The Norman Finkelstein controversy (HarvardCrimson 2)

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Real History

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[Alan M Dershowitz] CHEAP
PLAGIARISER: HARVARD PROFESSOR ALAN M
DERSHOWITZ

ALAN DERSHOWITZ CAST IN
NEW ROLE

Plagiarist and
Fraudster

by Gordon Thomas

PROFESSOR Alan Dershowitz, the darling of the Anti-Defamation
League, the defender of O J
Simpson, Jonathan Pollard and Ariel Sharon, who often speaks like he is the personal representative on earth of Moses, and is a vicious attacker of anyone who dares reproach Israel for the smallest infraction of human rights, is now revealed as a crude plagiarist and a fraudster.

The accusations come from a fellow Jewish professor, Norman
Finkelstein (right).

He is on the faculty of the respected DePaul University and is the author of “The Holocaust Industry”.

In a devastating onslaught on Dershowitz on MSNBC’s prestigious Scarborough Country, Finkelstein slammed the Harvard professor of law for “falsifying information, plagiarising, and lifting from other books and violating the most basic canons of historical scholarship”.

A transcript of the recording (EXCERPTS
BELOW) shows Dershowitz at his blustering best.

A row between two Jewish academics would not usually arouse much interest outside their campus followers.

Dershowitz has written a book “The Case For
Israel” which normally would only find review space in the newsletter of the Anti-Defamation League. Dershowitz is the man whose every word is slavishly recorded by his powerful media contacts.

He is the authentic voice of Right Wing Judaism – some would say extremism – in America.

To challenge him, it has been said, it is best to carry a cross and a piece of garlic for ever after.

He has seen more potential attackers off than there were numbers of the Biblical Gaderene swine.

The New York Times, the pillar of the Jewish establishment in the United States, has lavished his new book with the kind of unstinted praise it once gave to
Jason Blair, the archetypical fraudster who stoked his reporting ego and fooled his readers for many years.

Finkelstein has traduced Dershowitz with the kind of language the Harvard professor usually reserves for anyone who dares challenge him. “There’s only one conclusion one can reach having read the book. Mr Dershowitz has concocted a fraud, which amazingly in large parts he plagiarised from another fraud. I found that pretty shocking, coming from a
Harvard professor. I found it shocking coming from any professor”, Finkelstein told the MSNBC’s Amy Goldman
and her radio audience.

Throwing his own words back at Dershowitz live on air,
Finkelstein slammed the holder of the Felix Frankfurter
Chair of Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School: “There was no extensive historical research. Instead, there was the fraudulent manufacturing of historical anti-history. It was the kind of deception for which professors are rightly fired
– not because their views are controversial, but because they are violating the most basic canons of historical scholarship”.

DERSHOWITZ, now exposed as a master cribber, had levelled the same accusation against a French professor called
[Robert] Faurisson, charging him to be a
“fraud and a holocaust denier”.

Dershowitz could only threaten on the radio programme to sue for defamation. Professor Finkelstein ignored the threat. Instead, he said he had “read the book very carefully. I did what someone serious does with the book. I read the text. I went through the footnotes. I went through it very carefully”.

Then, with the remorseless piling of fact upon fact,
Finkelstein set about destroying the credibility of Alan
Dershowitz.

Central to the accusation of fraud and plagiarism against
Dershowitz is a previous book, From Time Immemorial
by Joan Peters.

Published in 1984, the book was a poorly written polemic that tried to support the old Zionist claim that Israel had
“been a land without people, awaiting people without a land” and that there had been no substantial presence before the
Bible’s wandering Jews arrived.

Once more The New York Times had salivated ecstatically over the book. But Finkelstein had set about demolishing the Peters book. As Finkelstein said: “I read it at least four times. I went through all 1854 footnotes”.

He assumed he would never again have to read the footnotes. But there they were, word for word, in
Dershowitz’s new book. Yet the Peters book gets no mention in the copious index to “The Case For Israel”.
Indeed, the only mention of Peters is on page 31 of
Dershowitz’s book.

He assures his readers that “I do not in any way rely on them in this book”.

Finkelstein cited on air what another writer, the excellent Alexander Cockburn, condemns as “this brazen declaration and wholesale unacknowledged looting of Peters’ research”.

Cockburn goes on: “If Justice Frankfurter had fuelled decisions with this kind of scholarship, he’d have been citing Marvel Comics as useful repositories of case law and precedent.

If, in writings off the bench, he’d (Frankfurter) used the sort of research procedures displayed elsewhere in
Dershowitz’s The Case For Israel, he’d probably have been forced off the Supreme Court for ethical considerations of a sort I imagine Harvard’s president, Lawrence
Summers will soon be pondering in the case of Professor
Dershowitz”.

They make a devastating indictment of his methods.

1. “In the sixteenth century,” Dershowitz remarks on the
   seventeenth page of his book, “according to British
   reports, “as many as 15,000 Jews” lived in Safad, which
   was a “center of rabbinical learning.” Turn now to page
   178 of Ms. Peters’ book: “Safad at that time contained as
   many as 15,000 Jews in the 16th century,” and was “a
   centre of Rabbinical learning.”
2. Dershowitz (page 18): “In 1834, Jewish homes in
   Jerusalem “were sacked and their women violated.”

