[Peace-discuss] Noam Chomsky: "Left Wing Pundit Widely Regarded as anti-Israel"

[David Green]

Message: 8         
   Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 13:30:00 EDT
   From: MichaelLevin11 at aol.com
Subject: Dershowitz Fires Back at His Critics [re.
Finkelstein and 
"Beyond Chutzpah"

Dershowitz Fires Back at His Critics
By Steven I. Weiss

Forward
May 20, 2005


An academic battle simmering for two years is coming
to a boil with
the release next month of a new book taking aim at
Harvard
University professor Alan Dershowitz and his support
for Israel.

In the new book, "Beyond Chutzpah," DePaul University
professor
Norman Finkelstein attempts to discredit Dershowitz's
2003
bestseller, "The Case for Israel." The title of the
new books is a
play on Dershowitz's 1991 book, "Chutzpah," which made
the case for
Jewish assertiveness in American life.

For two years, Finkelstein, author of "The Holocaust
Industry" and a
fierce critic of some Jewish organizations, has been
using his Web
site to criticize Dershowitz's book, going so far as
to argue that
the Harvard professor failed to properly attribute
material from
Joan Peters's book, "From Time Immemorial: The Origins
of the
Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine."

Dershowitz has vigorously defended the sourcing in his
book and is
firing back at Finkelstein.

In an essay recently published on the Web site
JBooks.com,
Dershowitz attacked Finkelstein, as well as Noam
Chomsky and
Alexander Cockburn, left-wing pundits widely regarded
as
anti-Israel. Dershowitz argued that the three were
guilty of
"literary McCarthyism" in their attempts to discredit
him.

"The mode of attack is consistent," Dershowitz wrote.
"Chomsky
selects the target and directs Finkelstein to probe
the writings in
minute detail and conclude that the writer didn't
actually write the
work, that it is plagiarized, that it is a hoax and a
fraud.
Cockburn publicizes these 'findings,' and then a cadre
of fellow
travelers bombard the Internet with so many attacks on
the target
that these attacks jump to the top of Google."

While Dershowitz has only recently gone public with
most of his
complaints about Finkelstein, he has for some time
engaged
Finkelstein's publishers with warnings about
potentially defamatory
material in "Beyond Chutzpah."

"Beyond Chutzpah" is now with its second publisher,
University of
California Press. "Dershowitz's interventions slowed
the production
schedule at New Press," Finkelstein said. "Given the
timeliness of
the book, I switched to UC Press, which was able to
promise an
accelerated production schedule."

However, Dershowitz claims that Finkelstein's contract
with The New
Press was canceled after the publisher "concluded that
the material
was defamatory."

Dershowitz said he has contacted UC Press in order to
alert "them to
any potential defamations.... I just wanted to make
sure they were
aware of the fact that a previous publisher had
canceled a
contract."

Officials at The New Press would not comment on
Finkelstein's
contract.

The director of UC Press, Lynne Withey, indicated that
although the
company plans to publish Finkelstein's book Dershowitz
had succeeded
on at least one front: Withey told the Forward that
any claim that
Dershowitz did not write "The Case for Israel" would
likely be
removed from Finkelstein's book. Finkelstein responded
to Withey's
comments by saying, "The decision of the press, with
which I fully
concurred, was to focus on the egregious
misrepresentations of the
factual record in Dershowitz's book."

http://forward.com/articles/3210



		
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