April 30, 2005

Dershowitz delays demolition?

A small diary column report in the Guardian's Saturday Review section seems to be saying that plagiarist and serial liar, Alan Dershowitz has delayed the release of Norman Finkelstein's latest offering, Beyond Chutzpah. This is rather strange because in one letter to Finkelstein's site, a Heinz Bartesch says that he purchased two copies. Perhaps he ordered them on-line. Anyway here's the article, which I found just a little bit sneery:
Norman G Finkelstein is no stranger to controversy, and he is stirring it up again. In The Holocaust Industry (2000) he argued that Jews should not elevate the Holocaust as in some way sacred, should not elevate their suffering above the suffering of others, should be careful about participating in a "memory" industry; in A Nation on Trial, he and Ruth Bettina Birn challenged, in detail, Daniel Goldhagen's bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners. Now he has written Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, which is, according to Finkelstein's comprehensive official website, "a meticulously researched expose of the corruption of scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict."

This time Finkelstein has in his sights Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and his bestseller The Case for Israel. Dershowitz has hired lawyers. And "he's been sending us some letters," says Lynne Withey, director of University of California Press, which is to publish the book in the US. "He's not too happy about this, as you can imagine." The book was meant to appear this spring, but is delayed until August. They're doing "a lot of copyediting". And factchecking? Yes. And they have decided not to publish it in England themselves, as they feel the book, which has "major sales potential in Europe", should be taken on by a UK publisher. As yet, there are no takers.
There will be.

Finkelstein's a fair minded chap I think. He has torn Dershowitz apart on a few occasions now and Dershowitz has found it all so upsetting he has formed "The Committee to Expose Norman Finkelstein’s Close Connections to Neo-Nazism, Holocaust Denial, and His "Big Lie" of an "International Jewish Conspiracy"". What impresses me about Finkelstein, apart from his meticulousness and courage, is his granting of a platform to such a lying toad as Dershowitz.

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