On Norman Finkelstein
yosi
NYC Posts: 3,069
Since Norman Finkelstein seems to appear a lot on this forum, I thought I might post the review of his sole major book "The Holocaust Industry," from the NY Times. People should know the quality of the sources they are being fed.
NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN first gained a national reputation with his essay, ''Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis,'' included in the book he wrote with Ruth Bettina Birn, ''A Nation on Trial.'' Much of the essay was a brilliant dissection of Goldhagen's book, ''Hitler's Willing Executioners.'' Its last section, however, revealed Finkelstein undergoing a bizarre metamorphosis, in which he employed the same dubious rhetoric and faulty logic he had identified in Goldhagen's work in order to propound his own, even ''crazier,'' thesis on the dark forces lurking, to his mind, behind his adversary's success.
Now Finkelstein is back, with a vengeance, a lone ranger with a holy mission -- to unmask an evil Judeo-Zionist conspiracy. The main argument in ''The Holocaust Industry'' is based on a simple distinction between two phenomena: the Nazi Holocaust and ''The Holocaust,'' which he defines as ''an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust.'' The author has little interest in the former, though he readily acknowledges that it happened, since both his parents survived its horrors and since some of the few historians he respects, notably Raul Hilberg, have written on it.
But in one of those strange inversions that characterize his book, Finkelstein speaks of the historical event with the same kind of awe, and demands the same sort of silent incomprehension, that he ascribes to his main foe, Elie Wiesel. In order ''to truly learn from the Nazi holocaust,'' he asserts, ''its physical dimension must be reduced and its moral dimension expanded.'' Whatever that might mean, it comes as no surprise that his views about the origins, nature and implications of the genocide of the Jews are but a series of vague, undocumented and contradictory assertions. Thus, for instance, in one place he writes that the ''historical evidence for a murderous gentile impulse is nil,'' and rejects the notion that there might have been an ''abandonment of the Jews'' by the United States government. But in another place he charges that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ''mutes the Christian background to European anti-Semitism'' and ''downplays the discriminatory U.S. immigration quotas before the war,'' and then goes on to cite approvingly David S. Wyman's book, ''The Abandonment of the Jews.''
But what really interests Finkelstein is ''The Holocaust.'' The gist of his argument is simple: Had the Jews and the Zionists not had the Holocaust already, they would have had to invent it. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, this is precisely what they have done, in the form of ''The Holocaust,'' despite the distracting fact that, once upon a time, such an event actually took place. And why was ''The Holocaust'' fabricated? Because it legitimizes ''one of the world's most formidable military powers,'' Israel, allowing it to ''cast itself as a 'victim' state,'' and because it provides ''the most successful ethnic group in the United States,'' the Jews, with ''immunity to criticism,'' leading to ''the moral corruptions that typically attend'' such immunity.
Finkelstein views himself as innocent of any desire to exploit ''The Holocaust'' for his own ends, unlike his apparently countless enemies. The fact that his sensational ''revelations'' and outrageous accusations draw a great deal of public and media attention is no fault of his own. Nor is his vehement anti-Zionism and seething hatred of what he perceives as a corrupt Jewish leadership in the United States anything but a reflection of a reality that only he can perceive through the clouds of mystification and demagogy that have deceived thousands of lay persons, scholars, and intellectuals. From his Mount Sinai, everything is clear and obvious. It's just that his voice is too faint to be heard in the valley.
The main culprit, in the world according to Finkelstein, is ''the Holocaust industry,'' made up of Israeli officials and fat lawyers, Jewish agents well placed in American political circles and ruthless Zionists determined to subjugate the Palestinians. Here he combines an old-hat 1960's view of Israel as the outpost of American imperialism with a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'' which warned of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Now, however, the Jewish conspiracy is intended to ''shake down'' (his favorite phrase) such innocent entities as Swiss banks, German corporations and East European owners of looted Jewish property, all in order to consolidate Jewish power and influence without giving the real survivors of the genocide anything but empty rhetoric.
Nowhere does Finkelstein mention that the main beneficiaries of compensation for forced labor will be elderly gentile men and women living their last days in poverty in Eastern Europe, or that German scholars like Ulrich Herbert, hardly an employee of ''Jewish interests,'' have been at the forefront of the struggle to gain compensation from corporations that for decades refused to admit their enormous gains from slave and forced labor. From the author's perspective, this is simply a case of organized American Jewry ''lording it over those least able to defend themselves,'' such as, presumably, the Swiss banks it was ''plotting'' to boycott, and ''the United States and its allies'' from whom it ''finagled another $70 million.''
Thus have the great powers of the world capitulated to what The Times of London called the ''Holocash'' campaign in the United States, according to Finkelstein. He reserves special contempt for the Claims Conference, an umbrella of Jewish organizations that distributes reparations funds to survivors, and quotes approvingly the right-wing Israeli Parliament member Michael Kleiner, who called the conference ''a Judenrat, carrying on the Nazis' work in different ways.'' Indeed, as Finkelstein says in another context, les extrmes se touchent: in denouncing the ''shakedown'' of German corporations, this left-wing anti-Zionist uses precisely the kind of rhetoric that Menachem Begin employed when he spoke out against taking ''blood money'' during the right-wing riots against the restitution agreement with West Germany in the early 1950's, which almost toppled the Israeli government.
There is something sad in this warping of intelligence, and in this perversion of moral indignation. There is also something indecent about it, something juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid. As was shown in Peter Novick's far more balanced (though not entirely satisfactory) book, ''The Holocaust in American Life,'' the changing perception of the Nazi genocide of the Jews has also opened the way for a variety of exploiters and small-time opportunists. Yet to make this into an international Jewish conspiracy verges on paranoia and would serve anti-Semites around the world much better than any lawyer's exorbitant fees for ''shaking down'' a German industrialist.
Finkelstein speaks of the ''Holocaust industry'' as ''cloaking itself in the sanctimonious mantle of 'needy Holocaust victims.' ''Yet he cloaks himself in that very same mantle, while at the same time showing little sympathy for the feelings of the survivors and enormous zeal in exposing the ''reckless and ruthless abandon'' of the ''Holocaust industry,'' which he calls ''the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe.'' By its ''blackmailing of Swiss bankers and German industrialists,'' as well as of ''starving Polish peasants,'' the ''Holocaust industry'' seeks endlessly to augment that pile of gold, or ''Holocaust booty,'' on which Jewish and Zionist leaders are now allegedly sitting. ''The Holocaust,'' Finkelstein concludes, is possibly ''the greatest robbery in the history of mankind.''
What I find so striking about ''The Holocaust Industry'' is that it is almost an exact copy of the arguments it seeks to expose. It is filled with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current media hype over the Holocaust; it is brimming with the same indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics and dubious contextualizations; and it oozes with the same smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority.
This book is, in a word, an ideological fanatic's view of other people's opportunism, by a writer so reckless and ruthless in his attacks that he is prepared to defend his own enemies, the bastions of Western capitalism, and to warn that ''The Holocaust'' will stir up an anti-Semitism whose significance he otherwise discounts. Like any conspiracy theory, it contains several grains of truth; and like any such theory, it is both irrational and insidious. Finkelstein can now be said to have founded a Holocaust industry of his own.
NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN first gained a national reputation with his essay, ''Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 'Crazy' Thesis,'' included in the book he wrote with Ruth Bettina Birn, ''A Nation on Trial.'' Much of the essay was a brilliant dissection of Goldhagen's book, ''Hitler's Willing Executioners.'' Its last section, however, revealed Finkelstein undergoing a bizarre metamorphosis, in which he employed the same dubious rhetoric and faulty logic he had identified in Goldhagen's work in order to propound his own, even ''crazier,'' thesis on the dark forces lurking, to his mind, behind his adversary's success.
Now Finkelstein is back, with a vengeance, a lone ranger with a holy mission -- to unmask an evil Judeo-Zionist conspiracy. The main argument in ''The Holocaust Industry'' is based on a simple distinction between two phenomena: the Nazi Holocaust and ''The Holocaust,'' which he defines as ''an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust.'' The author has little interest in the former, though he readily acknowledges that it happened, since both his parents survived its horrors and since some of the few historians he respects, notably Raul Hilberg, have written on it.
But in one of those strange inversions that characterize his book, Finkelstein speaks of the historical event with the same kind of awe, and demands the same sort of silent incomprehension, that he ascribes to his main foe, Elie Wiesel. In order ''to truly learn from the Nazi holocaust,'' he asserts, ''its physical dimension must be reduced and its moral dimension expanded.'' Whatever that might mean, it comes as no surprise that his views about the origins, nature and implications of the genocide of the Jews are but a series of vague, undocumented and contradictory assertions. Thus, for instance, in one place he writes that the ''historical evidence for a murderous gentile impulse is nil,'' and rejects the notion that there might have been an ''abandonment of the Jews'' by the United States government. But in another place he charges that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ''mutes the Christian background to European anti-Semitism'' and ''downplays the discriminatory U.S. immigration quotas before the war,'' and then goes on to cite approvingly David S. Wyman's book, ''The Abandonment of the Jews.''
