Q&A: Norman Finkelstein

Why do you give him any space at all. His ideas are simply ridiculous and he contradicts himself in every paragraph. Goldberg lived in Israel and thinks that he knows about Israel. How many years did  Finklestein live in Israel? Zero. Hizbollah has a good record respecting international law. Hizbollah has done more damage to Lebanon than any other organization and is openly anti-semitic. Well what can you expect from someone who is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, the formerly great magazine that has deteriorated rapidly over the past 10 years.
What’s next and interview with Haniyeh straight from Gaza?

For seventy-five years, people like Dr. Finkelstein said that anything Arabs did was justified by the “The Evil Zionist Entity”. That’s why I endorse everything that Bashar Assad does!!!!

The worst part of  David Samuel’s glow-job on Finkelstein (and Tablet’s publishing of  it as a cover story) was the  introduction in  which DS tells as that Finkelstein’s twisted thinking has been “embraced throughout the Jewish community”.
 Too bad Mr Samuel wasn’t around to interview the anti-Zionist Rabbi Elmer Berger who battled against the creation of the Jewish state , or better yet,  Gertrude Stein who compared French fascist leader Philippe Petain to George Washington and nominated Adolph Hitler for the 1938 Nobel Peace prize.

As many of the commentators noted, I do not care for Dr. Finkelstein.  In my mine, his logic is flawed but his anger is not.  This is what motivates him.  He is a child of survivors and the scaring is most apparent.  His connection to Dr. Chomsky is pitiful.  I do not know Dr. Chomsky but I have a very significant experience with him in 1972 as a result of the May day demonstration at the Boston Federal Building.  He, Chomsk, wrote an article about the “massacre” Government Center that was filled with mistruths and distortions.  How do I know?  I was there and returned home with a broken hand.  My transformation started there.

Tablet seems to revel in giving space and time to those who hate Israel and Jews – not just dislike but actively hate. 

Do you think there is some special virtue in those of Jewish origin who hate Israel and Jews? 

There have been many such in the past and will probably be such in the future. So what?

In the case of this thread, commentors observe that Tablet “seems to revel in giving space and time to those who hate Israel and Jews” and “squander[s its potential] with a self-hating obsession to report all
anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist doings, no hatter how trivial.”  Yet, just as often in other threads, I read comments ranting about Tablet’s Right wing, Zionist hawk bias.

If the ideologues on the Left and the Right both rage against you, you’re doing something right.  Kudos, Tablet…for publishing a range of opinions and perspectives.

Norman Finkelstein a “pariah .” What planet is the author from…planet knows nothing?

I was wondering about that “figures” bit. Does anyone have any idea what he was talking about?

David Samuels’ inteviews seemed to start out good but it tended to get a little too ‘chummy’ (in my veiw) toward the end.
 
Finkelstein wrote: “My views on the Israel-Palestine conflict are not particularly what you would call left-wing or radical. I say we should enforce the law and end the conflict on the basis of international law; that means a two-state settlement and a June ’67 border and a just resolution of the refugee question…”

To Professor Finkelstein, international law, promulgated by the United Nations and associated international bodies — no matter its underlying political motivation(s) with respect to Israel — is “the law,” and it needs to be “enforced.”

Finkelstein: “But on certain matters of principle, I’m not going to budge regardless of whether people like it or not. The Lebanese have the right to defend their sovereignty, and they have the right to use armed force to evict foreign occupiers….”

That’s what Hezbollah’s beef with Israel and the Jews is about – not that we are the sons of apes and pigs or that the prophet commanded Muslims to wage violent jihad against these subhumans – but that Israel is a foreign occupier of Lebanese territory?  That’s it?  How much land does Israel continue to occupy in Lebanon?  The small Shebaa farms which are disputed?

Before the 1967 Six Day war (between 1948 and 1967) before Israel occupied Judea and Samaria, Gaza, the Golan Heights, etc., there was no Muslim or Muslim-Arab war against Israel’s Jews?  No terrorism emanating form Jordan or Lebanon?  From Egypt?

Chomsky is increasingly being revealed to be an intellectual charlatan.

No wonder that Finkelstein likes him.

Chomsky’s linguistic theories are increasingly being revealed to be bunk.

Dan Everett, author of Don’t sleep, there are snakes, spent considerable time exploring the language of the Piraha people of the Amazon. Their language demonstrates without any doubt that Chomsky’s ideas of universal grammar are bogus.

For further information just read his article in Cultural Anthropology as well as the above mentioned book.

Dr. Everett, an eminent linguist and anthropologist was just as surprised as anyone to discover that the emperor has no clothes, that Chomsky, the god of linguistics, is just flat out wrong in so many of his beliefs and theories.

Finkelstein hangs around with intellectual frauds who scratch each other’s backs and who are the not taken seriously by anyone with even half a brain.

I believe Hezbollah is the future
Heed them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children’slaughter remind us how we used to be

I just hope David Samuels was wearing kneepads when was conducting this interview.

gandhi, was a fan or hitler.  and so it goes.

 ’But to dismiss him, professionally or personally, as “damaged goods” begs the question of who, exactly, made him this way’Who cares what made him ‘this way’! Certainly not I or those who find his particular brand of Self-hating Jew repugnant.  Only those who find him a somewhat ‘sympathetic’ character, like the author I suspect,could possibly care what events have combined to produce a Norman Finklestein.

 Tablet’s commentators always make me laugh. They believe in free speech, but only when said speech agrees with their own views about how a ‘proper” Jewish person is supposed to think, act, or behave. Otherwise they are called an anti-Semite, a claim which makes little sense if you actually read the interview.

Disagree with his methods. Disagree with his lens of the world. But don’t call him names like a school child because you disagree with his morals.

When did so many Jews make it their job to become the thought police?

Like Paul Berman, Finklestein entirely ignores Islam’s virulent, conspiratorial Antisemitic doctrine — present since the advent of the creed, melded permanently to jihad, and expressed continuously over nearly 14 centuries, through the present.    Finklestein also is unaware or ignores the inspiration prominent Nazis, including Hitler, derived from normative Islam before, during, and after World War Two.

The late Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi was Sunni Islam’s “ moderate “ Papal equivalent, Grand Imam of the Muslim Vatican, Al-Azhar University, from 1996, until his death on March 10, 2010.This brief excerpt summarizes, in Tantawi’s own words, the salient features of the Koran’s normative Muslim Jew hatred:

    ‘The Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e., killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61 / 3:112 ], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word …All Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims {Koran {text10|3:113} ], the bad ones do not.

These were the expressed, “carefully researched” views on Jews held by the Muslim Pope — the former head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, which represents some 90% of the world’s Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi never mollified such hatemongering beliefs while serving as the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on “ dialogue “ (January 1998) with Jews, the Jews as “ enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs “ (April 2002), and the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews (April 2002) made clear.

I like Chomsky, in spite of his controversy. Never heard of Finklestein before and this excellent interview,  – I love how Tablet covers all Jewish underdogs – this educated  gentleman  has some psychological fog to travel through. He should try a lecture of Likutey Moharan of Rabbi Nachman from Breslov. Here is a quote:

“When people want to become truly religious and serve G-d, they seem to be overwhelmed  with confusions and frustrations. They find great barriers in their path and cannot decide what to do”

Perhaps for Finklestein, G-d is “Intellectual Honesty” although this is as precise saying my home address is on planet earth. Rabbi Nachman continues:

” All the enthusiasm that such people have trying to do good is very precious, even if their goal is not achieved. all their offer is counted as a sacrifice in the category “for your sake we are killed each day, we are counted as sheep for the slaughter”. The Tikuney Zohar states that this psalm 44:23 speaks of both prayer and sacrifice”

Viewed from this angle, Mr. Finklestein  is what Breslov calls “an Erlicher Yid”, an Honorable Jew in Yiddish. He has desire and longing. “of course”, Rabbi Nachman says “this not enough, for this must be realized in action.

So when labeling Finklestein  anti-Jewish, he is not. He is very Jewish, because of his genuine desire to bring good into the world. As we discover our great Rabbi wisdom is not propaganda and Rabbi Nachman was, to begin with, a rebel of sorts, who maintains freshness today more than ever

Imagine growing up in a family so traumatized and grief-stricken that one could not even ask questions about the “elephant in the living room”?   (Family secrets run amok!)  Finkelstein’s point of view has to be seen from that perspective.  He claims his family’s victimhood and is unwilling to share it precisely because his childhood was so troubled.  One can disagree strongly with Finkelstein’s politics but he and all of us would  benefit from some generosity and simple  human kindness.

 I did not know Gertrude Stein nominated Adolf Hitler in 1938 for Nobel Prize for peace. Do you you realize if Ms. Stein would have had been successful,  the Holocaust would have had been avoided?

See my article “If Hitler would have had repented” | Pictures from the invisible http://bitly.com/MnXe0O

Was there actually a question in there likening Finkelstein to a prophet? Where were the tough questions? Where were the follow-ups or challenges?

