The Dershowitz - Finkelstein debate
Byrnzie
Posts: 21,037
Everyone should see this. It's superb. I don't think I've ever seen someone who purports to be a serious intellectual be so decisively demolished in public.
http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/3406/Democracy-Now-20030924-The-famous-Norman-Finkelstein-vs-Alan-Dershowitz
'This is the full version (2 parts conjoined in one file) of the famous debate at Democracy Now! (http://www.democracynow.org) between professor Alan Dershowitz at Harvard and professor Norman Finkelstein at DePaul university.
The debate - probably the most famous episode of Democracy Now! - ultimately led to Finkelstein losing his tenure at DePaul after a massive lobbying campaign against him, spearheaded by Dershowitz. Professor Noam Chomsky at MIT later called Dershowitz' campaign "a jihad against Finkelstein". The debate itself is about Dershowitz book The case for Israel, where he defends Israel's foreign policies. Finkelstein calls the book "a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism and nonsense". After having watched the debate, one can only agree.'
Here's a transcript of the start of the debate...
http://www.democracynow.org/2003/9/24/scholar_norman_finkelstein_calls_professor_alan
http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/3406/Democracy-Now-20030924-The-famous-Norman-Finkelstein-vs-Alan-Dershowitz
'This is the full version (2 parts conjoined in one file) of the famous debate at Democracy Now! (http://www.democracynow.org) between professor Alan Dershowitz at Harvard and professor Norman Finkelstein at DePaul university.
The debate - probably the most famous episode of Democracy Now! - ultimately led to Finkelstein losing his tenure at DePaul after a massive lobbying campaign against him, spearheaded by Dershowitz. Professor Noam Chomsky at MIT later called Dershowitz' campaign "a jihad against Finkelstein". The debate itself is about Dershowitz book The case for Israel, where he defends Israel's foreign policies. Finkelstein calls the book "a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism and nonsense". After having watched the debate, one can only agree.'
Here's a transcript of the start of the debate...
http://www.democracynow.org/2003/9/24/scholar_norman_finkelstein_calls_professor_alan
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I also woner what it says about Harvard that they can continue to employ this liar, and plagiariser.
YouTube..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqT6uKxz_eQ
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/matthew_abraham/2007/06/a_battle_for_academic_freedom.html
'...Raul Hilberg, the leading scholar on the Nazi holocaust, has called Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry "a breakthrough" and states that Finkelstein "was on the right track" in his documentation of how the World Jewish Congress, with the aid of the Clinton administration, extorted billions of dollars from Swiss banks in the name of Holocaust survivors, only to pocket the money for Jewish organisations. And, although The Holocaust Industry is Finkelstein's most frequently cited book in defamatory attempts to cast him as a "Holocaust denier" and a "denier of justice to Holocaust survivors", Image and Reality in the Israel-Palestine Conflict - a thorough criticism of the central political and philosophical tenets informing Zionism - is his most scholarly and substantial work. But Finkelstein's detractors avoid discussion of Image and Reality for exactly that reason: it is considered a first-rate piece of scholarship.
Finkelstein argues that most US commentators obscure or avoid the clear historical and diplomatic record in examining the Israel-Palestine conflict by ignoring or downplaying international law, fooling the US public into believing that Israel's occupation is just, necessary, and lawful. One such example is the failure of the 2000 Camp David talks - a failure that has been attributed, at least in elite circles within the United States, to Yasir Arafat's intransigence. In actuality, what Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak offered Arafat was something no Palestinian leader could accept: a Bantustan state reminiscent of the African national territories.
Finkelstein's latest exposure of US and Israeli apologetics for state violence was of famed Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who was at the centre of Finkelstein's analysis in Beyond Chutzpah: The Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. In August 2003, Dershowitz published The Case for Israel, which Finkelstein uses as a foil in Beyond Chutzpah, demonstrating that Dershowitz misrepresents key diplomatic, legal and historical aspects of the conflict. Dershowitz attempted to block publication of Beyond Chutzpah by inundating the University of California Press with threatening letters from the major New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore throughout the spring and summer of 2005, stating he would sue the press if it did not ensure that every claim Finkelstein made about Dershowitz was factually correct. Beyond Chutzpah was vetted by six experts of the Israel-Palestine conflict and several libel attorneys. When he could not prevail upon the press or the University of California's Board of Reagents, Dershowitz asked Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to intervene. Schwarzenegger refused to do so on grounds of academic freedom. Finkelstein wasn't so lucky at DePaul.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/arts/11depa.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
'Mr. Finkelstein said he clearly “met the publishing standards and the teaching standards required for tenure” and that DePaul’s decision was based on “transparently political grounds” and an “egregious violation” of academic freedom...
..In a full-court press against Mr. Finkelstein, Mr. Dershowitz lobbied professors, alumni and the administration of DePaul, a Roman Catholic university in Chicago, to deny him tenure. Many faculty members at DePaul and elsewhere decried what they called Mr. Dershowitz’s heavy-handed tactics.
Sounding resigned, Mr. Finkelstein said of DePaul, “Rationally, it has to deny me tenure.”
“Any time I wrote or spoke would evoke another hysterical response and would be costly for them,” he said, referring to the college’s fund-raising efforts.
It is no surprise that Mr. Dershowitz was delighted. “It was plainly the right decision,” he said.
Mr. Finkelstein said he plans to leave Chicago for New York. “Teaching is in my bones. I love to teach,” he said, but he added that as a result of this “blacklisting, I will be barred from ever entering a college classroom again.”
Nonetheless, any temptation to “indulge in a bout of self-pity,” he said, was halted by thinking of his parents, who survived the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi death camps while the rest of his relatives were exterminated. “They survived,” he said. “I’ll survive.”
