Saturday, November 14, 2009

Alan Dershowitz is Pissing Me Off

I became interested in the Israel/Palestine conflict and while earlier in my life I was reading more pro-Zionist sources recently I've been reading more from the other side of the conflict. For instance I read a couple of books by Norman Finkelstein. In one of Finkelstein's books, Beyond Chutzpah, he lays out a detailed case for why Alan Dershowitz book, The Case for Israel, is a blatant hoax, and further it's a plagiaristic work of a prior book widely regarded as an earlier blatant hoax, Joan Peter's book From Time Immemorial.

Finklestein's case looks pretty strong to me. The detailed documentation of plagiarism is devastating. But the outright fabrication is also clearly documented.

But I wanted to give Dershowitz a chance to respond and I had heard him say he responded in a recent book called The Case for Peace. So I got a hold of the audio version and I listened to his response to Finkelstein's book, which I have just read. Dershowitz starts by quoting Noam Chomsky as follows. And be aware that I'm listening to the audio book, so I'm not sure on punctuation, capitalization, etc.

"The Jews do not merit a 'second homeland' because they already have New York, with a huge Jewish run population, Jewish-run media, a Jewish mayor, and domination of cultural and economic life."

I'm no Noam Chomsky expert, but I've heard him make this statement. What he said was in response to the claim that Palestinians don't need a homeland because they are nothing but Jordanians. He says that argument is just as absurd as the claim that Jews don't need a homeland because they already have New York. He rejects that argument as absurd and as far as I know has long been on record in support of a two state solution. Dershowitz has taken that statement, which was intended to express what Chomsky thought was an absurd notion, and he's made it such that this is in fact Chomsky's view.

Is this sloppiness or deception? Read Beyond Chutzpah and you'll see that Dershowitz engages in both. As Finkelstein emphasized when he debated Dershowitz on Democracy Now (which is quite fun to watch), this guy is the Felix Frankfurter Chair at Harvard Law School. To see such sloppiness and error is pretty surprising.

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