I attended a Finkelstein speech a few years back, and it was nothing short of a horror-show. Sponsored by the Yale Arab Students Association (not helpful guys), Finkelstein made a series of outrageous claims - that survivors were essentially making up their claims in order to extort reparations from post-war Germany, etc. I didn't make it to the end of the talk because I had to walk out a friend whose grandparents had survived the camps. Finkelstien's major works of late have focused primarily on defaming Dersh - not exactly the stuff for which tenure is received. It's clear I'm no fan.

But there's something important that I worry is lost when contemplation of the effect of the Holocaust on American and Israeli culture is associated with Finkelstein. It's important that Finkelstein's extreme and often baseless variation on Peter Novick's brilliant book The Holocaust in American Life not undermine the essential introspection that Novick inspired. Do we abuse the legacy of the holocaust and the notion of the suffering minority? Does competation over historical suffering poison relations between Jews and African Americans? It's a question of degree, but we can't give a simple "no" without abandoning honesty.

I first became aware of Finkelstein when he wrote a ridiculous essay on Marxist apostasy (ostensibly as the prologue to a book about Palestinian disenfranchisement; there's his deranged mind prominently on display) which proceeded to attack Christopher Hitchens out of what can only be called intellectual penis envy. Hitchens had included Finkelstein's essay on Joan Peters in the book he (Hitch) co-edited with Edward Said, Blaming the Victims. "Never let a good deed go unpunished" seems to capture the essence of the good Dr. Finkelstein's intellectual and moral styles -- see his referring to the only school that'll employ him as a "third-rate Catholic university."

I've watched various videos of his lectures and I think he's got a rather severe and pitiable case of Aspberger's Syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism that afflicts plenty of catchpenny journalists and failed scholars. Its symptoms include a total lack of self-awareness, conceptual obsessiveness, and the inability to register humiliation, least of all of oneself.

Finkelstein's decisive demolition of Joan Peter's ridiculous fairy tales alone is a greater contribution to our collective historical treasury than all the self-serving collections of lies that Dersh amusingly refers to as "books".

Why does Michael give Dershowitz the high ground despite the little prick's implacable affection for the lie? For example, he continued to report that the Washington Post referred to F as a holocaust denier, a preposterous calumny that the Post had retracted almost immediately. No matter to Dersh-he continued to cite the non-existent accusation long after the retraction. He may still, for all I know. Similarly, D distorts a passage from F's memoir-in-progress to claim that F believed his mom to be a kapo during her incarceration by the Nazis. He believes no such thing, as a look at the passage in question (available at F's site) will show. (By the way, Michael, the memoir is quite touching and reflective, very much at odds with F's combative public persona. I think I just heard your little bit of dollar book diagnosis re Asperger's go down the toilet).

My point is that these are inexcusable lies, that their emptiness was well known to D, that the "kapo" allegation was particularly painful given the circumstances of F mere's life, and that by knowingly repeating these slurs, D demonstrates his absolute disregard for even the most elementary notions of fairness and accuracy. Michael, given your fetishistic concern with the character of the folks you denounce, how can you ignore D's deficits? These two instances are just the tip of the iceberg.

There's no question that F would have flunked out of charm school. The guy is obsessional, whiny, etc. But why focus on these stylistic tics at the expense of his substantive claims? Maybe it's just that the Shvitz isn't the place for an extended and substantive look at the particulars of F vs D, but I'm getting tired of the reflexive putdowns of F by folks who don't challenge the particulars of his scholarship but instead regurgitate the same tired ad hominems that D regards as argument.

Michael:
You clearly know nothing about autism, nor aspergers. Though I understand your desire to denigrate Finkelstein, using these afflictions to do so is deeply offensive to anyone who has had real experiences with them. If you want to say Finkelstein is a solipcistic intellectual fraud, just do so. There's no need for a misdiagnosis.

I'm no fan of Alan Dershowitz (as that mention of Claus von Bulow was meant to convey), and I've written before on the Shvitz of his dust-up with Finkelstein. As this post was all about a rather damning quotation, I indeed didn't feel like dredging up every sordid or histrionic detail of their years-long skirmish. If you think I'm being tendentious and unfair, you're free to judge my characterization of Finkelstein's scholarship and what I concede are his legitimate points about the Holocaust reparations scandal and Joan Peters' book.

