Fisher 'Did Not Mean to Suggest That'
Press Action
Sunday, December 08, 2002
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand12082002/

Marc Fisher, Metro columnist for the Washington Post, conceded in today?s issue (Dec. 8, 2002) that he was wrong in his Dec. 3 piece to describe author Norman Finkelstein as a writer who is “celebrated by neo-Nazi groups for his Holocaust revisionism.” Offset at the bottom of today?s Metro column, Fisher writes that he “did not intend to suggest that.”

Finkelstein won the retraction after a lot of back-and-forth last week between both Fisher and Washington Post lawyers. “I consider the matter with the Washington Post closed,” Finkelstein told Press Action. On his website, Finkelstein has posted the exchanges between the two sides, which concluded with this letter from a Post attorney:

Dec. 6, 2002

Dear Mr. Finkelstein:

I apologize for injecting yet another Washington Post person into the discussions about Marc Fisher’s column, but my colleague, Eric Lieberman, is out of the office today, and we didn’t want to wait for his return before responding further. We have no objection to clarifying the point that seems to be at issue in these discussions and would propose to publish the following language:

“In Tuesday’s column about academic freedom, I mentioned writer Norman Finkelstein, who lectured recently at Georgetown University. Although neo-Nazi groups have cited his work in support of their theories, Finkelstein has never denied the existence of the Holocaust, and I did not intend to suggest that.”

I would be glad to take steps to get that into the paper as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

Mary Ann Werner
Vice President & Counsel
The Washington Post


In a Dec. 4 letter to Fisher as part of the exchange, Finkelstein wrote: “I stated that the claim that I am a Holocaust revisionist means that I doubt whether my late parents endured the Nazi death camps and that their respective families were gassed to death. You stated that this isn’t what you meant by Holocaust revisionism but rather that I was revising the conventional understanding of the Nazi holocaust.”

Holocaust Revisionism entered the vocabulary of discourse about 25 years ago as a pejorative describing a school of thought that espouses the beliefs that Hitler and his lieutenants did not draw up plans for the systematic killing of Europe’s Jewish population and that the internment camps set up by the Nazis in Germany and its occupied lands during the Second World War did not contain gas chambers used for the mass killing of Europe’s Jews.

That Fisher would equate Finkelstein’s analysis of the “exploitation of Jewish suffering” during the Nazi holocaust with the “Holocaust-is-a-hoax” school of thought reveals either a lack of understanding of current issues or an indication that he has bought into the notion that any sort of criticism of Israel or the conduct of Jewish groups is anti-Semitic.

Of course, though, the real Holocaust Revisionists and their fellow travelers have been targeted by governments seeking to censor them, imprison them or deport them for stating their opinions about the intention of the Nazis. These cases have attracted the attention of many around world who support the concept of freedom of expression, even for speech that they may abhor.

Perhaps the most famous case is France’s Robert Faurisson who was brought to trial by a Paris court for “falsification of history” because he had written that the Nazis’ use of gas chambers at Auschwitz was a myth. Noam Chomsky and hundreds of others signed a petition urging Faurisson’s civil rights be respected. Faurisson wrote a book on the case published in 1980 entitled Memoir in Defense Against Those Who Accuse Me of Falsifying History. Faurisson used a letter written by Chomsky expressing elementary principles on freedom of speech as a foreword for his book.

In its Dec. 7 issue, the Post published two letters to the editor criticizing Fisher’s Dec. 3 column, one of which was from Georgetown University Professor Hisham Sharabi, a target for Fisher’s criticism. In his letter, Sharabi said his comments that were quoted in Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper and then cited by Fisher “were intended to underscore the urgency within the Arab world to respond to issues that hinder progress in the region. ... It is unfortunate that these points were not highlighted, as they were the crux of my presentation. Instead, proponents of Israel once again distract us from core issues and legitimate criticisms of Israel by crying anti-Semitism.”