Here’s what I know: Finkelstein is a double beneficiary of the “Holocaust Industry” he created for himself. His family received substantial reparations for their suffering. He then took that suffering and turned it into a profitable attack on the Jewish community. He brags that his book on the so-called Holocaust Industry has been translated to multiple languages.

Here’s what else I know: Finkelstein wrote a book about the Gaza war and traveled all over North American campuses in what can only be described as a dog and pony show, to let the masses know that what happened in Gaza was a massacre, not a war. When it was pointed out to him that if the other side loses hundreds of soldiers in the fighting, there must be warfare going on, he played games with numbers such as bringing up B’Tzelem’s reference to Hamas police as non-combatants. Several months later, this thesis was proven false when Hamas itself declared that the number of Hamas combatants who were injured was essentially the same as the IDF had been declaring all along. Then Goldstone himself recanted publicly on key assertions he made about the Israelis in that war. What did Finkelstein do, in his never-ending quest for honesty and integrity? He wrote a small book that doesn’t change his position on his naming this war a “massacre” and that seeks to pretend that Goldstone is not really the one we should believe.

It’s not hard to take Finkelstein apart because of his inherent anti-Jewish-community and anti-Israel biases. They end up coloring his entire oeuvre and leaving him open to justified criticism.

Dr. Finkelstein is a fabulous, knowledgeable, loving human being, therefore he was an excellent teacher. Those who doubt my words, read these students’ evaluations. 
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=155056&all=true

WHICH ones of you, commentators, who accuse here Dr. Finkelstein of this and that, is able to teach political science at a university level with such a great evaluation? Which ones???

By the way, after I made that comment about this Holocaust denier, he began “following” me on Disqus. Great piece of software. I remark on a piece of shit Holocaust denier and then I get to have the guy, with a swastika as his avatar follow me. Any plans to do something about this, Tablet?

 To whoever is listening at Tablet.

  Grathi is right. What point is there to Disqus,if all it does is to allow any crackpot to follow us around ? Why should we engage in any discussion here ?

indeed, he is now doing the same with me. An internet stalker. Of course he did post his phone number online 
917-974-6367 (though I would strongly recommend using caller ID blocking when calling).
It’s not so much that he’s a pathetic stalker who thinks we’d be scared of him (I’ve faced worse in person); it’s that he has the temerity to use the closing “peace”.  To quote Andre the Giant from The Princess Bride “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”

i liked the interview. norm has read a lot of books. he is angry at everyone but the stupid jew hating kids that kiss his butt, and noam chomsky.

i learned a lot

he was an ez a

oh goody…a link to a good jew hate site

if it makes  you feel better, i will gladly call him an anti semite…and anti american

hezbollah is not lebanon…it is not the ruling party

it is an enemy of the us and israel

norm is a traitor to his country and hates jews…and would love nothing more than to see millions of jews in israel massacred

Why are these “hatemongering beliefs?”  All of them are statements of facts and everyone of these is a correct description to the letter.  Need proof?  Simple, look at your history, be it fantastical or actual, and you will see all of these things.  Of course, you wil not see it because you refuse “to distance” yourselves “from the evil” you “do.”

Because someone has to give you some facts for a change.  Learn something from  it.

 Why don’t you actually reply to his words, rather than simply abusing him?

We are the world…

That must be one of those black lights, no?

Yeah, good luck.  This is like an ape trying to figure out the workings of Einstein.  But of course, going back a few posts above, you are apes and therefore there would be no need for the word “like.”

Many non-Jews and even Jews have criticised Zionism and Israel in the past, present and more expected in the future, and yet you have no clue of how wrong you are.  Don’t you think it is about time for you to re-evaluate yourselves and correct your path, or is it cozy in the dark place where your head is stuck?

Wow, you have become something wonderful. 

 It’s fitting that they arrived for the Finkelstein hagiography. They’re the crowd that loves the whole “Holocaust Industry” hypocrisy.

Despite the assertions of Finkelstein and others the phrase “a land without people for a people without land” was a Labor Zionist phrase. There were many other Zionist leaders who clearly saw the reality on the ground. They knew that there were people living in what was then Mandate Palestine and they also knew that the landless plight of the Jews needed a solution. Knowing that there is no “perfect justice” they believed as did Jabotinsky that the jewish people were “starving” (for a solution) while the Arabs had an “appetite”. He was not denegrating the Arabs living in Eretz Yisrael nor was he saying that they did not have rights. What he was saying was that the catastrophic situation of the jews demanded priority – notwithstanding the fact that “pure justice” would not be served.
Reuven Genn
Karkur, Israel

Despite the assertions of Finkelstein and others the phrase “a land without people for a people without land” was a Labor Zionist phrase. There were many other Zionist leaders who clearly saw the reality on the ground. They knew that there were people living in what was then Mandate Palestine and they also knew that the landless plight of the Jews needed a solution. Knowing that there is no “perfect justice” they believed as did Jabotinsky that the jewish people were “starving” (for a solution) while the Arabs had an “appetite”. He was not denegrating the Arabs living in Eretz Yisrael nor was he saying that they did not have rights. What he was saying was that the catastrophic situation of the jews demanded priority – notwithstanding the fact that “pure justice” would not be served.
Reuven Genn
Karkur, Israel

I find it odd that every negative comment about Dr. Finkelstein is related to his opinions about Israel rather than what he has to say about the genesis and development of the way we study and memorialize the Shoah.  That is the way he first came to my attention and where I think his ideas and opinions are valid.

So reporter notebook is now a jew hate site? and Finkelstein is self hating Jew…, and Left is attacking Zionism…. Yawn…:-O
Paranoid much?

Criticizing Zionism or Israel is one thing, hating its very existence and wanting to destroy it is another. Unfortunately,  many, including Finkelstein, want to destroy Israel and Jews, reflecting their hate, racism and anti-Semitism – do you fall into this category?

I hear you Reuven and I think it’s a point well taken but we have to minimize the injustices as much as we can while understanding that perfect justice is impossible the same way americans realize that with native americans..slowly they tried to adjust the situation but there is still no justice today and still total amnesia about the situation.
one good thing they did lately was to allow them to have casinos but the situation is still unbearable in many parts of the country..we should imagine new ways in israel to help palestinians that have lost land and hope. together we should come up with solutions!!!

AlKhalil,  there’s a woman showing a bit of ankle across town. Find her before she scandalizes her family!

NF says:  “If you take Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in
Jerusalem,” she wrote that in ’62 or ’63, and if you look at the
bibliography, do you know how many books there were in English about the
Nazi Holocaust? Two. There was [Raul] Hilberg’s book and one other.
Nobody gave a shit about what happened until it became an industry.” 
I do not doubt this may be true of American authors and American bookstores — but it was not in Europe (e.g. Britain and France) where a new genre of atrocity literature emerged abundantly in the 1950s, mostly written by survivors of PoW camps or concentration camps, including the first Gulag narratives (especially provocative in France, where several notorious trials publicized atrocity information, inviting debate whether Stalin’s aims and methods were worse than Hitler’s.)
NF’s conclusion that ”
Nobody gave a shit about what happened” before the Eichmann trial is obviously sincere:  and obviously unfactual, reflecting more the American point of view that what does not happen in America or to Americans has no significant reality.

Yes some people should learn English, especially if they’re going to comment about comprehension. What I wrote:

“Finkelstein is a double beneficiary of the
“Holocaust Industry” he created for himself. His family received
substantial reparations for their suffering. He then took that suffering
and turned it into a profitable attack on the Jewish community. He
brags that his book on the so-called Holocaust Industry has been
translated to multiple languages.”

Entirely and completely accurate.

I am trying to see Norman Finkelstein root of of his statements about a “Holocaust  obsession” created after 1962. Yet there is some truth that any documents showing huge atrocities get priority at Yad Vashem.

I know personally Arnold Daghani, the artist and survivor of  the camps from Transnistria He died in 1989 in UK. His collections and diary were refused by Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem as the time and a distinguished literary agent in Lodon rejected Daghani’s diary because it was  “good, but too few atrocities!”

“There is a danger of a new type of literature which literary history can
classify as “atrocity writing”. .. Even works of poetical restraint and
nobility of feeling, such as “The Diary of Anne Frank”, have been
exploited for commercial or political reasons. One condition of our half
demented society is that those great human documents can’t be left to
speak by themselves”

See Arnold Daghani. Who is he? | Pictures from the invisible http://bitly.com/JMmSyn

Well, no, it’s not accurate.  None of his remarks constitute an attack on the Jewish community.

Also, this is completely meaningless:  “When it was pointed out to him that if the other side loses hundreds of
soldiers in the fighting, there must be warfare going on,”  A war can be a massacre of civilians at the same time, which Operation Cast Lead certainly was.

Why are you giving space and time to this loathsome creature. Let the Stalinists interview him. Jews should subject him to a herem and refuse to bury him when he dies. And his little dog Chomsky too.

May his name be blotted out.

Aren’t you missing a bingo game?

Why do you say that? AlKhalil doesn’t sound like an Orthodox name.

Why do you say that? AlKhalil doesn’t sound like an Orthodox name.

