****en jews ...
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http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4768
Puni****ng Dissent
Freedom; Posted on: 2008-05-28
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Glenn Greenwald on de****tation of Norman Finkelstein
Glenn Greenwald
On Friday, Israeli security forces, ****n Bet, detained Norman Finkelstein
when
he tried to enter Israel, kept him in an air****t holding cell for 24
hours,
ordered him de****ted from the country, and then imposed a 10-year ban on
his
entry. Finkelstein, 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 Dershowitz, 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:
"[T]he 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.
Continue
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/27/finkelstein/index.html
News Source: salon
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