But what really interests Finkelstein is ''The Holocaust.'' The gist of his argument is simple: Had the Jews and the Zionists not had the Holocaust already, they would have had to invent it. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, this is precisely what they have done, in the form of ''The Holocaust,'' despite the distracting fact that, once upon a time, such an event actually took place. And why was ''The Holocaust'' fabricated? Because it legitimizes ''one of the world's most formidable military powers,'' Israel, allowing it to ''cast itself as a 'victim' state,'' and because it provides ''the most successful ethnic group in the United States,'' the Jews, with ''immunity to criticism,'' leading to ''the moral corruptions that typically attend'' such immunity.
Finkelstein views himself as innocent of any desire to exploit ''The Holocaust'' for his own ends, unlike his apparently countless enemies. The fact that his sensational ''revelations'' and outrageous accusations draw a great deal of public and media attention is no fault of his own. Nor is his vehement anti-Zionism and seething hatred of what he perceives as a corrupt Jewish leadership in the United States anything but a reflection of a reality that only he can perceive through the clouds of mystification and demagogy that have deceived thousands of lay persons, scholars, and intellectuals. From his Mount Sinai, everything is clear and obvious. It's just that his voice is too faint to be heard in the valley.
The main culprit, in the world according to Finkelstein, is ''the Holocaust industry,'' made up of Israeli officials and fat lawyers, Jewish agents well placed in American political circles and ruthless Zionists determined to subjugate the Palestinians. Here he combines an old-hat 1960's view of Israel as the outpost of American imperialism with a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'' which warned of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Now, however, the Jewish conspiracy is intended to ''shake down'' (his favorite phrase) such innocent entities as Swiss banks, German corporations and East European owners of looted Jewish property, all in order to consolidate Jewish power and influence without giving the real survivors of the genocide anything but empty rhetoric.
Nowhere does Finkelstein mention that the main beneficiaries of compensation for forced labor will be elderly gentile men and women living their last days in poverty in Eastern Europe, or that German scholars like Ulrich Herbert, hardly an employee of ''Jewish interests,'' have been at the forefront of the struggle to gain compensation from corporations that for decades refused to admit their enormous gains from slave and forced labor. From the author's perspective, this is simply a case of organized American Jewry ''lording it over those least able to defend themselves,'' such as, presumably, the Swiss banks it was ''plotting'' to boycott, and ''the United States and its allies'' from whom it ''finagled another $70 million.''
Thus have the great powers of the world capitulated to what The Times of London called the ''Holocash'' campaign in the United States, according to Finkelstein. He reserves special contempt for the Claims Conference, an umbrella of Jewish organizations that distributes reparations funds to survivors, and quotes approvingly the right-wing Israeli Parliament member Michael Kleiner, who called the conference ''a Judenrat, carrying on the Nazis' work in different ways.'' Indeed, as Finkelstein says in another context, les extrmes se touchent: in denouncing the ''shakedown'' of German corporations, this left-wing anti-Zionist uses precisely the kind of rhetoric that Menachem Begin employed when he spoke out against taking ''blood money'' during the right-wing riots against the restitution agreement with West Germany in the early 1950's, which almost toppled the Israeli government.
There is something sad in this warping of intelligence, and in this perversion of moral indignation. There is also something indecent about it, something juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid. As was shown in Peter Novick's far more balanced (though not entirely satisfactory) book, ''The Holocaust in American Life,'' the changing perception of the Nazi genocide of the Jews has also opened the way for a variety of exploiters and small-time opportunists. Yet to make this into an international Jewish conspiracy verges on paranoia and would serve anti-Semites around the world much better than any lawyer's exorbitant fees for ''shaking down'' a German industrialist.
Finkelstein speaks of the ''Holocaust industry'' as ''cloaking itself in the sanctimonious mantle of 'needy Holocaust victims.' ''Yet he cloaks himself in that very same mantle, while at the same time showing little sympathy for the feelings of the survivors and enormous zeal in exposing the ''reckless and ruthless abandon'' of the ''Holocaust industry,'' which he calls ''the main fomenter of anti-Semitism in Europe.'' By its ''blackmailing of Swiss bankers and German industrialists,'' as well as of ''starving Polish peasants,'' the ''Holocaust industry'' seeks endlessly to augment that pile of gold, or ''Holocaust booty,'' on which Jewish and Zionist leaders are now allegedly sitting. ''The Holocaust,'' Finkelstein concludes, is possibly ''the greatest robbery in the history of mankind.''
What I find so striking about ''The Holocaust Industry'' is that it is almost an exact copy of the arguments it seeks to expose. It is filled with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current media hype over the Holocaust; it is brimming with the same indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics and dubious contextualizations; and it oozes with the same smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority.
This book is, in a word, an ideological fanatic's view of other people's opportunism, by a writer so reckless and ruthless in his attacks that he is prepared to defend his own enemies, the bastions of Western capitalism, and to warn that ''The Holocaust'' will stir up an anti-Semitism whose significance he otherwise discounts. Like any conspiracy theory, it contains several grains of truth; and like any such theory, it is both irrational and insidious. Finkelstein can now be said to have founded a Holocaust industry of his own.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
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Leon Wieseltier put it best when he referred to Norman Finkelstein--the hysterical, Hezbollah-loving, soon-to-be-late-of DePaul University political science professor--as "poison, he's a disgusting self-hating Jew, he's something you find under a rock." Finkelstein has built a career on defaming Holocaust survivors as greedy liars out to rob noble Swiss bankers, all the while using "I'm Jewish!" as a defense. The wife of the neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Ernst Zuendel once said, "I feel like a kid in a candy store… Finkelstein is a Jewish David Irving." You get the picture. But if you don't, read Omer Bartov's review of Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry in the New York Times.
Well, it looks like Professor Finkelstein has some company under that rock: Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky and, perhaps more surprising, ostensibly respectable academic figures like Tony Judt and John Mearsheimer, author of the conspiratorial The Israel Lobby.
In June, DePaul University denied Finkelstein tenure. Of course, his defenders are all weeping the tears of those victimized by academic "censorship" (because, as we all know, it's leftists who are "censored" on college campuses). Ultimately, however, it was not Finkelstein's political views--odious as they are--that did him in, but his shoddy scholarship and unprofessional behavior. As DePaul's president wrote at the time, Finkelstein did not ''honor the obligation'' to ''respect and defend the free inquiry of associates.'' DePaul has canceled Finkelstein's class, but the good professor says he may carry out a "hunger strike" in protest. He'd be doing the world a favor if he did.
These academic heroes have joined an outfit called the "DePaul Academic Freedom Committee," the mission of which is to "preserve academic freedom for our faculty on campus." Ali, Chomsky, Judt and Mearsheimer will be convening a teach-in at DePaul in October to protest on behalf of Finkelstein. Though now lacking an academic perch (DePaul is the third university from which he has been fired) Finkelstein won't be out of a job for long; I imagine the Iranian mullahs, Hizbollah or Hamas would love nothing more than to have an energetic, American Jewish spokesperson to make their respective cases (though perhaps he's more effective advocating for them in an unofficial, unpaid capacity). If they don't come through, Finkelstein can always go climb back under his rock.
One expects these sorts of theatrics from Ali and Chomsky. But Judt and Mearsheimer have revealed much about themselves--and their intellectual motivations--by choosing to advocate for a Hezbollah propagandist and hero of neo-Nazis.
Alan Dershowitz responds:
It is not surprising that Noam Chomsky would leap to the defense of his ideological soul mate Norman Finkelstein. He always supports the academic freedom of those with whom he agrees, never those with whom he disagrees. But even Chomsky cannot actually cite any scholarly contributions that Finkelstein--who admits that he has never had an article published in a peer-reviewed journal--has made. What passes for Finkelstein-scholarship is charging me, and virtually every other pro-Israel writer, with plagiarism for citing material to their original rather than secondary sources. Anti-Israel as well as pro-Israel scholars use the same citation method because it is the one preferred by the Chicago Manual of Style and other authoritative sources. For example, Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer repeatedly cite primary sources for material they found in secondary sources. I proved this and challenged Finkelstein to level the same charge against these anti-Israel writers as he did against pro-Israel writers. He refused, because his is not scholarship; it is propaganda.
Finkelstein's other claim to scholarship is to cite the conclusions of anti-Israel human rights organizations as proof that I and other pro-Israel writers must be wrong when we come to independently researched conclusions that are different. He never provides independent research and when asked why not, he replied: "Why should I interview people?"
Finkelstein's only contribution to public discourse is to coarsen the level of debate about the Middle East. In a recent speech, Finkelstein called for all "monsters and freaks in the White House and their collaborators in Tel Aviv" to "drop dead." When Irshad Manji, the Canadian Muslim dissident, was subject to death threats, Finkelstein supported those threats and wrote to a website that was collecting petitions against the death threat the following: "Is there a petition supporting the death threats?" He has also supported, he claims in jest, my assassination. Some of his followers did not understand his humor and have made threatening phone calls to me. He has called me a moral pervert, a Nazi and commissioned a cartoon showing me masturbating in ecstatic joy to dead Lebanese civilians.
