Supporting academic freedom means uniting under a common cause:
Academics sympathetic to Norman Finkelstein, including “The Israel Lobby” authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, will gather to protest his firing.
The Oct. 12 protest at the University of Chicago, Mearsheimer’s employer, will include Tony Judt and Noam Chomsky, academics who like Finkelstein claim that pro-Israel voices have tried to silence them.
“The Israel Lobby,” alleging undue pro-Israel influence on U.S. foreign policy, appears in bookstores next week.
DePaul University fired Finkelstein last year, saying his vituperative attacks on Israel and its supporters were not in line with its Franciscan principles of respect for others. Its officials denied that a campaign led by Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard University law professor, played a role in the firing.
Among the protest organizers is a student group at DePaul called the Academic Freedom Committee, which says it is trying to to preserve academic freedom on campus.
Predictably, the Jewish community has either remained silent in the face of unprecedented attacks against Finkelstein or supported the attempts to isolate him.
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