Ebrima,
I just saw this one and thank you very much.I was recently introduced to
works Finelstein by a Gambian friend here.Any body interested in the
Israel/Palestinian conflict should read "The holocaust Industry",a very
serious work,no doubt many were struggling to stop the book from being
published.
For Freedom
Saiks
>From: "Ebrima Ceesay" <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
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>Subject: [>-<] Prof Norman Finkelstein replies Dershowitz
>Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 18:00:54 +0000
>
>[ This e-mail is posted to Gambia|Post e-Gathering by "Ebrima Ceesay"
><[log in to unmask]> ]
>
>
>
>
>Dear Readers:
>
>Find below Prof Norman Finkelstein's response to Alan Dershowitz.
>
>Ebrima
>
>_________________________________________________________________________________
>
>
>Finkelstein's Unedited Letter to the Crimson
>
>
>The Glove Does Fit: A reply to Alan Dershowitz
>
>By Norman Finkelstein
>
>
>Alan Dershowitz either cannot or refuses to understand why there is a
>controversy surrounding The Case for Israel ("Plagiarism Accusations
>Political, Unfounded," 30 September 2003). Perhaps I can enlighten him.
>Quite simply, the book he claims to have written is a hoax: (1)
>substantial swatches are lifted from another notorious hoax on the
>Israel-Palestine conflict, (2) it is replete with egregious falsifications,
>and (3) the few scholarly sources actually cited are mangled beyond
>recognition. In this reply, I will only illustrate points (1) and (2).
>These, along with point (3), will be fully documented in a forthcoming
>monograph.
>
>In 1984, Joan Peters published From Time Immemorial, which claimed that
>Palestine was virtually empty on the eve of Zionist colonization, and that
>Palestinians are in fact foreigners who surreptitiously entered Palestine
>after the Zionists "made the desert bloom." The book is now widely
>recognized as a fraud. Baruch Kimmerling (of the Hebrew University) and
>Joel S. Migdal, in their authoritative study, Palestinians: The Making of a
>People, published by Harvard University Press, observe that Peters's book
>is "based on materials out of context, and on distorted evidence," and,
>citing my own conclusion that the book "is the most spectacular fraud ever
>published on the Arab-Israeli conflict," report that "similar evaluations
>were expressed by notable historians" in Israel and Europe.
>
>Dershowitz states that he uses only a "few sources" cited in the Peters
>hoax. In fact, fully 22 of the 52 endnotes in chapters 1-2 are lifted
>straight from her without any form of attribution. In his defense,
>Dershowitz claims that no foul play is involved because he checked Peters's
>original sources before citing them, a laughable argument were an
>undergraduate to make it before a plagiarism committee. Dershowitz focuses
>on a lengthy citation from Mark Twain to argue this point. Yet, although
>Dershowitz reproduces Peters's page references to Twain's book in his own
>endnote, the relevant quotes do not appear on these pages in the edition of
>Twain's book that Dershowitz cites. Furthermore, Dershowitz cites two
>paragraphs from Twain as continuous text, just as Peters cites them as
>continuous text, but in Twain's book the two paragraphs are separated by 87
>pages. It would be impossible for anyone who checked the original source
>to make this error.
>
>Dershowitz similarly "checked" Peters's other sources. Quoting a statement
>depicting the miserable fate of Jews in mid-19th century Jerusalem, Peters
>cites a British consular letter from "Wm. T. Young to Viscount Canning."
>Dershowitz cites the same statement as Peters, reporting that Young
>"attributed the plight of the Jew in Jerusalem" to pervasive anti-Semitism.
> Turning to the original, however, we find that the relevant statement did
>not come from Young but, as is unmistakably clear to anyone who actually
>consulted the original, from an enclosed memorandum written by an "A.
>Benisch" that Young was forwarding to Canning. One wonders if Dershowitz
>also consulted Peters's original source for the term "turnspeak" - a
>coinage of Peters, which she says was inspired by George Orwell's 1984, but
>which Dershowitz, confounded by his massive borrowings from Peters, not
>once but twice credits directly to Orwell ("George Orwell's `turnspeak,'"
>"Orwellian turnspeak"). On which pages of 1984 did Dershowitz find
>"turnspeak"?
>
>Dershowitz does directly cite Peters on several occasions. But it's not
>prudent for a scholar to rely on a hoax. In his chapter on the 1948
>Palestinian refugees, Dershowitz cites from Peters a quote that the
>majority of 1948 Palestinian Arab refugees weren't expelled but "left
>without seeing an Israeli soldier." Had he even bothered to check her
>endnote, Dershowitz would have discovered from the subtitle of the study
>Peters cites that it in fact refers to the Palestinian refugee flight
>during the June 1967 war ("A Study of the Exodus of the 1967 Arab
>Palestinian Refugees").