That is what passes for scholarship on Planet Chomsky. I challenge Chomsky to cite specific pages of Finkelstein's writings that warrant the grant of tenure. Since Finkelstein writes only for popular audiences and never for scholarly ones, his work can easily be evaluated by lay readers. The pages please!
Chomsky characterizes my input into the Finkelstein debate as "disgraceful." Yet he admits that he, as an MIT professor, spoke at a rally against Columbia University granting an academic position to Henry Kissinger. He claims that he was invited to speak by Columbia faculty members. I too was invited to write about Finkelstein by a DePaul faculty member. Moreover, my comments about Finkelstein have mostly been responsive to attacks by him against me. Would Chomsky deny me my freedom of speech when attacked? Has Chomsky ever remained silent in the face of criticism?
In addition to distorting the record with regard to Finkelstein's scholarship Chomsky distorts the history of my criticism of him. It began when he endorsed a notorious neo-Nazi Holocaust denier named Robert Faurisson by writing an introduction to his book. He also legitimated his falsification of history by characterizing Faurisson's fabrications--he claimed that Hitler's gas chambers never existed and that the Holocaust "never took place"--as having been based on "extensive historical research". Chomsky also legitimated Holocaust denial by writing that he saw "no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust." Chomsky once told a group of people that he himself was "agnostic" on whether the Holocaust occurred. When professor Robert Nozick, who was part of the group, confronted Chomsky with this outrageous statement following a debate at Harvard Medical School, Chomsky shoved Nozick, saying, "How dare you quote an off-the-record remark I made to a small group at Princeton." He did not deny making the statement.
Chomsky then championed another anti-Semite, this time a Jewish one named Israel Shahak who has written that Jews worship the devil and that Israel is comparable to Nazi Germany. Shahak, like Chomsky, was a phony civil libertarian who believed in defending only the rights of the left, tried to hijack an Israeli human rights group.
Now Chomsky is once again championing an anti-Semite who has made a career out of rewriting the history of the Holocaust and denying the reality of Holocaust survivors. Chomsky and Finkelstein deserve each other. The DePaul community deserves better.
By Alan Dershowitz
you must enjoy provoking people...
war of words beginning in 5.....4......3......2...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
andrew sullivan sucked bush/cheney's cock until the last year or so of his presidency
dershowitz is a complete fraud as finkelstein proved on democracy now! by showing he fabricated numbers
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
I know. I'm relishing it.
In fairness, the same thing could be said of the posters who create anti-Israel threads. Is that also considered provocation or is that just discussion?
enjoy your fuckin world u living..
"..That's One Happy Fuckin Ghost.."
“..That came up on the Pillow Case...This is for the Greek, With Our Apologies.....”
You do know that Finkelstein has never published anything in a peer-reviewed journal. He's been fired from every academic position he's ever held, having been deemed entirely unsuitable for tenure at every single one. He has absolutely no scholarly credentials to speak of. And his "outing" of Dershowitz is garbage. He accussed Dershowitz of plagiarizing quotations because he cited the primary source rather than the secondary source. Dershowitz was in fact following normal academic procedure, as any half-brained college student could tell you, and was cleared of all such ridiculous charges by a Harvard investigation that Dershowitz himself requested, just to prove the point.
dershowitz got him fired from dupaul
secondly it wasn't just an accusation of plagiarism but in dershowitz's book he cites benny morris and says 2,000-3,000 Palestinians were displaced when the book by morris he cites actually said 200,000-300,000....pretty big error/typo for a harvard professor, i'd say. much less, previously dershowitz said he'd pay $10,000 to anyone who could find an error or falsehood in his book. finkelstein did just that and told him to make the check payable to a fund for jenin victims and dershowitz weaseled out of it saying that was just a typo so it didn't count when here i thought a typo was an error?
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
one of them is more prominent than others to me right now, and that is don't get so wrapped up in our agruments that we forget the sense of humanity we are fighting for.
i'm fighting for the 1.5 millions ordinary Palestinians who are currently victims of an illegal and brutal occupation at the hands of Israel.
and i won't forget, i have my own views on things, which i've definitely made known, but i'm passed fighting about who started it, why it started, when it started, where it started. i'm more concerned about now, and what is being done to help free the people of Palestine.
i just want it to stop, and i won't stay quiet and i won't forget. i'll keep focussing my energies into other areas where people actually do give a shit about what is happening right now to these people.
“If together we stand by truth and justice, if anyone does, we don’t lose, we all gain. We should not be anti-Jewish. We should not be anti-Israel. We should not even be anti-Zionist. The prize on which our eyes should be riveted on is human rights, human dignity, and human equality. We should not be asking questions like, ‘Are u now, or ever been, Zionist?’ It is a useless question.
Instead, we should be asking, ‘Are u for or against ethnic cleansing, torture, house demolitions, Jewish only roads, and Jewish only settlements, and discriminatory laws?’ If the answer comes against, against, against, shouldn’t we then say, ‘keep your ideology, whatever it may be, there is room for everyone at the rendezvous for victory?’
May we all, seekers of truth, fighters for justice, yet join the forsaken people of Palestine at the rendezvous for victory.”
This being such a sensitive topic, we often get wrapped up in our arguments and forget the sense of humanity we are fighting for.
We have to combat all the mud slinging with faith and trust in our understandings of the truth, in the sources, and in the documentary record.
-Norman Finklestein
April 30, 2007
As Tenure Drama Comes Down to the Wire
Dershowitz v. Finkelstein: Who's Right and Who's Wrong?
By FRANK MENETREZ
The feud between Alan Dershowitz, a senior professor at Harvard Law School, and Norman Finkelstein, a junior professor of political science at DePaul University, is back in the news. Finkelstein is up for tenure this year, and Dershowitz has been waging an aggressive campaign against him. Both Finkelstein's department and an outside committee voted in favor of tenure, but the dean then recommended against it. As of this writing, the university has not made a final decision.
To date, the coverage of the dispute has not included any serious attempt at evaluating the merits of Dershowitz and Finkelstein's charges and countercharges. It's clear enough that these guys don't like or respect each other, and that each claims the other's work is a travesty. But the question remains: Who's right, and who's wrong? Answering that question ought to be relatively straightforward, and it is high time that someone other than Finkelstein or Dershowitz tried to do it publicly.
The feud began when Finkelstein charged that Dershowitz's book The Case for Israel (2003) was partially plagiarized and wholly false. Finkelstein ultimately published his critique as part of a book of his own, entitled Beyond Chutzpah (2005). The book quotes Dershowitz as offering, in an interview, to "give $10,000 to the PLO" if anyone can "find a historical fact in [The Case for Israel] that you can prove to be false." (p. 91) Finkelstein maintains, to the contrary, that "[t]he genuine challenge is to unearth any meaningful historical fact in The Case for Israel." (p. 91) Finkelstein goes on to quote one assertion after another from The Case for Israel, examine Dershowitz's supporting evidence, and then adduce his own evidence that the assertions are false and Dershowitz's evidence is worthless...
Prior to publication, I emailed drafts of this article to both Finkelstein and Dershowitz for comment. Finkelstein gave me several substantive comments, some of which I incorporated. Dershowitz's response, in its entirety, was "What a rediculous [sic] and biased screed filled with demonstable [sic] falsehoods and half truths[.]" I wrote back, asking him to specify the half-truths and demonstrable falsehoods so that I could correct them. I also asked him for information on three specific issues. His response, in its entirety, was, "Your bias is so obvious you can't seem to help it[.]"
'...BEYOND BEYOND CHUTZPAH
Beyond Chutzpah purports to refute virtually every aspect of The Case for Israel's account of Israel's human rights record and the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Consequently, the most striking feature of Dershowitz's List is that not a single item on the List is taken from Beyond Chutzpah.
In the Case Study, Dershowitz's examples of Finkelstein's alleged "pattern" of "mak[ing] up quotations and facts" (p. 185) are likewise not drawn from Beyond Chutzpah, but there is a straightforward explanation: Both The Case for Peace, which contains the Case Study, and Beyond Chutzpah were published in August 2005, so it was impossible for either book to contain a response to the other. But when Dershowitz prepared the List in the fall of 2006, he had ample time to identify any instances of dishonesty in Beyond Chutzpah. Still, the List mentions none.
Some of Dershowitz's examples do, however, relate to Beyond Chutzpah. Here's the background for the main example: In The Case for Israel, Dershowitz laments that Israel's methods of interrogating Palestinian prisoners were "universally characterized as torture" even though "they were nonlethal and did not involve the infliction of sustained pain." (pp. 137-138) The endnote to that sentence reads as follows: "One person died following shaking, but an independent investigation attributed his death to an unknown preexisting medical condition." (p. 252, n.9) As support for those claims, the endnote cites a single decision of Israel's Supreme Court. In Beyond Chutzpah (p. 160), Finkelstein quotes the endnote verbatim and then attempts to refute it.
