Dershowitz and other racists embarked on a program to press DePaul University to deny tenure to our friend Dr. Norman Finkelstein.

If you are not familiar with Finkelstein's excellent work, take a look around his website. Anybody who read Beyond Chutzpah knows how meticulous is the research of Prof. Finkelstein. Dershowitz's plagiarizing and garbage would not be tolerated if he was not part of an elite that were used to having their way in America. But above all, Dean Suchar should not accept the attack on free speech by these desperate, mean, and increasingly (if that is possible) fanatical elite. McCarthyism and witch hunts should not be tolerated in America! I hope you will take time to write letters especially if you are in academia (I am sure they are receiving letters from racists who do not like the facts articulated in Finkelstein's books or his other scholarly work):
Dean Prof. Charles Suchar csuchar@depaul.edu
President The Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, CM president@depaul.edu

Also, read and sign the We Support A Fair Tenure Process for Dr. Norman Finkelstein Petition:
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?nf200704

Update: If you need some inspiration to write to DePaul University, here is a copy of a letter written by Prof. George Salzman - University of Massachusetts at Boston [Hat tip: Robin]

Monday, 9 April 2007

The Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M., Ed.D.
President De Paul University

Dear Reverend Holtschneider,

I write you regarding the effort of Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz to intervene in De Paul University's tenure consideration of Professor Norman G. Finkelstein.

Setting aside for the moment which of these two bitter academic contestants is more accurate in portraying the true nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict, I urge a strong, principled stand by your institution, utterly rejecting the legitimacy of Mr. Dershowitz's attempted intervention.

The Chronicle of Higher EducationI account at http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=tqyfjnxDdNnvzcffqm3kYcxKjWm3pgDH , on which I am relying, reports that your Liberal Arts and Sciences' Faculty Governance Council, at its meeting on November 17, 2006, "voted unanimously to authorize a letter to DePaul's president, Dennis H. Holtschneider, and the university's provost, Helmut P. Epp, along with the president of Harvard University and the dean of Harvard Law school. The letter was to express "the council's dismay at Professor Dershowitz's interference in Finkelstein's tenure and promotion case" which "Professor Dershowitz's emails" violate.

Your Faculty Governance Council should be commended not only for the substance of its principled stand but for making available the minutes of its meeting at which its decision was taken.

The intervention of Alan Dershowitz in Norman Finkelstein's tenure review is particularly egregious because Finkelstein has shown, with meticulous care, irrefutably, that Dershowitz, in his book The Case for Israel, plagairized substantial material from Joan Peters' book, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. Peters' book is well known to be a total fraud. Finkelstein, a skillful and committed scholar, has been relentless in uncovering the massively organized propagandistic misrepresentation of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The false, pro-Israel version held almost undisputed sway from 1948 until it began to be challenged in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon. Dershowitz used Peters' material to help meet his own apparent psychological need to justify Israel's actions. That he knowingly claimed the material taken from Peters' book was his own historical research was, independently of the fraudulent nature of the material itself, surely grounds for Harvard to have revoked his tenure and fired him. Lying, as a faculty member, by claiming plagairized material to be his own academic research, is unacceptable academic conduct, tenure notwithstanding.

Dean Charles S. Suchar of your College of Liberal Arts and Sciences appears to have based his rejection of the unanimous recommendation by the College Personnel Committee in favor of Finkelstein's tenure on his judgment: "I find the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein's published books to border on character assassination and, in my opinion, they embody a strategy clearly aimed at destroying the reputation of many who oppose his views." It is certainly true that Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky write very different kinds of polemics. However, Chomsky, like Finkelstein, exposes the shallow scholarly basis on which 'the reputation of many who oppose his views' are based, and in that way Chomsky acts to destroy their scholarly reputations. Among those 'many' are the uninformed but not malicious academics and others who honestly believe Israel is righteous. But Mr. Dershowitz is in a different category. He is not acting out of ignorance. His efforts to stifle open discussion and debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict are both legion, and undertaken with full readiness to lie. In this he acts as a lawyer, not a scholarly academic. His goal is to win 'the case for Israel', not to uncover the truth, and if besmirching Finkelstein and trying to destroy his livelihood and thus punishing him for not shutting up are, in Dershowitz's belief, useful tools for his campaign, he seizes them without hesitation. In my opinion his efforts are despicable.

I know full well that universities are not isolated from the society at large, and are subject to political and financial pressures, but I hope that you and your university will not be influenced by Dershowitz's attempted intervention.

Very sincerely,
George Salzman
Prof. Emeritus
University of Massachusetts at Boston