To Vote:  http://www.henleystandard.co.uk/index.php

College urged to drop controversial speaker

THE Henley College is being asked to reconsider inviting a controversial Jewish American academic speaker to address students.

Norman Finkelstein, who is banned from Israel because of his views on the Palestinian conflict, is due to give the talk next month during a five-day lecture tour of Britain.

Dr Finkelstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor, has accused Israel of using the Nazi campaign against Jews to justify its actions against the Palestinians.

He has also expressed his support of militant group Hezbollah, which waged war against Israel in 2006.

Harvey Rose, chairman of Zionist Federation, which supports Israel, has written to college principal Tom Espley asking him to reconsider the choice of speaker or to add a second more “moderate” speaker.

He said: “The federation supports freedom of speech and accepts the right of people to criticise Israel based on an objective review of all the facts.

“We also believe that a college should give its students the capacity to think for themselves and the tolerance to listen to all sides of an argument before rationally making up their minds. Furthermore, academic freedom must be exercised responsibly and never suppressed.

“On the basis of these tenets, we would ask you to reconsider the appropriateness of entertaining Norman Finkelstein on your campus.”

Mr Rose also asks Mr Espley to make it clear to the students that Dr Finkelstein will be giving his opinion rather presenting the results of research.

Mr Espley has also received protest letters from teachers.

Dr Finkelstein is due to give his lecture, entitled The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict — Reallity, Human Rights and International Law at Rotherfield Hall on Thursday, February 9.

It is part of a series of lectures at the college, which also include one on the same subject on March 21 to be given by a representative from the Israeli embassy.

Mr Espley said: “The students have organised a series of talks on the Middle East and they came up with the name of Norman Finkelstein.

“In March we have someone from the Israeli embassy coming in to talk so they are having a look at both sides.

“We have had lots of talks on subjects such as global warming and the rights and wrongs of abortion so I don’t know why this has blown up.

“I think our students of 16, 17 and 18 are able to take up these issues and hear different views. It doesn’t mean they will accept them.”

Dr Finkelstein is also due to speak at universities in Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Exeter and at Imperial College, London.

http://www.henleystandard.co.uk/news/news.php?id=1049498

Just Don’t Call Her Che

By WILLIAM MOSS WILSON

Published: January 28, 2012

LATE last month the British newspaper The Guardian asked readers to vote for its person of the year. The candidates included household names like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Egyptian techno-revolutionary Wael Ghonim and the Burmese pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. All placed far behind a striking, nose-ringed student from Chile named Camila Vallejo.

Though far from a familiar face in the United States, the 23-year-old Ms. Vallejo has gained rock-star status among the global activist class. Since June she has led regular street marches of up to 200,000 people through Santiago’s broad avenues — the largest demonstrations since the waning days of the Pinochet regime in the late 1980s. Under her leadership, the mobilization, known as the Chilean Winter, has gained nationwide support; one of its slogans, “We are the 90 percent,” referred to its approval rating in late September.

Ms. Vallejo’s charismatic leadership has led commentators to make the obligatory comparisons to other Latin American leftist icons like Subcomandante Marcos and Che Guevara. Yet “Commander Camila,” as her followers call her, has become a personality in her own regard. She skewers senators in prime-time TV debates and stays on message with daytime talk-show hosts hungry for lurid details about her personal life, while her eloquence gives her a preternatural ability to connect with an audience far beyond her left-wing base.

In perhaps the most poignant set piece in the year of the protester, Ms. Vallejo addressed a dense ring of photographers and reporters in August while kneeling within a peace sign made of spent tear-gas shells, where she calmly mused about how many educational improvements could have been bought with the $100,000 worth of munitions at her feet.

Ms. Vallejo, like many of her fellow student leaders, is an avowed communist. But while she has publicly commended other regional leftists like Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, she and her generation have little in common with the older left of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez. They are less ideological purists than change-seeking pragmatists, even if that means working within the existing political order.

Still, there’s no question that the movement is upending Chilean society. True, it is centered on a policy question, namely reforming an educational system that disproportionally favors the children of wealthy families. But the earth-shaking Paris protests in 1968 also began with calls for university reform — before spiraling into street battles between radicalized students and truncheon-wielding gendarmes, opposing symbols in the culture war between old and new France.

