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Now
Jimmy Carter's book plainly threatens
to ignite a serious mainstream discussion of the Israel-Palestine
conflict. To avert such a disaster he just as plainly must be
reduced to ridicule and the debate turned into a circus. Enter
Alan Dershowitz.
After Carter responded affirmatively
to a provisional invitation that he speak at Brandeis University,
Brandeis president (and Zionist historian) Jehuda Reinharz predicated
a formal invitation on his willingness to debate Dershowitz.
"I don't want to have a conversation even indirectly with
Dershowitz," Carter replied. "There is no need for
me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about
the situation in Palestine." (1)
Brandeis is a distinguished
nonsectarian university founded by American Jews. Aside from
the conventional social science departments its divisions include
an International and Global Studies program, an Islamic and Middle
Eastern Studies program, and a Near Eastern and Judaic Studies
program. Brandeis also houses the Crown Center for Middle East
Studies, the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, the Sarnat
Center for the Study of Anti-Jewishness, the Tauber Institute
for the Study of European Jewry, the Goodman Institute for the
Study of Zionism and Israel, the Stoll Family Chair in Israel
Studies, and the Summer Institute for Israel Studies.
Yet Reinharz apparently couldn't
find anyone more qualified than Dershowitz to debate Carter.
In a 2003 meeting of the United Jewish Appeal, Reinharz lamented:
"Many of the dozens of centers for Middle East Studies in
America are in sorry shape, and over the past 25 years these
centers have been controlled by ideologically motivated forces
or individuals, and very often produce biased and shoddy scholarship.Criteria
of excellence must be applied to Middle East Studies, as they
are applied to other areas of study." (2) One indication
of Reinharz's "criteria of excellence" was his praise
for Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial hoax as a "valuable
synthesis" and "new analysis" --just like the
syntheses and analyses presented at Iran's Holocaust Conference.
(3)
After Carter's demurral the
Boston Globe editorialized that if he "can't take
the heat, stay out of the kitchen"--i.e., shut up on the
Israel-Palestine conflict. In particular the Globe took
Carter to task for allegedly fearing "genuine debate"
with that "inveterate defender of Israel, Alan Dershowitz."
For argument's sake let's put
to one side the extraordinary condition put on a former president
that to receive an invitation he would have to debate a hostile
critic (would such a condition be put on former Israeli prime
minister Ehud Barak?); and let's put to one side Carter's seemingly
incontestable point that it's hard to have genuine debate with
someone who "knows nothing" about the designated topic
(in fact, an overly generous appraisal of Dershowitz's insight);
and let's put to one side whether the purpose of Reinharz's challenge
was to stimulate or to stifle genuine debate (Reinharz
told a Haaretz reporter in 2002 that his mission as university
president was "to promote the Jewish agenda in the world").
(4)
The principle that no one should
be immune from criticism is undoubtedly valid. It becomes hypocritical,
however, if selectively applied. Consider the case of that
"inveterate defender" of Israel. In 2003 Dershowitz
published a book entitled The Case for Israel that garnered
plaudits in periodicals such as the New York Times Sunday
Book Review and the Boston Globe and became a national
bestseller. In 2005 this writer published a study, Beyond
Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history,
copiously documenting that The Case for Israel was riddled
with falsifications and fabrications, and that large swaths were
plagiarized from Joan Peters's hoax. Unlike the complaints about
Carter the allegations leveled against Dershowitz possessed the
merit of being true.
When this writer first began
to expose Dershowitz's gross scholarly misconduct, Dershowitz
piously declared that he wouldn't respond with a libel action
because he believed "so strongly in the First Amendment
and full freedom of speech." (5) Nonetheless, in seeking
to block publication of Beyond Chutzpah, he first fired
off a barrage of minatory letters at the publisher, subsequently
boasting that he told it "I will own your company,"
and recruited reputedly the most powerful law firm in the country,
Cravath, Swaine and Moore, to escalate the pressure.
Dershowitz then implored California
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to intercede with the publisher,
but Schwarzenegger refused "because of the clear, academic
freedom issue it presents." (6) Dershowitz initially denied
writing Schwarzenegger, declaring that "My letter to the
Governor doesn't exist," but when pressed on the issue he
explained that "It was not a letter. It was a polite note."
