Friday, May 4, 2007
Point Dershowitz, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal: Finkelstein's Bigotry (requires paid subscription -- reposted in full in the forum -- registration required). Here's an excerpt:
Mr. Finkelstein does not do "scholarship" in any meaningful sense. Although his writings center on Israel (which he compares to Nazi Germany) and the Holocaust, he has never visited Israel and cannot read or speak German -- precluding the possibility of original scholarship.
Prof. Bartov characterized his work as an irrational Jewish "conspiracy theory." The conspirators include Steven Spielberg, NBC and Leon Uris. The film "Schindler's List," Mr. Finkelstein argues, was designed to divert attention from our Mideast policy. "Give me a better reason! . . . Who profits? Basically, there are two beneficiaries from the dogmas [of Schindler's List]: American Jews and American administration." NBC, he says, broadcast "Holocaust" to strengthen Israel's position: "In 1978, NBC produced the series Holocaust. Do you believe, it was a coincidence, 1978? Just at this time, when peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt took place in Camp David?" He argues that Leon Uris, the author of "Exodus," named his character "Ari" in order to promote Israel's "Nazi" ideology: "[B]ecause Ari is the diminutive for Aryan. It is the whole admiration for this blond haired, blue eyed type." (Ari is a traditional name dating back to the Bible.) He has blamed Sept. 11 on the U.S., claiming that we "deserve the problem on our hands because some things Bin Laden says are true.") He says that most alleged Holocaust survivors -- including Elie Wiesel -- have fabricated their past.
Like other anti-Semites, Mr. Finkelstein generalizes about "the Jews"; for example: "Just as Israelis . . . courageously put unruly Palestinians in their place, so American Jews courageously put unruly Blacks in their place." He says "the main fomenters of anti-Semitism "are 'American Jewish elites' who need to be stopped." Normally, no one would take such claims seriously, but he boasts that he "can get away with things which nobody else can" because his parents were Holocaust survivors.
And then, of course, there is me. In a recent article, "Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?" Mr. Finkelstein commissioned a cartoon by a man who placed second in the Iranian Holocaust-denial cartoon contest. The Hustler-type cartoon portrayed me as masturbating in joy while viewing images of dead Lebanese on a TV set labeled "Israel peep show," with a Star of David prominently featured...
Candace de Russy comments:
We know well that extremist academics have been systematically at work for decades hiring clones of themselves and replicating their ranks. But there has been little public naming and scrutiny of the backgrounds of exactly who has served on the committees responsible for the one-sided cloning and replication.
Learning more about the scholarship and activism of McCloud, for example, strikes me as a worthy enterprise. And, how about similarly checking into who exactly committed the dastardly deed of hiring the disgraced Ward Churchill?...
[h/t: Marathon Pundit]
Yeah and he's gonna get tenure.
This is nuts.
Correct me if I'm wrong but in the MOVIE "Ari" was played by the blue-eyed Paul Newman (who is Jewish in spite of his coloring, duh) but in the book he was very dark, with a black moustache, and was known as "The Palestinian", right? It's been decades since I read the book so I apologize if I'm incorrect.
Also I think "Ari" means "lion" in Hebrew, it is not short for "Aryan". Hello?
I do believe we are losing our collective minds. People are counting on this baloney because they know many of us don't read and have extremely short memories/attention spans and apparently there are lots of folks wearing aluminum foil hats a great deal of the time.
Help. Do we actually need to teach this stuff on the university level? Why?
And why is this happening in the first place?
Reminds me of Joseph Massad:
while making the argument that Zionism is a male-dominated movement, told students that the Hebrew word zion means 'penis'. Zion actually means a 'designated area or sign post', which sounds similar to zayin, which means a weapon or penis." In fact, the two words don't even sound similar in Hebrew, because they don't have the same root: Zion is pronounced tsiyon. It's hard to know what is more risible here: Massad's ignorance of Hebrew orthography or his perverse mode of analysis.
"Zion" and "penis"?
Who knew?
I should go to Columbia. It might provide some comic relief:)
I read that Finkielstein doesn't know Hebrew...or Arabic.
"... but in the book he was very dark, with a black moustache, and was known as "The Palestinian"."
because I suppose until Israeli independence the British referred to the Jews in that part of the world as Palestinians, while the Arabs there were just Arabs with no national association until after 1967, and the Jerusalem Post was initially the Palestine Post.
As for the Aryan business especially after Hitler's quest for that "Holy Grail" there is this to muse about:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=persia
Scroll down to 2.
" The reason for white people calling themselves Aryan stems to the 19th century when a bunch of dumbass German philosophers tried to link themselves to Aryans because they found a comple of words in German that resembled a couple of words in Persian. German later took this and tried to call himself Aryan so that he could seem like a superior race. This is because Aryan in both Persian and ancient Indian language (sanskrit) means "noble". Hitler also stole the swastika from the Hindus and turned it into an evil symbol, when in reality it is a symbol of peace and harmony.
Persia was the land of the Aryans. GERMANS ARE NOT ARYAN. EUROPEANS ARE NOT ARYAN."
The full text of Professor Dershowitz's article "Finkelstein's Bigotry " can be read at www.campus-watch.org...
http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/3293
No WSJ subscription needed to read his article. :-)
Regarding Hitler's stealing the swastika from the Hindus, I understand that it's true. In India, you see swastikas right next to stars of David carved onto centuries-old Hindu temples. An older Indian man I met told me that the story in India goes that Hitler lost the war because he abused the swastika symbol, turning it into something evil. Is was a sort of cosmic revenge.