Zionist Conspiracy

1.
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23995
Norman Finkelstein's Obscenities
By Alan M. Dershowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com August 22, 2006

The level of .academic. discourse on the Middle-East reached a new
low.quite a feat considering some of the old lows.when the notorious
Jewish anti-Semite and Holocaust-justice denier Norman Finkelstein wrote a
screed suggesting that I be targeted .for assassination. because of my
views on Israel. The obscene article was accompanied by an obscene
cartoon drawn by .Latuff., a frequent accomplice of Finkelstein. The
cartoon portrayed me as masturbating in rapturous joy while viewing images
of dead Lebanese civilians on a TV set labeled .Israel peep show,. with a
Jewish Star of David prominently featured. The cartoon aptly represents
the content of Finkelstein.s piece, which accuses me of being a .moral
pervert. who .missed the climactic scene of his little peep show.. He also
claims quite absurdly that I .sanction mass murder. and .the extermination
of the Lebanese people.. (I.m surprised he hasn.t accused me of kicking
of puppy dogs, scowling at little children, and parking in handicapped
spaces.)

Finkelstein calls me a Nazi not once, but twice, first saying that I
subscribe to .Nazi ideology. and then comparing me to Nazi propagandist
Julius Streicher, who was prosecuted at Nuremberg by my mentor Telford
Taylor.

The peep-show cartoon was even too extreme for the notorious
.Counterpunch,. a Stalinist website that glorifies Hezbollah, Hamas and
other terrorist enemies of the U.S. and Israel. Prior to its decision not
to run this particular cartoon, Counterpunch seemed to have no standards,
but even for them this one was apparently too much (though they kept in
the .peep show. reference that inspired the cartoon).

The article itself is typical Finkelstein. He totally distorts my
positions, uses quotes out of context, and simply makes things up. He
assumes that his readers will not have read the material he criticizes,
because if they did, they would not recognize his characterizations of
them. Indeed I challenge any reasonable reader to peruse my writings and
then Finkelstein.s characterization of them and decide whether his
characterizations are even close to what I actually said.

It was President Bush who once famously said, .I don.t do nuance.. Well
at least Finkelstein has that much in common with our president. Any
effort by a pro-Israel writer to be reasonable, balanced or nuanced is
turned by Finkelstein into a justification for genocide.

Finkelstein himself is a well-known Holocaust minimizer and
Holocaust-justice denier. He is beloved by full blown Holocaust deniers.
Listen to Ernst Zundel, the notorious Hitler lover and Holocaust denier:

"Some people hate it when I pitch Finkelstein and his .Holocaust Industry.
yet one more time - because they know, as I know, that what must be for
tactical reasons, .Stormin' Norman. doesn't go all the way and says what
he must surely have come to realize in his heart: That the
"gassing-of-millions" stories of the so-called Holocaust are just a pot of
crock.

[.]

That doesn't mean that Finkelstein isn't exceedingly useful to us and to
the Revisionist cause. He is making three-fourths of our argument - and
making it effectively. Never fret - the rest of the argument is being made
by us, and will topple the lie within our lifetime. We would not be making
vast inroads in Europe with our outreach program, were it not for his
courageous little booklet, "The Holocaust Industry."

Zundel.s wife and fellow Neo-Nazi, Ingrid Rimland, referred to Finkelstein
admiringly as the .Jewish David Irving..a reference to the well known
Holocaust denier and admirer of Hitler. Finkelstein himself admires
Irving.s .historical. research.

Finkelstein is also an admirer of Hezbollah, having said that his .chief
regret is that I wasn.t even more forceful in publicly defending Hezbollah
against terrorist intimidation and attack..

This academic pornographer, who uses .professor. in his byline even when
he is spewing unacademic hate, is now up for tenure at DePaul University,
a Catholic school in Chicago that recently fired a teacher named Thomas
Klocek for offending Arab students during a discussion of the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Finkelstein was fired by several universities at which he
previously worked for abusing students who disagreed with his bigoted
views. The chairman of one department where he taught said he was fired
for .incompetence., .mental instability. and .abuse. of students with
politics different from his own. I wonder whether Finkelstein will submit
this .assassination. article as part of his tenure portfolio at DePaul.
He certainly should, since it is quite representative of his
.scholarship.. If he submits it, will it be accompanied by the
masturbation cartoon? It should, because the cartoon too personifies
Finkelstein.s academic standards.

