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• 
  By Anonymous 5/7/07 at 3:16 p.m. UTC

  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’.”
• 
  By Anonymous 1 5/7/07 at 2:53 p.m. UTC

  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.
• 
  By Parent 5/7/07 at 9:46 a.m. UTC

  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.
• 
  By Anonymous 5/7/07 at 9:15 a.m. UTC

  “Fuck off.” Ah, well, that’s intellectually decisive.
• 
  By Michael Weiss 5/6/07 at 10:54 p.m. UTC

  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.
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  By Dan Freeman 5/6/07 at 10:52 p.m. UTC

  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.
• 
  By Anon #2 5/6/07 at 8:03 p.m. UTC

  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.
• 
  By Anonymous 5/6/07 at 6:15 p.m. UTC

  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.
• 
  By Michael Weiss 5/6/07 at 3:43 p.m. UTC

  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.
• 
  By Anonymous 5/6/07 at 11:42 a.m. UTC

  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?
• 
  By Dan Freeman 5/4/07 at 12:30 p.m. UTC

  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.

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