 I don’t doubt that his opinions of the Shoah have been influenced by his personal experiences; that’s true of many people.  However as a writer and observer of Jewish society and a student of Jewish history I find his descriptions and analyses spot on. 

It’s unfortunate that some of his views give succor to Holocaust deniers, but just because those with nefarious intentions use them does not make them invalid.

 lol did you study wikipedia in college?

 lol did you study wikipedia in college?

 I have seen both Bartov’s and Novick’s work and I still don’t agree with you, and name-dropping doesn’t impress me.

 Hate much?

 I agree that the ‘revelation’ section is hyperbolic. After all, once you look at the numbers, Peters’ screed is pretty darn ridiculous and an obvious sham.

Finkelstein seems to suggest that implementation of the will of the people is the most important consideration in politics. In the previous breath he seems to say that executing international law (which of course is made by thoroughly undemocratic bodies, and is often designed to negate democratic desires) is of primary importance. And what would happen if Arab politicians tried to follow the “Arab Street” and particularly the Palestinian popular will? But rather than address those “contradictions”, I would  settle to see him disparage other writers he doesn’t like as he did Hitchens and Goldberg.

 Clearly written by a person 1) with a political agenda and 2) with no real knowledge of the field of linguistics or of the field’s fractious nature and lively debates. Syntactic Structures stands like a Principia Mathematica of the discipline–there is a before and an after. Is Chomsky a god? Of course not. Is he always right? Who cares? Newton dabbled in alchemy; Einstein didn’t believe in quantum mechanics.

BTW: Love that ‘growing number’ Faux News style citation. Can you actually name one scholar?

Toni Kamins: “I find the knee-jerk reaction of the commenters baffling.”

I don’t.  It’s always easier to write on subjects that we don’t like.  

The question I have, after reading this 5-page indictment, is whether David Samuels (and, by extension, Tablet) believes that there is anything to be learned from any interview.  

As long as David Samuels denies to the reader-juror so much evidence, even, as one example of what Finkelstein claims are his discoveries about Joan Peters’s numbers, the reader-juror will know nothing about Finkelstein except the personal–which he already knew, and which is not only the same as the charge against Finkelstein but is the reason we’re here in this courtroom today.  

 The reader, unlike Samuels and Tablet, has no choice, can’t introduce evidence.  All the reader can do is cast a vote.

as there never was a palestine, good luck in taking it back.

wonderful threat that arabs have never been able to act upon.

so now they use surrogates like norm to cry a river about how they are now the oppressed

boo hoo

love what you are doing in syria…keep it up

good job. excuse the behavior of the lunatic, pedophile, mass murderer.

i have never referred to norm as a self hating jew.

one has to accept that one is jewish before one can self hate

norm doesnt see himself as jewish, until it suits his purpose.

there arent facts on that site…there are lies used as propaganda….have you ever visited?

and no…the left doesnt attack zionism…the far left loonies do…a very tiny minority of people in this country

AlKhalil, I’ll remember you when I do reserve duty in the IDF, especially at target practice time. Congratulations for motivating an Israeli citizen who is a Zionist soldier when duty calls! 

And don’t forget to tell your friends that you helped the cause of Zionism.  ’Cause you just did.

“Syntactic Structures” is not science, it’s garbage. There are plenty of unsupported propositions based on Chomsky’s favorite phrase “It is obvious that” “Nobody can deny that…”, etc. That’s not science, it’s voodoo.

We should not forget that there was massive Arab immigration into the British Mandate of Palestine due to economic development spurred by the Jews. My favorite Arab immigrant example are Yasser Arafat and Edward Said, both Egyptians.

We should also not forget that there were more Jewish refugees from Arab  and Muslim countries after 1948 than palestinian refugees. More than 5o % of Israeli Jews are the descendants of these Jewish refugees.

Of course, you would never hear such facts from Chomsky or Finkelstein or David Samuels.

Oh, Hephie!  Where do we begin?

If the field of linguistics is characterized by a fractious nature and lively debates, then you are affirming that Chomsky’s outsized stature is in fact the subject of debate, which is half of my point.   Now, is there an emerging consensus that his fundamental positions are correct, or, alternatively, is there a growing number of scholars who disagree with him?  Or is there a kind of stasis, with insufficient evidence on either side to draw any definitive conclusions?  Whatever the case, he commands too much veneration from adepts quick to try to snuff out heresy, a point you make eloquently if not wittingly.

No, I’m not a scholar of linguistics, but I would assume that a prerequisite for attaining a degree is a basic command of language.  Or perhaps not.

Russell and Whitehead is an interesting choice of comparison.  It is a book that is highly derivative of its antecedents (something Russell would freely admit), is widely cited without actually being read, given its promiscuous and opaque use of symbols, and which is, at best, a relic of a different era that has largely passed by, owing to the growing number of scholars who believe that it is largely a dead end.  In fact, it never really had any influence to speak of, except as a kind of white elephant.

Newton didn’t dabble in alchemy; he was deeply invested in it.  Einstein didn’t disbelieve quantum mechanics, which, in any case is predictive without being explanatory.  He was resistant to the implications that some were quick to draw from it.

It was awfully considerate, though, Hephie, in quoting Alexander Pope, to offer yourself up as precisely the kind of dilettante that he was lampooning.

Superb interview!

 Yes, I noticed that at the end.  Why then did you undercut your answer further by drawing attention to it?  

 I find the knee-jerk reactions most refreshing rather than baffling since they are not shown on TV’s consensus unreality version of events.  

 Have you forgotten Jimmy Carter is an anti Semitic Holocaust denier?

Muhammad did not copy anything from Rabbinical Judaism as evident in the differences between Islam and either Christianity and Judaism.  Yes, I fault him for expressing the view that Christianity and Judaism were/are valid religions but that they needed corrections.  If I were him I would have negated both of them outright as false and corrupt religions that had no basis of history or valid moral teachings.  Having considered them originally valid but later corrupted religions, he was thus obligated to offer views about where both have erred and where their teachings could be accepted.  Regardless, however, Christianity and Judaism are still fantastical religions of mythical tales and pagan beliefs.  Islam tainted itself by accepting them and regarding them as valid.

As for his marriage of Ayesha at a young age, this is a matter of historical debate but has basically no value.  First, most scholars do no know the exact age of any historical personality and it gets less so as you go deeper inn time.  Second, Muslim scholars themselves did not settle the issue and did not find it important to do so conclusively because any of the age ranges mentioned in any source were within the norms of the society.  However, most scholars who studied the issue have set Aeysha’s age at somewhere between 17 and 19, cenrtainly an old age by the times’ standards.  The only report of Ayesha young age comes from one source reporting the age of 9 from Ayehs herself.  However, Ayesha could have lied about her age as most women did, and certainly saw nothing wrong about her being 9 years old.  And the reporter of the story himself  only reported the story at an old age (never before when he was writing Hadiths) when most scholars consider him becoming senile and do not take any of his reports as at this age factual.

I absolutely disagree with Dr. Finkelstein’s assessment of his own writing abilities. I think he is a marvelous writer, and the truths he uncovers through his meticulous research and logical analysis are invaluable. Thank you, Norman Finkelstein.

 Oh royq! Where do we begin? You admit you really know nothing about the field and then go on fail to recognize a reference to Newton’s magnum opus. Well done! You follow this with a non-sequitur that debate within the field of linguistics means that Chomsky’s stature is debatable. It does not. Like him or not, Chomsky revolutionized the discipline. Of that there is absolutely no debate. You are clearly one of those whose limited intelligence needs to believe in unanimity and uniformity when genuine scholarship is debate. As a dabbler, you again quote that mysterious group of a ‘growing number of scholars’ without being able to name any. Really glad you read the popularizations at least.

Thank you for playing.

Don’t let us keep you wishnitz.

 Well Nik, I don’t think the percentage is as high in Israel as it is here, you know they are actually living it not idealizing it in their upper east side living rooms.  Most of Israel’s far left realized after Gaza that no matter how much Israel wanted peace and no matter what they did it would not matter, their enemies wanted their state.

 yes, heads are rolling all over Israel, women are stoned to death throughout Europe and in the US, wearing the wrong clothes will get you 50 lashes in Chicago but in NY it is marked down to 49.
Sure it is no more totalitarian in the west than it is in Arabia or Iran.

are you leftist following this, you think you can live in peace with this mentality?

I’m not sure that Yasser Arafat could be properly described as an “immigrant”. This is an excerpt from the Nobel Prize website:

“Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini was born on 24 August 1929 in Cairo, his father a textile merchant who was a Palestinian with some Egyptian ancestry, his mother from an old Palestinian family in Jerusalem. She died when Yasir, as he was called, was five years old, and he was sent to live with his maternal uncle in Jerusalem, the capital of the British Mandate of Palestine.”

very good article. very genuine feeling it gives…

Hahahaha, say what you want in your criticisms, but I would LOVE to see you standing before a class of university students and teaching them politics. Or, I would love to put you before Dr. Finkelstein’s former students and regurgitate word by word what you say about him here. I would LOVE to see that spectacle !!!!!!!!! I bet YOU would be the very injured man. :-/ 

 Dolce there are answers for finklestein’s twisted hate speech against Israel and support for sociopathic terrorists.  In a room filled with honest people the conversation would expose and embarrass him and those like you who buy his drivel.  Dolce, the man’s hate speech is sadly as unbalanced as he is, there is another side to the issues, perhaps you will be curious to seek it out.