The same process is under way in Chile. As the protests increasingly devolve into rock and tear-gas exchanges between students and the police, it’s becoming clear that more than education policy is at stake: a nonviolent social revolution in which disaffected, politically savvy youth are trying to overthrow the mores of an older generation, one they feel is still tainted by the legacy of Pinochet. It is not just about policy reform, but also about changing the underlying timbers of Chilean society.

It’s no surprise that the movement should be led by someone as charismatic as Ms. Vallejo. Paris 1968 had its celebrity protesters, handsome faces that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets, photogenic young men like Jacques Sauvageot and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Chile has Ms. Vallejo.

Chile is perhaps Latin America’s greatest success story. After decades of authoritarian rule, it has spent the last 20 years building a thriving economy with a renewed democratic culture and a booming, educated middle class. But it is also confronting a dangerous imbalance: While the liberalization of higher education has led to improvements in access, tuition has consistently outpaced inflation and now represents 40 percent of the average household’s income.

At the same time, protesters say that wealthy students from private and expensive, co-pay charter schools have unfair access to elite universities, while the rest struggle to meet entrance standards at under-financed public institutions.

Criticism of the university system has been growing for years, but it was only in April that, energized by protests against a dam in Patagonia, students finally took to the streets. The protests grew over the winter; by the first press conference held by the national confederation of student unions, known as the Confech, Ms. Vallejo had emerged as its leader.

Echoing 1960s street activism, the Chilean Winter dabbled in the absurd, but with a high-tech, social-media twist. Thousands gathered in front of the presidential palace in June dressed as zombies, then broke into a choreographed dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” In July, students again gathered in front of the palace for a huge “kiss-in.”

Though the ideas came, said Giorgio Jackson, former student president of Chile’s Catholic University, from “everywhere, absolutely every local space,” the movement’s success hinged on the leadership’s ability to channel such creativity while maintaining a unified front to government and the media. The organization used a Web site to gather ideas and disseminate content for placards and posters. And it has used Ms. Vallejo’s 300,000-plus Twitter followers to quickly initiate huge “cacerolazos,” a form of dictatorship-era protest where people walk the streets banging on pots and pans.

While they vow to continue until all their lofty demands are met, the students have already scored some political victories. The government’s proposed 2012 budget has a $350 million increase for higher education, with promises to finance scholarships for qualifying students from families up to the 60th percentile in household income. Meanwhile, the year began with the naming of Chile’s third education minister in six months.

It was only a matter of time, perhaps, before the movement’s focus on education began to broaden. As more support for the movement came from outside the universities, its interests changed accordingly. “This year we have already started talking about political reforms and tax reforms, and we think the students and youth in general play an important role in profound reforms in the country,” said Noam Titelman, the new student president at Catholic University.

Tax reform is, not coincidentally, now at the top of the government’s agenda. And rightly so: though it has the largest economy in Latin America, Chile is the 13th most unequal country in the world.

“Something very powerful that has come out of the heart of this movement is that people are really questioning the economic policies of the country,” Ms. Vallejo said. “People are not tolerating the way a small number of economic groups benefit from the system. Having a market economy is really different from having a market society. What we are asking for, via education reform, is that the state take on a different role.”

The movement has also begun to spread regionally. Ms. Vallejo lent her star power to Brazilian student protests in August, while in November students demonstrated in France, Germany and several other countries in support of Confech’s Latin American March for Education.

“The student movement here is permanently connected to other student movements, principally in Latin America, but also in the world,” Ms. Vallejo said. “We believe this reveals something fundamental: that there is a global demand for the recovery and defense of the right to education.”

But the students clearly have a lot to learn about real-world politics. Ms. Vallejo and other student leaders spent weeks lobbying in Parliament, only to be left out of the final budget negotiations.

Frustration with Ms. Vallejo’s strategy propelled a rival leftist, Gabriel Boric, to challenge her in the latest round of student-government elections. On Dec. 7, national TV news crews lingered past 5 a.m. outside the University of Chile to cover a stunning defeat for the world’s most famous student leader.

Yet even in her early-morning concession speech, Ms. Vallejo claimed victory, recognizing that the movement was greater than any one figure. Indeed, her rise has barely broken stride. She just left for a speaking tour in Europe, while her first book, a collection of her speeches and essays from the last year, is rising through the best-seller ranks. And she is being heavily courted by the Communist Party to run at the top of its list for the Chilean Congress in the 2013 elections.