Those who accuse him of Holocaust denial are scurriously trying to end his professional career when they could simply do so on the CV points he all too willingly owns and brandishes. Like a good truth-to-power martyr, he maintains that he's just too "radical" for correct-thinking institutions. Yet this curiously never stopped his doyen Noam Chomsky from becoming a fixture at M.I.T...

Now, I haven't read F's "touching" memoir-in-progress, but if you think I was striking a low blow with my Aspberger's claim, consider that he is a person who thinks this cartoon, scrawled by Carlos Latuff, since anointed the second place winner of Iran's Holocaust Cartoon Contest, is tribute enough to himself to deserve posting on NormanFinkelstein.com. I'll give him added credit for outre originality, too: Finkelstein said that the the true "Axis of Evil" was not the US, Great Britain and Israel but a trio of universities that have denied or rescinded his speaking engagements! This is clearly a mind that toils under a darker cloud than solipsism. F's almost methodical humorlessness, his total absence of self-awareness, and one school's citation of his mental instability as reason for canning him are pretty telling. I wasn't trying to be cruel when I said it's pitiable.

Let's see, now. You concede NF's "legitimate points about the Holocaust reparations scandal and Joan Peters' book." In an earlier installment you conceded that things "weren't looking good" for the Dersh on the small matter of plagiarism. You may well know that Dershowitz has, in the past, argued that NF believes his own mother to have been a kapo - using the same cut-and-paste technique you find the the WSJ editorial above. And you call this pastiche of unattributed quotations by a plagiarist "settling the case"? Why don't you just amend your post to read:
"Norman Finkelstein was right about Joan Peters, right about Goldhagen, right about the Holocaust reparations scandal, and right about Dershowitz. But I REALLY don't like him."

I have to say, I really do enjoy being called perverse but someone who still hasn't identified himself yet repeatedly takes the liberty of referring to me by my first name. If you haven't got the courage of your own convictions to correspond like a human being but only as a closeted heckler, I don't see why I should have to countenance you at all. But since I'm in a good mood...

Norman Finkelstein defends Hezbollah, which cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as historical fact and lionizes Adolf Hitler, and he says he does this because that terrorist organization, like him, opposes both Israel and the United States. Finkelstein used his findings into the Swiss banking scandal to try and argue that reference to the Nazi Judeocide amounts to a cynical tactic to immunize the state of Israel against any and all forms of external criticism. He self-promotingly rewards the work of a cartoonist who proclaims solidarity with the mullahs of Iran and placed second in the their viciously anti-Semitic Holocaust cartoon contest. Given all this, am I supposed to really like him? Better yet, why do you? And can you appreciate that someone who may be right about some things can be catastrophically wrong about other things of immensely greater moral and intellectual weight? William Blake understood this imbalanced contradiction when wrote that "A truth that's told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent."

You have not refuted anything cited by Dershowitz in his WSJ piece, nor has Finkelstein, who promptly copied and pasted the article in its entirety -- and I'm sure without permission, stickler for copyright decorum that he is -- on his own website. Instead you say that Dershowitz once accurately referred to the content of a Washington Post article, which content was later shown to be erroneous. As to whether or not Dershowitz continues to refer to the false content of that article, you have no idea but guess that he must. (Conveniently gnoring the countervailing evidence that would favor the other side, you offer no argument as to why Finkelstein still insists that Dershowitz didn't even write his own book despite Finkelstein's being sent the handwritten manuscript that would rather suggest Dershowitz did.)

As against this, you cite my suggestion that Dershowitz indeed may have used block quotations from Peters' book without proper attribution. Well, all right: I did not know until after I wrote my original post that Harvard, at Dershowitz's own request, conducted an investigation into the plagiarism claim and cleared the law professor of the charge. So even if I think he was needlessly sloppy or lazy in his research, by the standards of his own academic institution, he was not. Whatever I may still think, the very sort of peer review that Finkelstein has a preternatural ability to flunk repeatedly has, in fact, vindicated Dershowitz on the gravest accusation that can be hurled against a scholar. 

If we allow that Norman Finkelstein is not necessarily a raving charlatan all of the time, why must we insist that Alan Dershowitz is? And if Finkelstein himself doesn't bother to disavow his own shabby rhetoric, why should we count Finkelstein the more reliable or trustworthy participant in this affair?

