Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah...Under Chutzpah

[AlamoDemoc]

Exposing Grave Moral Distortions

By NEVE GORDON

It is not everyday that a professor hires a prestigious law firm to threaten the University of California Press, yet for months Alan Dershowitz, Harvard's Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, tried to stop UC Press from publishing Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah. When the Press' director Lynne Withey replied that she believed in academic freedom and would therefore go ahead with the book, Dershowitz sent letters to the university's board of trustees and even to California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, asking them to intervene on his behalf. Following both the trustees' and governor's decision not to get involved, one would have thought that the struggle had ended, but now that the book is on the shelves it seems that a new campaign is underway; this time an attempt to cancel the author's reading engagements for example at Harvard Bookstore and Barnes and Noble in Chicago. So what is the controversy about?

<snip>

On the face of it, the conflict stems from an allegation which Finkelstein, a professor of political science at de Paul University, makes against Dershowitz's The Case for Israel, accusing him of "lifting" information and ideas from Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. In addition to the fact that Peter's book has been, in Finkelstein's words, "dismissed as a fraud," Harvard University's own definition, ("passing off a source's information, ideas, or words as your own by omitting to cite them" would, argues Finkelstin, convict Dershowitz of plagiarism. After a careful examination of the documents Finkelstein presents in Beyond Chutzpah, it is difficult not to infer that the Harvard professor did indeed pass off someone else's information as his own.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/gordon10152005.html

[MrPrax]

1. The bad blood also stems from...

from the fact that Dershowitz is a bone fide racist and nutbar. What other academic can get away with telling folks quite proudly that he would to destory any UNIVERSITY that attempts divestiture.

Anyone familiar with his prosecution of John Demjanjuk knows this--stunning the man never learned a single bit of humility out of that episode.

But specifically--in a Front Page article (Horowitz magazine), Dershowitz wrote that Finkelstein's own mother, a Holocaust survivor, was a Nazi kapo. He completely made it up...

Finkelstein is has asked that people write http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=129">Harvard to have this racist plagerist removed--promptly.

Why Dershowitz warrants this protection--who knows

[reprehensor]

2. It's a brilliant book.

Even if I do say so myself.