4.2.12 WC: 191694 failed academic who had been fired from several universities, to obtain tenure at De Paul University. Finkelstein had never published any scholarship. Moreover, he had been dismissed by Brooklyn College for abusing students who disagreed with his extremist views and had engaged in sexist behavior at DePaul. Not exactly a strong record for tenure. But he had something going for him. He was so vitriolically anti-Israel, that he had many radical supporters who cared more about his politics than his scholarship. He also argued that most people who claim to be victims of the Holocaust—including Elie Wiesel—were “frauds” and “liars” and that the Holocaust itself was being exaggerated for political and financial reasons. By falsely claiming that those opposed to his tenure were motivated by his political views on Israel and the Holocaust, rather than his lack of scholarship, he hoped to bestow on himself the mantle of victimhood to a conspiracy of Zionist-McCarthyites. I exposed his tactic in the Wall Street Journal by comparing it to the ploy used by Mary McCarthy’ fictionalized failed academic who, realizing he wouldn’t get tenure, became a communist so that he could claim that he was being denied tenure because he was a Red rather than a lousy scholar: “Facing tenure denial, Mr. Finkelstein opted for a tactic that fit the times. He expressed views so ad hominem, unscholarly and extreme that he could claim the decision was being made not on the basis of his scholarship, but rather on his politics.”** °> Mr. Finkelstein is supported by hard-leftists like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn. They regard him as a scholar in a class with Ward Churchill. He’s the Colorado professor who called the 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns” comparing Finkelstein to Churchill is a characterization with which I would not quarrel. Mr. Finkelstein does not do “scholarship” in any meaningful sense. Although his writings center on Israel (which he compares to Nazi Germany) and