Today’s generic headline from Chi Trib: “Justice delayed, perhaps not denied.” The copy eds have a list. This one comes in the j’s.
When is a coup not a coup? . . . Liz Sly has a Baghdad “coup” looming as “Iraq’s best hope”:
an assortment of Iraqi politicians has been spending the summer vacation plotting a new Iraqi coup — a non-violent, parliamentary coup to be sure, but a coup nonetheless, that would oust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, declare a state of emergency and install a new government.
But how a coup when parliamentary?
According to [prospective new head of govt.] Allawi’s published program, the parliamentarians would not only appoint a new government but also suspend the new constitution, declare a state of emergency and make the restoration of security its priority.
A Sunni politico is cited as saying incumbent prime minister
al-Maliki’s failure thus far to deliver on almost all the key measures of progress set forth by the Bush administration and evidence that his coalition is falling apart suggest Washington may soon have to explore alternatives,
He’s the source of the “coup” desegnation, apparently:
“The Americans finally will support us because they don’t have another solution,” he said . . . . If all these things don’t work out, it is the people who will make a coup. They will rise up, and there will be a coup all over Iraq.”
So the story repaid reading, but no thanks to those early ‘graphs. I say the foreign correspondent can use help from the home desk, from editors.
Where are the yea-sayers? . . . . Could not Dave Newbart have asked for some defense of the tenure-deniers in the DePaul-Finkelstein case beyond the official spokesman (oops, spokeswoman), whose hands are officially tied in such cases. There ought to be some cool head on (or off) campus who can be trusted for at least a paragraph.
A teacher is quoted — dissidents always are available — calling the tenure denial “outrageous,” which by now has lost its sting, except she added “absolutely.”
He does have sources saying DePaul
cited alleged [sic: why not simply “alleged” as verb?] confrontations between Finkelstein and an administrator and some faculty members who opposed his tenure bid as reasons not to allow him back.
That’s back for a final year of teaching sans tenure, not about tenure denial in itself. In fact, searching discovers no Sun-Times article or column detailing the case against Finkelstein. A June 12 letter is all there is. The rest is protest and the anti-Israel accusation, which tenure-deniers would argue is beside the point.
The letter mentions a letter to Finkelstein by the tenure reviewers:
have long found your reporting and editorial page reliable and fair. I was surprised that your [June 9] news article on the denial of tenure at DePaul University to Norm Finkelstein was lacking in context. Denial of tenure is a very rare occurrence. In this case, DePaul had a range of reasons (outlined in their letter to Finkelstein) to issue such a denial.
His faulty scholarship was the prime reason for DePaul’s rejection, since reputable scholarship is one of the prime reasons universities exist. Finkelstein‘s failures in this regard are well-known (and notorious); however, the article seemed to depict him as the victim of a vendetta from forces outside the university angered by his anti-Israel positions and the notoriety he has generated for his revisionism regarding the Holocaust. The letter from DePaul to him expressly rejected these as reasons behind denial of tenure.
He is not a victim of his politics; he victimized himself by failing to abide by the precepts of his profession.
Ed Lasky,
Northbrook
If this letter is quoted anywhere in S-T, it’s not clear from headlines, whose stories seem geared to the protestors’ viewpoint. Do S-T and Newbart lean that way?
Blithe Spirit 