For all its recent stumbles, the movement’s prospects of getting a woman under 26 elected to Congress would help fulfill one of its underlying aims, to kindle young people’s interest in traditional politics. This may be Ms. Vallejo’s greatest contribution: to restore faith in a discredited system by showing a new generation that politics can be responsive to the people’s demands.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/student-protests-rile-chile.html?pagewanted=1&hp?hp&_r=2

Western Michigan University

DATE: Tuesday Jan 31

PLACE: Western Michigan University, North Ballroom of the Bernhard Center
TIME: 6:00
SPONSORS: West Michigan Justice in Palestine, Kalamazoo Non-Violent Opponents of War, Interfaith Coalition
CONTACT EMAIL ADDRESS AND TELEPHONE NUMBER: mtd4545@hotmail.com 269-290-2935

_______________________________________________________________________

Calvin College

DATE: Wed Feb 1, 2012
PLACE: Calvin College, Commons Lecture Hall
TIME: 3:30pm
SPONSORS: Calvin History Department, Calvin Political Science Department, Calvin Middle East Club, CRWRC Office of Social Justice

______________________________________________________________________________________

Grand Valley State University

DATE: Wednesday February 1, 2012

PLACE: Loosemore Auditorium (DeVos Center, Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids)
TIME: 7:00 p.m.
SPONSORS: Peace M.E.ans, Grand Valley Middle East Studies Department

[Note: We have not yet been in contact with Grand Valley’s Hillel group, but the Muslim Student Association and Arab Culture Club are likely to co-sponsor.]

CONTACT EMAIL ADDRESS AND TELEPHONE NUMBER: Elizabeth Kuchenmeister kuchenme@mail.gvsu.edu (586)549-9062

Interrogating The NY Times’ Anthony Shadid

The two-time Pulitzer winner on sneaking into Syria, being kidnapped in Libya, and the high cost of getting the story in a war zone.

By Aaron Ross

Anthony Shadid may have a hard time topping his last year’s adventures. The New York Times’ Beirut bureau chief and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting spent 2011 tracing the path of the Arab Spring. He traveled west from Egypt, where he covered the 18-day uprising that toppled strongman Hosni Mubarak, to Libya, where demonstrations against dictator Moammar Qaddafi morphed into armed rebellion. During a battle last March in the eastern city of Ajdabiya, Shadid and three Times colleagues were captured by Libyan government forces. Over the course of a harrowing week, they were blindfolded, beaten, and threatened with execution before finally being released. Returning to Lebanon in August to report on the Assad regime’s intensifying crackdown on Syria’s protest movement, Shadid audaciously snuck across the Syrian border sans visa. For days he shuttled on motorcycle from one safe house to the next alongside some of the country’s most wanted dissidents, emerging with a rare first-hand glimpse of a nation cascading toward civil war.

Despite his renown for daredevil reporting—in 2002, Shadid was wounded by sniper fire in Ramallah—it’s his knack for penetrating the surface of rough-and-tumble conflict zones that makes him one of his generation’s preeminent foreign correspondents. In his more than six years covering the Iraq War, he routinely unearthed the conflict’s human faces with a lyricism that seemed to belie his prolificacy.

Shadid’s third book, House of Stone, due out in late March, demonstrates his uncanny ability to reclaim humanity from wreckage. It recounts Shadid’s return to his ancestral village in southern Lebanon from 2007-2008 to rebuild his great-grandfather’s abandoned home—and perhaps piece back together his own wayward life in the process. In an account infused with introspection, the Oklahoma-raised Shadid narrates a rich personal odyssey for community amid a war-torn region’s struggle to reclaim a modicum of its former identity. I spoke to Shadid about the Arab Spring, the perils of his profession, and the path forward in Syria.

Mother Jones: What was it like growing up Lebanese in Oklahoma City?

Anthony Shadid: I had a great childhood. I think writers are always better off when they have more twisted childhoods, but I didn’t. There’s always a sense of community, of belonging to the Lebanese community in Oklahoma. It’s remarkable, when I talk to other Arab-Americans, how closed and tight-knit the community was, everything from the church that everyone shared—they all came from the same town in Lebanon—to the food that was served on every holiday and almost every day. There was a sense of coming from someplace else and having to make it in the place they ended up, and there was a lot of pride in that. The one thing that shaped my life was when I was 15 or 16: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. And not just a journalist, but a journalist in the Middle East, and to go back to the Arab world and try to understand what it meant to be Lebanese.