Why is it despicable to COMPARE Israel? They dumped white phosphorus on Palestinians…

Can you refer me to some concrete material, where I could read or hear this hate speech against Israel you’re talking about? I know it doesn’t exist, you’re a very disturbed man.

Hatha Nadila Hatha… Blah Blah Blah
You people are hopeless and have wind stirring in a vacant skull.

Thank you. You couldn’t have come up with a better compliment. Being an Arab is a source of extreme honor.

Remember what exactly Mr. IDF Child Killer? And I did not have to motivate you for anything since your Talmud and Zionist upbringing brainwashed you enough to commit your atrocious acts.

Maybe you shouldn’t believe him, but Joan Peters’s book has been thoroughly debunked. No responsible historian takes it seriously; that Finkelstein was one of the first to investigate her claims doesn’t make him wrong.  I strongly support the state of Israel as a Jewish state.  But you still have to be honest about the situation: Peters was full of it and anyone who cites her is putting propaganda above truth.

Van Creveld is the most respected Israeli (and Jewish) military historian and theorist. 

But yes, you’re correct, it’s only when the Likudniks and right-wing Zionists compare their opponents to Nazis it’s ok. 

Van Creveld is the most respected Israeli (and Jewish) military historian and theorist. 

But yes, you’re correct, it’s only when the Likudniks and right-wing Zionists compare their opponents to Nazis it’s ok. 

Well argued and compelling is not the same as accurate and factual.

sweetheart, have you ever pondered what events have combined to PRODUCE you? Probably the plague and chickenpox. :-/

sweetheart, have you ever pondered what events have combined to PRODUCE you? Probably the plague and chickenpox. :-/

NF is twisted?? — You are a real imbecile, sir. 

Which statement? Are you talking of the 1948 armistice lines? Or the annexation of the Golan Heights?

(I say that while being for 1948 armistice lines as the border, as long as Jerusalem is also included.)

Which statement? Are you talking of the 1948 armistice lines? Or the annexation of the Golan Heights?

(I say that while being for 1948 armistice lines as the border, as long as Jerusalem is also included.)

Ya Khalil, I guess that’s when you started killing Jews in kindergartens. That donkey must have been quite something.

I wouldn’t kill a child. I would surely deal properly with an armed Arab terrorist. My training is to defend myself and my country from bloodthirsty antisemites like yourself, AlKhalil. 

Based on how you write on these pages, there is absolutely no doubt that you would participate in murder against Jews and genocide against the Jewish people, just like your WWII Palestinian chief Haj Amin al Husseini did, he the Palestinian SS boy.

Tablet Magazine can be proud of allowing you here, so that we see someone ready to kill Jews to the last man, woman and child. Frankly I really hope these pages are monitored. Maybe next time you’re part of some news about drones, Hamas boy Al-Khalil. That way you could tell Rantisi what’s going on in Tablet.

Ya Khalil, when you tell us Jews about digging graves, we think you’re an SS Nazi or a Palestinian terrorist (or both, as Haj Amin al Husseini was). Both asked grave-digging from Jews before murdering them. In either case, you appear a deadly and very personal enemy. Is that what you want? Don’t ask us to dig graves: if you make us do it, it might be your own.

Speaking about terrorism, Irgun and the Stern Gang slaughtered women and children at Deir Yassin, sometimes sliting their throats, other times shooting pregnant women at point blank range. Deir Yassin became the single most effective idea causing non-Jews to flee. Benny Morris said that there were over 20 Deir Yassin type massacres. When Israel rejects every legal attempt for the refugees to return to the homes which were stolen from them, is it any wonder they turn to the terrorism which the Jews used so effectively?

Pleasure to see you cribbing my opening line, Hephie, but then we already knew you were good at mindlessly parroting other peoples views.

First, Benny Morris hasn’t documented 20 such massacres. Moreover, the Israeli s aren’t proud of Deir Yassin. The Arabs ARE proud of the massacres they committed, where they killed during the same time far more Jews than Arabs at Deir Yassin. They also name streets after suicide bombers. There are at least such 117 such streets in the Palestinian Authority. 
How come you don’t mention the Arab massacres of Jews? Because you approve of it.

Second, more than 50% of Israeli Jews are the descendants of jews who are refugees from the Arab countries after 1948. There were more Jewish refugees from Arab countries (850,000) than Palestinian Arabs (656,000). Yet you do not give the same rights to the Jews. 

Of course, Jews have no rights in your eyes, just Arabs.

Like most Israelis, I personally am in favor of a Palestinian states, in which they should have their refugees. People like you want Israel to accept a Jew-free Palestinian state and at the same time have them put all refugees in Israel. “What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is mine too” – that’s their belief and yours too. 

Third, AlKhalil has declared he will make millions of graves in Israel. And it seems normal to you.

Given these three points, do you expect me to view you with trust?

No, it is not time to re-evaluate. Israel is the country of the Jewish people. We have the right to it, just as much as the various nations Arabs have to right to their many and vast countries, or how the various European nations have the right to theirs. Without a country, Jews will be murdered in genocide by yourself and your friends. 

You have declared right here on Tablet that you want millions of graves. There is no better evidence that you are a deadly enemy and that Israel is necessary not just as a homeland but also as a shield from the AlKhalil mass murderers of the world. 

AlKhalil, I actually do appreciate your sincerity. It is not everyday that I can hear someone telling us to our face that he wants to murder Jews by the millions. (It’s true, I don’t live in an Arab country.) Your sincerity shows that people as radically evil as the Nazis or Haj Amin Al Husseini still exist today, and want nothing less than genocide of Jews. You are one of them.

Here is a better one, being a human being who doesn’t openly of murdering millions of Jews. That you are not.

How often do you send money to jihadis? How often do you work yourself as a Jihad terrorist? I think you should tell us more about your terrorist activities, AlKhalil. Express yourself before the drone comes.

To AlKhalil, you are making him a victim simply because you are alive. AlKhalil wants Jews dead by the millions. Elsewhere on this thread, AlKhalil has declared he wants millions of graves when he takes back Palestine. 

Compared to AlKhalil, the Holocaust denier is almost a nice guy.  He didn’t say he wants another Holocaust. In contrast, AlKhalil doesn’t just like Holocaust deniers – he has told us openly that he aspires to be a Holocaust MAKER.

I did learn something, from you. That there are people who want to murder us Jews by the millions, and that you are one of them. 

I tend to forget that genocidal murderers exist, but you AlKhalil very effectively reminded this to everyone on his thread.  

THIS is what you AlKhalil wrote: “Could you please do it somewhere else since we do not want to worry about digging millions of graves when we take Palestine back.  Thank you for your concern and help in this matter.”

I like NF? :-) oh, why not, he IS a very handsome Jewish guy!! …anyway,  what did NF say in his praise exactly? — When my country was occupied and plundered by the Nazis, we also had the feeling we wanted all Germans dead. So don’t blame the Hezbollah, blame those who invade their land.

Reading your lines is like a trip to hell. What makes you say such crap? It  has absolutely no value but smear and hatred. Do you need a psychiatric help? I know NF and he’s one of the most beautiful human beings. 

He is honest because no matter what he always tries to stick to the facts. Read him and double check  the numbers he presents. They are not a secret information hidden in a vault. 

Lebanon is occupied by Hezbollah, your speed in justifying genocidal psychopaths who focus on murdering Jews is clarifying. 

No one said you cannot live in your homeland, be it Russia, Poland, Germany or whatever. If you do not like your places of origin you can always emigrate to America or finance an expedition to Mars, but do not take someone else’s land and turn them into dispossessed refugees. That fact that Arabs and Europeans or Russians have vast lands does not give you a right to steal any of it.

While I did not ask you to dig your own graves (apparently people see whatever they want to see), I am now convinced by your argument but I say dig them first and them we will see who will fit in them. We will do it on a first come first serve basis. Let me know when you are done, but just to be safe do dig graves for say 120 million since we do not know how many would die from which side. Do not be greedy again and just dig 15 million yo cover yourselves. Think of others at for once in your life.

AlKhalil is obviously quite unapologetic about his rabid antisemitism and jihadi mentality, and he even grants its source in the Qur’an.  Although there are many in the West, usually on the left (and including our own President Obama) who would deny this and who love to dream of “Islam, the religion of peace,” he has an awful lot of Muslim company in this.  According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project survey of 2011, fully 98% of Muslims in Middle Eastern countries (“only” 95% in Indonesia, so this really is a Muslim trait globally) have antisemitic attitudes, most of them believing the most extreme and irrational myths about Jews; they boast of the source of these ideas in the Qur’an, although some of their current ideas were also drawn from Nazi propaganda in the Middle East during WWII.  But they are not wrong about the Qur’an and other classical Muslim sources.

