breed of fanatic.

He also has made a habit of comparing Israel, a pluralistic, liberal democratic country, to Nazi Germany.

It was only a matter of time before he dropped the analogy and actually called the Israeli government  "Nazis."

Finkelstein, the "child of Holocaust survivors" who fancies himself an expert on middle east politics might want to take an undergrad course in 20th Century European history, because he either has no idea what Nazism is, or he is an idiot.

An interesting Noam Chomsky interview

Noam Chomsky is an interesting fellow. He is a moral relativist, which of itself suggests hypocrisy and lack of insight, so he becomes an easy target for mockery.  But nonetheless, he is, by several orders of magnitude, more intelligent and nuanced than his acolytes, such as Naomi Klein and Norman Finkelstein.

He has done some very positive things, such has his campaign for East Timor, that helped draw attention to the situation there, and he was about as wrong as a person could have been regarding the Cold War and the approach to the former Soviet Union, which would still exist if Chomsky's counsel had been followed.

Here is an interesting interview where he discusses his take on aspects of the Israel/Palestine issue, boycotts and the legitimacy of states in general. I disagree with much of what he says, but this provides a good window into his mind:



A Conversation with Noam Chomsky on Palestine/Israel from Frank Barat on Vimeo.


h/t TVO's Agenda blog

Professor Werner Cohn: Prolegomena to the Study of Jews who hate Israel - Not to Weep or to Laugh, but to Understand

Professor Cohn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of British Columbia

"Broadly speaking, Jews who hate Israel fall into three categories: a) the famous, of which Noam Chomsky is about the only one; b) the well-known, like Norman Finkelstein and Tony Judt, and c) others who are not known beyond their immediate circles but who do lurk in various crevices of the Internet. Altogether, as I will explain below, it is not likely that there are more than a few thousand of these haters active worldwide, say fewer than 10,000 and probably no more than half that number. Considering that there are more than 13 million Jews in the world at the moment, the proportion of those who actively hate Israel, about 0.04 of one percent, might well be considered to be modest indeed. "

In Canada, we have one or two in the locally "well-known" category, such as non-credible players like Naomi Klein and her husband, what's-his-name, and Judy Rebick.

For more about this very interesting look at a sad phenomenon, read Professor Cohn's entire piece here.

Today in History

On this date in 1931, Chinese People's Republic was proclaimed by Mao Tse Tung.

The result was millions of deaths and oppressive rule.

It's probably safe to assume that Norman Finkelstein is throwing a celebratory party for himself today.

Anti-Israel Group launches co-ordinated "Letters to Editor" campaigns to vilify Israel

Does it seem that whenever a story about Israel gets printed in a major publication, a group of the same online posters combined with usual suspect letters-to-the-editor writers get a control message to go into action and use a familiar litany of spurious talking points to malign the middle east's only democracy?

Ever wonder why they all sound so similar?

There's a reason for that.

The so-called "Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East," (CJPME) an anti-Israel group whose board includes Canadians Osama Abu-Shihab and Louay Jabry, wants you to be on stand-by to join their team of "media responders". Your job is to badmouth Israel and you don't even have to have a command of the facts that you're going to claim to find objectionable.

Can't think of what to write, or what to say? Incapable of thinking for yourself? No problem!  The CJPME will do that for you. In the words of their own promotional videos below, their Media Centre will allow you to "respond effectively without even having to locate a newspaper or magazine." Talk about convenient! Any semi-literate half-wit could participate (and from the looks of things, quite a few do).

These people are also sponsoring ex-professor and admirer of mass murderer Mao Zedong, Norman Finkelstein, on a speaking tour of Canada this week. Finkelstein is a seemingly anti-Semitic Jew, so expect a coordinated letter campaign saying what a "heroic" figure we have in that slimy supporter of terror-organization Hezbollah.