****
It should be noted that Norman Finkelstein is the guru and role model for
Neve Gordon, the anti-Israel lecturer at Ben Gurion
University who served as a human shield to prevent the IDF from
apprehending wanted murderers and terrorists. See
http://moonbatcentral.com/wordpress/?p=1715

2. Berkeley Prof. Yoo on War:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23998

3. Caroline Glick on the NEXT war:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23996

4. If the world ends because of the Iranian bomb, it will all be Jimmy
Carter's fault for installing the Islamofascist regime there. More on
Goobers:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16570

5. From the Wall St Journal:
August 22, 2006
The Constitution vs. Counterterrorism

By RICHARD A. POSNER
August 22, 2006; Page A12

Last week a federal district judge in Detroit ruled that the National
Security Agency's conduct of electronic surveillance outside the
boundaries of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is illegal. As a
judge I cannot comment on the correctness of her decision. But I can
remark on the strangeness of confiding so momentous an issue of national
security to a randomly selected member of the federal judiciary's corps of
almost 700 district judges, subject to review by appellate and Supreme
Court judges also not chosen for their knowledge of national security.

A further strangeness is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (which hears
appeals from FISC) have been bypassed, with regard to adjudicating the
legality of the NSA program, in favor of the federal district court in
Detroit. The reason is that the jurisdiction of those courts is limited to
foreign intelligence surveillance warrants, and the NSA program under
attack involves warrantless surveillance.

In June, the Supreme Court in the Hamdan decision invalidated the military
commissions that the Defense Department had established to try captive
terrorists -- commissions that had never succeeded in conducting any
trials. And the pending Senate bill to revise the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act contemplates the submission of NSA programs to the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for an opinion on their legality
-- a problematic procedure because federal courts are not permitted to
render advisory opinions. A court might even hold that a surveillance
"program," as distinct from the surveillance of specific individuals, was
a "general warrant," which the Fourth Amendment forbids.

Five years after the 9/11 attacks, the institutional structure of U.S.
counterterrorism is in disarray. The Department of Homeland Security
remains a work in progress -- slow and painful progress -- and likewise
for the restructuring of the intelligence community decreed by Congress in
the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. And now, in
the wake of Hamdan and the Detroit case, we learn that we do not have a
coherent judicial dimension to our efforts to combat terrorism. (One
reason may be that there is no official with overall responsibility for
counterterrorism policy.) Other than the judges assigned to the two
foreign intelligence courts, federal judges do not have security
clearances and, more to the point, have no expertise in national security
matters. Moreover, the criminal justice system is designed for dealing
with ordinary crimes, not today's global terrorism, as is shown by the
rules, for example, that entitle a person who is arrested to a prompt
probable-cause hearing before a judge and require that criminal trials be
open to the public.

* * *
Other countries have greater flexibility in tailoring their judicial
procedures to the special problems posed by terrorism. We are boxed in by
our revered 18th-century Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court.
The Hamdan decision suggests that a majority, albeit a bare majority, of
the court is unsympathetic to arguments that our understanding of certain
provisions of the Constitution needs to be revised to meet contemporary
needs. The court that resisted Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s
eventually bowed, and so may the court in the current era, but we cannot
wait for that to happen.

The dilemma of defeating terrorism while respecting essential civil
liberties can perhaps be resolved by a change of focus from the
adjudicative process to executive and congressional oversight. This would
mean less effort at trying to prevent terrorism by means of criminal
prosecutions, whether in regular courts or in ad hoc military tribunals,
and less use of devices, such as the warrant, that are used mainly in
criminal-law enforcement. It is telling that no one was ever tried by the
military commissions set up in the wake of 9/11, and that criminal
prosecutions of terrorists have been few and have seemed to have had
little impact on the terrorist menace.

