Thursday, June 8, 2006
Not. But that's the headline, anyway. An object lesson in how to lie with data.
A reader reacts to the fact that a "progressive" Presbyterian web site has posted Norman Finkelstein's letter to the 700 commissioners of the upcoming PC(USA) General Assembly in a laudatory and "must read" manner:
I was frankly surprised to find a letter from Norman Finkelstein featured with approval on the Witherspoon Society page.
Finkelstein is a sort of crackpot intellectual, the fact that some of his ideas are congenial is no excuse for mistaking describing him as a responsible scholar.
Your headline, "Jewish professor of political science writes in support of divestment," further misleads in giving the impression that Finkelstein's opinions are in any sense representative of the Jewish community. Support for divestment among Jews is extremely low. Among Jews with an affiliation beyond the mere accident of ancestry, support for divestment drops to nearly zero.
Your description of Finkelstein as "work(ing) for lasting peace between the two nations," is extremely odd. To say that someone has "worked for... peace" applies some positive activity. Finkelstein is a critic, not a worker. And he is not an evenhanded critic of "the two nations." He is an angry, intemperate, vicious critic of Israel alone.
Finkelstein is a well known Holocaust minimizer and anti-Israel propagandist whose writing is popular in neo-Nazi circles. For those of your members who are not familiar, here are a few, random Finkelstein quotes:
'I can't imagine why Israel's apologists would be offended by a comparison to the Gestapo.'
"All opinion-leaders, from the left to the right, are Jews…"
Finkelstein has made intemperate allegations that Holocaust surviviors are bogus, "I'm not exaggerating when I say that one out of three Jews you stop in the street in New York will claim to be a survivor."
"Elie Wiesel [is] resident clown of the Holocaust circus."
According to the highly regarded University of Chicago historian, Peter Novick, "No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate." "(Finkelstein) "displays a paranoid belief in some sort of global conspiracy of the Jewish elites in the U.S."
While I understand the impulse to advertise the opinions of your political allies, it really does the Witherspoon Society no credit to ally itself with a man like Norman Finkelstein.
Sincerely Yours,
xx
Is Norman Finkelstein Jewish?
I know his parents were Jewish. But can you stop being Jewish? I mean, does he belong to a synagogue? does he send money to the JNF? Does he tecch his kids the alepf bet oand light Chanukah lights with them? does he do anything Jewish? When he wants to work out, does he go to the JCC? I doubt it. In what sense is this man Jewish?
Unless, of course, like the Nazis we reduce "Jewish" to a matter of blood.
Finkelstein is an enemy of the Jews. He reviles Israel. Exhibits contempt for victims of the Shoah. and dedicates his career to slandering Israel and Jewish scholars.
Is there some way we can kick him out of the tribe?
Couldn't agree more. Who is this creepy Finkelstein guy and why is he so angry at Jews? Like Irate says, let's disown him.
So now one has to be religious, to be Jewish? Or ultraorthodox?
Then I welcome Norman Finkelstein as one of my people - atheists.
You don't have to believe in God to be Jewish. You do, however, have to make some positive commitment to the idea of a Jewish people.
There are positively identified Jews who direct or hld season tickets to Jewish theater troops, who subscribe to Jewish newspapers (the sommittedly socialist Forward is not exactly a religious newspaper,) who speak and regularly read literature in such Jewish languages as Yiddish, Hebrew, or Judeo-Persian, who participate in Jewish musical ensembles.
I did not argue that you have to believe in god to be counted as Jewish, let alone that you must be Orthodox.
However, we live in a world in which not only professional Israel-bashers like Norman Finkelstein, Norton Mezvinsky, Noam Chomsky, but many members of such gorups as the so-called "Jews Against the Occupation" have no visible Jewish memberships, commitments, or sultural elements in their lives, with the sole exception of using the "fact" that they are Jewish-by-ancestry to attack Israel and the Jews in ways that would be recognized as clearly anti-Semitic if not for the accident of ancestry.
I very much doubt that Norman Finkelstein believes in God, but that was not my point. If he wants to make a career of being a professional Jew by seling anti-Semitic books to anti-Semites, let him prove that he is Jewish in some positive, meaningful way.
Otherwise, we should regard Norman Finkelstein, Ora Wise, Adam Shapiro, and their ilk as vile anti-Semites who happen to have had Jewish parents or grandparents.
Let me say as a non Jew (I'm a Deist/Unitarian), supperter of Israel and Judaism, I believe Jews make this whole issue a mess.
Finkelstien, Chomsky, etc. are not Jews in any real sense as pointed out above. They are atheists, Chomsky I know is a Marxist, etc.
Marxism, etc. often act as a religion, in particular for many atheist' types. At best, they have left Judaism.
This is where the problem is: as long as "Jew" is defined by merly having a Jewish mother, your screwed. You fall in the trap of being some kind of "race" and open to all kinds of anti-Semitic nonsense.
Another problem is the refusal to accept converts, those that want to follow Judaism as a faith, while holding on to scores of atheists, etc. that hate the mention G-d in any form.
I don't consider an atheist a Jew anymore than I see Jews for Jesus (Christians) as Jews or atheists as Unitarians.
To quote, "You don't have to believe in God to be Jewish. You do, however, have to make some positive commitment to the idea of a Jewish people."
So all I have to do is follow some Jewish rtitual, recite a few words of Hebrew and I'm a Jew? You know how many "replacement" Christian cults play that game?
Here is one I spent a lot of time debunking at http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/ccg.htm
Why can't atheists call themselves what they are? Humanistic Judaism??? Give me a break.
Unitarianism has been nearly ruined by this near identical problem. We got overrun with atheists and agnostics that believed in nothing, then inseted every belief under the sun to fill in the holes. They often hate Israel too while traditoial Unitarians have been friendly towards Judaism.
Good luck to all of you. I'd like an opinion on this.
Being Jewish at a minimum should mean having a feeling of belonging to a people and sharing their history. I'm married to a non-Jew, but we observe a few Jewish rituals and feel part of a larger Jewish "family." Finkelstein is Jewish by accident of his birth but not because of identification with other Jews (except if their politics happens to coincide with his). He is a very angry person vis-a-vis anyone who dares question him or who even has views that differ from his. Just look at one of his recent postings on his website:
10.09.2006 Isn't it time to send over Hitchens, George Packer, Tom Friedman, Paul Berman and all the rest of those top guns in the rear? Personally, I hope they end up among the dead, but if it has to be among the wounded, let's hope all their limbs (and tongues) will be amputated
This is not the work of a rational academic. He posts hateful and scurrilous cartoons from a Brazilian fanatic on his website (not just Dershowitz but also Condi Rice "loving the smell of burnt Lebanese flesh" or Kenneth Roth taking money from Jewish bankers for giving Israel a free pass on war crimes, which he certainly didn't do). When a questioner at Yale dared to ask if he sat shiva after his parents died, he ranted against that "stupid question" (obviously, the answer was negative). The purpose of the question was to find out if F. observed any kind of Jewish rituals at all, and the answer was obvious.
He can't carry on a rational debate with Alan Dershowitz, whom he called a "hoodlum," but instead digs deeper and deeper until now it has come down to "you who write for Penthouse have no right to challenge me for printing a bawdy cartoon of you, and what about your obscenity of saying that my mother must have been a kapo?" Or "cover your private parts when you sunbathe on Martha's Vinyard before you object to my cartoons." I have never seen an academic descend to that low level.
Finkelstein belongs to those Jews who, having given up any Jewish identity, substitute an identity with the Palestinian cause (especially in his case Hizbullah) as compensation.