   Peters
   (page 183): “The Jews were the worst sufferers, their
   homes were sacked and their women violated

3. Dershowitz (page 20): “Nor could the Jew seek
   redress, as the report observed: ‘Like the miserable dog
   without an owner he is kicked by one because he crosses
   his path, and cuffed by another because he cries out – to
   seek redress he is afraid, lest it bring worse upon him;
   he thinks it better to endure than to live in the
   expectation of his complaint being revenged upon him.’

   Peters (page 187: “Like the miserable dog without an
   owner he is kicked by one because he crosses his path,
   and cuffed by another because he cries out – to seek
   redress he is afraid, lest it bring worse upon him; he
   thinks it better to endure than to live in the
   expectation of his complaint being revenged upon
   him.”

4. Dershowitz ( page 26): “A Christian historian has
   reported that several villages throughout Palestine “are
   populated wholly by settlers from other portions of the
   Turkish

   Empire within the nineteenth century. There are
   villages of Bosnians, Druzes, Circassians and Egyptians.”
   Peters (page 156): “In some cases villages [in
   Palestine] are populated wholly by settlers from
   other portions of the Turkish Empire within the
   nineteenth century. There are villages of Bosnians,
   Druzes, Circassians and Egyptians,” one historian has
   reported.

5. Dershowitz (page 26): “Four years later, it was
   reported that “depopulation is even now advancing.”

   Peters (page 159): “In the 1860s, it was reported that
   “depopulation is even now advancing.”

6. Dershowitz (page 27): J.L. Burkhardt [sic]
   reported that as early as in the second decade of the
   nineteenth century, “Few individuals die in the same
   village in which they were born. Families are continually
   moving from one place to another in a few years they fly
   to some other place, where they have heard that their
   brethren are better treated.”

   Peters (163) “Few
   individuals die in the same village in which they were
   born. Families are continually moving from one place to
   another in a few years they fly to some other place,
   where they have heard that their brethren are better
   treated.”

A comment from Cockburn: “Dershowitz plagiarized
Peters, while simultaneously claiming he hadn’t used her for any historical material. One fraud ripping off another, the former at last giving the latter justifiable grounds for arguing maltreatment.”

An excerpt from the MNBC broadcast offers further evidence on how Finkelstein traduced [sic. trashed?] Dershowitz.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I’m referring to your standards. To miseducate, misinform and misdirect to violate the standards of historical scholarship are grounds for expulsion.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Tell you what I will give $10,000 to the
P.L.O. in your name if you can find historical fact in my book that you can prove to be false. I issue that challenge,
I issue it to you, I issue it to the Palestinian Authority,
I issue it to Noam Chomsky, to Edward Said, every word in my book is accurate and you can’t just simply say it’s false without documenting it. Tell me one thing in the book now that is false?

(Later)

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Let’s start. Number one, I’m going to first deal with just concrete facts which are not particularly controversial, which can easily be confirmed.
On page 80 of your book you write, according to Benny
Morris between. . .

AMY GOODMAN: Benny Morris is an Israeli historian.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I have a copy of his book here, which
I’ll hold up. 2,000 to 3,000 Palestinians were made refugees during the second stage of the flight. Here is the book.
Page 256, do you read what the sentence says.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Let me put in the context. Chomsky says that Morris does not believe that any Arab leaders told the
Palestinians to leave. I say, in some areas I quote from
Morris, in some areas Arab commanders ordered . . .

(Later)

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Let’s be serious.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: I agree with you.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Read the next sentence. Morris estimates in your book I have right in front of me. Next sentence.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: That between 2,000 and 3,000 Arabs fled their homes.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Can you please (read) what Mr. Morris wrote.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: You’re talking about . . .

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Please read what he wrote.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: If I have the whole book I will find for you if you want to take time. Norm Finkelstein if you want the . . .

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at page 256 of Morris book.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Phase two now same one as you. You’re talking about . . .

AMY GOODMAN: About 2,000 to 3,000 Arabs fled their homes.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: The difference between 2,000 and
3,000 and 200,000 and 300,000. You could check this many times, Mr. Dershowitz. But you are really going to have to pay the $10,000. I hope you allow me to earmark it for
Jenin.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: We’re talking about a variety of . .
.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: It is not the O.J. trial. This is not the O.J. trial. We’re not going to play a game

Go back
to original article

… previous website items and outlinks on the Israeli torturing of prisoners:

Amnesty
International reports, Israel Supreme Court to Rule on
Torture and Holding of Lebanese Hostages as
Pawns

Human
rights lawyers argue that Israel’s torture of
Palestinians is illegal (but sometimes
necessary)

Lipstadt’s
Witness Bernie Farber is Revealed as

Torture
Apologist

Israeli
torture of Palestinian prisoners seized in the notorious
Khiam prison in southern Lebanon

Israeli
medical association rules it is okay to break fingers of
Palestinian prisoners during interrogation

US
creating torture centers in non-US locations: “It

allows
us to get information from terrorists in a way we can’t
do on US soil.”
[since removed from newspaper
website]

Robert
Fisk reports: Inside an Israeli torturers’ den, manacles
lie abandoned

Danish
opposition to the appointment of Israeli torture chief,
Ambassador Carmi Gillon

Torture
of

children by USA’s closest allies