On these sources, see Andrew G. Bostom, ed. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (2008) — this book gives over a hundred pages (double columns, small print, large-size pages) of extracts from the Qur’an, the Hadith (legal and doctrinal traditions drawing on Muhammad’s own sayings and deeds), and Sira (biographies of Muhammad, also used for legal and doctrinal precedents), then about 150 pages of writings on the Jews by the leading Muslim jurists, theologians and scholars of classical, medieval and modern times, followed by over 200 pages of scholarly articles by leading Western academic authorities on the treatment of Jews under Muslim rule down through the ages, including documents and eyewitness accounts.  It is the most detailed and authoritative survey of this topic available in any language.  And it is a devastating indictment of Islam.  

Also see Mohammed, Allah, and the Jews: The Foundational Doctrine, published by CSPI, the Center for the Study of Political Islam (2006) and available in paperback.  This is a shorter but also scholarly anthology of Muslim texts, with excellent very clearly written commentary.  It is Volume 5 in a series, The Islamic Trilogy, dealing with the Muslim treatment of other religions. Vol. 6 is Mohammed, Allah, and the Christians, Vol. 7 deals with Mohammed, Allah, and Hinduism, Vol. 8 with “the Intellectuals,” Vol. 9 on “the Mind of War” (i.e., jihad teachings) etc.

If you are just going to purchase one of these books, I w0uld recommend Bostom.  Bostom has also edited an equally important book on the Islamic jihad ideology and history, The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (2005) using the same format of generous selection of primary sources, selections from Muslim jurists and authorities down through the ages, and historical documents, plus many analytical essays by leading modern academic authorities on Islam.

On the general treatment of Jews, Christians and other “dhimmi” under Islam down through the ages, another good book (available in paperback) is by Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam (1985).

I did learn something from you. That all Zionazi criminal are either blind or one-eyed and cannot see. All you had to do to find out that there are genocidal murderers and religious maniacs is to look in the mirror or at least to a close relative. That image you see, if you are capable, is that of a genocidal zionazi killers of innocent chidren and women and of whole societies and destroyer of a once viable nation.

Oh MAN! You must be very very sick ! Finkelstein is mentally unhinged? WTH?   ”His passionate hatred of  everything about Israel, Jews and often his own family is truly frightening. ” — only a mentally deranged individual can say such things  about Prof. Finkelstein.  I am shocked you actually know the alphabet.

Palestine is occupied by Israel. Israel bombed Lebanon. Israel bombed Palestine. Now Israel feels like bombing Iran. Poor Israelis, they are obviously governed by a meshugah government which astounds me because Jews are smart people. What a paradox. Israel needs a coup d’etat!!!

“Lied about her age as most women do”?

Not only do you hate Jews, you hate women, too.  Must be a Q’uran loving Muslim.

I actually did.  What I have a problem with is the sources for his numbers.

This attempt to equate Israel to Nazi Germany and their policies in war is presented as cliché worldly-wise inevitabilities, but underlying this is hate propaganda.  It has no truth value.

Col. Richard Kemp, CBE, former Commander of British forces in Afghanistan, and also commander of troops in Northern Ireland and the Iraq war, and one of the foremost experts in the world on counter-terrorism methods and problems, informed an UN Human Rights Council inquiry into the 2009 Gaza war that: “Mr. President, based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”  His frank and hard-hitting testimony can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX6vyT8RzMo.

Retired Major General Jim Molan, American Chief of Operations of Allied forces in the Iraq war during 2004-5, a commander with deep experience of counter-terrorism operations, who monitored the Gaza conflict closely, strongly agreed that Israel’s enemy was the one who constantly violated international law, not Israel, that Israel made great efforts to protect civilians as much as possible and that it was nevertheless being held to an impossible standard, while its terrorist enemies were being held to none. See, for example, his article “UN bias binds Gaza,” The Australian, October 2, 2009, at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26152548-7583.html.

Anthony Cordesman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in a 96-page examination of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war (Examining the Conduct of IDF Operations in Gaza,” February 2, 2009, at http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/090202_gaza_war.pdf) agrees that Israel has set a humanitarian standard for fighting urban terrorists that use civilian populations as shields that no other Western country either now or in the past has ever matched.  Jeffrey White, another strategic and military analyst of international stature, also underlines the efforts made, successfully, by Israel to minimize civilian casualties, in his “Examining the Conduct of IDF Operations in Gaza,” Policy Watch #31497, at http://washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=3034.

Even Richard Goldstone, who inexcusably allowed his UN Preliminary Report on the Gaza conflict to reflect only the Hamas point of view and its allegations, eventually withdrew that endorsement and acknowledged that Israel had investigated all the alleged war crimes responsibly and found very few allegations had any truth, but any that had were properly prosecuted and offenders punished, while Hamas for its part refused to investigate any alleged war crimes done by its own fighters, nor to punish those guilty of them.

This is incoherent and dumb on two levels.  First you equate Christianity with Europe and the US.  That’s not going to impress someone half-educated.  Next, you completely disregard a whole millennium of clergy control in Europe.  Religions are a tool of social control, not the end in itself.  To say this or that religion is totalitarian is completely meaningless and anti-intellectual.  The history of the Mideast is very complex and doesn’t boil down to the nature of Islam.

Oh, man, you really sound like someone who likes to write “intelligent” stuff. What is this all about?? It’s empty, it has no substance. It’s just bad -mouth. You are not sure if NF is sociopath??????????????????

 Wonderful man in spite of the many ill-guided spirits who think otherwise.
Good interview.

One of the well-known traits of Arab culture is the love of exaggerated rhetoric for its own sake, which tends to replace reality.  But actions speak louder than words like “Being an Arab is a source of extreme honor.”  As AlKhalil too must know, Arabs dishonor and hate each other on a daily basis far more than even they hate non-Arabs. It is part of their culture: they kill far more of each other (as in Syria right now, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, etc.) and always have done so.  The observation applies to Muslims generally, regardless of their hate-incitement and actual violence regarding non-Muslims, since as a simple matter of fact they kill far more of each other than they do non-Muslims.  Here are the actual figures:  in all conflicts since 1950, about 11 million Muslims have been violently killed, of which a miniscule number, just 35,000, or 0.3 percent, were killed fighting Israel.  About 90 percent of the 11 million, on the other hand, were killed by other Muslims.  See, on this, Gunnar Heinsohn and Daniel Pipes, “Arab-Israeli Fatalities Rank 49th,” FrontPageMagazine.com for October 8, 2007, at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1908134/posts 

A really good resource on Norman Finkelstein can be accessed at: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2204

It provides links to many articles offering critical analysis of his writings, and certainly documents the many problematic aspects of the guy.  There are extensive quotes from him that prove his dodginess with figures and assertions, his very far-left views, and his anti-Jewish attitudes on everything from the Holocaust to Israel to the mainstream American Jewish community and leadership.  He has even been eager to declare David Irving his hero, tends to minimize the numbers of those killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust, has happily published his articles in German neo-Nazi Holocaust-revisionist journals, and has focused his entire life on attacking Jewish solidarity, Zionism, and ordinary Jewish community life.  It is no accident that he is heroized and constantly cited on rabidly antisemitic websites.  All of this certainly disproves the “wonderful man” claim (obviously, such claims reveal more about the claimant than about NF). 

Sorry, I know David Horowitz propaganda efforts. Personally I consider his list “mostly” as a recommendation, although occasionally someone escapes his attention, like Gil Ayal.

I’d suggest you read all articles of my late friend David Mills aka Undercover Black Man on Horowitz. You will then get an idea why I am allergic to the man and his efforts.

Besides I was following the whole propaganda campaign against Norman Finkelstein’s De Paul tenure closely on an H-Net list. It was very disgusting to watch all the screeching propagandists.  The extreme right from my perspective had many other “traitors of  the people”  e.g. Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, to list the most prominent. For me that is still  a term from the Nazi vocabulary and I find it highly ironic it surfaces again.

The efforts to put any of them first and foremost Norman Finkelstein in the same camp as David Irving clearly shows a deficiency in differentiation,  you may share with Horowitz, or simply a surrender to his or other’s propaganda. The last being the most sad aspect of the whole story.

 That’s the typical racist reply that is hard to ignore.

Certainly not Finkelstein himself, since he has been rejected for tenure everywhere and teaches on no university staff.

Whether or not you need THIS here? I’d say you do, badly, BUT as I read through the comments, I see that the majority of commentators here are bigots, who’s minds are set against people like NF.  

Lol,are you serious? Do you also believe fragments,apples on the fence,the painted bird, and the laughably impossible claims long since debunked in Ellie wiesel’s almost comical eyewitness accounts?

Jews are unmatched in cruelty when in a position of power yet no people are more cowardly when evenly matched”…….general George Patton

You would shoot children from your settlement, but apologize to a guy who spits in your face in Brooklyn.

“[W] hy should I believe him rather than Joan Peters,who, incidentally, started out as a Zionist skeptic?”