Terrorists are difficult to deter and locking them up has only a limited
preventive effect because the supply of terrorists is virtually unlimited.
Fortunately, if a terrorist plot is detected it will usually be possible
to neutralize the plotters without prosecuting them. Some can be deported,
some held in administrative detention, some "turned" to work for us, some
discredited in the eyes of their accomplices, some sent off on wild-goose
chases by carefully planted disinformation, and some carefully monitored
in the hope that they will lead us to their accomplices.

Monitoring, even when it takes the form of wiretapping or other electronic
interceptions, need not be conducted under a warrant. The Fourth Amendment
restricts warrants, as I have said, but warrantless searches are
permissible as long as they are reasonable. The potential abuses of
warrantless surveillance can be minimized, without judicial intervention,
by rules limiting the use of intercepted communications to national
security, requiring that the names of persons whose communications are
intercepted (and the reasons for and results of the interception) be
turned over to executive and congressional watchdog committees, and
imposing draconian penalties on officials who violate civil liberties in
conducting surveillance.

Mr. Posner, a federal circuit judge and a senior lecturer at the
University of Chicago Law School, is the author of "Uncertain Shield: The
U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform" (Rowman & Littlefield,
2006).

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115620738001741724.html

6. Life and death:
August 22, 2006
Life and Death

By SHELBY STEELE
August 22, 2006; Page A12

The simple back-and-forth of war can create the illusion that both sides
have a legitimate point to make even when this is not so, and it is clear
that Hezbollah's cause has greatly benefited from war's "equalizing"
effect. This Shiite militia seems to have known that merely fighting
Israel would gain legitimacy for its cause. A cease-fire would make it a
"partner" in peace. The Goliath Israeli military would make it a David
whose passion proved the truth of its cause. But amidst all the drama of
this war there has been very little talk of exactly what Hezbollah's cause
is.

And, of course, it is not just Hezbollah's cause. There is Hamas, one more
in a family of politicized terrorist groups spread across the Muslim
world. Beyond these more conventional groups there is the free-floating
and world-wide terrorism of groups like al Qaeda. In Europe, there are
cells of self-invented middle-class terrorists living modern lives by day
and plotting attacks on modernity by night. And around these cells there
is often a nourishing atmosphere of fellow traveling. Then there are the
radical nation-states in league with terrorism, Iran and Syria most
prominent among them. From nations on the verge of nuclear weapons to
isolated individuals -- take the recent Seattle shootings -- Islamic
militancy grounded in hatred of Israel and America has become the Muslim
world's most animating idea. Why?

I don't believe it is because of the reasons usually cited -- Israeli and
American "outrages." No doubt Israel and America have made mistakes in the
Middle East. Certainly, Israel was born at the price of considerable
dislocation and suffering on the part of the Palestinians. And yes, there
will never be a satisfying answer for this. Yet every Israeli
land-for-peace gesture has been met with a return volley of suicide
bombers and rockets. Palestinians have balked every time their longed-for
nationhood has come within grasp. They have seemed to prefer the aggrieved
dignity of their resentments to the challenges of nationhood. And
Hezbollah launched the current war from territory Israel had relinquished
six years earlier.

If this war makes anything clear, it is that Israel can do nothing to
appease the Muslim animus against her. And now much of the West is in a
similar position, living in a state of ever-heightening security against
the constant threat of violence from Islamic extremists. So here, from the
Muslim world, comes an unappeasable hatred that seems to exist for its own
sake, a hatred with very little actual reference to those it claims to
hate. Even the fighting of Islamic terrorist groups is oddly
self-referential, fighting not for territory or treasure but for the
fighting itself. Standing today in the rubble of Lebanon, having not taken
a single inch of Israeli territory, Hezbollah claims a galvanizing
victory.

* * *
All this follows the familiar pattern of a very old vice: anti-Semitism.
The anti-Semite is always drawn to the hatred of Jews by his own
unacknowledged inadequacy. As Sartre says in his great essay on the
subject, the anti-Semite "is a man who is afraid. Not of Jews of course,
but of himself." By hating Jews, he asserts that his own group represents
the kind of human being that God truly wants. His group is God's
archetype, the only authentic humanity, already complete and superior. No
striving or self-reflection is necessary. If Jews are superior in some
ways, it is only out of their alienated striving, their exile from God's
grace. For the anti-Semite, hating and fighting Jews is both
self-affirmation and a way of doing God's work.

