Posted on 07/05/2005 3:46:24 PM PDT by Lorianne
Why would the University of California Press (UCP) be publishing a sequel to a book that several distinguished historians have compared to the notorious czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? It is by an author whose previous works were eliminated from the curriculum by the Toronto School Board because they were “anti-Semitic.” This author has also been characterized as a “writer celebrated by neo-Nazi groups for his Holocaust revisionism…,” and as a purveyor of “crackpot ideas, some of them mirrored almost verbatim in the propaganda put out by neo-Nazis….”
Imagine if a university press were publishing an overtly racist, sexist or homophobic book by a well-known bigot. There would be demands that the university, and the state that supports it, not lend its imprimatur to hate speech. Speech codes and political correctness would be invoked by the censorial hard left. But these same groups are now demanding the UCP change not a single word in this bigoted book by this anti-Semite.
You’ve probably never heard of the author, unless you travel in neo-Nazi, radical Islamic or hard left circles. His name is Norman Finkelstein. Yes he is a Jew. His parents were even Holocaust survivors, though he suspects his mother of having been a kapo (“really, how else would she have survived?” he asks rhetorically). He boasts that because of his parents’ status as survivors, he “can get away with things which nobody else can,” and reviewers have pointed out that if he were not Jewish, the book to which this one is a sequel “would have been dumped by the reviewers as a right-wing extremist pamphlet.”
Nor is he a scholar with any credentials. He boasts that “Never has one of my articles been published in a scientific magazine,” despite efforts by Noam Chomsky who believes Finkelstein’s scholarship is almost as good as Ward Churchill’s. The distinguished professor, Peter Novick, who Finkelstein himself credits with stimulating his dreadful book about the Holocaust has a different view. Novick has written the following:
As concerns particular assertions made by Finkelstein . . . the appropriate response is not (exhilarating) ‘debate’ but (tedious) examination of his footnotes. Such an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention. . . . No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites.
The Finkelstein book being published by the UCP is about Israel, a country Finkelstein has told the Jerusalem Report that “he has never actually visited,” and admits that “I don’t really know very much about Israel.” But he has quite strong feelings about the Jewish nation, as he does about Jews in general. He thinks that Israel should be flattered by “a comparison to the Gestapo,” and he loves Hezbollah, the overtly anti-Semitic terrorist group that makes videos showing suicide bombers where to stand in a crowded bus to maximize the number of Jewish children who will be killed and maimed.
Finkelstein also has a penchant for making up facts about people with whom he disagrees. Here’s where I come in. In 2003, I wrote a bestselling book called The Case For Israel. Finkelstein didn’t like the fact that, in his own words, my book “got great reviews everywhere,” so he started to spread the canard that I didn’t write my book, implying that it was written for me by the Israel Mossad. Not only didn’t I write it, I didn’t even read it! He went so far as to claim I didn’t write any of my books:
“[Dershowitz] has come to the point where he’s had so many people write so many of his books. [I]t’s sort of like a Hallmark line for Nazis… [T]hey churn them out so fast that he has now reached a point where he doesn’t even read them.” (This is after he compared me to Adolf Eichmann!)
Finkelstein knows, of course, that I write all my books by hand, since I don’t type or use a computer. I even sent my handwritten manuscript of The Case For Israel to the UCP, because they were publishing his book and he had written an email to the dean of the Harvard Law School in which he said he was:
“completing a book manuscript for the University of California Press” which will “demonstrate that he [Dershowitz] almost certainly didn’t write the book, and perhaps didn’t even read it prior to publication.”
The UCP made him take this defamation out of his book after I provided them with conclusive proof that it was a knowing lie. He screamed and yelled about being censored, but the First Amendment gives no author the right to make up defamatory lies and publish them. There are many more lies in his book, and I address them in the sequel to my book, The Case For Peace, which is being published by Wiley in August.
The question remains, why would the UCP exercise its own First Amendment rights by deciding to get into the gutter with the likes of Norman Finkelstein?
Finkelstein is now threatening to pull his book because the UPC is demanding that he make some changes in order to meet their editorial standards. He is apparently refusing. Recently Finkelstein placed the following headline on his website: “DERSHOWITZ WINS: UCP will not publish
And you think this is a good thing? Why?
Might it be because they have accepted bribes from Arab and muslim interests?
In the Arab world, bribery is an honorable means of getting one's way. Wouldn't one expect them to bribe American journalists and publishers to promote Arab/muslim views?
Wow, that really says a lot about both the company he keeps and the level of his 'scholarship'. :=)
It's just amazing how low the educational system of California has sunken.
Despite their best efforts, American universities still have some aura of academic credibility. The University of California ought to be careful what books it lends that credibility to.
"Why?" - Both are dubious characters, that's why.
Ping
A couple of observations:
1) I never thought I'd see Freepers rally around Alan Dershowitz.
2) Is it just me, or is this piece almost completely fact-free? Dershowitz accuses Finkelstein of publishing anti-semitic lies, but doesn't specify any of them. The only factual claim presented is about Dershowitz's authorship of his book.
I'm not coming down on either side of the argument -- this article doesn't give me enough facts to reach any conclusion. All I can glean is that Dershowitz and Finkelstein are at odds with each other; the article doesn't offer much of a clue why.
..........................................