>
>"Let it be absolutely clear," Dershowitz states elsewhere, "that my
>demographic conclusions are very different from Peters's." Really? The
>centerpiece of Peters's book is a demographic study purporting to prove
>that many of the 1948 Palestinian Arab refugees were actually recent
>arrivals to the area of Palestine that became Israel from other parts of
>Palestine. She "proves" this by falsifying key data. Far from reaching
>different conclusions on this key point, Dershowitz repeats Peters's
>fraudulent claim, even fabricating the flat-out lie that the "United
>Nations recogniz[ed] that many of the refugees had not lived for long in
>the villages they left."
>
>Dershowitz's book is replete with absurd falsifications. The Mufti of
>Jerusalem during the British mandate years, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was
>undoubtedly a despicable human being. But rather than sticking to the
>facts, he copies mostly from a single newspaper column by an obscure
>right-wing Zionist ideologue. Dershowitz avows that "Adolf Eichmann
>visited Husseini in Palestine"; the mufti was "taken on a tour of Auschwitz
>by Himmler"; "The grand mufti of Jerusalem was personally responsible for
>the concentration camp slaughter of thousands of Jews"; the mufti organized
>a commando unit "to poison Tel Aviv's wells"; "The mufti was apparently
>planning to return to Palestine in the event of a German victory and to
>construct a death camp modeled after Auschwitz near Nablus"; and on and on.
>I have consulted the relevant secondary literature and the leading
>authorities on the mufti and the Nazi holocaust, but couldn't find
>scholarly support for any of these fantastic claims.
>
>Similarly, Dershowitz extensively details an alleged plot in which
>"terrorist operatives" rape Palestinian women to recruit them as suicide
>bombers. However, he never explains why they would need to do so when the
>number of Palestinian women volunteering for suicide attacks already
>exceeds the number of planned missions. Turning to his endnote, we find
>that he gets this "information" from an official Israeli government web
>site, which bases itself on a confidential "Israeli Military Intelligence
>Report," which is based on "reliable Palestinian sources" - none of which
>are independently corroborated.
>
>On an even more shocking note, Dershowitz maintains that "there is no
>evidence that Israeli soldiers deliberately killed even a single civilian"
>in Jenin during Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002. Yet, Human
>Rights Watch reports that of the "twenty-two civilian killings" during the
>Israeli siege of Jenin, "Many of them were killed willfully or unlawfully,
>and in some cases constituted war crimes. Fifty-seven-year-old Kamal
>Zghair, a wheelchair-bound man, was shot and then run over by IDF tanks on
>April 10 as he was moving his wheelchair - equipped with a white flag -
>down a major road in Jenin. Thirty-seven-year-old Jamal Fayid, a
>quadriplegic, was crushed to death in the rubble of his home on April 7
>after IDF soldiers refused to allow his family to remove him from their
>home before a bulldozer destroyed it." Dershowitz also maintains that
>Israel has "abolished any kind of torture, in fact as well as in law" (my
>emphasis). Yet, turning to B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for
>Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, we read that, "Interrogation by
>torture is absolutely prohibited by Israeli and international law. Despite
>this, Israeli security forces breach the prohibition and torture
>Palestinians during interrogation."
>
>In his book, Dershowitz argues that it's "fair" to impose "economic
>sanctions" on Palestinians lending "emotional support" to terrorism. He
>accordingly supports demolishing the home of a suicide bomber's family,
>which constitutes a "soft form of collective punishment." In the Jersualem
>Post, Dershowitz has urged the "automatic destruction" of an entire
>Palestinian village after each Palestinian terrorist attack. Isn't this
>lending "intellectual support" to terrorism - and shouldn't his home be
>subject to the "soft form of collective punishment"?
>
>"I am proud of my book," Dershowitz concludes. Indeed, what Harvard
>professor wouldn't be proud of a book that cites a Sony movie and a
>chronology appended to a high school syllabus to document casualty figures
>from a major conflict, and an editorial in the Orlando Sentinel to resolve
>the controversies regarding a crucial United Nations resolution that has
>been the subject of numerous scholarly studies?
>
>To "deliberately misinform, miseducate, and misdirect" students, Dershowitz
>maintains, is "a particularly nasty form of educational malpractice." He
>further argues that the "fraudulent manufacturing of false antihistory" is
>"the kind of deception for which professors are rightly fired - not because
>their views are controversial but because they are violating the most basic
>canons of historical scholarship." To paraphrase a colleague of
>Dershowitz, if the glove fits, we cannot acquit.
>
>
>
>
> Norman G. Finkelstein
>
> October 1, 2003
>
>_________________________________________________________________
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