First of all, let us disambiguate the several anonymous posters. I am the guy who posted "dersh settles the case? really?". Although I fully endorse the points made by "perverse, michael", I am not him or her. I know this can be confusing, but I find your prickly response to anonymous posters a little schoolmarmish. Why do you care if I use my name, an avatar, or simply "anon"? You may see some deep ethical issue here, but I don't. If you'd prefer, I won't call you by your name. But isn't the only thing either of us should attend to the particulars and soundness of each other's argument?

Provenance of your "Hezbollah lionizes Hitler" claim, please.

Despite your fictional claim that F has not refuted D's claims in his WSJ piece, he has in fact done so both on his website and in "Beyond Chutzpah". The WSJ piece is only the most recent iteration of D's talking points against F, and I assume that, having countered them so often in the past, F had better things to do then do the same again. In this regard, you may find having a look at "Beyond Chutzpah" instructive. Am I correct in thinking you've not yet done so?

As for the Washington Post business, I was present at a D talk in which he trafficked in the "denier" lie, and this was long after its retraction by the Post. He committed this ethical howler in print as well. In fact, when called on this, he declared the WP retraction a "clarification", thereby giving himself license to continue the lie. Dersh takes his Lewis Carroll seriously, I guess-words shall mean what he wants them to mean.

Now on to the "handwritten manuscript" business. You say that F has received same from D. Precisely the opposite is true. F has requested same numerous times, but has not gotten it. D says he has submitted it to UC Press, but this hasn't been confirmed. So it is you who is ignoring the counervailing evidence that might favor the other side. Worse, you are claiming something that even D doesn't claim-the moral pygmy never said that he'd sent the manuscript to F. Must you invent exculpations for this charlatan?

Regarding the plagiarism charge, let me suggest that you refer to the steely moralism you so often champion. You say that, by your own standards, D was sloppy or lazy in his research. But you'll defer to Harvard. Why? Aren't your own standards good enough? Can you imagine an instance wherein a university's own procedures may be mistaken or corrupt? I think that if you had a look at F's exhaustive appendix to "Beyond Chutzpah", you'd come away a little skeptical of Harvard's imprimatur of D's "work".

By the way, what do you make of the "alleged" in the final sentence of the Dershowitz quote you mentioned? Is D saying that F disdains the biographical accounts of only alleged holocaust survivors? Why the qualifier? Is he numbering Elie Wiesel among the "alleged"? This may just be sloppy writing on D's part, but I doubt it, given D's profession. The main point is that F never said anything remotely approaching the preposterous "most holocaust survivors have fabricated their past", so the malevolent D stuck an "alleged" in there to cover his vicious ass.

D is a serial liar whose rabid propagandistic desires regularly trump his obligation to rectify his demonstrable epistemic failures. He has bullied UC Press in an effort to unpublish his adversary's book, and then lied about it. He thinks nothing of repeating calumnies about his opponent's mother, for crying out loud!

F runs self-promoting cartoons on his website. Wow. Pretty damning.

You are of course correct that someone may be right about some things but wrong about issues of incalculably greater weight. This is a truism whose opposite has no champion. The specifics are what matters, though, and the issues about which F is right dwarf his odd mannerisms, personal quirks, etc. The guy demolishes a book that, remember, was absolutely revered by all, a bestseller that academics, intellectuals and pundits of all stripes were all overthemselves praising to the skies. "This will change Middle East scholarship forever..." and so on. And a grad student says it's a pack of lies. And he was right. David and Goliath. Then he writes about the depredations of some vile cynics who personally profit from the horrors of the Nazis, to the detriment of their ostensible clients (never, by the way, mking the claims about "all holocaust survivors" that his detractors cite). He also pretty much wipes the floor with Goldhagen, long before that academic pipsqueak was revealed as a lightweight elsewhere by more mainstream scholars. Most of all, he demystifies Israel's ongoing siege against the Palestinians, showing its naked brutality and fundamentally aggressive nature clearly.

So what the hell are the massively weightier moral issues he's wrong about?