Against Dershowitz's claim that there has been only one interrogation-related death, Finkelstein quotes the reports of two independent human rights organizations, both of which concluded that there have been multiple such deaths. (Beyond Chutzpah, pp. 160-161) And against Dershowitz's claim that the one prisoner who died "following shaking" actually died because of a preexisting medical condition, Finkelstein quotes Amnesty International's report on that prisoner, entitled Death by Shaking: The Case of Abd al-Samad Harizat. According to Finkelstein, Amnesty reports that Israeli officials originally attributed the death to a preexisting medical condition, but "it so happened that Abd al-Samad Harizat was in good health at the time of his sudden death." (Beyond Chutzpah, p. 161) The Amnesty report further states that the official autopsy, which was conducted by two Israeli doctors and observed by a Scottish doctor on behalf of the decedent's family, concluded that Harizat died because of violent shaking. According to Amnesty, the Department of Investigations of Police reached the same conclusion, as did both an "expert opinion" on the official autopsy report and a statement from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. Finkelstein then writes the following (Beyond Chutzpah, pp. 161-162):
The Supreme Court decision cited by Dershowitz (HCJ 5100/94) states that "[a]ll agree" that Harizat "expired after being shaken." The Court decision makes no mention of an "independent investigation" attributing Harizat's death to "an unknown preexisting medical condition." Indeed, no record of this independent investigation exists.
That's the background. What does Dershowitz have to say in response? In his List, Dershowitz writes:
Here is what [Finkelstein] said in Chicago on March 18, 2004: "There was a famous case in 1995 of a Palestinian who was shaken to death while in detention. And nobody disputed the facts the Israeli pathologist's office, the forensic pathologists who were brought into the case, eventually it went to the Israeli High Court of Justice they all agreed. And I'm quoting now from the High Court of Justice Judgment: 'All agree that Harizad [sic.: Harizat] died from the shaking.' If you go to Dershowitz's book, he discusses the case and says, quote, 'An independent inquiry found that he didn't die from the shaking, but from a previous illness.' That was just made up."
It was Finkelstein who made up the quotation. The Supreme Court actually said that "the suspect expired after being shaken." The difference between "died from the shaking" and "expired after being shaken" is considerable, especially since the sentence that follows in the decision attributes the death to an extremely rare complication, and the sentence before summarizes the literature as having no examples of anyone dying from shaking. This is not a translation error. It is an example of a made-up quotation. Remember, Finkelstein said he was "quoting," not paraphrasing, yet the words he purports to quote simply do not exist. Finkelstein has never, to my knowledge, responded to this serious charge of fabricating a quotation from the Israeli Supreme Court.
Finkelstein's pattern of making up quotations . . . should alone disqualify him from any tenured academic position.
Because Dershowitz cites no book or other publication, I will assume that he is quoting an interview or lecture that Finkelstein gave in Chicago on March 18, 2004. I will also assume that he is quoting Finkelstein accurately. Dershowitz makes essentially the same argument in his Case Study (p. 185), though there he quotes from a Finkelstein appearance on C-SPAN2. (p. 233, n. 118)
What should we make of this exchange? On the one hand, in Beyond Chutzpah Finkelstein
(1) accurately quotes both Dershowitz and the Supreme Court decision,
(2) adduces evidence refuting Dershowitz's claim that there has been only one Palestinian death from interrogation,
(3) asserts that the Supreme Court decision cited by Dershowitz makes no reference to any "independent investigation" that concluded Harizat's death was not caused by shaking,
(4) cites multiple independent investigations that did attribute the death to shaking, and
(5) asserts that there is no record of an independent investigation that reached a contrary conclusion.
On the other hand, in his List Dershowitz:
(1) ignores what Finkelstein wrote in Beyond Chutzpah,
(2) quotes some oral presentations in which Finkelstein misquoted two passages that he later quoted accurately in Beyond Chutzpah, and
(3) charges Finkelstein with having "made up the quotation."
Dershowitz never responds to, let alone refutes, any of Finkelstein's substantive claims in Beyond Chutzpah concerning the number of interrogation deaths, the actual independent investigations of Harizat's death, or the fact that Dershowitz's cited source does not mention an independent investigation that attributed the death to a preexisting medical condition.
Thus, continuing to assume that Dershowitz is accurately quoting Finkelstein, we can draw the following conclusions. Finkelstein appears to have made two oral misquotations of material he quoted correctly in Beyond Chutzpah. Dershowitz's The Case for Israel appears to contain multiple serious falsehoods concerning Israel's violent interrogation of Palestinian prisoners.
Moreover, in the Case Study, Dershowitz attempts to conceal the inaccuracies in The Case for Israel by misrepresenting both his own endnote and the Supreme Court opinion that he cited in it. Dershowitz writes (p. 234, n. 120):
What the High Court said was that "medical literature has not, to date, reported a case in which a person died as the direct result of having been shaken." It did reference a case, different from the one I discussed in my book, in which "the suspect expired after being shaken," but explained that "according to the state, that case was a rare exception, [where] death was caused by an extremely rare complication which resulted in pulmonary edema" (emphasis added). . . . In addition, Finkelstein misquotes me as saying "he didn't die from the shaking." I actually said, "one person died following shaking," and he knows I was discussing a different case.
Dershowitz thus claims that the case in which, according to the Supreme Court, "the suspect expired after being shaken" is not the same case Dershowitz discussed in The Case for Israel. That cannot be true: The endnote in The Case for Israel refers to only "[o]ne person [who] died following shaking[;]" Dershowitz mentions that one person as the one potential exception to his claim that Israel's interrogation methods are "nonlethal." The only source Dershowitz has ever cited concerning that one person is this Supreme Court opinion. But the Supreme Court opinion mentions only one case of a person dying after shaking, so they must be the same case.
It should also be noted that in this endnote from the Case Study, Dershowitz largely admits that The Case for Israel's reference to an "independent investigation" was incorrect. Recall that, in The Case for Israel, Dershowitz cited this Supreme Court opinion as his only source concerning the "independent investigation" that found the death was caused by an unrelated medical condition. Now, in the Case Study endnote, Dershowitz acknowledges that the Supreme Court did not assert in its own voice that Harizat's death was caused by "an extremely rare complication." The court did mention that assertion, but the court neither endorsed it nor attributed it to an independent investigation. Rather, as quoted by Dershowitz, the court said that "according to the state," the death was caused by an "extremely rare complication." That is, the assertion that Harizat's death was caused by a rare complication was made by the Israeli government lawyers who were defending the security services' interrogation methods. The court's opinion states no basis for the lawyers' assertion--for all the court tells us, the lawyers might have just made it up.
Dershowitz's List contains no other items related to Beyond Chutzpah. (It mentions the plagiarism issue, which I address below, but the List unequivocally states that Dershowitz is "not answering that charge here.") But his Case Study does contain two others. (p. 185) Dershowitz writes that
Finkelstein claims that in The Case for Israel I "never once--I mean literally, not once--mention[ed] any mainstream human rights organization. Never a mention of Amnesty's findings, never a mention of Human Rights Watch's findings, never a mention of B'Tselem's findings . . . none." But a simple check of the index reveals that I repeatedly discuss--and criticize--the findings of these very organizations.
Dershowitz again cites the C-SPAN2 appearance as his source for the quotation. (p. 233, n. 117) Again, I will assume he is quoting it accurately.
Here is what Finkelstein writes in Beyond Chutzpah (pp. 92-93):
The most fundamental--and telling--fact about the chapters of The Case for Israel devoted to human rights issues is that never once does Dershowitz cite a single mainstream human rights organization to support any of his claims. . . .
Not only does Dershowitz systematically ignore their findings, but in order to justify having done so, he seeks to malign the human rights organizations themselves.
Finkelstein then goes on to discuss some of The Case for Israel's criticism of human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and B'Tselem (an Israeli organization monitoring human rights violations in the occupied territories). (p. 93)
Again, what should we make of this exchange? On the one hand, in Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein points out that Dershowitz, in The Case for Israel, purports to defend Israel's human rights record but never once cites a mainstream human rights organization in order to support his claims; rather, Dershowitz cites such organizations only to discredit them. On the other hand, Dershowitz (1) quotes an incorrect oral statement by Finkelstein to the effect that The Case for Israel never cites mainstream human rights organizations at all, (2) points out that The Case for Israel does indeed cite mainstream human rights organizations (in order to discredit them), and (3) charges Finkelstein with "mak[ing] up . . . facts."
Again, Finkelstein appears to have made a fairly trivial oral misstatement. Dershowitz, however, appears to have implicitly admitted that he did precisely what Beyond Chutzpah charged him with doing: The Case for Israel, his bestselling defense of Israel's human rights record, cites mainstream human rights organizations only to discredit them, never for support.
