Hero of the Day: Dr. Norman Finkelstein

Today's featured hero of the day is political theorist and radical academic, Dr. Norman Finkelstein.

This is a man did not let anything or anyone get in the way of his quest to expose the lies and fake discourses of the Zionist political agenda, concealed and cloaked behind the respectability of "academic" scholarship. Finkelstein was your run-of-the-mill superstar academic, having obtained his PhD from Princeton (an Ivy League university, to the uninitiated) and having served in various academic roles at institutions of similar prestige.

He is well known within radical activist circles as a trenchant, outspoken and passionate critic of Zionism, or an international political movement towards the formation of an Israeli-controlled State within the region of Palestine (an area continuously settled by Palestinian indigenous people for centuries).

He's a non-Zionist Jewish, whose parents were both sole survivors of concentration camps in Warsaw and Auschwitz (the rest of their family having perished in the camps), and most famously rebutted students at the University of Waterloo for throwing the "Auschwitz argument" used in defence of Israeli zionism, infamously berating a student for shedding "crocodile tears" when she protested that his position was offensive to Jews and others in the audience.



So some documentarians decided to make a movie about this amazingly brilliant and brave scholar - who put his ass on the line to expose other academics for deliberately fabricating hoaxes about the Holocaust (ostensibly because these academics were being funded by Zionist backers and hence had an interest in biasing the facts). For his valiant efforts (for whom Noam Chomsky tried to warn him against), he was pretty much destroyed by the wider academic community, who tried to discredit him and got him outed from his tenure and position as a university professor.

I think that Israel clearly has a lot to answer for in the way they have oppressed, exploited and killed Palestinian people on Palestinian land. The Israeli state consistently uses "national security" (never mind that the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory being dubious at best) and so-called "anti-semitism" as to silence criics of their pre-emptive, unmeditated attacks on Palestinians and their settlements, for the forced evictions and removal of Palestinians from their own homes.

I also cannot get past how the state has constructed the whole fake discourse of "security", in constructing a "us" (the civilised Israelis) against "them" (the savage, crazed Islamist terrorists) paradigm to continue blinding the masses to the real suffering of the Palestinians as a result of Israeli occupation policies.

I think the adage one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter holds true when speaking about Palestinians taking arms against Israelis. As Dr. Finkelstein said in his introduction to this speech:



"when you cage people into a ghetto, deprive them of food, of medicine, of water, when you deprive them of work, when you then bomb them, and then incinerate them and spray neighbourhoods with white phosphorus, you really don't need Mickey Mouse to teach them to hate Israel".

Good man. My hero of the day.


OK, rant over - better get back to study!