Dershowitz regrets having taken Finkelstein’s bait
[I’m not posting the full text of this to avoid the wrath of TNR’s IP
cops.]
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070521&s=diarist052107
Cambridge Diarist Taking the Bait by Alan Dershowitz Post date 05.14.07 | Issue date 05.21.07
Afew years ago, I barely knew the name Norman Finkelstein. I was
vaguely aware of his screed, The Holocaust Industry, which argued
that Jews “fabricated” their victimhood. I had heard of his
comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany. (”[I] can’t imagine why
Israel’s apologists … would be offended by a comparison with the
Gestapo,” he once wrote.) And I had caught wind that neo-Nazi
Holocaust-deniers like Ernst Zundel, now in an Austrian prison,
praised him for “making three-fourths of our argument–and making it
effectively.” But I certainly never imagined meeting such a person.
Like David Duke, who is now teaching in the Ukraine, Finkelstein is a
failed academic. By his own account, he has been fired by “every
school in New York,” including Brooklyn College and NYU. One of his
former department chairs attributed Finkelstein’s firing to
“incompetence,” “mental instability,” and “abuse” of students with
different politics from his own. That may help explain why he
accepted a job at DePaul, a school Finkelstein describes as “a third-
rate Catholic University.” With a political science department known
as hard left, Finkelstein finally saw a path toward tenure–a sorry
possibility now being debated, and one that I may have inadvertently
helped along.
[…]