The Case Study contains one other charge relating to Beyond Chutzpah. Background: Dershowitz writes in his book Chutzpah, concerning the plight of the Arab Palestinians who were expelled in 1948, that the expulsion "is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal or other projects that require large-scale movement of people." (Chutzpah, p. 215) In Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein accurately quotes part of that statement (he omits "or other projects that require large-scale movement of people"). (p. 47) Later, he cites several prominent Israeli scholars (Baruch Kimmerling, Ilan Pappe, and Benny Morris) as having described the 1948 expulsion as an "ethnic cleansing." (p. 53, n. 29)
In the Case Study, Dershowitz writes the following: "Another made-up quotation by Finkelstein is his claim that in my book Chutzpah I analogized 'ethnic cleansings' to 'urban renewal.' I say nothing of the kind in Chutzpah. I never even mention 'ethnic cleansing.'" (p. 185) As his source, Dershowitz cites a talk by Finkelstein at the Vancouver Public Library in 2004. (p. 234, n. 121)
It is true that the relevant passage in Chutzpah does not employ the phrase "ethnic cleansing." It is also true that in Chutzpah Dershowitz drew an analogy between urban renewal and the 1948 expulsion of the Arab Palestinians, which, according to Finkelstein, has been described by prominent Israeli scholars as "ethnic cleansing." In his List, Dershowitz does not challenge Finkelstein's claim about what the Israeli scholars say, so I have not independently verified it. I also have not checked the accuracy of Dershowitz's quotation from Finkelstein's appearance at the Vancouver Public Library. But it should be noted that it is not clear from Dershowitz's own rendering of the quotation that Finkelstein ever attributed the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to Dershowitz.
That's it. Apart from the plagiarism issue, nothing else in either the List or the Case Study (or elsewhere in The Case for Peace) relates to Beyond Chutzpah.
Skeptical readers may wonder whether Dershowitz's charges could really be this silly and inconsequential. Such readers should not take my word for it. The List is posted on Dershowitz's web site, and it contains a link to an online copy of the Case Study. The texts of The Case for Israel, The Case for Peace, Chutzpah, and Beyond Chutzpah, including endnotes, are also searchable online at Amazon.com. (Not all pages are viewable online, but many of the relevant ones are.)
Recall now that in Beyond Chutzpah Finkelstein quotes and purports to refute claim after claim after claim from The Case for Israel. Recall also that one year later, Dershowitz, when preparing his List of the "clearest and most egregious instances" of Finkelstein's dishonesty, does not even attempt to refute a single claim in Beyond Chutzpah, plagiarism aside. And note that the foregoing discussion seems to tell us something about just how "clear and egregious" some of the instances on the List are.
From these facts it appears reasonable to conclude that, with the possible exception of the plagiarism issue, Dershowitz has been unable to find a single false statement in Beyond Chutzpah. And it follows that, as far as Dershowitz himself can now determine, his own book The Case for Israel is full of falsehoods concerning Israel's human rights record and the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, while Finkelstein's book contains none.
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Although published at the same time as Beyond Chutzpah, the Case Study constitutes Dershowitz's most thorough discussion of Finkelstein's assault on The Case for Israel. The thesis of the Case Study is that Finkelstein's attack was the product of a "well-orchestrated campaign" devised by a left-wing anti-Israel conspiracy whose members are Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and Finkelstein. The chapter opens with an introductory description of the conspiracy. (pp. 167-170) Next come subsections consisting of attacks on each of the alleged conspirators. (pp. 170-172 (Chomsky), pp. 172-175 (Finkelstein), p. 175 (Cockburn)) The next subsection describes the conspiracy's previous work, including its campaign to discredit Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial (1984), the book Finkelstein accuses Dershowitz of plagiarizing. (pp. 175-180)
Finally, in the last subsection of the chapter, Dershowitz turns to the conspiracy's attacks against him. (pp. 180-188) The bulk of his discussion, however, either deals exclusively with the plagiarism charge (pp. 180-184) or describes the power and extensive influence of the conspiracy. (pp. 186-188) (E.g., "Finkelstein can get anything he writes published, regardless of its demonstrable falsehoods, because Noam Chomsky has enormous influence on the hard-left press." Beyond Chutzpah was in fact published by the University of California Press after undergoing a rigorous peer-review process.) Apart from the plagiarism issue, just one page of the twenty-two page chapter is devoted to arguing that some of Finkelstein's claims about Dershowitz are false. (p. 185)
That one page contains, by my count, five separate charges against Finkelstein. I have already dealt with three of them (shaking, citation of human rights organizations, and ethnic cleansing) in the previous section. The remaining two do not require extensive discussion. One is based on a quote for which Dershowitz cites no source, so it can fairly be ignored. The other involves a quote from a talk Finkelstein gave in Calgary in 2004. According to Dershowitz, "Finkelstein has even alleged that the autobiographical account of my life in Chutzpah [1991]--growing up as an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn in the 1940s and 1950s--does not 'have much to do [with] what has actually happened in [my] life.'" (p. 185, alterations by Dershowitz)
I have not checked the accuracy of the quote, because I cannot imagine why anyone would care enough to debate this one. I will only note that Dershowitz's own presentation of the quote leaves open the possibility that what Finkelstein actually said was that, although Chutzpah purports to be autobiographical, it spends relatively little time discussing Dershowitz's own life and spends an inordinately large amount of time discussing other matters, such as the 1948 expulsion of the Arab Palestinians. But I don't know whether that's what Finkelstein said, and, if it is, I don't know whether it's true.
Apart from that one page, plus the plagiarism issue, Dershowitz's arguments in his Case Study suffer from the well-known defect inherent in all ad hominem arguments: They attack the messenger but leave the message untouched. That is, it does not matter whether Dershowitz's conspiracy theory is true. Even if it were true, that would not show that any of Beyond Chutzpah's claims about The Case for Israel (and about Dershowitz's other writings) are false.
Because Dershowitz's conspiracy theory thus has no bearing on the merits of the dispute between Finkelstein and Dershowitz, I will not discuss it further.
PLAGIARISM
When Finkelstein first attacked The Case for Israel in a debate with Dershowitz on the radio program Democracy Now! in 2003, one of his principal charges was that Dershowitz had plagiarized significant portions of his book from Peters' From Time Immemorial. Finkelstein has not dropped the plagiarism charge, but he has repeatedly stated that it is of secondary importance, the main issue being the truth about Israel's human rights record. In Beyond Chutzpah, he relegates the plagiarism discussion to one of the book's three appendices, introducing it with the observation that, next to Dershowitz's alleged whitewash of Israel's human rights record, "Dershowitz's academic derelictions seem small beer." (p. 229)
In the Democracy Now! debate, Finkelstein also charged that Dershowitz did not write The Case for Israel himself. Dershowitz claims he can prove he wrote it, because he is still in possession of his own handwritten manuscript for the book. (Case Study, p. 181) Finkelstein informs me that he requested a copy of that manuscript, but Dershowitz refused to provide it. In any event, Finkelstein did not include the charge in Beyond Chutzpah. I therefore will not discuss it further.
Some background on Peters' book is needed to ground an assessment of the plagiarism controversy. From Time Immemorial argues that at the time of Israel's founding in 1948, many of the Arab inhabitants of the areas that became the state of Israel were actually recent immigrants--they and their ancestors had not lived there "from time immemorial." When the book was originally published in the United States in 1984, it received glowing reviews in periodicals across the country and quickly became a bestseller. Later, when a number of scholars (of whom Finkelstein was the first) examined the book carefully, they concluded that it was of no scholarly value whatsoever. It ignores important parts of the documentary record, misuses the sources on which it does rely, and contains straightforward logical errors.
Consequently, Peters' book has been rejected as worthless by the scholarly community around the world, including in Israel. Skeptical readers should not take my word for it. Yehoshua Porath, one of Israel's leading scholars on the Arab population of Palestine during the pre-state period, described the book as a "sheer forgery," adding that "n Israel, at least, the book was almost universally dismissed as sheer rubbish except maybe as a propaganda weapon." (New York Times, Nov. 28, 1985). Porath, who describes his own politics as "centrist," also tore the book to shreds in a review published in The New York Review of Books. (Jan. 16, 1986) The review is freely available online, together with a subsequent exchange of letters that is also quite illuminating. (March 27, 1986) Given the well-known scholarly repudiation of Peters' book, no scholar would rely on it, any more than a scholar would rely on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Now, back to the plagiarism issue: In Beyond Chutzpah, Finkelstein argues that in the first two chapters of The Case for Israel Dershowitz plagiarized Peters by lifting numerous quotations and citations directly from Peters' book without acknowledging that he found them there. (Beyond Chutzpah, p. 230)
Dershowitz counters that although he was led to some primary sources by seeing them cited in Peters' book, he always tried to check them before citing them. If he could not find the primary source himself, he cited Peters. If he was able to check the primary source, he cited it directly, without mentioning Peters. He claims that his failure to cite Peters in such circumstances is proper. (Case Study, p. 182)
Finkelstein's principal response is that Dershowitz's quotations and citations of primary sources contain obvious errors that Dershowitz could not have made if he had checked the primary sources himself, and that Dershowitz's errors are identical to Peters' errors concerning the same primary sources. (Beyond Chutzpah, pp. 230-231) Finkelstein infers that Dershowitz copied the quotations and citations from Peters rather than checking the primary sources himself.