MJ: What resonated with you the most as you researched your family’s history for the book?

AS: I didn’t know a lot about my great grandfather who built the house, and I’d done interviews 20 years ago, even before I went to college. I started doing some interviews with elderly people in the family because I knew they would pass away and we would lose the power of their story. But I saw a certain resonance with my grandfather’s life and the decisions that he had to make in terms of his career and his family, in terms of sending his kids away. The more I learned about him, the more I understood him.

MJ: You write that some people in Marjayoun weren’t too happy about a past story you’d penned about the town. How do you think your book will be received?

AS: [Laughs.] I have no idea. I’m actually building a fence around the house right now because I’m worried the reception might not be all that great. I think people will understand what the town represents and what the town means, and be very proud of the book. I’ve tried to offer a memorial to what Marjayoun is and what it was and hopefully what it can still be. But, it’s a town, and a town is filled with gossip and rivalries and jealousies. I don’t think the reception is going to be universally the one I would’ve hoped for.

MJ: So how do you determine which stories are worth risking your life for?

AS: I’ve struggled with that question a lot. I don’t think there’s any story worth dying for, but I do think there are stories worth taking risks for. What’s so regrettable to me about Ajdabiya [where Shadid was kidnapped] was that I didn’t feel like that story was worth taking that risk for, and I was too late in understanding that, and at great cost: the cost of our driver’s life. That’s something that all four of us have to live with. I took great risks when I went into Syria illegally and without a visa. That was probably one of the greatest risks I’ve ever taken as a journalist, but that story felt as if it wouldn’t be told if I didn’t go there. That’s the arithmetic that I usually rely on. And those events in Syria over the summer were seismic. It’s a decision that’s a lot easier to make in hindsight. Emotion and, hopefully not, but ambition often get in the way of the judgment. But you go and hope you get it right.

MJ: Did your kidnapping just a few months earlier weigh heavily on your mind when you decided to sneak into Syria?

AS: It did. And I was scared, to be frank. In the back of my mind, I was wondering whether I was being foolish, whether I was being rash. In the end, it worked out all right, but I think any risk you’re going to take like that you need to have that in the back of your mind.

MJ: Speaking of Syria, the Arab League just announced a timetable for a transition, within months, to free elections. Will that change the calculus on the ground at all?

AS: There aren’t a lot of options out there. There aren’t a lot of mechanisms for diplomatic pressure. And I think this is a gesture that kind of highlights that. They’ve put this out there as another means of trying to force the situation. But how you deliver on something like this is very unclear.

MJ: Can you think of anything that might break the current stalemate between government and opposition forces?

AS: I think there are two trends out there that may shift the situation. One is the economy. You just have to look at the exchange rate right now of the Syrian pound. It’s shifting rapidly. I think it’s up to as much as 75 to the dollar when it used to be 47. That is very clearly going to create a lot of pressure on people first and foremost, but also on the government. The second thing is the balance of forces on the ground. If you look at towns like Zabadani or Duma—I don’t want to say it’s a situation like Hama last summer, where the city was in some ways liberated and Syrian forces were withdrawn—but I think you’re seeing instances today where local residents are able to keep the forces of the government out, however temporarily. And I think that’s something to watch very closely.

MJ: Is there an imminent possibility of full-blown civil war?

AS: Absolutely. Some things that suggest a civil war are well in place. But we have to consider where those forces would be aligned. I don’t think the sheer demographics of a sectarian conflict lend themselves to a prolonged civil war. In other words, the Alawites [Assad's sect] are vastly outnumbered. They remain the backbone of this regime, but they just doesn’t have the numbers or, I think, the determination to fight a protracted civil war there.

MJ: What are some of the possible endgames?

AS: I think we’ll see something very bloody, very chaotic, with a fracturing of both opposition and the government, and a conflict that’s really hard to discern—a conflict in which it’s easy to see multiple parties rather than two parties trying to slug it out. Who knows? It’s always the unexpected that determines events. Just look at the way it’s played out up to this point.