Dr. Porath,
Israel’s leading demographic historian, called Peters’ book a “forgery…
[that] was almost universally dismissed [in Israel] as sheer rubbish except
maybe as a propaganda weapon.”(New
York Times, Nov.28, 1985)

Rabbi Arthur
Herzberg, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, agreed: “I think that she’s cooked
the statistics…. The scholarship is phony and tendentious. I do not believe
that she has read the Arabic sources that she quotes.”(ibid)

Peters
ignored the population figures for Palestine carefully calculated by expert
demographers during the 19th century as well as censuses taken by
British officials during the British mandate. Many scholars
are convinced Ms. Peters did not write the book herself, but served as a front
for others whose motives are obvious.                                                               

Jews can never be allowed to have weapons,you people simply don’t have a sense of empathy for children or the restof human kind, all while being the most cowardly men to ever walk the earth.

As general Patton observed after watching the newly liberated Jews swarm on German towns raping children and mothers and robbing anything of value ther slimy hands could find in the homes that were empty of men who were hundreds of miles away ” there are no people so cowardly in battle yet so cruel when in a position of power as the vile Jew”. George Patton in his diary describing the days after the liberation of the concentration camps

Hope Arab orderlies are urinating on his vile Jew face at night

Arthur Hertzberg is a fine man, but he is not a specialist in this subject, not a demographer nor statistician, and has slight knowledge of the historical issues, so citing him proves nothing except his own preconceptions.  

Porath is not “Israel’s leading demographic historian.”  That much inflates his stature.  He is however a generally respected scholar.  Nevertheless, his comments on Peters, quoted above, shed no glory on him: they were highly exaggerated or rather simply unfactual in regard to other Israeli demographic and historical scholarship, and this just by itself tends to discredit the rest of his analysis.  Furthermore, as was pointed out in my earlier post, complaints that Peters’ demographic and statistical analysis were amateurish and grossly incorrect, even “fraudulent,” miss the fact, always ignored by critics and also by Porath, that they were produced by the leading demographic statistician of that generation, Phillip Hauser.  They were not poorly compiled, amateurish nor in violation of professional standards.  The resort to highly insulting ad hominem terminology, in addition, as is usual with such language, shows that Porath was highly passionate and not objective on the subject, but was also not able to justify his views in any properly measured and scholarly way; it tends to disqualify his whole discussion.  

It should be added that Porath is well known to be strongly leftist and a post-Zionist himself, and his ideological views explicitly obtrude in his article on Peters, with ideological/historical red herrings introduced that have nothing to do with Peters as such.  Even his assessment of sources reflects this strong prejudice.  For example, he rejects and mocks a citation Peters makes to a Mandate period account of Arabs in Tel Aviv solely on the grounds that the author of this account is Zionist!  In any case, Porath’s analysis was taken apart and refuted in the same articles and letters by Daniel Pipes already cited in my earlier post, and in the same Letters section of Commentary Magazine, October 1986 issue, that dissected Finkelstein, also referred to in my earlier post, both by the Isaacs themselves and by other specialists who wrote letters on the subject.

Avneri’s book The Claim of Dispossession, cited in my earlier post, represents far better the mainstream Israeli scholarly consensus, and it confirms Peters’ views.  It is accepted in Israel as an authoritative work on the subject.  Those few who dissent from it are all very far left themselves, and are known for their tendency to confuse their own passions with truth.  Another demographic historian of stature who has focused on these matters is Fred M. Gottheil.  He too entirely confirms Peters.  See his “The Smoking Gun: Arab Immigration into Palestine, 1922-1931,” Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2003, pp. 53-64, available on-line at http://www.meforum.org/522/the-smoking-gun-arab-immigration-into-palestine.  Gottheil points out in this article the tendentious simple-mindedness of those analyses that take British Mandate Palestine (and earlier Ottoman period) census figures as their final authority: the British Censuses themselves carried caveats stating that their figures for the Arab population and in-migration reflected only the officially registered Arab residents.  Thus by definition (and the Census caveats stated this explicitly) the official British figures could not take account of any illegal and unregistered in-migration.  Using them therefore to justify a claim that there was no significant illegal and unregistered Arab influx to British Mandate Palestine is an elementary, indeed a ludicrous “scholarly” non-sequitur.  This, however, is exactly what critics of Peters do, pretending to present exact figures on the resident Arab population that refute her analysis of significant unrecorded Arab in-migration, based on official British Mandate and earlier figures.  Gottheil shows just how laughable those anti-Peters’ analyses are.

There are no scholars who claim that Peters did not write From Time Immemorial.  But this sort of claim shows exactly how reliable all the other comments by Misterioso are.

This is exactly the kind of “exact” figures contesting Peters’ own conclusions that Gottheil in 2003 definitively demonstrated were based on false, tendentiously unscholarly and even illogical foundations.  However, even these figures (covering let us remember, only 23 years) do not prove what Misterioso and his sources suppose — quite the contrary they disprove those suppositions and conform fairly well to Peters’ own arguments, even though we can be sure that the immigration from abroad was a systematic under-estimate, ignoring reasonable estimates of unrecorded immigration.  For in any case these figures as stated by Misterioso only relate to migration from other Muslim countries.  They do not add any reckoning for internal migration of Arabs from elsewhere in Mandate Palestine to Jewish-resident areas, the areas that later became Israel.  This internal migration was also a significant factor, with the rate of growth and resulting density of Arab population around Jewish populated areas far in excess of Arab growth and density in non-Jewish populated areas elsewhere in Mandate Palestine.  This can be shown from British census data itself.  

In contrast, Peters, and Hauser himself, granted that we cannot know for certain the precise figures, but that all the best evidence, after carefully working through known birth-rates, mortality rates, and other factors of natural increase over the period 1893 to 1947, as distinct from the probable actual population figures (with the excess attributable to in-migration) both in Jewish areas and outside them in Mandate Palestine, indicated that the probable minimum Arab net in-migration into Jewish-resident areas of Mandate Palestine, both from abroad and from other areas of Mandate Palestine, over that 50-year period was roughly 168,000.  (So the figures of the sources cited by Misterioso apply to a different region than the one focused on by Peters, and do not disprove her figures at all.)  When one then calculates the natural increase of 168,000 over 50 years, conforming it to the natural increase of the rest of the Arab population in Mandate Palestine, one arrives at a considerably higher final figure of “Palestinians from time immemorial” in 1947 that were actually either newcomers themselves or their immediate descendants, within the Jewish-resident areas.  A very high percentage of the final Arab population that had settled around Jewish areas (and that ended up being incorporated into the new state) derived from those migrants.

Misterioso sneers at Daniel Pipes.  We can thank him for that.  It is like a seal and confirmation of academic respectability.

Moderator, please note my earlier post on this guy.  It is obvious that Finkelstein’s fellow-travellers have gotten wind of this article and have flocked to this webpage to attack Jews and to defend their showcase Jew.  This is also an inditement of Finkelstein himself, showing the company he chooses to keep.  But the more explicitly Nazistic posts should not be published on this Jewish site.

Hello sir, nice to meet you here. Just one question: did you proofread your comment?? Anti-holocaust/holocaust. Jeez,  explain or I won’t sleep tonight…

330,000 Jews, yet the only evidence is Jewish claims.

Anne frank lived in the camps for 2 years before dying of typhus, not gas chambers, you probobly assumed that because the myth of “children and elderly were gassed immediately” that she was gassed.

The entire narrative is underpinned by almost comical claims so easily debunked it’s embarrassing

Get a real education,the Talmud teachings have left you a moron unable to debate serious men

The sort of hysterical name-calling that anti-Zionists have given Peters’ book really says a great deal about how effectively that book refutes the pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist case.  Edward Said, Edward Quandt, Norman Finkelstein, the Journal of Palestine Studies in-house contributors, Anthony Lewis, etc., etc., all curse it passionately and use strong words.  It is clearly an obsession with them.  And why not, since it completely demolishes their case.  The ferocity of the attack is a high compliment to Peters.  These are people who on the other hand find nothing special to object to when the Palestinian Authority declares that there never was a Temple on the Temple Mount, and that there are no Jewish holy sites either in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Eretz Yisrael.  They do not complain about Fatah allegations of “genocide” in Jenin in 2001, and instead they like to argue for the “moderation” of the Fatah and the Hamas terrorist organizations, and their readiness to seek peace with Israel.  There are no articles in the Journal of Palestine Studies refuting those serious falsities.  Truth therefore is a matter of indifference to this coterie.  

As for the claims that Peters misrepresents various British Mandate documents, they are false.  My favorite example to illustrate that falsity is the analysis of Blair in Capitalism Magazine, for he made much of the claim that Peters misrepresented those documents and, when the actual documents are checked against his specific instances, one finds again and again that Blair is the person who has misrepresented them, selectively citing them and ignoring passages from the sources that confirmed Peters, leaving out crucial portions of quoted sentences in order to distort their actual meaning, misrepresenting the wider contexts of those passages, even going so far as to pretend high moral and academic scholarly outrage at a specific supposedly paradigm case of Peters’ alleged falsification and tendentious editing of a quoted Brtitish Mandate document when checking the actual page in the source shows that it was Blair himself who has falsified and edited the quote in question, leaving out portions of sentences that reverse his interpretation (without indicating even the elision) and that Peters had interpreted its sense and meaning correctly after all.  Similarly in Blair’s treatment of Peters’ own book, one finds that he has a tendency to make claims about what Peters said, giving page citations, that are actually not even in the book.  The actual pages cited might even be on an entirely different subject than the one claimed by Blair.   