As Anon #2, I was going to respond to Weiss's lazy little rant, but I see that Anon #1 has already saved me the trouble. I will add, though, that I find it deliciously ironic that Dershowitz reverts to Mary McCarthy in his effort to "settle the case." After all, her verdict on Lillian Helman is entirely apposite to Dershowitz's purge trial of NF: "Everything word he writes is a lie, including 'a' and 'the'." For more detail see: http://normanfinkelstein.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/wsj-response-final.... (And no, for the record, I am not Matthew Abraham).

To take your points in seriatim:

It's not schoolmarmish to object to arguing with someone who won't come right out and identify himself. Rather, you're being poltroonish and rude, so this leads me to wonder why you're afraid of having your name associated with your opinions. Why speak up at all if it's got to be from a position of absolute safety and immunity? If you choose to stand so doggedly behind Norman Finkelstein, don't you think he and his fellow defenders would appreciate knowing who you are the better to be able to thank you for it?

You conveniently elide the gravamen of my charges, or act as if I've yet to bring up those weighty moral failings of Finkelstein's. So perhaps I should just ask you the following questions outright, and I'll know if it's worth continuing this conversation based on your willingness to respond:

1. Do you agree with Finkelstein that Hezbollah is an organization deserving of solidarity? If not, would you say that this allegiance is dire coming from an educated American academic who will cite UN resolutions critical of Israel but remain silent on the one that demands Hezbollah disarm?

2. Do you deny that Hezbollah takes as historical fact The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that it trains its militia to give the Nazi salute? (Sorry if you think extrapolating a lionization of Adolf Hitler is inappropriate given especially this latter trait.)

3. Do you see nothing debased or megalomaniacal in that cartoon which Finkelstein views as a fitting homage to his reputation; and does it not unsettle you at all to know that it was scribbled by a crackpot patron of the Islamic Republic who also trafficks in the most cretinous commentary on 9/11?

4. In his WSJ piece Alan Dershowitz cited Finkelstein's remark in an interview with CounterPunch magazine that ran as follows: "Frankly, part of me says - even though everything since September 11th has been a nightmare - you know what, we deserve the problem on our hands because some things bin Laden says are true." Is this just another demonstrable falsehood peddled by Dershowitz and refuted in Beyond Chutzpah or on Finkelstein's website, which boasts a link to that interview for the curious reader to check himself?

5. Likewise, what about Finkelstein's comments on "Schindler's List" and Leon Uris's Exodus? Was Dershowitz making those up, too?

6. You say that Finkelstein's legitimate work eclipses every other unseemly quality he exhibits. Yet for every accomplishment of his you evince, there are others who have toiled in the same field without succumbing to Finkelstein's singular brand of ideological psychosis, and who do not view themselves as lone crusaders against some ominous Jewish conspiracy.

Peter Novick was the pioneer in exposing the cynicism and corruption that governed a portion of Holocaust reparations claims. Raul Hilberg (who, yes, did sign off on much of the data printed in The Holocaust Industry) and Yehuda Bauer both questioned Daniel Goldhagen's reliability and his competence with respect to German archives and documents in Hitler's Willing Executioners.

As for Alan Dershowitz, well, he hardly lacks for critics of his personality or of his shameful endorsement of U.S. and Israeli torture policies (I would count myself among these, not that you asked or care). Yet most of his critics, at least those worth listening to, do not then turn around and say that Islamist suicide bombers and fascist guerrillas who fire rockets into residential neighborhoods -- with the express purpose of killing civilians -- are glorious combatants against state imperialism. Why, frankly, heroize anyone who would?

Finkelstein portrays himself in messianic and martyrological terms, as if the "Holocaust Industry," which he sees as some un-self-critical monolith of Jewish racketeering, is out to destroy him. (Mark the consistency of behavior of those who speak of Jews as a bullying ethnicity of consensus, and who blame their own professional failures on same.) Yet he has no problem of citing evidence against interest when it suits him to show how morally unimpeachable Jewish conservatives like Hilberg will give him credit where they think credit is due.

Do you not see a mind at work here that, at the very least, fails to register important contradictions and gaping holes in its own obsessive thesis? Finkelstein has told a British interviewer that "I'm not exaggerating when I say that one out of three Jews you stop in the street in New York will claim to be a survivor."

Now, letting aside the fact that this ludicrous proposition could be easily put to the test, how does such a glib and fatuous remark wash with what Finkelstein claims is his very serious motive of redeeming the historical legacy of the worst atrocity of the 20th century, not to mention survivors of it like his parents? In other words, and by Finkelstein's own declared standards, are Edgar Bronfman and Edward Fagan the only ones invoking the Holocaust in bad faith?