Dershowitz has never, to my knowledge, responded to Finkelstein's argument concerning the identical errors in The Case for Israel and From Time Immemorial. He wrote the List, for example, one year after publication of Beyond Chutzpah, but in it he expressly declined to address the plagiarism issue. Dershowitz has not argued that the alleged errors do not exist, or that his errors are not identical to Peters', or that the identity of the errors is just a coincidence and the errors are easy to make even when one checks the primary sources.
Finkelstein's argument concerning the identical errors strikes me as persuasive, and Dershowitz's failure to respond to the argument strikes me as telling. But I expect that reasonable minds could differ.
The entire plagiarism issue, however, seems to me to be of relatively little importance. If Dershowitz had uncovered a little-known but true and important piece of scholarship on the Middle East and had plagiarized it, passing off the original author's work as his own, he would surely have been guilty of a serious breach of academic integrity and would have done an injustice to the original author, who would have been deprived of deserved credit. At the same time, however, Dershowitz would have been doing a substantial public service by bringing the original author's true and important insights to a much wider audience than they had previously received. If that were what he had done, on balance I would probably be glad he had done it.
But that is not what he did. Instead, he relied upon a bestselling book that has been condemned by the international scholarly community. Even if his citations to Peters were impeccable--even if he is right that they are in fact impeccable--it is still true that he repackaged material from Peters' discredited bestseller, From Time Immemorial, and added to it his own imprimatur, as a Harvard law professor, in his bestseller The Case for Israel.
On this issue, Dershowitz has only two potential lines of defense. He could argue that he does not really rely on Peters' book in The Case for Israel, or he could argue that, contrary to the international scholarly consensus, Peters' book really is a legitimate source on which a serious scholar can reasonably rely.
To some extent, Dershowitz pursues both defenses. In The Case for Israel, for example, Dershowitz writes that "Peters's conclusions and data have been challenged. . . . I do not in any way rely on them in this book." (p. 246, n.31) Likewise, in his Case Study, Dershowitz writes, "I disagreed with some of [Peters'] conclusions and said so in my book The Case for Israel." (pp. 175-176) As proof that he had "said" he "disagreed with some of her conclusions," Dershowitz notes that in The Case for Israel he wrote, "Palestine was certainly not a land empty of all people. It is impossible to reconstruct the demographics of the area with any precision, since census data for that time period are not reliable." (The Case for Peace p. 229, n. 60, quoting The Case for Israel, p. 24) The quote does not mention Peters, so it is not in fact an example of Dershowitz having said that he disagreed with Peters' conclusions. Moreover, to my knowledge not even Peters ever claimed that Palestine was "a land empty of all people" before Zionist immigration.
Despite Dershowitz's attempts to distance himself from certain aspects of Peters' book, the fact remains that by his own admission (Case Study, p. 182) he relied upon Peters at least for some primary sources that he was unable to locate himself. Given the scholarly consensus concerning Peters' book, no serious scholar would have done that.
As regards the legitimacy of relying on Peters, Dershowitz writes in his Case Study that, although the book has its flaws, it "was supported by evidence and contributed an important new element to the debate." (p. 176) To support that claim he cites reviews of Peters' book that appeared in the Washington Post in 1984 and the Financial Times in 1985. (p. 229, n. 61) Regardless of what those reviews do or don't prove about Peters' contribution to scholarly debate in the mid-1980s, they prove nothing about whether Peters' book was considered a reputable scholarly source in 2003, when Dershowitz published The Case for Israel.
Dershowitz further states that "[a]ll Finkelstein . . . managed to show was that in a relatively small number of instances, Peters may have misinterpreted some data, ignored counterdata, and exaggerated some findings -- common problems in demographic research that often appear in anti-Israel books as well, including those of Chomsky." (p. 177) He cites no authority for that assessment, and he never sets forth or engages with Finkelstein's arguments in detail. (Readers who are curious about Finkelstein's critique of Peters can find it in his Image and Reality of the Israel/Palestine Conflict (2d ed. 2003) and judge for themselves.)
I take it that Dershowitz has not succeeded in refuting the international scholarly consensus that From Time Immemorial is neither a serious piece of scholarship nor a source on which a serious scholar would reasonably rely. Moreover, Dershowitz's weak disclaimers--e.g., certain aspects of Peters' book have been "challenged," and the book suffers from "common problems in demographic research"--actually make matters worse. They create the misleading impression that the book's flaws are common in other reputable works in the field, and that the book is merely the subject of scholarly controversy. It is not. Serious scholars no longer debate Peters' book--they dismiss it.
There is consequently no way out for Dershowitz here. Either he knew that Peters' book was discredited or he didn't. If he did know it, then he intentionally used a thoroughly disreputable source. If he didn't know it, then he was too ignorant of mainstream scholarly work on Israel/Palestine to deserve to be taken seriously. Either way, by relying on Peters in The Case for Israel and expressly defending her in The Case for Peace, he took himself outside the realm of serious, informed discussion of the topic on which he was writing.
...On that basis, I concluded that the first sentence of the first item on Dershowitz's List of the "clearest and most egregious instances" of Finkelstein's lies is itself a fraud. And on that basis I concluded that my original project--to sift through and evaluate every single claim on Dershowitz's List--should be abandoned.
My work on the project, however incomplete, does nonetheless raise the following interesting question: If this is the best that an adversary as clever and dedicated as Dershowitz can come up with, how could Finkelstein possibly not deserve tenure?
Frank J. Menetrez received his PhD in philosophy and JD from UCLA. His
article The Real Reason to Get Out of Iraq appeared on ZNet last fall (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle ... emID=11223). He can be reached at <!-- e --><a href="mailto:frankmenetrez@yahoo.com">frankmenetrez@yahoo.com</a><!-- e -->.
'The battle over political science professor Norman Finkelstein to receive tenure at DePaul University is heating up. Finkelstein has taught at DePaul for the past six years. Finkelstein’s two main topics of focus over his career have been the Holocaust and Israeli policy. We speak to two world-renowned scholars in these fields: Raul Hilberg, considered the founder of Holocaust studies, and Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations at Oxford University and an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shlaim calls Finkelstein a “very impressive, learned and careful scholar”, while Hilberg praises Finkelstein’s “acuity of vision and analytical power.” Hilberg says: “It takes an enormous amount of courage to speak the truth when no one else is out there to support him.”
Raul Hilberg - One of the best-known and most distinguished of Holocaust historians. He is author of the seminal three-volume work “The Destruction of the European Jews” and is considered the founder of Holocaust studies. He joins us on the line from his home in Vermont:
Raul Hilberg: Yes. I read this book, which was published about seven years ago, even as I, myself, was researching actions brought against Swiss companies, notably banks, but also other enterprises in insurance and in manufacturing. And the gist of all of these claims, all of these actions, was that somehow the Swiss banks, in particular, and other enterprises, as well, owed money to Jews or the survivors or the living descendants of people who were victims. The actions were brought by claims lawyers, by the World Jewish Congress, which joined them, and a blitz was launched in the newspapers. Congressmen and senators were mobilized, officials of regulatory agencies in New York and elsewhere. Threats were issued in the nature of withdrawal of pension funds, of boycotts, of bad publicity.
And I was struck by the fact, even as I, myself, was researching the same territory that Professor Finkelstein was covering, that the Swiss did not owe that money, that the $1,250,000,000 that were agreed as a settlement to be paid to the claimants was something that in very plain language was extorted from the Swiss. I had, in fact, relied upon the same sources that Professor Finkelstein used, perhaps in addition some Swiss items. I was in Switzerland at the height of the crisis, and I heard from so-called forensic accountants about how totally surprised the Swiss were by this outburst. There is no other word for it.
Now, Finkelstein was the first to publish what was happening in his book The Holocaust Industry. And when I was asked to endorse the book, I did so with specific reference to these claims. I felt that within the Jewish community over the centuries, nothing like it had ever happened. And even though these days a couple of billion dollars are sometimes referred to as an accounting error and not worthy of discussion, there is a psychological dimension here which not must be underestimated.
I was also struck by the fact that Finkelstein was being attacked over and over. And granted, his style is a little different from mine, but I was saying the same thing, and I had published my results in that three-volume work, published in 2003 by Yale University Press, and I did not hear from anybody a critical word about what I said, even though it was the same substantive conclusion that Finkelstein had offered. So that’s the gist of the matter right then and there.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think, Professor Hilberg, he was criticized and you were not?
RAUL HILBERG: Well, Finkelstein—I believe Finkelstein was criticized mainly for the style that he employed. And he was vulnerable. And it was clear to me already years ago that some campaigns were launched—from what sector, I didn’t know—to remove him from the academic world. Years ago, I got a phone call from someone who was in charge of a survivors’ group in California who told me that Finkelstein had been ousted from a job in New York City at a university—actually, a college there—and this was done under pressure.