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1493
'...Here are some of the relevant facts: Finkelstein has published five books, one of them co-authored. Four were published before DePaul hired him as a tenure-track assistant professor. Some of those four were reissued in expanded editions while he was at DePaul. His fifth book, Beyond Chutzpah, was published while he was at DePaul, and it was published by a more prestigious university press than any of his previous works. Beyond Chutzpah does not differ materially in style or the use of “personal attacks” from Finkelstein’s previous books, and, to my knowledge, not even Dershowitz has ever claimed that it does. If anything, Beyond Chutzpah strikes me as more moderate in tone than its predecessors.
Tenure-track faculty are given annual reviews evaluating their performance in all areas relevant to eligibility for tenure. Finkelstein’s annual reviews at DePaul expressed nothing but enthusiasm about his scholarship. Even the annual review dealing with his manuscript for Beyond Chutzpah contained not a word of criticism of Finkelstein’s scholarship.
DePaul’s stated grounds for denying Finkelstein tenure consequently seem impossible to take seriously. The style of his first four books cannot have disqualified him from receiving tenure, because they were already in print when DePaul hired him into a tenure-track position. Thus, those books must have made him a promising candidate for tenure, not the reverse. If those books nonetheless contained flaws that Finkelstein needed to avoid in his subsequent work in order to get tenure, then his annual reviews would have said so. In fact, they said nothing of the sort. And Beyond Chutzpah, which (1) was issued by a more prestigious academic press than anything Finkelstein had published before, (2) contained nothing new in terms of “inflammatory style” or “personal attacks,” and (3) received not a word of criticism from his department in his annual review, can only have strengthened his case for tenure.
I conclude that the president’s claim—that Finkelstein’s scholarship does not meet DePaul’s standards for tenure—cannot be true. And even the UBPT conceded that “By all accounts” Finkelstein is “an excellent teacher, popular with his students and effective in the classroom.” It follows that there must be some other explanation for why Finkelstein was denied tenure. Dershowitz’s campaign seems the most likely candidate.'
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1076
'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.'
The Fate of an Honest Intellectual
Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, pp. 244-248
http://www.chomsky.info/books/power01.htm
'...I told him, yeah, I think it's an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you're going to get in trouble—because you're going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they're going to destroy you. So I said: if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you're getting into. It's an important issue, it makes a big difference whether you eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population—it's preparing the basis for some real horrors—so a lot of people's lives could be at stake. But your life is at stake too, I told him, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.
Well, he didn't believe me. We became very close friends after this, I didn't know him before. He went ahead and wrote up an article, and he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn't even bother responding. I finally managed to place a piece of it in In These Times, a tiny left-wing journal published in Illinois, where some of you may have seen it. Otherwise nothing, no response. Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn't make appointments with him, they wouldn't read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.
By this time, he was getting kind of desperate, and he asked me what to do. I gave him what I thought was good advice, but what turned out to be bad advice: I suggested that he shift over to a different department, where I knew some people and figured he'd at least be treated decently. That turned out to be wrong. He switched over, and when he got to the point of writing his thesis he literally could not get the faculty to read it, he couldn't get them to come to his thesis defense. Finally, out of embarrassment, they granted him a Ph.D.—he's very smart, incidentally—but they will not even write a letter for him saying that he was a student at Princeton University. I mean, sometimes you have students for whom it's hard to write good letters of recommendation, because you really didn't think they were very good—but you can write something, there are ways of doing these things. This guy was good, but he literally cannot get a letter.
He's now living in a little apartment somewhere in New York City, and he's a part-time social worker working with teenage drop-outs. Very promising scholar—if he'd done what he was told, he would have gone on and right now he'd be a professor somewhere at some big university. Instead he's working part-time with disturbed teenaged kids for a couple thousand dollars a year. That's a lot better than a death squad, it's true—it's a whole lot better than a death squad. But those are the techniques of control that are around...'
Finkelstein is probably most of the time in awe, or stunned, of the sheer bullshit Dersh can fly and make it look/seem legit and matter of fact.
Two brilliant capable minds.
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
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Doesn't he?! It's so damn frustrating to watch!
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
It is. On a scale of 1 - 10.... a solid 9 is my guess. I leave 1 point for that unknown person in the future that absolutely blows my mind. I suppose I wouldn't even realize it at that point.
I have to admit he flipped me a few times on the issue.
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
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( o.O)
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After watching this debate I wouldn't say that Dershowitz has a brilliant capable mind at all. He looks like a total buffoon digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole of his own making. Finkelstein wipes the floor with him and exposes him for the shifty little fraudster that he is.
Ultimately yes, but if you zoom in and listen to his specifics, he does make some compelling points in defending his work. Whenever I found this happening I would just zoom back out a notch, and realize what he was doing. For me anyways. I tried to remain as impartial to both sides as I could while listening to this, often giving benefit of the doubt.
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
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The Mark Twain quote example, obviously a great find by Finkelstein, but I think it shows Dershowitz sloppiness more than anything.
The example with the number of Palestinians who fled, I mean, once again that may be an error on Dershowitz part, but it doesn't really mean much on its own.
Before I watched the interview, I was expecting a debate on the conflict, not on the book's technicalities.
A.D's improper use of a Twain quote is no reason to discredit all or some of the points that 'The Case For Israel' makes...
But that's just one example Finkelstein chose at random. He mentions that there's about 16 direct plagiarisms from the first chapter alone in the book.
I've ordered 'Beyond Chutzpah' - Finkelstein's book, in which, among other things he analyzes Dershowitz's book in detail. Should be an interesting read.