I'm glad you were spared the trouble of having to think or argue anything for yourself. Also, you might look up the definition of irony before you go using such a powerful term incorrectly and ruining my Sunday.  Then inquire as to which of those those dueling feminine figures -- McCarthy or Hellman -- Norman Finkelstein more closely resembles.

Anon #2
The "gravamen" of your charges against Finkelstein now reduces to:

(1) A foolish long-distance diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome.
(2) Taking Dershowitz's "quotes" of Finkelstein at face value. Take the care to track down the primary sources of Dershowitz's quotes (when they exist - they frequently do not), and you will find that Dershowitz is nothing more than a serial liar.
(3) Severe dislike of his position on Hezbollah.
(4) A fresh and no less foolish long-distance diagnosis of "ideological psychosis".

And what has dropped out of your discussion? Any substantive disagreement with Finkelstein's dissection of:
(1) Joan Peters
(2) Daniel Goldhagen
(3) Bronfman, Singer, Neuborne et al.
(4) Dershowitz
(5) And, most importantly, Israel

Why don't we stipulate to every bit of character assassination you can imagine and more: Norman Finkelstein is a self-hating, Hezbollah and bin Laden-loving, Asperger's-syndrome-suffering, ideological psychotic who regularly enjoys the carnal knowledge of goats. He also has the disquieting habit of getting it right.

Anonymous 1 & Anonymous 2,

It's not character assassination to ask you to account for Finkelstein's innumerable flaws. Unless you can prove that Dershowitz made up the quotes, then it's fair to ask you to justify them. Unless you agree with Finkelstein's position concerning Hezbollah, it's fair to ask you to defend it. And unless you believe that one third of Jews in New York City would claim to be holocaust survivors in order to exploit collective suffering, then you must explain a series of what Michael (and I) believe are indefensible generalizations, exaggerations, and attacks on the community in which Finkelstein was raised: what Michael calls ideological psychosis. Michael didn't cease discussing what Finkelstein has gotten right. But he correctly noted that others - like Novick - have made many of the same observations but made them better, with subtlety and nuance entirely lacking in Finkelstein's work.

More importantly, if you have so much to say, pull up a chair and join a conversatoin. Stop being anonymous. If you beleive your statements are correct and consistent, you have nothing to lose. You'll certainly have more credibility - and you'll stand a far better chance of convincing your audience of the rightness of your argument. It's clear that if you treat those you are attempting to engage with respect, they'll do the same with you.

Dan, I already stipulated to every bad thing about Finkelstein's bad character Dershowitz, Weiss, you, anyone else, has said, and added goat-screwing for good measure. None of this has anything to do with whether or not Finkelstein has been right when it comes to his main targets: Peters, Goldhagen, Dershowitz, et al. You are familiar with the term "red herring," right?

After you come to terms with the intellectual bankruptcy of this approach, then you can reflect on your willingness to believe the worst of NF based on the word of a liar like Dersh and your attendance at a talk whose point you did not understand.

As for Michael - I just had the misfortune to look at his blog. He thinks Jonathan Chait is an intellectual powerhouse. Michael and Dan both need to spend some time learning the difference between serious research and opinionated snarks.

Slow down and let's try to have a civil conversation.  The point that Michael made and I defended was not merely questioning character.  That's why goat-screwing has nothing to do with it.  It's a question of intellectual bankruptcy.  If the views that Finkelstein promotes have some degree of consistency (as would be required for them to be worth praising), then pointing out where they lead (support for Hezbollah) demonstrates a fundamental flaw.  As constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld has pointed out, if your theory of constitutional interpretation doesn't support Brown v. Board of Education, then your theory must be wrong.  Same thing here - if your theory of history supports the terrorist aims of an organization that wantonly kills civilians, lionizes Hitler, and uses tactics that it knows will increase civilian casualties among its own population, then your theory of history is fatally flawed.  I'm not talkign about the Hezbollah that builds schools and hospitals.  I'm talking about the Hezbollah that uses schools and hospitals and homes as bases from which to launch mortars at Israeli towns in the nothern Galillee. 

