I missed American Radical: the Trials of Norman Finkelstein in the theater, but I hope to catch a copy on the black market. It’s even said to be well-balanced and fair, and that’s a real selling-point when talking about Norman Finkelstein. Watch the trailer below. I’ll just point out that F’s initial declaration, “Excuse me, every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated…” (um, playing the Holocaust card again, Norman?) can’t be taken too seriously. A minute later in the same trailer, he’s kvetching about how his mother thought he had taken her too literally and was destroying his life for an ideal. So was she exterminated or not? If not, the author of The Holocaust Industry is fabricating his own personal history around a people’s tragedy in order to win sympathy from his listeners. Sound familiar?
Norman Finkelstein
A Little Matter of Stupidity
Deborah Lipstadt brought this to my attention, but I recently had a dream about Ward Churchill. No shit.
He’s on the Chomskyite fringes of public discourse and, like other acolytes of the Dean, has come into hard times for saying really stupid things in public.
He doesn’t matter much, on the whole. He’s not worth getting upset about, even. He’s not well-spoken, like Noam, nor does he have any big achievements under his belt. He doesn’t get invited to speak on Al-Manar or Al-Jazeera–just at my alma mater, VCU. No shit.
So just sit back and dig his style. Straight up, no chaser.
Marc Di Martino 