He now maintains that he didn't attempt suppression of the book
and has "released the letters" to prove it. Those
seeking to retrieve these "released" letters have had
to bear Dershowitz's crude evasions and tantrums instead. (7)
Ironically, just as he was
threatening University of California Press with expensive and
time-consuming lawsuits to prevent publication of Beyond Chutzpah,
Dershowitz denounced Holocaust denier David Irving, who had sued
author Deborah Lipstadt for libel, in these words: "Before
Irving lost his case [against Lipstadt], several publishers had
refused to issue books critical of Irving, out of fear of his
bringing expensive and time-consuming lawsuits. That was a chilling
of free speech." (8)
As Beyond Chutzpah was
going to press and after its publication Dershowitz embarked
on an unremitting campaign of defamation, hurling wild and, frankly,
obscene ad hominem calumnies. Disseminating these slanders under
such juvenile titles as The Committee to Expose Norman Finkelstein's
Close Connections to Neo-Nazism, Holocaust Denial, and His "Big
Lie" of an "International Jewish Conspiracy,"
he asserted that this writer was a "notorious Jewish
anti-Semite" and "Holocaust revisionist," had
"praised" Osama Bin Laden, and had been let go from
a teaching post due to "mental instability." He even
threatened to show up during the tenure process at the university
where this writer teaches at his--Dershowitz's -- "own
expense" to "document the case against Finkelstein."
Although he hasn't yet acted on this particular threat, Dershowitz
is currently inundating the university's faculty and administration
with lurid allegations to block this writer's tenure.
Dershowitz posted on Harvard
Law School's official website the insinuation that this writer's
late mother was a "kapo" who had been "cooperating
with the Nazis during the Holocaust." Harvard Law School
Dean Elena Kagan held that Dershowitz's gross defamation fell
within the parameters of what was permissible to post on its
website. For the record, this writer's late mother was a survivor
of the Warsaw Ghetto, Maidanek concentration camp and two slave-labor
camps, lost every member of her family during the war and after
the war served as a key witness at a Nazi deportation hearing
in the U.S. and at the trial of Maidanek concentration camp guards
in Germany. (9)
In his companion book The
Case for Peace, Dershowitz embellished on these smears and
went on to proclaim that a "well-orchestrated" conspiracy
had been mounted by an "anti-Israel triumvirate" to
ruin his reputation on account of his outspoken support of Israel.
When not denouncing the "Chomsky-Cockburn-Finkelstein conspiracy"
hatched against him, Dershowitz derided his critics for trafficking
inconspiracy theories. (10)
It must surely be reckoned
a victory that, despite the brutal pressures exerted on it, University
of California Press went ahead and published Beyond Chutzpah,
a display of principle for which it was duly commended by the
Middle East Studies Association. (11) It should nonetheless
be borne in mind that the victory was partial. Getting a truly
controversial book published is half the problem; the other half
is getting it noticed among the tens of thousands of other books
put out each year.
Normally a book that had garnered
so much pre-publication publicity (due to Dershowitz's libel
threats) would have had editors scrambling to be the first to
review it. But these circumstances weren't normal. The controversy
implicated Israel's egregious human rights record, exposed a
senior Harvard Law School professor who had concocted an academic
fraud mangling this record, and embarrassed eminent individuals,
institutions, and periodicals that, wittingly or unwittingly,
had staked their names singing paeans to the hoax. It was a
real scandal having real consequences in a real conflict touching
on the lives of real people, not just of those eminent personalities
whose reputations might be tarnished but of the people of Palestine,
who daily bear the brunt of the numberless lies that proliferate
in the United States.
Unsurprisingly, Beyond Chutzpah
did not receive a single mainstream review in the United States.
(In Israel, both Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post
reviewed it, Haaretz quite favorably.) (12) This writer
was unable to get on a single mainstream radio, let alone television,
program or publish an op-ed on the Israel-Palestine conflict,
not from a want of trying and notwithstanding that Israel-Palestine
was constantly in the news.
Popular as ever, Dershowitz
emerged from the potential scandal unscathed, still authoritatively
cited and interviewed, his subsequent book The Case for Peace
being acclaimed by the Boston Globe for providing "well-honed
and incisivelogical argumentation" reminiscent of "Thomas
Aquinas in his Summa Theologica." (13) In answer
to the criticism that the fragmented state being offered Palestinians
wouldn't be viable, Dershowitz quotes this piece of geopolitical
wisdom in The Case for Peace: "Palestinians could
yet build a Monte Carlo in Jericho, a Vatican state in Bethlehem,
a Luxembourg in Ramallah, a Cyprus in Gaza, a Singapore in Nablus."
