Desperate Dersh digs deeper

Amazing how disgraced Harvard professor, Alan Dershowitz fails to heed the advice to the man in a hole: "Stop digging!" But no, Dershowitz still has more smears to hurl around about Professor Norman Finkelstein. Cop this

You've probably never heard of the author, unless you travel in neo-Nazi, radical Islamic or hard left circles. His name is Norman Finkelstein. Yes he is a Jew. His parents were even Holocaust survivors, though he suspects his mother of having been a kapo (really, how else would she have survived? he asks rhetorically).

Funny how when Dershowitz copies "work" he approves of he can manage to quote correctly, though, of course, without attribution. But when it comes to people he doesn't approve of his powers of plagiarism seem to desert him. Now compare (or contrast)

Except for allusions to relentless pangs of hunger, my mother never spoke about her personal torments during the war, which was just as well, since I couldn't have borne them. Like Primo Levi, she often said that, being "too delicate and refined, the best didn't survive." Was this an indirect admission of guilt? Much later in life I finally summoned the nerve to ask whether she had done anything of which she was ashamed. Calmly replying no, she recalled having refused the privileged position of "block head" in the camp. She especially resented the "dirty" question "How did you survive?" with the insinuation that, to emerge alive from the camps, survivors must have morally compromised themselves. Given how ferociously she cursed the Jewish councils, ghetto police and kapos, I assume my mother answered me truthfully. Although acknowledging that Jews initially joined the councils from mixed motives, she said that "only scum", reaping the rewards of doing the devil's work, still cooperated after it became clear that they were merely cogs in the Nazi killing machine. When queried why she hadn't settled in Israel after the war, my mother used to reply, only half in jest, that "I had enough of Jewish leaders." The Jewish ghetto police always had the option, she said, of "throwing off their uniforms and joining the rest of us" – a point that Yitzak Zuckerman, a leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, made in his memoir. (It was always gratifying to find my mother's seemingly erratic or harsh judgments seconded in the reliable testimonial literature.) Still shaking her head in disbelief, she would often recall how, after Jews in the ghetto used the most primitive implements or even bare hands to dig bunkers deep in the earth and conceal themselves, the Jewish police would reveal these hideouts to the Germans, sending their flesh-and-blood to the crematoria in order to save their own skins. One of the first acts of the ghetto resistance was to kill an officer in the Jewish police. On a sign posted next to his corpse – my mother would recall with vengeful glee – read the epitaph: "Those who live like a dog die like a dog." Still, if she didn't cross fundamental moral boundaries, I glimpsed from her manner of pushing and shoving in order to get to the head of a queue, which mortified me, how my mother must have fought Hobbes's war of all against all many a time in the camps. Really, how else would she have survived?

Why the University of California Press kowtows to this shameless fraud I'll never understand.