Here are a couple of letters that were sent to Marc Fisher commenting on his Dec. 4 column and then forwarded to Press Action:

Dec. 8, 2002

Dear Mr. Fisher:

I am glad to see that you wrote in your column today: “In Tuesday’s column about academic freedom, I mentioned writer Norman Finkelstein, who lectured recently at Georgetown University. Although neo-Nazi groups have cited his work in support of their theories, Finkelstein has never denied the existence of the Holocaust, and I did not intend to suggest that.” It would be much more appropriate if you had issued a real apology to Professor Finkelstein especially since he is a critic of the exploitation of Nazi holocaust. It is also quite wrong to smear anyone. I found it particularly distasteful when the attempt was made to accuse Finkelstein of Holocaust revisionism. I am sure if the readers of the Post knew that Finkelstein is the son of survivors of the Nazi holocaust, that his scholarly work has been guided by his parents’ legacy and that his research seeks to restore the scholarly study of the Nazi holocaust and free it from the shackles of frauds and hypocrites, they too would have been deeply shocked.

I am particularly intrigued as to why you had chosen to do this in the first place since you should be aware of the facts. Your short biography in the Washington Post states that you are the author of “After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History,” published in 1995 by Simon and Schuster. I have not read your book, but I take it that as an educated person and a columnist for the Washington Post you have some interest in history and facts. You might want to have a look at my review of Norman Finkelstein’s book. My review appeared in Z magazine.

Of course, reading a review is no substitute for reading the book. I urge to you read Finkelstein’s book, if you have not done so already. In your retraction you mentioned nothing about Professor Sharabi, whose letter appeared in the Post. Professor Sharabi clearly states in his letter to the editor that he “was referring to Israel as a political entity, not the Jewish people.” He also states that you quoted him out of context.

Sincerely,

Tanweer Akram


Dec. 4, 2002

Dear Mr. Fisher,

I read your article today about a very dear man to me and saw him reduced to nothing more than a vile racist by your piece. Dr. Hisham Sharabi deserves far better.

You quote Dr. Sharabi as having said to the Daily Star, “Jews are getting ready to take control of us, and the Americans have entered the region to possess the oil resources and redraw the geopolitical map.” Surely you cannot object to him offering his political view about American intentions in the Gulf. Is it then the statement about Jews? Would you have preferred he say “Israelis”? I don’t know for sure but I suspect that Dr. Sharabi would have a problem with saying Israelis because not all Israelis are Jewish. Many are Palestinians. He is specifically concerned about what some Jews from Israel are doing.

Despite the fact that Israeli Jews (recent Russian immigrants in fact) live in his stolen home in Haifa this is not a man reduced to racist inveighing against Jews. If you hear him talk you will know that his real sentiment regards what some Jews from Israel are doing and not all. In fact, he has opened the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine to Muslims, Jews, Christians, and others to talk about the problems of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Very few have done as much as he has to get Muslims, Jews, and Christians together to talk about an historic injustice done to the Palestinians and yet this was entirely ignored by your piece.

The efforts of people such as yourself to equate all criticism of Sharon and Israeli actions with anti-Semitism is clearly an effort to intimidate good people into silence. You expressed some awareness of this at the end of your piece. Opposing Israeli actions is not the same as anti-Semitism. Yet there are Christian bigots who are pro-Israel in their politics and anti-Jewish in their theology who receive no such criticism or very little.

I hope you will take the time to speak to those who know Dr. Sharabi — people of all faiths — and that you will have the courage to issue a retraction and fuller picture of who Dr. Sharabi is at some point in the near future. You have jumped to a conclusion that I believe cannot be substantiated by the facts. Anti-Semitism is vile and should be criticized, but I believe you will find if you really look into it that Dr. Sharabi is no bigot. Indeed, you should find that he is precisely the opposite—a man of conscience who has been dealt enormous blows in his lifetime yet has not been reduced to the zealotry of a racist. You might even begin to admire this man if you talk to him and those who know him.

I ask at the very least that you consider that you got this one wrong.

I do not know Halim Barakat or Norman Finkelstein well but suspect that they are staunch opponents of racism and greatly grieved that you would mistake their political beliefs against the Israeli occupation for anti-Semitism.

As for your comment that donations from Middle Eastern donors taint Georgetown programs, I think this shows your own biases. Do you mean to tell us that all Arabs and Muslims living in the Middle East and their contributions are out of bounds? On what grounds? Are all of them terrorists in your mind? If not, this needs much greater elaboration as to what precisely you were trying to say.

Sincerely,

Michael Brown
Baltimore, Md.

-- Mark Hand