That adds more detail about the feud, but nothing about what started it. Dershowitz repeats the charge that Finkelstein is a liar, but not once does he say, in simple terms, "Finkelstein said [X], which is false." He uses a whole lot of words to make his very simple point that Finkelstein is a liar, but doesn't give a single claim that can be fact-checked, let alone sourced.
If this is a story well-known to others and I'm late to the game, I apologize. But I've read through several thousand words of Dershowitz's prose, and I still don't know what in Finkelstein's work offends him.
"The mode of attack is consistent. Chomsky selects the target and directs Finkelstein to probe the writings in minute detail and conclude that the writer didn’t actually write the work, that it is plagiarized, that it is a hoax and a fraud. Cockburn publicizes these “findings,” and then a cadre of fellow travelers bombard the Internet with so many attacks on the target that these attacks jump to the top of Google. Because no one has thus far exposed the pattern, each attack may seem plausible on first impression. But when the pattern is examined and exposed, the entire enterprise becomes clear for what it is: a clear attempt to chill pro-Israel advocacy on university campuses by a form of literary McCarthyism."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1411099/posts
Finkelstein accuses authors including Dershowitz of plagiarism, thus attempting to discredit their work. Then Cockburn and others use the internet to disseminate these false charges.
Are you suggesting that the charge of plagiarism is not "offensive?" Or that Dershowitz has not proven the authenticity of his work? What is it you don't understand?
What I do not understand is why Dershowitz and Finkelstein are at each other's throats. I have a whole lot of how, but no why. Dershowitz says that Finkelstein lies, but doesn't call out a single specific lie. If he wrote a book full of anti-semitic slanders, would it kill someone to give me an example?
The counter-charge of plaigarism is secondary. This thread began with the claim that Finkelstein's book is bigoted. No example of that bigotry has been presented. It's not a question of whether I believe either of them -- I have no information either way. My issue is that I still don't know what the story is. I feel like I walked in in the middle of the movie.
First, the counter-plagiarism is not secondary. Dershowitz wrote a widely acclaimed important book defending Israel and showing why demonization of Israel is a new PC form of anti-Semitism. So trashing it was an important goal for the Finkelstein/Chomsky crew. Just as Joan Peter's book was very important and undermined Finkelstein/Chomsky's pet cause of delegitimizing Israel.
Second, from the article posted here:
"His parents were even Holocaust survivors, though he suspects his mother of having been a kapo (“really, how else would she have survived?” he asks rhetorically)."
That is a nauseating claim which smacks of revisionism.
Third, read for yourself some tidbits on US:
"What do you think of America's moral authority to spearhead a crusade against terrorism?
If you understand terrorism to mean the targeting of civilian populations in order to achieve political goals, then plainly the US qualifies as the main terrorist government in the world today, if only because of the sheer force it has at its disposal. I am not claiming that another government were it to be in the position of the US would act better, but given the predominant material and political weight of the US today, means that they are going to be the main terrorist state in the World today, and I think that's true."
and
"I get the impression that you think that the West was in some way responsible for the tragedy of September 11.
Lets put it this way. The so-called West, and really we're talking about the United States, and to a lesser extent its pathetic puppy dog in England, have a real problem on their hands. Regrettably, it's payback time for the Americans and they have a problem because all the other enemies since the end of World War Two that they pretended to contend with .. were basically fabricated enemies. The Soviet Union was a conservative bureaucracy by the end of World War Two, which apart from the sphere of influence it carved out--mostly for defensive reasons--was plainly in retrospect a stabilising force in international affairs. Then the enemies that the US conjured up as the Soviet Union fell into decline beginning in the early 1980`senemies like Libya, Iraq, narco-terrorists and so forththese were basically enemies created by the United States to--among other things--justify repressive policies around the world, and to inflate its military budget. Now they do have a problem on their hands, and its going to exact a cost from Americans. The American elites can talk about honour and creativity until the cows come home, but it's not going to be like the Iraq shooting fish in a barrel situation, like they did when they destroyed Iraq in 1991. Frankly, part of me says - even though everything since September 11 has been a nightmare--'you know what, we deserve the problem on our hands because some things Bin Laden says are true'. One of the things he said on that last tape was that 'until we live in security, you're not going to live in security', and there is a certain amount of rightness in that. Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread? Why should we go on merrily with our lives while so much of the world is suffering, and suffering incidentally not with us merely as bystanders, but with us as the indirect and direct perpetrators. So that I think that you can summon up all the heroic and self-aggrandizing rhetoric you want, but there is a problem facing all of us now, and maybe it's about time that the United States starts having to confront the same sort of problems that much of humanity has had to confront on a daily basis for God knows how long."
http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein1.html
If that's not sufficient to hate his guts, your stomach is stronger than mine.
Plenty of facts, and while neither party comes out looking simon pure, The Dirtbag seems to get much the worst of it.
1933 in Germany all over again. Except this time the Nazis are alive and well and recieving acclaim in America. How far down the path to destruction America has plunged in 60 years
"Finkelstein is a professor at Chicago's DePaul University. Another professor, Thomas Klocek, was fired by DePaul after sticking up for Israel after arguing with some Muslim students. "
Exactly--DePaul chose to cuddle to Islamists demands to stifle free speech, but it allows somebody like Finkelstein to publish freely his smears against Holocaust remembrance. I wonder how much lower DePaul and much of academia could further sink. Free speech applies only to the lowest scum.
FYI, I chose not to continue my Grad studies at DePaul. While Klocek affair was not central to my decision--primarily I can't balance work and studies at this time--it played part too.
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