Axis of Asses

Alan Dershowitz responds to the smear campaign launched against his excellent book, The Case for Israel, by ultra-left icons Noam Chomsky, Norm Finkelstein and Alexander Cockburn:

The well-planned and carefully coordinated response to The Case for Israel employed exactly the same words they had employed so successfully against [Joan Peters] (and others).

They first claimed—as they had with Peters—that I did not “write this book,” that I did not even “read it,” and that I “had no idea what was in the book.” Recently Finkelstein claimed that I don’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.”

The implication was that some Israeli intelligence agency or propaganda unit wrote it and had me sign it—as they claimed was the situation with Peters’ book. The problem for them is that I don’t type or use a computer, so that every word of the text was handwritten by me in my own handwriting—and I still have the manuscript. Even after I publicly offered to make the manuscript available for anyone to examine, Finkelstein repeated the false charge on a C-SPAN television broadcast.

Well, if I did actually write it in my own hand, I must have copied it or plagiarized it. That was the next charge. And guess who I plagiarized it from? Joan Peters, according to Finkelstein, Chomsky, and Cockburn. The problem with their charge is that Peters’ book was entirely demographic and historical, whereas more than 90 percent of my book deals with contemporary events that took place after the publication of Peters’ book. The other, even more serious problem for them is that they could not come up with a single sentence, phrase or idea in my book that came from another source and was used without quotation marks, attribution, and citation. Indeed, I explicitly cited Peters’ book numerous times while disclaiming reliance on its conclusions because I disagreed with some of them. That, of course, means there was no plagiarism. But Finkelstein knew from his previous experience that the charge of plagiarism, if leveled, would be more likely to garner media attention than simple criticism of my conclusions.
[...]
Professor Charles Fried, the former Solicitor General of the U.S. and the Beneficial Professor of Law at Harvard, agrees, calling the Finkelstein accusation “stupid, unfair and ridiculous… from a biased accuser.” The distinguished chief-librarian at Harvard Law School also concluded that I had done nothing improper. An inquiry by Harvard cleared me of any wrongdoing.

Finkelstein, of course, knows this, but he also knows that a false charge once made tends to stick, even if it has been authoritatively disproved. The media regards plagiarism as such an explosive charge that even absolute innocence is no defense. After the charge against me was authoritatively dismissed as wholly without merit, it continued to be recycled and even expanded. Finkelstein’s tiny accusation—that I cited Peters merely eight times instead of a dozen times in two small chapters totaling seven pages of my 264-page book—totally false as it is—has ballooned into a charge that I plagiarized “all” or “large parts” of my book from Peters, despite the fact that the majority of my book deals with events that occurred after the publication of Peter’s book. For example, here is what Chomsky has said: “large parts of the book were simply plagiarized from a well-known hoax….” It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The only new element in this tired tactic is the creative use of the Internet. [footnotes deleted]

This one is well worth filing away for future reference, next time the left whines about a David Horowitz/Daniel Pipes-led "new McCarthyism" assaulting American universities.

(via Melanie Phillips, who also has more details on last week's anti-Israel hatefest in Trafalgar Square)

Posted by damian at May 25, 2005 12:58 PM | TrackBack