Thread: Intellectual Hypocricy! The Finkelstein story.

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?"

link?

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

Norman Finkelstein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by obsidian

link?

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

I will read it in about 5 weeks.

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

^ 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.

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

^ 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.

Finklestein denied tenure.....

"Academic freedom is alive and well at DePaul"

DePaul University Statement on the Tenure and Promotion Decision Concerning Professor Norman Finkelstein

06.08.2007

DePaul University confirms that it informed Professor Norman Finkelstein today that Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, C.M., DePaul president, upheld a recommendation by the University Board on Promotion and Tenure (UBPT) - the final stage in the faculty review process - to deny his application for tenure and promotion.

Granting tenure equates to a guarantee of lifetime employment, and the same standards are applied to all faculty members under consideration. In every case, the final decision is one of balancing the various arguments for and against tenure. The tenure process, which is detailed in DePaul's Faculty Handbook, involves a rigorous review of each applicant's scholarship, service and teaching, with the recommendations at each level forwarded up to the next level for consideration. It is an evaluation of faculty by faculty.

In Professor Finkelstein's case, a faculty committee of the Department of Political Science voted in favor of tenure, submitting statements for the majority and minority, with a response from the majority. The Personnel Committee for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences then voted to support tenure and promotion, with reservations that it asked the college dean to note in his report. Subsequently, the college's dean issued a written opinion against tenure and the UBPT voted against tenure. The UBPT report and materials from the lower committees were forwarded to the president for review. As in all cases of tenure, the final decision was made by the president.

Fr. Holtschneider said, "According to DePaul's Faculty Handbook, the president can overturn the UBPT's recommendation in rare circumstances and for compelling reasons. I find no compelling reasons here to overturn the UBPT's decision."

Link: Norman G. Finkelstein

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

^ I doubt you know much about Chomsky then kerux. Just because he is not a grand conspiracy theorist does not make him a fraud.
Considering he is often called 'the most important intellectual alive in the world today', I don't think I'll bother saying more.

ANYWAY, on with the speech-



Well, people here read British reviews—if you're in the American intellectual community, you read the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review, so it began to get a little embarrassing. You started getting back-tracking: people started saying, "Well, look, I didn't really say the book was good, I just said it's an interesting topic," things like that. At that point, the New York Review swung into action, and they did what they always do in these circumstances. See, there's like a routine that you go through—if a book gets blown out of the water in England in places people here will see, or if a book gets praised in England, you have to react. And if it's a book on Israel, there's a standard way of doing it: you get an Israeli scholar to review it. That's called covering your ass—because whatever an Israeli scholar says, you're pretty safe: no one can accuse the journal of anti-Semitism, none of the usual stuff works.

So after the Peters book got blown out of the water in England, the New York Review assigned it to a good person actually, in fact Israel's leading specialist on Palestinian nationalism [Yehoshua Porath], someone who knows a lot about the subject. And he wrote a review, which they then didn't publish—it went on for almost a year without the thing being published; nobody knows exactly what was going on, but you can guess that there must have been a lot of pressure not to publish it. Eventually it was even written up in the New York Times that this review wasn't getting published, so finally some version of it did appear. It was critical, it said the book is nonsense and so on, but it cut corners, the guy didn't say what he knew.

I'LL SKIP STRAIT TO THE FINAL PARAGRAPH-

Still, in the universities or in any other institution, you can often find some dissidents hanging around in the woodwork—and they can survive in one fashion or another, particularly if they get community support. But if they become too disruptive or too obstreperous—or you know, too effective—they're likely to be kicked out. The standard thing, though, is that they won't make it within the institutions in the first place, particularly if they were that way when they were young—they'll simply be weeded out somewhere along the line. So in most cases, the people who make it through the institutions and are able to remain in them have already internalized the right kinds of beliefs: it's not a problem for them to be obedient, they already are obedient, that's how they got there. And that's pretty much how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools—that's the basic story of how it operates, I think.

THATS THE WAY THINGS WORK.
They don't usually need to shoot you, jail you, or make you disappear in our system for saying or thinking an inconvenient truth. The system handles it even more effectively.
Sadly, more people in the USA believe "Joan Peters"- an established fraud- than believe Finkelstein.
Now perhaps you understand the difficulty of arguing logic with an American educated person about Israel, Zionism and Palestine- you are coming against an ingrained Belief system.

As you can see from MM's post above, Finkelstein is 'excluded' to this day. He would be a senior Professor by now at a prestigious institution if only he would Lie, or not disclose his findings- he is a brilliant mind and scholar.
Even if he gained 'tenure' he would still be excluded- no big name university would have him, no big publisher will publish his books, mainstream media will not publicise them, most bookshops will not stock them. Thank goodness for Amazon.
The Man-