Professor
Dershowitz 'Rests His Case'
I have proven beyond any
doubt that what Norman Finkelstein and Alexander Cockburn have accused me of
doing—properly quoting material I first came across in secondary sources to
their primary—follows proper citation form and certainly does not constitute
plagiarism (News,
“Dershowitz Defends Book,” Oct. 2). They believe I should have cited the
material as follows: “Quoted in Peters.” But the Chicago Style Manual
specifically says that, “to cite a source from a secondary source ('Quoted
in….') is generally to be discouraged, since authors are expected to have
examined the works they cite.” I followed this preferred form, and Finkelstein
and Cockburn know that. Why, then, have they attacked me? The answer lies in
their documented history of leveling similar attacks on the integrity of many
other writers who are either pro-Israel or favor justice for Holocaust survivors.
Finkelstein has called Elie Wiesel—whose
lifelong devotion to peace and reconciliation earned him the Nobel Peace
Prize—a “clown” (See Irish Times, July 1, 2003). He accused Wiesel of lying
because Wiesel said that when he was 18 years old “I read The Critique of Pure
Reason…in Yiddish.” Here is Finkelstein’s “gotcha” accusation: “The Critique of
Pure Reason was never translated into Yiddish” (The Guardian, July 12, 2000). A
fairly unambiguous charge. The only problem is that The Critique of Pure Reason
was translated into Yiddish and published in Warsaw in 1929. The Harvard
Library has a copy and Wiesel did read it. I have seen no apology from
Finkelstein.
Nor has Finkelstein apologized for
leveling false and disproved charges of “plagiarism,” “fraud,” “hoax,”
“hucksterism,” “slipshod scholarship,” “blackmail,” and “profiteering” against
some of the world’s most distinguished professors and writers, including Stuart
Eizenstadt, Burt Neuborne, Gerald Feldman, Sir Martin Gilbert, Richard Overy,
Abba Eban, Yehuda Bauer, Daniel Goldhagen and others. (Goldhagen demonstrated
that Finkelstein “fabricated” charges against him, as he did with Wiesel and
that “he has no credibility.” Frankfurter Rundschau, Aug. 18, 1987, cited on
www.goldhagen.com).
Finkelstein has gone so far as to claim
that someone else ghost wrote The Case For Israel for me. When I offered to
produce my handwritten drafts—I do not type—he backed away from this
fabrication, again without apologizing.
In an article in The Financial Times
(Aug. 23, 2003), John Authors observed that, “Finkelstein appears to suffer
from an almost total lack of self-control. His readers might find him harder to
take seriously if they had watched him screaming questions as a heckler at the
back of the audience.” They might also better understand his motive for
attacking pro-Israel writers if they knew that he regularly compares Israel to
“the Gestapo.” “I can’t imagine why Israel’s apologists…would be offended by a
comparison with the Gestapo.” He suggested that [they] should be flattered by
the comparison. (Ibid). No wonder Gabriel Schoenfeld, in an article in
Commentary labeled Finkelstein’s views “crackpot ideas, some of them mirrored
almost verbatim in the propaganda put out by neo-Nazis around the world” (Jan.
2001).
His academic colleagues and students
apparently do not take him seriously, since—by his own admission—“I
[Finkelstein] was thrown out of every [university] school in New York” and is
“in exile in [DePaul University] in Chicago,” where he is “not happy” (Irish
Times, July 1, 2003). He doesn’t understand why he has had such a “hard time.”
Well maybe because he has leveled so many false charges against so many people
that he has absolutely no credibility.
Alexander Cockburn deserves only brief
mention, since his charges are all derivative of Finkelstein’s. Suffice it to
say, that he too makes it a practice to attack prominent Jews who support
Israel. His hit list includes the late Irving How, the late Senator Paul D.
Wellstone, D-Minn., and Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. When asked whether he
believed the “stories” that he reported were “sloshing around the news”
involving Israeli complicity in 9/11 and in the Anthrax attack, his response
was “I don’t know there’s enough exterior evidence to determine whether they
are true or not.” (The New Republic Online 4/8/02). According to Franklin Foer,
“Cockburn is the only prominent western journalist to give these slanderous
stories any credence.” (Ibid). Columnist Jon Margolis, after exposing several
false charges made by Cockburn, asserted that “Cockburn has been abusing
reality for decades” and that “as an accuser, Joe McCarthy was more
responsible” (Washington Watch, May 11, 1998.) In 1984, he was fired from The
Village Voice for hiding a $10,000 “grant” he received from an anti-Israel
organization (The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 18,1984).
These then are my accusers, who
themselves now stand accused of including me in their long list of those
falsely charged with literary crimes.
I will no longer dignify false and empty
charges leveled by these serial fabricators. I rest my case.
Alan
M. Dershowitz
Oct.
2, 2003
The
writer is Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard Law School and author of The
Case for Israel.