So the anti-Semite comes to a chilling place: He easily joins himself to
evil in order to serve God. Fighting and even killing Jews brings the
world closer to God's intended human hierarchy. For Nazis, the "final
solution" was an act of self-realization and a fulfillment of God's will.
At the center of today's militant Islamic identity there is a passion to
annihilate rather than contain Israel. And today this identity applies the
anti-Semitic model of hatred to a vastly larger group -- the infidel. If
the infidel is not yet the object of that pristine hatred reserved for
Jews, he is not far behind. Bombings in London, Madrid and Mumbai; riots
in Paris; murders in Amsterdam; and of course 9/11 -- all these follow the
formula of anti-Semitism: murder of a hated enemy as self-realization and
service to God.

Hatred and murder are self-realization because they impart grandeur to
Islamic extremists -- the sense of being God's chosen warrior in God's
great cause. Hatred delivers the extremist to a greatness that compensates
for the ineffectuality in his world. Jews and infidels are irrelevant
except that they offer occasion to hate and, thus, to experience
grandiosity. This is why Hezbollah -- Party of God -- can take no
territory and still claim to have won. The grandiosity is in the hating
and fighting, not the victory.

And death -- both homicide and suicide -- is the extremist's great
obsession because its finality makes the grandiosity "real." If I am not
afraid to kill and die, then I am larger than life. Certainly I am larger
than the puny Westerners who are reduced to decadence by their love of
life. So my hatred and my disregard of death, my knowledge that life is
trivial, deliver me to a human grandeur beyond the reach of the West.
After the Madrid bombings a spokesman for al-Qaeda left a message: "You
love life, and we love death." The horror is that greatness is tied to
death rather than to achievement in life.

The West is stymied by this extremism because it is used to enemies that
want to live. In Vietnam, America fought one whose communism was driven by
an underlying nationalism, the desire to live free of the West. Whatever
one may think of this, here was an enemy that truly wanted to live, that
insisted on territory and sovereignty. But Osama bin Laden fights only to
achieve a death that will enshrine him as a figure of awe. The gift he
wants to leave his people is not freedom or even justice; it is
consolation.

White guilt in the West -- especially in Europe and on the American left
-- confuses all this by seeing Islamic extremism as a response to
oppression. The West is so terrified of being charged with its old sins of
racism, imperialism and colonialism that it makes oppression an automatic
prism on the non-Western world, a politeness. But Islamic extremists don't
hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely
because the end of oppression and colonialism -- not their continuance --
forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not
more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism.

* * *
But the international left is in its own contest with American
exceptionalism. It keeps charging Israel and America with oppression
hoping to mute American power. And this works in today's world because the
oppression script is so familiar and because American power cringes when
labeled with sins of the white Western past. Yet whenever the left does
this, it makes room for extremism by lending legitimacy to its claim of
oppression. And Israel can never use its military fire power without being
labeled an oppressor -- which brings legitimacy to the enemies she fights.
Israel roars; much of Europe supports Hezbollah.

Over and over, white guilt turns the disparity in development between
Israel and her neighbors into a case of Western bigotry. This despite the
fact that Islamic extremism is the most explicit and dangerous expression
of human bigotry since the Nazi era. Israel's historical contradiction,
her torture, is to be a Western nation whose efforts to survive trap her
in the moral mazes of white guilt. Its national defense will forever be
white aggression.

But white guilt's most dangerous suppression is to keep from discussion
the most conspicuous reality in the Middle East: that the Islamic world
long ago fell out of history. Islamic extremism is the saber-rattling of
an inferiority complex. America has done a good thing in launching
democracy as a new ideal in this region. Here is the possibility -- if
still quite remote -- for the Islamic world to seek power through
contribution rather than through menace.

Mr. Steele, research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the
author of "White Guilt" (HarperCollins, 2006).

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115620764577241736.html

7. The Charms of Losing, according to Olmert:
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=110547

8. Bang:
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=110546

9. Now THERE is an idea worth considering:
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=110540

# posted by Steven Plaut : 3:15 AM