(14) Didn't he leave out a Disneyland in Rafah refugee camp?
After the succession of laudatory notices for Dershowitz's
books in the Globe, this writer contacted its Books Editor
wondering if he might consider reviewing Beyond Chutzpah.
The answer was a flat no. So much for the spirit of genuine
debate.
Indeed, although repeatedly
approached by third parties to debate this writer, Dershowitz
adamantly refused on the ground that he had a "longstanding
policy against debating Holocaust deniers, revisionists, trivializers
or minimizers," but would instead debate Noam Chomsky. (15)
Several anomalies in his position merit notice. This writer
has authored two books on the Nazi holocaust. The first, A
Nation on Trial (co-written with Ruth Bettina Birn), received
glowing praise from the world's leading authorities on the Nazi
holocaust, including Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, and
István Deák, and was named a "notable book
of the year" by the New York Times Sunday Book Review.
The second, The Holocaust Industry, was blurbed by Hilberg,
the undisputed dean of Nazi holocaust historians. Referring explicitly
to this writer's findings on Holocaust compensation, which Dershowitz
claims to find so repellent, Hilberg wrote that "he was
actually conservative, moderate and his conclusions are trustworthy.I
am by no means the only one who, in the coming months or years,
will totally agree with Finkelstein's breakthrough." Beyond
this, Dershowitz has for many years pilloried Professor Chomsky
for Holocaust denial. To cite the most recent examples, in The
Case for Israel he deplores "Chomsky's flirtation with
Holocaust denial," and in The Case for Peace he deplores
Chomsky for "supporting, praising, and working with Holocaust
deniers." (16) The real reason Dershowitz has refused
to debate this writer would seem to lie elsewhere.
Many academic and literary
scandals touching on questions that overlap with those posed
in Beyond Chutzpah recently received wide media play.
A duo of Harvard Law School professors, Laurence H. Tribe and
Charles J. Ogletree, faced credible charges of scholarly malfeasance.
It is noteworthy that, although both these professors share
the mainstream liberal politics of the New York Times,
and although Harvard is held in reverence by the Times,
none of these considerations deterred the Times from giving
prominent critical coverage to the HLS scandal. (17) A singular
omission in the Times reportage, however, was any mention
of the copiously documented and far more serious accusations
leveled against Dershowitz, who also teaches at HLS. Defenders
of the Holy State get to play by a different set of rules. The
Times reporter privately told Dershowitz that she couldn't
"even understand" the charges against him. (18)
Again, notice must be taken of just how truly impressive such
mental discipline is.
Tribe and Ogletree were publicly
rebuked, while a popular left-wing professor at the University
of Colorado was to be stripped of his teaching post after being
charged with scholarly fraud and plagiarism. Yet, although their
combined academic malfeasances paled beside Dershowitz's, he
continues to go his merry way at Harvard. Just since Spring
2005, and in addition to his academic derelictions documented
in Beyond Chutzpah, the Public Committee Against Torture
in Israel has credibly accused Dershowitz of making "blatantly
false and utterly preposterous" statements; the main national
Jewish newspaper Forward reported that "not a wordis
true" in the self-promoting passage of a speech Dershowitz
delivered; a respected Amherst College professor suggested in
a scholarly review of another of Dershowitz's recent books,
Rights From Wrongs, that "parts of Dershowitz's book
are in conflict with one another because they were written by
different hands"; and senior Harvard Law School librarian
Harry S. Martin denied Dershowitz's repeated claim that he (Martin)
had exonerated Dershowitz of plagiarism charges. (19)
In yet another literary scandal,
it was revealed that the author of a book chronicling his redemptive
personal odyssey, which became a national bestseller after Oprah
Winfrey's selection of it for her book club, had fabricated portions
of his life. The Times weighed in with no less than 16
articles in the space of 20 days meditating on the perils of
an eroding boundary between fiction and fact, for which postmodernist
relativism was held culpable, and of nonfiction straying from
"objectivity and veracity." One might have thought
that this would be a ripe occasion for the Times, finally,
to scrutinize the Dershowitz case. But it was not meant to be.