And then, again, I gave a lecture a year and a half ago in Chicago, which is the place where Finkelstein had been employed at DePaul University, and my lecture was about Auschwitz, and it was based on the records, which we’ve now recovered from Moscow, about the history of this camp. Not exactly a simple topic. But there was a question period, and I awaited pertinent questions, when someone rose from his chair and asked, “Should Finkelstein be tenured?” Now, for heaven’s sake, I said to myself, what is going on here?
And whether he’s being intimidated, whether he is in a situation where, whatever else may be happening, the employers are being intimidated, it’s hard for me to say, but there is very clearly a campaign, which was made very obvious in the Wall Street Journal, when Professor Dershowitz wrote in a style which is highly uncharacteristic of the editorial page of this newspaper, which incidentally I read religiously. So I, myself, cannot fully explain this outburst, but it clearly emanates from the same anger, from the same revolt, that prompted the whole action against the Swiss to begin with...
AVI SHLAIM: Yes. I think very highly of Professor Finkelstein. I regard him as a very able, very erudite and original scholar who has made an important contribution to the study of Zionism, to the study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, in particular, to the study of American attitudes towards Israel and towards the Middle East.
Professor Finkelstein specializes in exposing spurious scholarship on the Arab-Israeli conflict. And he has a very impressive track record in this respect. He was a very promising graduate student in history at Princeton, when a book by Joan Peters appeared, called From Time Immemorial, and he wrote the most savage exposition in critique of this book. It was a systematic demolition of this book. The book argued, incidentally, that Palestine was a land without a people for people without a land. And Professor Finkelstein exposed it as a hoax, and he showed how dishonest the scholarship or spurious scholarship was in the entire book. And he paid the price for his courage, and he has been a marked man, in a sense, in America ever since. His most recent book is Beyond Chutzpah, follows in the same vein of criticizing and exposing biases and distortions and falsifications in what Americans write about Israel and about the Middle East. So I consider him to be a very impressive and a very learned and careful scholar.
I would like to make one last point, which is that his style is very polemical, and I don’t particularly enjoy the strident polemical style that he employs. On the other hand, what really matters in the final analysis is the content, and the content of his books, in my judgment, is of very high quality.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Shlaim, what about the whole issue of when you criticize the Israeli government, being charged with anti-Semitism? What is your response to this? You were born in Iraq. You’re also an Israeli citizen and then moved to Britain?
AVI SHLAIM: I am. I was born in Baghdad. I grew up in Israel. I served in IDF. And for the last forty years, I have lived in Britain, and I teach at Oxford. My academic discipline is international relations, and I am a specialist in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And I think that there is no—that we must be very careful to separate questions of anti-Semitism from critique of Israel. I am critical of Israel as a scholar, and anti-Semitism just doesn’t come into it. My view is that the blind supporters of Israel—and there are many of them in America, in particular—use the charge of anti-Semitism to try and silence legitimate criticism of Israeli practices. I regard this as moral blackmail. Israel has no immunity to criticism, moral immunity to criticism, because of the Holocaust. Israel is a sovereign nation-state, and it should be judged by the same standards as any other state. And Norman Finkelstein is a very serious critic and a very well-informed critic and hard-hitting critic of Israeli practices in the occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians.
His last book, Beyond Chutzpah, is based on an amazing amount of research. He seems to have read everything. He has gone through the reports of Israeli groups, of human rights groups, Human Rights Watch and Peace Now and B’Tselem, all of the reports of Amnesty International. And he deploys all this evidence from Israeli and other sources in order to sustain his critique of Israeli practices, Israeli violations of human rights of the Palestinians, Israeli house demolitions, the targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants, the cutting down of trees, the building of the wall—the security barrier on the West Bank, which is illegal—the restrictions imposed on the Palestinians in the West Bank, and so on and so forth. I find his critique extremely detailed, well-documented and accurate.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Hilberg, like you, Norman Finkelstein is the son of Holocaust victims, his mother and his father both in concentration camps. Your final thoughts on this whole dispute and whether Norman Finkelstein should get tenure at DePaul University in Chicago?
Raul Hilberg: Well, let me say at the outset, I would not, unasked, offer advice to the university in which he now serves. Having been in a university for thirty-five years myself and engaged in its politics, I know that outside interferences are most unwelcome. I will say, however, that I am impressed by the analytical abilities of Finkelstein. He is, when all is said and done, a highly trained political scientist who was given a PhD degree by a highly prestigious university. This should not be overlooked. Granted, this, by itself, may not establish him as a scholar.
However, leaving aside the question of style—and here, I agree that it’s not my style either—the substance of the matter is most important here, particularly because Finkelstein, when he published this book, was alone. It takes an enormous amount of academic courage to speak the truth when no one else is out there to support him. And so, I think that given this acuity of vision and analytical power, demonstrating that the Swiss banks did not owe the money, that even though survivors were beneficiaries of the funds that were distributed, they came, when all is said and done, from places that were not obligated to pay that money. That takes a great amount of courage in and of itself. So I would say that his place in the whole history of writing history is assured, and that those who in the end are proven right triumph, and he will be among those who will have triumphed, albeit, it so seems, at great cost.'
http://www.counterpunch.org/ryan12072005.html
A Review of the Harvard Debate
Dershowitz versus Chomsky
December 7, 2005
By JOHN RYAN
'I have just watched the Chomsky-Dershowitz debate. I'm not entirely sure how debates are judged or graded, but unless one is blinded by Zionist/pro-Israel bias, there's no question that Chomsky scored a decisive victory--on a number of counts.
The topic was Israel and Palestine After Disengagement: Where Do We Go From Here? Chomsky consistently stayed on topic, whereas Dershowitz hardly referred to it, except at the end when directed to it by a question. What's the debate penalty for ignoring the topic?
In his opening address, Dershowitz only dealt with the issue obliquely, and devoted most of his time to berating the Palestinians, Chomsky, and professors who criticize Israel, and challenged Chomsky to form an alliance with him to work for peace in the area-- a seemingly worthy proposal but totally off topic. Chomsky began by saying that the only thing Dershowitz said that he couldn't take issue with was that the two of them had once been in some summer camp together. Chomsky then proceeded to provide background to the crisis and pointed out that the current Israel-USA policy and any proposal emanating from it would lead to only further disaster. The Palestinians are not prepared to accept a non-contiguous Bantustan "state" which is what is being offered. Instead he clearly stated that it was the Geneva Accord that provided a basis for meaningful future negotiations. Dershowitz, on the other hand, only at the end, when pressed on this matter, said that the new Sharon-Peres party would "offer" the Palestinians a "proposal"--which the Palestinians should not refuse! This was his answer to "where do we go from here." So much for substance by Dershowitz. Debate score?
Looking back at the "debate," Dershowitz's approach was characterized by a consistent tirade of comments aimed at character assassination, rather than salient arguments relevant to the topic. At almost every instance when he spoke, Dershowitz peppered his address with ad hominem attacks on Chomsky--from the very beginning to the very end. Chomsky conducted himself with the dignity and decorum that such an occasion demanded. He kept to the topic, never raised his voice, never interrupted Dershowitz, and only at one time did he speak over the moderator's voice who tried to cut off a much needed response to Dershowitz. What's the debating penalty to Dershowitz for his abysmal ad hominem performance?
Right from the beginning it was obvious that Dershowitz did not intend to engage in honest debate. Instead, his aim was to smear, vilify, misrepresent and discredit Chomsky, and at intervals, in an almost childish manner, invited the audience to visit "Planet Chomsky." There were countless examples of this. It's hard to believe that Dershowitz would not have read some of Chomsky's major works on the Israel-Palestine issue. But if he did read them, it means that he purposefully proceeded to misrepresent Chomsky's views--views which Chomsky denied were his and challenged Dershowitz to cite such references. For example, how could Dershowitz claim that Chomsky never supported a two-state solution, which Chomsky has done over a 30-year period. Yet that's what Dershowitz asserted in his opening remarks, which Chomsky immediately refuted. Then when Chomsky referred to his own writings, Dershowitz blustered that none of this work was available, or that it was "selected passages," or in Esperanto or in some Czech edition immature, scandalous behaviour and outright lies. Indeed, it's "selected passages" or quotations, with references, that often provide the required documentation. On several occasions, in putting forth a position or as a challenge to Chomsky's argument, Dershowitz would say in a pretentious tone, " President Clinton told me directly and personally . . ." In rebuttal, with devastating effectiveness, Chomsky responded, "You can believe what the research shows or you can believe what Mr. Dershowitz says someone told him."
Dershowitz can't claim he didn't read the Geneva Accord or that it was in Esperanto, yet he asserted that the Accord's major flaw was its insistence on the Right of Return. This shows either inexcusable ignorance or it was a deliberate lie. When Chomsky challenged this, the moderator cut him off so he couldn't explain what the Accord actually says. As provided in Resolution 242, an alternative to the refugees actually returning to their original homes is the right of appropriate compensation. The Accord states that some refugees may return (up to about 50,000) but this would have to be with Israel's agreement. As for the remainder, the Accord specifically spells out the provisions for compensation. For Dershowitz to deny this shows that to try to score a "debating point" he was fully prepared to lie, knowing that most people would not be aware of the Accord's specific provisions.
