Glenn Greenwald on deportation of Norman Finkelstein
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4192 Greenwald
On Friday, Israeli security forces, Shin Bet, detained Norman http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1661, the son of a Holocaust survivor, is a Jewish American author and academic who has frequently criticized the Israeli Government and provoked extreme animosity among right-wing factions in the U.S. He had flown to Israel 15 times previously without incident and was never charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime.
This morning, I interviewed Finkelstein regarding this episode and related issues. I also interviewed Harvard Law Professor Alan http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1717, whose animosity towards Finkelstein is intense and long-standing. Dershowitz, to his credit (and, given the below-described events, somewhat ironically) was quite critical of Israel’s exclusion of Finkelstein.
This morning, the Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, published an Editorial emphatically criticizing the government’s exclusion of Finkelstein, rejecting the notion that Finkelstein posed any remote security threat and noting: “Considering his unusual and extremely critical views, one cannot avoid the suspicion that refusing to allow him to enter Israel was a punishment rather than a precaution.” Haaretz further highlighted the danger of allowing the Government to suppress viewpoints it dislikes:
“[The right of Israeli citizens to hear unusual views is one that should be fought for. It is not for the government to decide which views should be heard here and which ones should not.
The decision to ban Finkelstein hurts us more than it hurts him.”
Beyond the obvious significance of the story itself (one which has been written about extensively in the foreign press, including Europe, but which is missing almost completely from the American media), this episode is part of a very disturbing trend whereby advocates of right-wing Israeli policies try to suppress viewpoints that deviate from their orthodoxies.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/27/finkelstein/index.html