(20) Then it was revealed that a Harvard undergraduate had
lifted passages from other literary works in her debut "chick-lit"
novel. The Times gave extensive coverage to this scandal
as well. Unlike the Times, Harvard's school paper had
the temerity to mention that among similar scandals rocking Harvard
in recent years was the Dershowitz case. Predictably Dershowitz
fired off an outraged letter denying any parallels. (21)
In a more comic than textbook
case of projection Dershowitz accused two respected academic
authors who had written an article critical of the "Israel
lobby" of precisely the scholarly derelictions leveled against
him: "a compilation of old, false, and authoritatively discredited
charges dressed up in academic garb. The only thing new about
it is the imprimatur these recycled assertions have now been
given by the prominence of its authors and their institutional
affiliationsfilled with errors and distortions that should be
obvious to any critical readerquotations are wrenched out of
context...facts are misstatedembarrassingly poor logic is employed."
Along the way Dershowitz also
alleges that "the authors cite quotations to their primary
sources, when it's obvious that they did not find the materials
there.On at least one occasion, they quote to the primary source
incorrectly.Rather than citing to where they actually found the
quotation, the authors simply copied a citation without checking
the source they were citing." (22) These allegations of
Dershowitz were widely and respectfully quoted in the major media
and serious journals, it not once being so much as hinted that,
even if valid (itself highly doubtful), he should be the very
last one leveling them. (23)
And now it's that "inveterate
defender" bravely protecting the Holy State from another
infidel attack. Dershowitz lunges into Carter's book for being
"shallow and superficial," "biasedindecentahistorical,
one-sided," a "wrongheaded, upside-down view of the
Mideast conflict," replete with "hyperbole and overstatement,"
"conveying misinformation, ahistorical facts to American
audiences," "misleading the court of public opinion,"
and on and on. (24) These criticisms of Dershowitz are yet
again cited reverentially across the U.S. media without even
a trace of irony.
According to Dershowitz, Carter's
book is filled with "simple mistakes of facts and deliberate
omissions thatwould fill a volume the size of his book."
None of his obsequious admirers seem to have noticed that a
book the size of The Case for Israel has already demonstrated
Dershowitz's numberless mistakes and omissions--not to mention
fabrications, falsifications and plagiarisms.
"You can always tell when
a public figure has written an indefensible book," Dershowitz
says of Carter, "when he refuses to debate it in the court
of public opinion." But dare anyone say that the kettle
shouldn't be calling the coffeepot black? "The real reason
Carter won't debate me," Dershowitz proclaims, "is
that I would correct his factual errors." But isn't that
the real reason Dershowitz won't debate this writer? "Authors
should be accountable for their ideas and their facts,"
Dershowitz asserts. "Books shouldn't be like chapel [a
sermon?] delivered from on high and believed on faith."
But shouldn't this principle also apply to authors delivering
books from on high at Harvard Law School?
"Jimmy Carter isn't brave
for beating up on Israel. He's a bully," Dershowitz scowls.
"And like all school-yard bullies, underneath the tough
talk and bravado, there's a nagging insecurity and a fear that
one day he'll have to answer for himself in a fair fight."
But doesn't our "inveterate defender of Israel" hurl
slanders and libels at this writer--and numberless others who
dissent from the Party line--because he dreads a fair fight?
Is it brave, Mr. Dershowitz, to scandalize the memory of a deceased
survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi death camps because
you are terrified of being exposed as a fraudster?
"When Jimmy Carter's ready
to speak at Brandeis, or anywhere else, I'll be there,"
Dershowitz challenges. "If he refuses to debate, I will
still be there--ready and willing to answer falsity with truth
in the court of public opinion."
This writer is also ready to
debate, anytime and anywhere. But will Alan Dershowitz be there?
2. Farah Stockman and Marcella
Bombardieri, "Carter Book Won't Stir Brandeis Debate,"
Boston Globe (15 December 2006).
3. Harry Mairson, "Mideast
Scholarship, A Canard," in Brandeis Hoot (1 April
2005).
4. Library Journal, 15
April 1984.
5. Cited in Mairson.
6. UCLA International Institute,
"Alan Dershowitz Speaks on His 'The Case for Israel'"
(21 October 2003).