Clearly, in these cases, the actual truth is not what is at issue in the debate.  What is at issue is that Peters as a non-Jew and even originally pro-Palestinian observer has dared to say clearly and emphatically that the Palestinian mythic emperor has no clothes.  This cannot be permitted.

None of what you claim is backed up by documentary evidence,just ludicrous survivor claims that became so embarrassingly absurd the top Jewish holocaust scholars declared in the nyt ” survivor testimony is notoriously unreliable and mostly consist of implausible accounts of fantasmagorical accounts of victimization and heroism” why did the so called death camps have delousing chambers and shave heads to stop typhus from spreading,and why would a death camp have a 700 bed hospital/ infirmary to care for typhus and injury victims? Remember Ellie weisel and Otto frank were in the camp hospital when liberated, one for a minor foot injury. Why did auchvits have a movie theatre,soccer pitch( which some survivors admit Jews played in games against guards), why did they have a brothel,library, art program,and were allowed to produce theatrical and orchestra productions? Address those facts and you will have some credibility, I guarantee you won’t,

Ah,the last 4 decades as the coordinated holocaust gas chamber 6 million canard was being shaped through tv,Hollywood,and laughable eyewitness claims

Finklestein knows history will describe the holocaust story as a coordinated myth promulgated by Jews who knew they were pushing falsehoods,he’s protecting his legacy as a serious scholar

Jews who are anti zionists are a fraud, they are simply acting out of a fear of the myth crumbling and America turning on Jews, where were they 10 years ago,the sudden bout of consciousness is just a Jewish technique .

True,like all Jewish writers,scientists,pols, and so on his myth of greatness was cultivated and reinforced by Jewish fellows and critics.

tzur, you sound like a fanatic! In the Kevin Costner’s movie No Way Out you could easily play the Pritchard’s character.

Your “citations” are all by gatekeepers of the myth,lol

lame really lame comment. this is not the soviets.

joan peters’ only mainstream appearance in the last 20 years ore more has been on some freakish jewish evangelist’s pro rapture internet show called the Zola Levitt Ministries. Even Israel televisions won’t invite her. She has been completely discredited since her lies and it’s really funny that there are still some propagandists who are wiling to defend her lies.

Carter supported Israel during his presidency. Only later did he find out Israel helped the GHW Bush team pull off the “October surprise” which doomed Carter’s re-election bid.

Read about it in Ari Ben-Menashe’s “Profits of War.”

http://www.amazon.com/Profits-War-Inside-U-S-Israeli-Network/dp/1879823012

to be a jew hater and be called an intellectual is madness..Finky and Chumsky would defend a pogrom! What do these two jew haters say about the so called arab/spring/fall? Jews may talk each other to death, but we dont kill each other.. witness Syria.. et al!

Somewhere buried among the amazing 311 comments so far – a great satisfaction for Norman Finkelstein.- Natan79 – (known for colorful language like “Nazi bitch” and “F..k
you donkey face, go to your rat hole, the marines will smoke you out
of there and check your teeth.”) – writes:

” 330,000 Jews were murdered by Romania during WWII, mostly
in Transnistria. We should forget this simply because Miha
Ahronovitz doesn’t like it? Who the hell are you to tell
us what we can do and what we can’t? ..”

The number is not as relevant as the tragedy. As Arnold Daghani
wrote in his diary, after learning that all prisoners from
Mikailowka in Transnistria were transferred to Tarassiwka and butchered , he was
deeply traumatized. “not even today”, he wrote many years after” ” I
was able to go over it”. He felt guilty he escaped and they didn’t.
But the total number of Jews killed was 4,000 and not 4 millions,
and this why, Yad Vashem rejected Daghani holocaust documents as
minor, or because “too few atrocities”

See Note 2 in my post:

http://mirceavorona.blogspot.com/2012/05/arnold-daghani-who-is-he.html

Also in Romanian Moldavia, Dobrogea and Valachia, under general
Antonescu control, the Jews survived almost intact.(I would never
had have been around otherwise). This is what the historian Tesu Solomonovici calls “Asymmetrical Holocaust” Not that Antonescu was a savior – he
was antisemitic – but he decided to defend what he considered all
Romania’s citizens. Paul Celan and Arnold Daghani were saved because
they escaped to Romania (Paul Celan parents were killed because they
fled to Ukraine, I believe).

So what was the real number? Some people unable to judge values,
consider people quality according to how wealthy they are. It is the
same simple mind that considers the tragedy of Holocaust based on
how many more millions we can add to the dead. This will feed even more the holocaust deniers, who are looking for any inaccuracies to minimize the tragedy

You say:Maybe you shouldn’t believe him, but Joan Peters’s book has been thoroughly debunked.
Says who? most probably only the Israel bashers and no doubt by
the Fink & Chomsky who would jump at the chance too
Do you also debunk Mark Twain who travelled extensively the whole area
And its environs.
.

If Martin van Creveld (?) said any such thing, he only demonstrates his profound ignorance of Israel or Germand 1871 through May 1945, or both. What a stupid statement.

Except that your Middle East Forum article is a hoax–and a deliberate one.

The first demographic reference is of U.O. Schmelz’ work on
1905 data. (Interesting data, by the
way. Here it is: http://tinyurl.com/66hazt4) Your article says: ‘of those Arab Palestinians born outside
their localities of residence, approximately half represented intra-Palestine
movement—from areas of low-level economic activity to areas of higher-level
activity—while the other half represented Arab immigration into Palestine
itself’. What the article ignores is
that Schmelz estimated that 93.1% of Palestinian Muslims were born in their current
locality of residence, 5.2% were born elsewhere in Palestine,
and 1.6% were born outside Palestine.
93.4% of Palestine Christians were born in their current locality, 3.0% were
born elsewhere in Palestine, and 3.6% were born
outside Palestine. (see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Palestine)
This is pretty bad sleight of hand.
What’s left out is that the half in question is half of a tiny minority.

Even more bald-faced is this: Your article:
‘[Schmelz] did acknowledge that “stable population models assume
the absence of external migrations, a condition which was obviously not met
by all the subpopulations”.’
What is left out is ‘…subpopulations of Table 1.6’, which is a breakdown
of age and sex, not origin. (See
footnote 54, page 61 of the Google Books version linked above.)

Sorry, that’s English. You just haven’t finished 9th grade yet.

No. It’s simply a comment on your prepubescent level of discourse.

The following interview appeared in Ha’aretz on January 9, 2004 in an article called “Survival of the fittest”:
…
Ari Shavit, Q: According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?

Benny Morris, A: “Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field – they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village – she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.

“The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.

“That can’t be chance. It’s a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres.”
…
Haaretz has removed the original story from the internet, or changed its original URL.

The above copy of the Haaretz interview is archived at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080515210330/http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=380986&contrassID=2

Piffle. Peters is “a hoax,” now Gottheil, a world-recognized scholar of unimpeachable integrity, is all of a sudden “a hoax,” without even an attempt to deal with his actual claims and arguments (including those relating to Schmelz’s work, which are not summarized adequately or fairly above). Hoax here, hoax there, hoax everywhere. The constant use of this sort of terminology and outright demonization does not suggest a careful academic mind nor scholarly rigor, but mere schoolyard bullying and taunts. It suggests that pure projection and wishful thinking is operating here.

No doubt the British Mandate Census 1931 tables listing the foreign countries from which many Jerusalem area Arabs had immigrated from, and the very many native tongues Arabs throughout Mandate Palestine spoke (see Peters, Tables C and D, pp. 227-9), are also “a hoax.” And the independent confirmations by Avneri and other scholars I mentioned above (the Isaacs in their article demolishing Finkelstein and Porath, Moshe Braver, and did I mention Saul Friedman’s Land of Dust [1982]?), proving Peters’ accuracy, are all hoaxes too — perhaps they do not exist at all? — and I suppose we must conclude that even the Hamas Minister of the Interior Fathi Hammad must be a hoax, since he of course correctly asserts out of his own knowledge the foreign origins of nearly all Palestinians in Gaza that was already proven by the historical research of Peters, Moshe Braver, Saul Friedman, and Avneri. Inconvenient truths.

