It's just hard to read him without disgust. Doug, do you find his sleaze fascinating or something?
On 5/14/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> [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.
>
> [...]
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