MJ: Can you envision circumstances in which there’s a foreign intervention?

AS: It’s really hard to imagine for me. It’s going to be used as a form of pressure, as a warning, but I think foreign intervention would be a dramatic step in a region that’s very combustible. The very combustibility of this region makes that unlikely.

MJ: You said you went into Syria last year because you didn’t feel the story would be told otherwise. How much of it is getting told now?

AS: More now because more journalists are getting in. That’s for sure. Journalism is always the art of the incomplete. You get bits and pieces. And I think we’re getting more bits and pieces at this point than we were, say, a year ago.

MJ: Is it frustrating to be on the outside looking in?

AS: Yeah, absolutely. I’m desperately looking for a visa. It’s not coming. So far. As a reporter, you want to write about what’s happening in front of you and to not have it happen in front of you is frustrating.

MJ: So what do we know about the Middle East now that we didn’t know a year ago?

AS: I’m not sure we know anything, to be honest with you. It’s still so early. When we talk about the Arab Spring, we’re talking about a region that has for so long lived under the boot of dictatorship, in which civil societies have been obliterated, in which freedom of expression is subversive. And what I saw in Tahrir Square was the counter-example of that. And what I also saw in Syria, in Hama, where for a short period the security forces had withdrawn. Just for the span of a few weeks, in a society that had been ruled by dictatorship for four decades—where there’s hardly any civil society, where there’s no sense of opposition that’s viable—we saw an idea of self-determination as society began to rule itself. That was remarkable to me, just how resilient these societies actually are even after these incredibly withering few generations of oppression. What we’ve seen is the movement against, which is represented by the revolts, but what we’re beginning to see coalesce are the movements for. And what for represents is much more ambiguous.

MJ: So, should we fear the Islamists?

AS: I think what we’re starting to see is the fruition of those trends that began even as early as the 1980s with [Rached] Ghannouchi [in Tunisia], but also in the 1990s with the Wasat Party in Egypt and changes in the Muslim Brotherhood in the decade after. These societies are on the verge of trying to strike some deal in which political Islam forcefully enters the mainstream and becomes a part of the body politic. I think that will yield a healthier society even as the cleavages sharpen between secular and religious, between mainstream Islamists and Salafists. But I think this is going to be a process that all these societies are going have to go through. How the West deals with it, I think, is a much different question. The West’s reaction has tended much more toward anxiety, unease. And in some ways, for this reckoning between political Islam and these societies to succeed, you’re going to need a change in mind—almost a paradigm shift within the West—over how they look at political Islam and whether they can embrace political Islam to try to make this experiment succeed.

MJ: Your discussion of the Levant in House of Stone contains a sense of almost irreversible loss.

AS: In some ways, the history of the Middle East in the last century has been a history of borders—borders that were drawn on the map, often by imperial whim, but also borders in terms of mentalities, as our notions of identity have shrunk. Whatever we thought of those ideologies that held sway a generation ago—say Arab nationalism, communism, Syrian nationalism—they’ve lost their vitality. In their wake, they’ve left smaller identities where we identify ourselves first and foremost by religion and faith. You see a shift from inclusive ideologies to exclusive notions of identity. And that has made for a much smaller Arab world, a much less cosmopolitan Arab world. Marjayoun is a great example: The town itself, which was once very vibrant politically, has become much more affiliated with this simpler, almost visceral, notion of being Christian. And that’s a recurring theme you hear from people in Marjayoun and from other Christians in the Arab world—that when we identify ourselves first and foremost as a minority, we’re almost setting the stage for eventual extinction. Minorities in and of themselves become imbued with a sense of powerlessness.

MJ: Why do you think Lebanon hasn’t experienced the same upheaval as its neighbors?

AS: Proponents of the Lebanese system would say you have a greater degree of freedom of expression here. You have more a sense of individual rights—and that’s not necessarily because of an enlightened government but by virtue of a weak state. Critics, though, would say you’re not dealing with one dictator but many dictators, and these sectarian leaders who play on fears of insecurity keep a stranglehold over the political system in Lebanon. So because they’re so numerous it’s much harder to rally the country against one leader or one source of oppression. I don’t think Lebanon has avoided the Arab Spring because it’s an enlightened place; I think it’s avoided the Arab Spring because the critical mass of how you oppose such an ingrained system with power so diffuse remains unclear.