But if you demand to set the agenda, sure, I'll reflect on my willingness to beleive the worst of Finkelstein, based on a talk I attended.  I certainly understood its point.  I left because the lies and insinuations he made were so degrating to the suffering my friend's family had endured that she couldn't sit there and take it anymore.  Its point - neither original nor well stated - was that Israel is a racist state perched upon a false view of the Holocaust.  At one point Finkelstien stated that if the Nazis were so efficient at killing Jews, there simply could not have been so many survivors.  Therefore the "survivors" in the States are lying extortionists and the "survivors" in Israel are those who escaped before the war or colluded.  This is, at its base, fiction built upon a fantasy.  Moreover, it defames the memory of those who lived.  Like Finkelstein's mother.  Like my grandparents.  So even if Finkelstein's basic point - that Israel exploits past suffering to justify abusive policies today - remains valid, his overwrought exaggeration makes any of his specific observations suspect at best.

So please, there's no need to speak down to your interlocutors, asserting I don't know what a red herring is and then informing me I "need to spend some time learning the difference between serious research and opinionated snark[]." If you want to remain anonymous, at least be civilized enough not to insult me.

I have offered substantiation of Dershowitz's quotations, using Norman Finkelstein's own website, no less. At no point have you -- or your equally nameless, faceless comrade (who, for all I know, is just you under another pathetic guise) disproved anything stated in that WSJ article; your preference is call Dershowitz a serial liar and hope the accusation does all your work for you. Then you lecture me about knowing snark from serious research.

I've made a minor hobby of trying to understand the cowardliness of internet anonymity. In your case, I think the explanation is fairly obvious. I can't imagine anyone wanting the non sequiturs and semi-literacy on display in your rhetoric being traced back to them via Google.

All I ever said in my life about the TNR editor Jonathan Chait was he wrote an admirable anatomy of the netroots movement. You interpret this as my calling him an "intellectual powerhouse." If that's the level of sophistication I've been sitting here wasting my time with, then I am to blame after all. I should have just told you to fuck off and left it at that.

"Fuck off." Ah, well, that's intellectually decisive.

Michael,

As the parent of a child with Asperger's Syndrome and someone who has studied the autism spectrum disorders closely, I disagree with your comment that Finklestein has Asperger's or Autism. Finklestein is far too socially intelligent to be on the spectrum. Please don't use the AS and autism labels without learning more about the tragic circumstances for many people with ASD.

Setting that aside, I agree with many of your comments. Finklestein strikes me as the typical self hating Jew. His position on Hezbollah is reprehensible--as a Jew and as an American.

Sorry Michael and Dan are so much more stringent re anonymity than are many other Jewcy contributors, some of whom recently defended a poster's right to remain anonymous-I think it was in the thread in which an oaf screeched at Monica Osbourne for what he saw as her moral failings. One poster even alluded to Talmudic dispensation for concealing one's identity if revealing it could cause harm to the concealer. I guess honest folks can disagree about this, but I really hate to see what I think is a minor issue occupy so much energy. Perhaps if a poster produces nothing but ad hominem invective, sound and fury, etc.,-but to make the anonymity issue so central as a general principle...I just don't get it.

I also welcome Dan's overall cordial and judicious tone and wish Michael were not so quick to get personally accusatory (e.g., I'm happy that M demurs from endorsing torture a la Dersh, but where did his "...not that you asked or care" come from? How does M presume to know what I care about? Unnecessarily argumentative and personal.)

Let me address some of M's points as he presented them:

1. I wish the repulsion of the Nazis from Russia had been accomplished by Mr. Rogers or Captain Kangaroo. It was not. Instead, Stalin, a vicious brute who wouldn't have known a human right if it sat on his face, did the job. Do I endorse Stalin? No. Would I support his actions against the Nazis? Yes.
Israel has treated its border with Lebanon in a decidedly subjunctive fashion for years (Lebanon enjoys no special status in this regard since, as I'm sure you know, Israel has declined to state the whereabouts of its borders since the Nakba brought it into being). It has allied itself with with the Phalangists in Lebanon, whose behavior and ideology makes them a much better fit with the Nazis than does Hezbollah's stupid salute. The Phalangists are far more correctly described as fascists than Hezbollah is. (By the way, just as Michael correctly recoiled from anon 2's misuse of "irony", so I found M's calling Hezbollah "fascist" the mark of a linguistic or historical innocent. Let's keep the word semantically substantive and not reduce it to an epithet for those we dislike.)
Hezbollah has been the only entity to rout the invaders-twice. I see Israel's aggressions as more serious than Hezbollah's silly salutes. So if I have to choose, I am untroubled that Hezbollah has the wherewithal to repel Israel's siege, though I do not endorse their religious lunacies or other failings.

