Norman Finkelstein is an expert at playing the blame game. He nimbly accuses other scholars of the very crimes and misdemeanors he commits himself. This tactic shifts the focus from his faulty theses and flimsy scholarship to his accused victims, usually Israel and the Jewish people.
His new book, “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History,” claims to be “an iconoclastic interrogation of the new anti-Semitism” and a “meticulously researched exposé of the corruption of scholarship on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
However, it seems more appropriate to call it another version of the Jewish Conspiracy myth — that all Jews (except for people like Finkelstein) are lying, deceiving connivers who manipulate public opinion and the truth to suit their devious scheme of ruling the world.
In fact, Finkelstein is the one generating propaganda intended to manipulate the reader. Just because you see it in print, with footnotes, doesn’t mean it’s true.
Finkelstein further pursues themes from his previous book, “The Holocaust Industry,” proposing that the “Jewish elites” and Israel use not only the Holocaust but also anti-Semitism as a shield against scrutiny. He defines the “new anti-Semitism” as a combination of “exaggeration and fabrication,” “mislabeling legitimate criticism of Israel’s policy” and “the unjustified and yet predictable spillover from criticism of Israel to Jews generally.”
According to Finkelstein, “Whenever Israel comes under renewed international pressure to withdraw from occupied territories, its apologists mount yet another meticulously orchestrated media extravaganza alleging that the world is awash in anti-Semitism. This shameless exploitation of anti-Semitism delegitimizes criticism of Israel.”
“Beyond Chutzpah” reads much like the extremely successful Palestinian media campaign that glorifies suicide bombers and their families, placing the Palestinians squarely in the victim camp and casting the Israelis as the violent aggressors. Finkelstein twists the truth, exactly as he accuses Israel and the “Jewish elite” of doing.
He also dedicates a significant section of the text to tearing apart the scholarship of Joan Peters’ “From Time Immemorial” and Alan Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel.”
Any scholar or published work disagreeing with Finkelstein is labeled a fraud, a hoax, rubbish. He must be quite familiar with the meaning of those words, as illustrated by his own career.
“Finkelstein is a pseudo-scholar with an empty academic publication record,” Steven Plaut wrote in the Jan. 3, 2006 online edition of Front Page Magazine. “His entire career has been devoted to turning out propaganda screeds in the form of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel books and web rants. His books have been dismissed as collections of fraudulent pseudo-research and thinly-disguised Jew-baiting propaganda by nearly every serious historian who has reviewed them.”
A master at manipulating facts and records to support his thesis, Finkelstein crams his book with warped references and dubious sources that most often would not stand up to careful scrutiny.
“The appropriate response is not (exhilarating) ‘debate’ but (tedious) examination of his footnotes,” wrote Peter Novick, historian and author of “The Holocaust in American Life.”
“Such an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention. … No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites.”
Unfortunately, it is easier and more effective to shift the accusations to his opposition than to produce true scholarship. Regardless of their accuracy, such allegations leave a lasting impression, even when later disproved.
“Beyond Chutzpah” is a dangerous book. Finkelstein presents his arguments meticulously and earnestly, but beneath the veneer of pseudo-scholarship, the content is revealed to be a vitriolic, unscholarly, anti-Semitic attack.
“Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History” by Norman Finkelstein (343 pages, University of California Press, $22.50).