By David Brumer, Executive Committee StandWithUs Northwest, Seattle
JTNews’ coverage of Norman Finkelstein’s May 8 University of Washington lecture (“A question of motives, not of legitimacy,” May 16) raises questions the Seattle Jewish community would do well to ponder. Why would a failed academic, a proud Hezbollah collaborator (“we are all Hezbollah today”), who is celebrated on neo-Nazi Web sites the world over, who was denied tenure last year at DePaul University for his decidedly unscholarly work, a polemicist who regularly resorts to malicious ad hominem attacks against Jewish personages such as Alan Dershowitz (“a moral pervert”) and Elie Wiesel (“the resident clown in the Holocaust circus”), and a rabid denouncer and demonizer of Israel (“I don’t see why Israel’s apologists would be offended by a comparison to the Gestapo…”) would be featured in a Jewish community newspaper, with barely a nod to his pariah-like status in the mainstream Jewish world.
Your article regurgitates the main points of Finkelstein’s lecture without challenging the straw man argument he makes regarding Israel’s alleged breaches of international law (Finkelstein holds up the International Court of Justice as the supreme arbiter of world justice; never mind that the court’s very legitimacy is seriously in question). Finkelstein essentially gets a free pass, with no hint that he is persona non grata in respectable academic circles. Instead, Finkelstein is referred to as a “controversial professor” who challenges orthodox Western views regarding Israel “in the measured tones of an academic lecturer, which is precisely what he is.”
No substantive context is provided nor is any question raised as to why Finkelstein was invited by the Graduate School and the Simpson Center of the UW during the week of celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the establishment of modern Israel. We are informed that “Finkelstein”s appearance was coordinated in concert with commemorations of the “˜Nakba’ or “˜catastrophe,’ the term used by Arab and pro-Palestinian activists to describe Israel’s independence.”
Coincidentally, just this week Finkelstein was barred from entering Israel, a ban the Jewish State rarely exercises. The Seattle Jewish community should be asking ourselves why he is welcomed and feted here, and why such a fringe voice beyond the pale of civil discourse is further legitimized in our Jewish newspaper.