2. While I know that the "Protocols" enjoys wide distribution in the Middle East (as it does in Japan and other Far Eastern, non-Muslim nations), I don't know for a fact what Hezbollah's position on those fairy tales may be. Belief in forgeries must be challenged, of course, but don't you think that the "Protocols" are more of a fillip than anything else in the MidEast? Do you think that Hezbollah is animated in its opposition to Israel by a comic book?
To be honest, I'm far more outraged by Israel's haste to sow as many cluster bombs as it could in Lebanon before the ceasefire took effect than by Hezbollah's stupid endorsement of a nasty fiction. In a world in which, today, Israel continues a decades-old siege, why are we talking about a book?

3. F's use of the cartoon bothers me not a whit. But suppose you're right-suppose it outs him as a megalomaniac? So what? Again, why reach for these tiny peccadilloes to pillory someone? Let me ask you a question; Does it bother you that there are legitimate, powerful political coalitions in Israel, members of the government, who openly call for the removal of 20% of Israel's population? Which do you think is a greater affront to human dignity, a cartoon by a guy who keeps company with holocaust deniers (rather marginal effect on the world, I'd say) or the policies of Avigdor Lieberman?

4. Ah, finally, here's the Ward Churchill question. First, I don't dispute that F made the comment. Second, I wouldn't have made it. But I do think that there's more to the underlying sentiment than M and Hitchens et al will allow. Innocent people don't deserve to die. The authors of the tragedy on 9/11 ought to be pursued and punished. Those authors, however, didn't attack those innocents because they hate our freedoms or plan to extend the caliphate to Staten Island or whatever the fevered hallucination du jour may be. It is a fact that the US has been instrumental for years in the miseries of the Middle East- our foul support of Saddam, toppling Mossadegh, underwriting tyrants from Pahlevi to Saud, arming and financing Israeli aggression. What lunatic would not imagine that the people affected by this shameful history might not strike out at us? I wish I didn't have to underscore this, but I am not excusing, endorsing or minimizing the outrage of 9/11, just refusing to understand it in the way that M seems to.

5. The "Schindler's List" and "Exodus" comments were silly. But don't you feel a little funny ignoring the body of substantive work done by F in order to cherry-pick a couple of excessive remarks? Sorry, but this really smacks of desperation.

6. I don't endorse your notion of intellectual fungibility-that similar work by academics in roughly the same area is more or less the same-that Novick or Hilberg are simply F without the vitriol. Novick's book, though invaluable,
covers very different territory from F's. Hilberg and Bauer denounced Goldhagen, but F produced a detailed monograph on G's book, much more rigorous and scholarly than either H or B's pieces. I'm not saying better-though I think F's work is-only that claiming there's no need to distinguish F since his stuff has been covered elsewhere by more sobersided critics is false.

In short, I think that, while F has his issues, his originality, dogged research and fearlessness are invaluable. I also suspect that you have a prior animus towards him which you look for things to justify. The guy says he's "in exile" at a "3rd rate Catholic school". Some might see this as honest, self-deprecating, funny, mournful, etc. You see it as a mark of F's beastly ingratitude. Why? Is there something internal to the comment that forces that interpretation?

Enough. I've tried to answer some of your questions and keep more or less to the high road. I'm sorry that my anonymity poses such a problem for you. I'm interested to hear what you think, but have no recourse but to respect your wish to choose who you care to talk to.

OED ADDITIONS SERIES 1993
irony, n.

Add: [2.] spec. in Theatr. (freq. as dramatic or tragic irony), the incongruity created when the (tragic) significance of a character's speech or actions is revealed to the audience but unknown to the character concerned; the literary device so used, orig. in Greek tragedy

e.g. - I find it deliciously ironic that Dershowitz reverts to Mary McCarthy in his effort to "settle the case." After all, her verdict on Lillian Helman is entirely apposite to Dershowitz's purge trial of NF: "Everything word he writes is a lie, including 'a' and 'the'."