MJ: Are you more or less optimistic about the Middle East the more you report on it?

AS: I came out of Iraq very pessimistic and dejected in some ways. Egypt, I think, was an antidote; watching what happened with the revolution was quite inspirational. At least what you see now is that there’s a chance for redemption in the region, and that kind of keeps you going as a journalist. What I think you see in so many of these situations are the shades of gray. The more we get away from that either/or, the better I think we understand these countries and the region as a whole. It’s hard to get away from the fact that, whatever you call it—East versus West, America versus the Arab World—these two regions have been in conflict at least for my generation. So in any kind of conflict, you have a certain dehumanization that comes along with it. And it’s important as a reporter, a writer, a journalist, to try to restore humanity.

MJ: You’ve spent a lot of time documenting violent events in godforsaken places. How did you find writing this book, which is much more personal?

AS: I found it difficult. As a journalist, your job is to bear witness, and this book is in part a memoir. It wasn’t easy. It was definitely a different style of writing. On the flip side, I enjoy covering the Arab world, I’ve spent my entire career here in the Middle East, but I would never call myself a war correspondent. The region I want to cover is beset by conflict and that’s regrettable, but it forces me to cover it. Being in Marjayoun for a year, especially coming out of the war in Lebanon in 2006, I was doing what I wanted to do, and that was make sense of society, of people’s lives—very much with the threat of war but in a moment where war didn’t dictate everything that was going on.

MJ: You write in the book about the toll your job has taken on your personal life and your family. Do you have any regrets?

AS: There are a lot of careers you could say that about, but I think especially in journalism trying to balance your personal and professional life is endlessly frustrating. At the end of that war in 2006, I felt the cost of that more than I ever had. My marriage had fallen apart, I was away from my daughter, and I really didn’t have a sense of having a home. And that was what was so important about being in Marjayoun and rebuilding the home. At its most elemental, it was about trying to find home, and in the end, I did. It sounds like propaganda for the book, but it’s actually not. I now consider that house in Marjayoun—how do I put this?—it’s the place where I end up when I’m looking for home.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/01/anthony-shadid-libya-syria-house-of-stone

By Katherine Hall

Younger DePaul students may only know the name “Norman Finkelstein” as a buzzword for a controversy before their time at this university.

It’s a name associated with a debate about the line between free speech and discrimination so heated that students on both sides organized sit-ins and hunger strikes, and resulted in a much-admired professor resigning in 2007 amid claims DePaul had violated its own free speech policies.

But Norman Finkelstein was speaking out long before he ever came to DePaul.

The Princeton-educated son of Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein first drew the attention of the academic community when his dissertation, debunking much of the Pro-Israel book “A Time Immemorial” by historian Joan Peters as false, was published.

Finkelstein went on to write another six books discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and arguing that a “Holocaust industry” had used the tragedy of World War II as “an ideological weapon” to drum up support abroad—both politically and financially—for Israel while also stifling criticism of the Israeli army’s engagements with Palestinians. Finkelstein believed that the Palestinians were now suffering at the hands of the Israeli army in much the same way his own parents suffered at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Finkelstein’s opponents have decried Finkelstein’s pro-Palestine stance (Leon Wieseltier, a literary critic for magazine, The New Republic, called Finkelstein a “disgusting, self-hating Jew” in 2007) and his strident, sometimes aggressive presentation tactics. A clip from his 2009 documentary “American Radical: the Trials of Norman Finkelstein” of Finkelstein lambasting a sobbing female student for her “crocodile tears” went viral on YouTube and only added to his volatile image.

When he was up for tenure at DePaul, the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences personnel committee voted 5-0 and the political science department voted 9-3 in favor of tenure, only to see the decision reversed after a minority report was filed. After several months of dispute, a private settlement was reached, part of which included Finkelstein’s resignation. DePaul acknowledged Finkelstein’s credentials, calling him a “prolific scholar and an outstanding teacher,” and while Finkelstein described the university’s decision as “a bitter blow”, he acknowledged that DePaul had provided “a scholarly haven”.

Of DePaul students, he said they “rose to dazzling spiritual heights in my defense, that should be the envy of and an example for every university in the United States.”

http://www.depauliaonline.com/focus/who-is-norman-finkelstein-1.2747328#.Tx9A0vlaf0R