When Chomsky stated that the American media did not report Clinton's delivery of a huge number of helicopters to Israel to counter the Intafada, Dershowitz ridiculed the idea of media bias and said that it occurred only in Chomsky's imagination. Dershowitz ignored Chomsky's challenge to provide such documentation. Chomsky then went on to say that a media search showed that it was widely reported in Europe, but that the search showed zero results in the USA.
Dershowitz kept harping on the wonderful "generous" deal offered by Barak at Camp David--never once addressed the fact that what was offered was a nonviable "state" consisting of three non-contiguous Bantustans--and disingenuously tried to divert attention by waving a map showing the provision for a rail/road connection to Gaza. In confronting Chomsky's position that Israel terminated discussions at Taba after one week, Dershowitz said it was done because Arafat had rejected the Camp David proposal. Utter nonsense. Taba was simply a continuation of the Camp David negotiations, and when it appeared that some real progress was being made, Israel terminated the discussions. In later years, it was the continuation of these discussions that led to the Geneva Accord. Despite being an acclaimed academic at Harvard, and being obsessed with Israel, Dershowitz appears to be clueless on many crucial issues.
One of the reasons for Dershowtiz's hatred of Chomsky is the fact that back in 1973, Chomsky exposed and proved that Dershowitz lied in an attempt to discredit an Israeli civil libertarian. In the years that followed, Dershowitz has conducted a personal jihad against Chomsky. And recently, Chomsky, Finkelstein, and Alexander Cockburn exposed Dershowitz's shoddy scholarship in his book The Case for Israel. So the animosity between them is long standing.
In the above cited reference, Chomsky states that Dershowitz "knows that he can't respond to what I say. He doesn't have the knowledge or the competence to deal with the issues. Therefore, the idea is to try to shut it up by throwing as much slime as you can."
The scene at the end of the debate was nauseating. Dershowitz trots up to Chomsky to shake hands "look how magnanimous I am let's be friends!" After his scurrilous attacks on Chomsky, he indeed owed him an apology, but I'm sure he didn't offer one. One wonders what Chomsky said to him. It could be that Dershowitz realized he had crossed the line in civility, and he then wanted to somehow ingratiate himself with Chomsky, at least for public appearances.'
Alan Dershowitz Vs Norman Finkelstein - Democracy Now
Part 1: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 5870962994
Part 2: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 8714490692
Please, Dershewitz didn't get him fired from DuPaul. He was denied tenure because his candidacy had no merit. My father is a university professor. I've lived with university professors all my life. The rule is publish or perish. If you haven't published widely in serious peer-reviewed journals in your field you have no shot at tenure. That's how the tenure system works. Finkelstein didn't get tenure because he didn't deserve it because HE HAS NEVER PUBLISHED ANYTHING IN A PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL, which is the single greatest criterea for tenure. The real question is how did someone so unqualified for tenure even get so far along in the process before being turned away?
So now I'm deflecting am I? Forgive me for thinking that you posted an entire letter of Dershowitz's above in your lame attack on Finkelstein.
Fact is, Dershowitz is a proven liar and plagiarist.
Did you even read the two articles I posted above? Come to think of it, did you even read the articles that you yourself posted?
You don't know what you're talking about. And by the amount of typos in your post I'd guess that you're drunk.
Finkelstein was supported in his tenure bid by the DePaul University Political Science department with a vote of nine to three, and by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Personnel Committee five to zero. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein
...unofficial calls have been issued by scholars worldwide for a boycott of both DePaul University and the Catholic Church of which it is a subordinate educational unit unless and until Finkelstein and Larudee are reinstated and granted tenure. In a move not yet taken by U.S. Jews, a Jewish-Canadian human rights organization, Vancouver Jews for a Just Peace, has declared its solidarity with Finkelstein: “[W]e recognize continuities between an attempt to silence a professor and the conditions that make it difficult for marginalized people all over the world to express their political beliefs. Prof. Finkelstein's dismissal leads us to reflect on Palestinians living in West Bank and Gaza who risk more than tenure when they choose to speak truth to power.”
His tenure bid was denied by the university's president after a slander campaign by your beloved Alan Dershowitz, who also 'attempted unsuccessfully to block the publication of Beyond Chutzpah by making concerted appeals to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that the book was anti-Semitic and laced with Holocaust denial.' http://www.arabisto.com/article.cfm?articleID=643
The case against Finkelstein by Dershowitz is examined in the article I posted above. I suggest you read it instead of continuing to spout gibberish.
Raul Hilberg, One of the best-known and most distinguished of Holocaust historians.
Avi Shlaim, Professor of international relations at Oxford University, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and widely regarded as the most important intellectual alive.
And on the other hand, we have:
an unnamed source
A blogger called Andrew Sullivan.
Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Professor who has been exposed as a liar and a fraud.
And Yosi.
So, whose your money on?
Except that isn't the reason he was denied tenure, as well you know.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/the-ch ... le-source/
'...The final decision rested with the university’s president, the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, who said in a three-page letter sent to Mr. Finkelstein on Friday that he had found “no compelling reasons to overturn” the tenure board’s recommendation.
An electronic copy of the letter has now been posted on Mr. Finkelstein’s Web site.
In the letter, Father Holtschneider quotes extensively from the report of the university’s tenure-and-promotion board, which describes Mr. Finkelstein as “a nationally known scholar and public intellectual, considered provocative, challenging, and intellectually interesting,” and then comments that Mr. Finkelstein’s dossier “reveals some division of opinion as to the soundness of some of his scholarship.”
Father Holtschneider’s letter dwells on allegations that Mr. Finkelstein engaged in “ad hominem attacks” on scholars with opposing views. “In the opinion of those opposing tenure,” the university president writes, “your unprofessional personal attacks divert the conversation away from consideration of ideas, and polarize and simplify conversations that deserve layered and subtle consideration.”
The president goes on to invoke the American Association of University Professors and its standards of scholarly conduct, as well as standards articulated in the DePaul Faculty Handbook.
“On the record before me, I cannot in good faith conclude that you honor” those collegial obligations, Father Holtschneider told Mr. Finkelstein in the letter. “Nor can I conclude that your scholarship honors our university’s commitment to creating an environment in which all persons engaged in research and learning exercise academic freedom and respect it in others.”
In an interview over the weekend with The Chronicle, Mr. Finkelstein took strong exception to the letter’s verdict on his character as a scholar and to what he called “this vicious, sordid campaign to dirty my name so that there’s a pretext for getting rid of me.” He said that the university tenure-and-promotion board had relied on the so-called minority report — a document put together by the three members of the departmental committee who opposed giving Mr. Finkelstein tenure — rather than the “majority report” compiled by the nine committee members who supported him.
“I met the requirements of tenure. I met them, and then some,” Mr. Finkelstein said. “But meeting those requirements, and playing by the rules, was not sufficient to overcome the outside pressures that were exerted on DePaul.”
The case has excited widespread interest, in part because of Mr. Dershowitz’s open involvement. The Harvard professor threatened to sue the University of California Press if Mr. Finkelstein’s 2005 book Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History went to press containing allegations that Mr. Dershowitz plagiarized portions of his book The Case for Israel. And in recent months he has written about Mr. Finkelstein in op-ed commentaries in prominent venues such as The Wall Street Journal and The New Republic. He also comments on the dispute on his Web site...
Mr. Finkelstein said he was convinced that in his case “the university succumbed to outside pressure, and the criticism should be directed fundamentally at those who exerted such pressure that the university finally had to cave in.”
“That to me is the essential element,” he continued. “It’s not Norman Finkelstein versus DePaul University. That is not correct, because I have not the slightest doubt whatsoever that had there not been external pressure exerted on this university, I would have gotten tenure. I don’t want to lose sight of that.”
Other members of the DePaul faculty have apparently had their doubts as well. The Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Faculty Governance Council voted unanimously last November to send a letter to administrators at both DePaul and Harvard to “express the council’s dismay at Professor Dershowitz’s interference in Finkelstein’s tenure and promotion case.”
Actually, the article was written by someone called Jennifer Howard.
What he hasn't done is publish a book which has been exposed as a fraud, full of plagiarisms. In fact, all of his books so far have been widely praised by serious scholars.
Though I realize this isn't the answer you're looking for, but I don't care. Your latest persistent attempts to deflect attention from the real issues re: the IP issue simply reflect the fact that you have lost all credibility.
so, you don't have anything to say about the faulty numbers in dershowitz's book or how he weaseled out of his pledge that if anyone could find an error or falsehood in the book he'd pay them $10,000?
and you're right, i'm sure dershowitz's vigorous campaign to get finkelstein fired had nothing to with him getting fired :roll:
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'