It seemed like something was going to happen in the hubbub filling Roone Arledge Auditorium a few hours ago, just before Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, started his speech. Two hours in, Finkelstein is still going, after saying at least 15 times that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is completely uncontroversial and taking jabs at academics from Alan Dershowitz to Lee Bollinger.

Referring to PrezBo’s statement that the analogy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to South African apartheid is “grotesque and offensive,” Finkelstein said, “It’s a sad day for a great institution when its president subjugates the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of fundraising.” Huge applause from certain sections of the audience. “Not to say that he’s the only one, but Larry Summers lost his job.”

More Fink quotes after the jump.

“I’m in awe of the Butler Stacks. Although I’m afraid of what a perverted professor might do there.”

On Elie Weisel’s Peace Prize: “Why he got it, nobody knows.” Boos from the audience. “I guess somebody does know.”

On the night he discovered that Joan Peters had fabricated much of her book, From Time Immemorial: “I didn’t know who to call, but I am Jewish, so I called my mother.”

“The only difference between Israel’s and Hamas’ terrorism is that Israel is three times as lethal…Hamas sometimes talks about destroying the Jewish state, but Israel is in practice dismantling and destroying the Palestinian state.”

“It’s only a matter of time before ‘holocaust denier’ enters the Dictionary of American Slang as a synonym for the F word. Like ‘Holocaust you’ or ‘Mother Holocauster.'”

“You can’t be anti-anything on a college campus…you can’t even be anti-downright-ugly on a college campus.”