Free To Spout Hate Propaganda

"[Finkelstein has] shamefully spent his academic career minimizing the impact of the Holocaust, calling those who have sought restitution 'cheats' and 'greedy'."
"[His invitation to speak at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus is] shocking and deeply disturbing."
Jody Zelikovitz, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs

"There's a war against the Jewish people, essentially. It's been raging on university campuses for 18 years [since the origin of Israeli Apartheid Week, usually held in February or March]."
"This is another spike."
"He is part of that problem [of rising anti-Semitism] on university campuses."
Avi Benlolo, CEO, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies

"From the beginning I was rather skeptical of that explanation [that the motive of the Gaza war was the then-upcoming election in Israel]. It's true that there is, you know, it is a factor, the jockeying for votes, in a Sparta-like society consumed by revenge, the thirst for blood and where killing Arabs is a sure crowd-pleaser."
"There's no doubt that that factor played its part in the motive behind the war, the massacre [purportedly of innocent Gazan civilians by barbaric Israeli military, with no mention of civilians being used as human shields by Hamas as they fired off rockets from the midst of civilian enclaves and stored explosives and ammunition in schools]."
Pro-Palestinian activist, Norman Finkelstein, former academic, author, hate-monger

Pro-Palestinian activist Norman Finkelstein is arrested outside UN headquarters in New York, July 29, 2014, during a rally against Israeli strikes on Gaza strip.Lewaa Khalek/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

This is essentially a very troubled man in the sense that he appears pathologically averse to his parents' experience as Holocaust survivors, resentful to the point of damning them and all Jews who underwent the horrific experience of the Holocaust, surviving it, and living with the torment of what they experienced. This man's abhorrence of his parents and their tribulations beset by a trial that would annihilate six million men, women and children of Jewish heritage, has transferred itself to Judaism and the State of Israel.

So coloured is his detestation of Israel as the overwhelming symbol of Jewish resistance to genocide that he sets aside as trifling the struggle of a Jewish state to defend itself and its population from the savage and existential threat of its neighbours. No consistent and ongoing assaults on Jews in Israel by Hamas and Fatah who celebrate the 'martyrdom' of recruits deliberately sacrificing themselves in the greater interests of speeding the destruction of the Jewish state are noticeable by this man who vastly prefers his conspiracy theories about Jewish intransigence and murderous intent respecting Arabs.

The numerous deadly wars forced on Israel by its neighbours combining their armies to defeat a single, small state in their midst are insignificant since obviously they have been provoked by the very presence of Israel. The fact that an almost-equal number of Jews were expelled from Arab countries where they historically lived during the diaspora years numbering 800,000 as opposed to the 600,000 estimated to have been ordered to leave by the incoming state in 1948 and by the invading Arab armies who assured them they would return to an 'unoccupied' Palestine is also irrelevant to him.

The University's Association of Palestinian Students invited this man who has long defended their 'rights' and preferred a blood libel against Jews. Nothing serves to dissuade him from his path of denouncing Israel as an invader-occupier of historically Jewish ancestral lands, and the persecutor of innocent Arabs forced out of their 'indigenous' homeland, once historically referred to as Judea and as Palestine denoting its Jewish heritage and presence, but reworked latterly as Arab 'Palestine', the ancestral home of Arabs from Egypt and what is now known as Jordan.

Norman Finkelstein is a prolific author of books he writes to delegitimize Israel: the Holocaust, and the Jewish experience. The list is impressive; The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Beyond Chutzpah, On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism, and the Abuse of History, and finally, A Farewell to Israel. He is persona non-grata in Israel. As he is now in most academic institutions in the United States where he was once a professor of political science at DePaul University in Chicago; denied tenure in 2007.

His talk is to take place at the Robert Gillespie Academic Skills Centre at University of Toronto, Mississauga. The province of Ontario under a new Conservative government follows a new law that campuses must accept free speech; universities must enforce freedom of expression on campus to "a minimum standard prescribed by government". And so the speech, with the expectation that it will be as vilifying of Israel and the Holocaust and Jews as ever, will proceed. The director of the Centre, Tyler Evans, however, has seen that the centre's name has been removed from the lecture's promotional material.

It is clear that it neither supports nor endorses the event, refusing permission for its name to be used in connection with the lecture. The poster in question describes the speaker as "a political scientist who specializes in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Holocaust". And the tickets are sold out. Norman Finkelstein was deported and banned for a ten-year period from Israel as a result of his interaction with Hezbollah, the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese terrorist militia on Canada's terrorist group list.

When Chicago's DePaul University denied him tenure it was directly linked to his solidarity with Hezbollah during the 2006 war in Lebanon. Earlier, when the newly-formed Hezbollah under the direction of Iran's al-Quds Republican Guards had bombed an American military peacekeeping base in Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. servicemen in 1983. Hezbollah has since then gone on to perform many more feats of heroism, among them aiding and abetting Syria's bloody tyrant in his bid to destroy Syria's Sunni population, killing a half million during the civil war, and displacing tens of millions from their homes.

US Marines searching for victims in Beirut eight days after an attack that killed 241 American service members on October 23, 1983.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has stated on record: "no one in academe will give him another job -- not even as an adjunct [professor]". Mr Finkelstein has spoken at UTM on an earlier occasion, in 2009, on the war in Gaza, then in its final week. He addressed speculation otherwise known as conspiracy theories that the Gaza war was occasioned by an election, to gain votes, having nothing to do with the thousands of rockets that kept erupting from Gaza into Israel and terrifying Israeli citizens in places like Sderot, where the residents have a minute or so from when the sirens go off to get into shelters.