I have checked Hephie’s cited source, and find that Gottheil has correctly cited and quoted from them, and Hephie’s objections have no substance. Her own explanations are misleading at the very least, if not simply false. First of all, Schmelz did not discuss the overall “Palestinian” population of the Ottoman Palestine region at any point in his article, as Hephie claims. Even the title of his article is: “Population characteristics of Jerusalem and Hebron regions according to Ottoman census of 1905.” So he left out completely and did not refer to any other Ottoman districts in the Palestinian region. Furthermore, what Schmelz actually says on p. 41 of his article on the 1905 Ottoman census, under the sub-chapter rubric “Place of Birth,” is that even as early as 1905, a significant percentage of Muslims in the city of Jerusalem were not native to that place: only 78%, he says, were born locally (of course we are not told about their parents’ origins: some of them might well have been from elsewhere) but most of the other Muslims in the city were born outside even the village districts surrounding Jerusalem (extending to Jericho, Ramallah, Bethlehem, etc.), “and at least half came from outside Palestine altogether.” But 93.9% of Muslims in the villages surrounding Jerusalem were locally born. and 96.7% of those of Hebron. The percentage of locally born Christians was 83.5% for the city of Jerusalem, 98.3% in the villages around Jerusalem. The significance of this, I might add, is that since Jerusalem was mostly Jewish in population, this tends to confirm that just as Peters and Gottheil claim, even as early as 1905 there was a significant influx of Arab migration, both Muslim and Christian, to Jewish population centers, both from within the wider Ottoman Palestinian region, and from outside it, but that the Arab population of mostly Arab villages did not much change and did not have much of an influx of migrants.

I have not been able to find, in Schmelz’s article, what Hephie claims: “that Schmelz estimates that 93.1% of Palestinian Muslims were born in their current locality of residence, 5.2% were born elsewhere in Palestine, and 1.6% were born outside Palestine. 93.4% of Palestine Christians were born in their current locality, 3.0% were born elsewhere in Palestine, and 3.6% were born outside Palestine.” There are apparently no such estimates, neither for Palestinian Muslims nor Christians in general, nor even for those in the Jerusalem and Hebron areas, in the Table 1.8 (p. 42) that presents detailed statistics on birthplaces or elsewhere in the article. Perhaps he/she can direct me to them?

Finally, to complete the tale of misleading or false comments, Hephie asserts that Gottheil wrongly used a reference to Table 1.6 by Schmelz, in his footnote 54 on p. 61, because that did not deal with birthplace statistics. But nevertheless, Schmelz did in fact say in the cited footnote that the statistics in that table needed the caveat that certain of the population groupings by age and sex did not necessarily indicate stable patterns, because they had had considerable impact from recent migrations. This was an entirely relevant and even necessary observation, brought out in any case more fully in the text of the article, especially pp. 41-42, also see p. 46 where migrations are said to affect the sex and age distribution of a given population. So Gottheil did not commit any scholarly sin in citing it. As for screaming and yelling, perhaps Hephie can reconsider his/her assertion that “it’s there in black and white: the guy’s a fraud.” Best not to throw stones from glass houses.

You have been exposed as a “lying fabricator,” as you say in a telling verbal slip. And in exactly the precise detail you invited in an earlier post. Not a single claim you made, when examined, proved to be valid. Three strikes, and you were out. The very source you alleged supported you actually very convincingly proved the opposite and constructed the case against you. Schmelz said nothing about all Arabs in the Palestine region as you falsely asserted, only about the Jerusalem and Hebron areas; he did not give the elaborate statistics at all that you falsely attributed to him, that purported that few Arabs had immigrated into the Palestine region — on the contrary he showed that as early as 1905 already about 20% of Arabs in Jewish areas had not been born there, and half of these were from outside the Palestine region altogether; and Gottheil did not inappropriately cite Schmelz as you asserted. Each claim was false, an open-and-shut case. And actually you confirm this with no attempt to refute any detail.

I expected though that you would not even be ashamed about it, despite having been caught red-handed before everyone. It is typical of people who support antisemitic groups. After all, the Palestinian cause is sustained by such people, Anshe damim vemirmah. It is precisely this that lies behind the intense and unremitting attacks against Peters’ book, and the strong support for such as Finkelstein who laps this stuff up. But it is very much worth it to show decent people just how mendacious the enemies of the Jews are.

Thanks to you, too, I have found yet another good scholarly confirmation of Peters in the Gilbar book, this time relating in precise detail and documentation to the late Ottoman period which I had not much read on before. So, believe me, the pleasure was all mine.

Table 1.8 does not say anything like what you asserted in your previous post; your figures are nowhere in Schmelz’s article.

I am well aware of what Table 1.8 is about. That comment is irrelevant anyway. Show us, will you, just where the statistics are that you claimed were there? You yourself stated that they applied to all Palestinians. You even truncated Gottheil’s words to make it seem like he was talking about all Arab Palestinians. Now you are accusing HIM of doing so, to cover over your own falsification. I quote from your first post on this: “Your article [i.e., Gottheil's article] says: ‘of those Arab Palestinians born outside their localities of residence, approximately half represented intra-Palestine movement—from areas of low-level economic activity to areas of higher-level activity—while the other half represented Arab immigration into Palestine itself’. What the article ignores is that Schmelz estimated that 93.1% of Palestinian Muslims were born in their current locality of residence, 5.2% were born elsewhere in Palestine, and 1.6% were born outside Palestine. 93.4% of Palestine Christians were born in their current locality, 3.0% were born elsewhere in Palestine, and 3.6% were born outside Palestine.” The impression that both authors were talking about all Arab Palestinians comes solely from you.

Again however, the first question is, where did Schmelz give those figures you cited as his, Hephie? You faked them. You still provide no source for them. That is because there is none, at least none in Schmelz whom you claim gives them.

As for Gottheil, you as usual are falsifying here again. Here are his own actual words regarding Schmelz, in full, which make it very clear that the Arab Palestinian population he mentions here applies specifically to the Jerusalem-Hebron districts that Schmelz studied:

‘Demographer U.O. Schmelz’s analysis of the Ottoman registration data for 1905 populations of Jerusalem and Hebron kazas (Ottoman districts), by place of birth, showed that of those Arab Palestinians born outside their localities of residence, approximately half represented intra-Palestine movement—from areas of low-level economic activity to areas of higher-level activity—while the other half represented Arab immigration into Palestine itself, 43 percent originating in Asia, 39 percent in Africa, and 20 percent in Turkey.[18] Schmelz conjectured:

“The above-average population growth of the Arab villages around the city of Jerusalem, with its Jewish majority, continued until the end of the mandatory period. This must have been due—as elsewhere in Palestine under similar conditions—to in-migrants attracted by economic opportunities, and to the beneficial effects of improved health services in reducing mortality—just as happened in other parts of Palestine around cities with a large Jewish population sector.”[19]

‘While Schmelz restricted his research of the 1905 Palestinian census to the official Ottoman registrations and used these registrations with only minor critical comment, he did acknowledge that “stable population models assume the absence of external migrations, a condition which was obviously not met by all the subpopulations” that Schmelz enumerated.[20]‘

In a very long and richly footnoted article, these are the only paragraphs dealing with Schmelz. They disprove your assertions, as usual. If you keep setting yourself up as a sitting duck, you will continue to be shot down in flames. Give it up, Hephie, you have already proved one thing for sure: you are a liar. Nothing you say can be trusted, including even alleged “quotes”.

I have generally found, Brian, that pro-Palestinian types quite often distort their sources, truncate quotes to make them serve their own propaganda purposes (sometimes even reversing their meaning outright) and can even go so far as to invent quotes and provide spurious statistics not to be found in the source cited. Some examples of this can even be found dissected by me and exposed to the light of day on this very webpage in regard to shrill claims made by Finkelstein and his often purely antisemitic acolytes against Peters’ important book From Time Immemorial. They accuse her of precisely the tricks and lies that only they themselves use to defame and distort her. Below Grathi takes apart false claims about civilian deaths in the Gaza conflict of 2008/9 which Finkelstein adamantly distorts, like all pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist polemicists and even such NGOs that should know better but never do in regard to Israel as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. So your scepticism is richly justified.

Since it is so a propos, I respond here as well to the false claims by earlier posters concerning the the IDF’s use of phosphorus in the Gaza conflict of 2008/9. There can be no doubt that terrorist groups and their leftist and far right sympathizers have fantasized all sorts of horrors which did not take place. Their loud outrage, put together with their silence or, on the part of Amnesty and HRW, their hardly heard formulaic and brief objections, regarding terrorist atrocities by Hamas and other Gaza terrorist groups, Fatah, etc., speaks volumns about their actual debased morality and hypocrisy. The IDF in its final report on “The Operation in Gaza: 27 December 2008-18 January 2009: Factual and Legal Aspects, July 2009,” available online (Google that title), discusses the use of phosphorus weapons in its pages 145 to 152. It points out that such weapons are NOT illegal in international law, are used around the world, and Israel used them within the limits set by international law. No exploding munitions containing white phosphorus were used in built-up areas of the Gaza Strip or for anti-personnel purposes. They were used sparingly even aside from that, and no particular complaints were raised about them; nevertheless, after January 7th, as a precautionary measure all such use ceased. Smoke-screening projectiles using felt wedges dipped in white phosphorus were used to create smoke screens. Horror stories told about them and their alleged incendiary effects were belied by later video film showing the entirely undamaged places where they fell, and no actual victims of phosphorus burns (a very distinctive kind of injury) were shown or ever presented to international monitors even by the Hamas propagandists who made much of this and claimed that lots of children had been made victims. Amnesty Int’l and HRW were shown up, yet again, as untrustworthy sources in regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict.