The disgraced DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein spoke at UC Irvine Wednesday night, affirming the hateful beliefs of an overwhelmingly large audience of Muslim radicals. The speech was insignificantly tedious, albeit Castroian in length and loaded with the obligatory logical fallacies that befall the weakness of argument.

The central theme was the issue of whether criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, but most of Finkelstein's speech was dedicated to defending his own scholarship and pressing one sided and dubious legal charges against the legitimacy of Israel. Though he made an incalculable amount of baseless assertions, I was especially puzzled by the following claims:

1. Israel violated international obligations after achieving 1967 land levels

2. International bodies and human rights organizations are legitimate because of their perceived absence of interest.

3. The recognition and independence of Israel proper in 1948 was an ethnic cleansing campaign of Arab majorities.

4. Israel, not Palestine is a serial human rights abuser.

5. Terror organizations are willing to talk, while Israel plays constant aggressor. I will address all five claims in a series of later posts.

Correspondingly, all five were argued on the premise of the indisputable nature of Finkelstein's claims. This attitude was especially apparent during the Q and A period of his discussion. Though Finkelstein stated that dissenting opinions were welcome, he did not make clear the condition that he would only answer softball questions. So when I took him to task on his speculated appearance to the Holocaust Denial Conference in Tehran, he became especially indignant. But why? After all, he was happy to express solidarity with Iran's proxy Hezbollah. Instead of directly answering the question or even addressing the controversy, Finkelstein tried to berate me with the same ad hominem attacks he usually directed to his former academic counterparts. At first he tried to disarm the question by calling my motives filthy, but as I pressed his answer was finally no, invoking his parent's experience in the Nazi Holocaust. Finkelstein was obviously uncomfortable with the question because it put him on the other side of the ledger from an overly sympathetic audience of Muslim radicals and Holocaust deniers. This is hardly the mark of an honest educator, and yet another example of why he was disgraced from academia in the first place.