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sabang

This could just a easily go on the Mid East Issues section. Norman Finkelstein is Jewish American, and was a brilliant graduate scholar at Princeton, about to embark on his Thesis. He researched and discovered a very serious academic fraud.

Now read what happened to him- it's in a very easy style, from a talk given by Noam Chomsky, who became his friend and was intimately acquainted with the whole thing as it happened. It will give you a big insight into the real world in action, academia, belief systems and how seeming experts are no more objective or honest than Politicians. More of Finkelsteins later work to come.

If you are at all interested about the real world and the sysem we live in, this is required reading.

The Fate of an Honest Intellectual
Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, pp. 244-248

" I'll tell you another, last case—and there are many others like this. Here's a story which is really tragic. How many of you know about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? There was this best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters—or at least, signed by Joan Peters—called From Time Immemorial. It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants [i.e. to the Jewish-settled areas of the former Palestine, during the British mandate years of 1920 to 1948]. And it was very popular—it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it. Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there's no moral issue, because they're just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. And there was all kinds of demographic analysis in it, and a big professor of demography at the University of Chicago [Philip M. Hauser] authenticated it. That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake.Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He's a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: "Here's what I've found in this book, do you think it's worth pursuing?"

__________________
To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.

obsidian

link?

DrB0b

Purely in the interests of starting a fight here's a link;
Moonbat Central » Blog Archive » CAMERA Exposes Norman Finkelstein

raycarey

kerux

Or more appropiately in the Zionist/Israel thread. Funny, if I was to bring this up in a separate thread, I'd be castigated.

Don't forget to mention the role Zionist Alan Dirtbag Dershowitz played in interferring in the internal affairs of another university to have a critic of Zionism/Holy Holocaust censured.

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Please, no more greens and what ever you do, don't throw me in that briar patch.


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sabang

'The Fate of an Honest Intellectual', by Noam Chomsky (Excerpted from Understanding Power)

Or of course the Chomsky book 'Understanding Power", a good read and intro to Chomsky.

sabang

Now for the meat of the story. I hope you are listening :-



Well, he got back one answer, from me. I told him, yeah, I think it's an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you're going to get in trouble—because you're going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they're going to destroy you. So I said: if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you're getting into. It's an important issue, it makes a big difference whether you eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population—it's preparing the basis for some real horrors—so a lot of people's lives could be at stake. But your life is at stake too, I told him, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.

sabang

Hotting Up?


Well, he didn't believe me. We became very close friends after this, I didn't know him before. He went ahead and wrote up an article, and he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn't even bother responding. I finally managed to place a piece of it in In These Times, a tiny left-wing journal published in Illinois, where some of you may have seen it. Otherwise nothing, no response. Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn't make appointments with him, they wouldn't read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.

sabang

And onwards. For some reason, I can only Paste one paragraph at a time??


By this time, he was getting kind of desperate, and he asked me what to do. I gave him what I thought was good advice, but what turned out to be bad advice: I suggested that he shift over to a different department, where I knew some people and figured he'd at least be treated decently. That turned out to be wrong. He switched over, and when he got to the point of writing his thesis he literally could not get the faculty to read it, he couldn't get them to come to his thesis defense. Finally, out of embarrassment, they granted him a Ph.D.—he's very smart, incidentally—but they will not even write a letter for him saying that he was a student at Princeton University. I mean, sometimes you have students for whom it's hard to write good letters of recommendation, because you really didn't think they were very good—but you can write something, there are ways of doing these things. This guy was good, but he literally cannot get a letter.

sabang

He's now living in a little apartment somewhere in New York City, and he's a part-time social worker working with teenage drop-outs. Very promising scholar—if he'd done what he was told, he would have gone on and right now he'd be a professor somewhere at some big university. Instead he's working part-time with disturbed teenaged kids for a couple thousand dollars a year. That's a lot better than a death squad, it's true—it's a whole lot better than a death squad. But those are the techniques of control that are around.

sabang

Juicy Stuff. Next-


But let me just go on with the Joan Peters story. Finkelstein's very persistent: he took a summer off and sat in the New York Public Library, where he went through every single reference in the book—and he found a record of fraud that you cannot believe. Well, the New York intellectual community is a pretty small place, and pretty soon everybody knew about this, everybody knew the book was a fraud and it was going to be exposed sooner or later. The one journal that was smart enough to react intelligently was the New York Review of Books—they knew that the thing was a sham, but the editor didn't want to offend his friends, so he just didn't run a review at all. That was the one journal that didn't run a review.

sabang

Meanwhile, Finkelstein was being called in by big professors in the field who were telling him, "Look, call off your crusade; you drop this and we'll take care of you, we'll make sure you get a job," all this kind of stuff. But he kept doing it—he kept on and on. Every time there was a favorable review, he'd write a letter to the editor which wouldn't get printed; he was doing whatever he could do. We approached the publishers and asked them if they were going to respond to any of this, and they said no—and they were right. Why should they respond? They had the whole system buttoned up, there was never going to be a critical word about this in the United States. But then they made a technical error: they allowed the book to appear in England, where you can't control the intellectual community quite as easily.

A BAD ERROR!

sabang

Well, as soon as I heard that the book was going to come out in England, I immediately sent copies of Finkelstein's work to a number of British scholars and journalists who are interested in the Middle East—and they were ready. As soon as the book appeared, it was just demolished, it was blown out of the water. Every major journal, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review, the Observer, everybody had a review saying, this doesn't even reach the level of nonsense, of idiocy. A lot of the criticism used Finkelstein's work without any acknowledgment, I should say—but about the kindest word anybody said about the book was "ludicrous," or "preposterous."

sabang

SABANG NOW, NOT CHOMSKY-

I have no idea why I can only post one paragraph at a time. Whats going on? Is this some form of cyber scrutiny? Beats me, but anyway it's the truth from someone that was there at the time, trying to help. We'll finish tomorrow the article- not that much left really.

I'll then give you some examples of much the same thing in the world of investment that I am personally privy to, and one from journalism that I was close enough to know first hand about. This is more than just a Zionist thing.

Milkman

I have ordered the book Beyond Chutzpah before this thread was started, today. What a coincidence!!

I will read it in about 5 weeks.

sabang

^ It will make you think MM. Don't neglect your Chomsky though.

Milkman

^ I also ordered Hegemony or Survival by Chomsky.

I can't wait to pick up these goodies.

I ordered 11 books today.


Go my man, Finklestein.

sabang

Any Chalmers Johnson?
I Highly recommend the Sorrows of Empire.

Milkman

^ Thanks. Going to check it on amazon now. I am critical and slow to pick books. I'll check it out.

The next bulk will be ordered in about 2 weeks.

Milkman

Finklestein denied tenure.....

Link: Norman G. Finkelstein

I'll look for more information and links. It looks like a double lynching.