7. See Steven Zeitchik, "Behind
Beyond Chutzpah," Publisher's Weekly (17 May 2005),
Scott Jaschik, "First Amendment Furor," Inside Higher
Ed (27 June 2005); Jon Wiener, "Giving Chutzpah New
Meaning," Nation (11 July 2005), Jennifer Howard,
"U. of California Press to Publish Book That Alan Dershowitz
Has Criticized as Anti-Semitic," and "Calif. Press
Will Publish Controversial Book on Israel," Chronicle
of Higher Education (11 July 2005, 22 July 2005), Mandy Garner,
"The Good Jewish Boys Go Into Battle," Times Higher
Education Supplement (United Kingdom) (16 December 2005).
8. Alan Dershowitz, "Neve
Gordon Can't Take Criticism," Jerusalem Post (8 November
2006)
9. Afterword to Deborah
Lipstadt, History on Trial: My day in court with David Irving
(New York: 2005), p. 304 (emphasis in original).
10. Dershowitz repeated these
accusations in numerous articles, many of which are posted at
www.NormanFinkelstein.com,
under "Beyond Chutzpah" and "Who Was Maryla Husyt
Finkelstein?"
11. Alan Dershowitz, The
Case For Peace: How the Arab-Israeli conflict can be resolved
(Hoboken, N.J.: 2005), pp. 122 ("conspiracy"), 169-70
("well-orchestrated"), 180, 187 ("triumvirate").
13. Neve Gordon, "The
Controversy Surrounding the Origins of the 'New Anti-Semitism,'"
Haaretz (26 April 2006). Ben Naparstek, "His Own
Worst Enemy," The JerusalemPost (12 December
2005).
14. Michael D. Langan, "Dershowitz
Makes a Compelling 'Case for Peace,'" in Boston Globe
(15 November 2005).
15. Dershowitz, Case for
Peace, p. 41.
16. Statement of Alan M.
Dershowitz (www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/dershowitz/statement.html).
17. Dershowitz, Case for
Israel, p. 212; Dershowitz, Case for Peace, p. 170.
18. Sara Rimer, "When
Plagiarism's Shadow Falls on Admired Scholars," in The
New York Times (24 November 2004).
19. Dershowitz, Case for
Peace, p. 234n119 (quoting Rimer). For another disingenuous
attempt to separate out Dershowitz from Tribe and Ogletree, see
M. Aidan Kelly, "Mercy of the Court of Public Opinion,"
Harvard Crimson Magazine (27 September 2006); for my (unpublished)
reply, see www.normanfinkelstein.com/.
20. Regan Boychuk, "The
Case Against Alan Dershowitz" (15 April 2005; www.zmag.org/);
Kathleen Peratis, "Only Human" in Forward (24
February 2006); Hadley Arkes, "The Rights And Wrongs of
Alan Dershowitz," in Claremont Review of Books (Fall
2005); "Correction," Harvard Crimson (26 May
2006).
21. After several fruitless
phone conversations with the Times reporter who covered
the story, this writer spelled out for him in writing the obvious
reasons why the Dershowitz fraud merited Times attention:
The Case for Israel was also a Times best seller
on the nonfiction list; it bore not on personal salvation but
rather a burning political issue; The Times Sunday Book Review
ran a positive review of it by a Times editorial board
member; and so on (email to Edward Wyatt dated 30 January 2006).
The quoted phrase in the text came from Times book reviewer
Michiko Kakutani's contribution, "Bending The Truth In a
Million Little Ways," in New York Times (17 January
2006).
22. David Zhou, "College
Looking Into Plagiarism," in The Harvard Crimson
(27 April 2006). Alan M. Dershowitz, "Plagiarism Accusations
Unfairly Characterized" (letter), in The Harvard Crimson
(5 May 2006).
24. See John J. Mearsheimer
and Stephen M. Walt, Setting the Record Straight: A response
to critics of "The Israel Lobby" (5 November 2006;
forthcoming).
25. Alan Dershowitz, "The
World According to Carter," New York Sun (22 November
2006); Alan Dershowitz, "Jimmy Carter Trivializes Rwandan
Genocide" (8 December 2006; www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/;
"Dershowitz
Dissects Carter, " (8 December 2006;); Alan Dershowitz,
"From
Jimmy Carter, a book-length smear on Israel" (2 December
2006; ); Alan Dershowitz, "Jimmy
Carter Plays the 'God Card'"
(13 December 2006; ); Alan Dershowitz, "Why Won't Carter
Debate His Book?," Boston Globe (21 December 2006).
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