Beyond Chutzpah updates

Here are some updates I missed to the ongoing saga of Norman Finkelstein's demolition of serial liar Alan Dershowitz, Beyond Chutzpah. First up is a review in Publishers' Weekly which is worth posting in full

Finkelstein, a political science professor and author of The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, has conducted a rancorous public feud with Harvard Law professor and pro-Israel stalwart Alan Dershowitz over the latter's The Case for Israel, and here expands his arguments into a vigorous polemic on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first part of the book examines what he feels is a growing tendency of pro-Israel commentators to use spurious charges of anti-Semitism to deflect and discredit legitimate criticism of Israel. The second, much longer, part is a line-by-line debunking of The Case for Israel, which he compares to Communist apologetics for Stalinist Russia. Rebutting Dershowitz's claims about Israel's "superb" human rights record, Finkelstein cites human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli group B'Tselem to document Israeli abuses in the occupied territories, including killings of Palestinian civilians, torture of Palestinian prisoners and home demolitions. Lengthy appendices flesh out his explosive assertion that Dershowitz plagiarized the historical research and interpretations (but not the actual phrasing) of Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial. The Middle East conflict rarely inspires calm discussion, and Finkelstein duly pillories his opponents as perpetrators of "hoax" and "fraud" who lack "ordinary moral values" and whose behavior resembles anti-Semitic stereotypes. Inflammatory rhetoric aside, he does raise serious questions about the veracity, scholarly methods and fairness of Dershowitz and others. More important, he presents a wealth of evidence on the human rights situation in the occupied territories, so often ignored in American debate on these issues. Exhaustively researched and meticulously-if intemperately-argued, Finkelstein's book is a formidable challenge to the conventional wisdom on the Middle East.

Note the accusation of "inflammatory rhetoric.......intemperately argued". This is the most accurate criticism one can level at Finkelstein. No one so far seems to have successfully argued against the facts presented by Finkelstein.

The same day that this appeared Gary Younge had an article on the Finkelstein-Dershowitz dispute in the Guardian. I read it at the time and found it extremely disappointing. Younge tries desperately to toe a "six of one-half a dozen of the other" line and occasionally drifts into supporting Dershowitz in preference to Finkelstein

Finkelstein billed his book as "an exposé of the corruption of scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict," but essentially it is an attack on Dershowitz in general and his bestselling book, The Case for Israel, in particular, which Finkelstein describes as "among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict."

This is unfair. Finkelstein's method is to draw attention to a general state of affairs in academia by using a specific case as a foil. In the run-up to the Holocaust Industry, to demonstrate the worthlessness of some, indeed much, holocaust scholarship, Finkelstein (together with Ruth Bettina Birn) use Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners in this way. In the Holocaust Industry itself, Peter Novick's work comes under scrutiny. Similarly, to demonstrate the poverty of true knowledge of the Middle East in America, Finkelstein exposes the fraudster Alan Dershowitz as part of portrayal of a general state of affairs in American Middle East scholarship.

The latest (on 15/8/2005) has "Dershowitz in super panic mode". Finkelstein presents a statement by Alan Dershowitz and then in a couple of lines exposes the sheer hypocrisy and dishonesty of the man. Dershowitz's statement begins thus:

Norman Finkelstein, and his publisher University of California Press (UCP), have undertaken a systematic media attack on me in order to generate publicity for an anachronistic and irrelevant book that would otherwise receive little or no attention.

And ends with

I will not debate Finkelstein. I have a longstanding policy against debating Holocaust deniers, revisionists, trivializers or minimizers. Nor is a serious debate about Israel possible with someone who acknowledges that he knows “very little” about that country. I will be happy to debate any legitimate experts from Amnesty International or any other human rights organization. Indeed, I have a debate scheduled with Noam Chomsky about these issues in the fall.

To which Finkelstein replies

Alan Dershowitz dismisses Beyond Chutzpah as “anachronistic,” “unlikely to be [of] much interest,” “uninteresting,” and “irrelevant.” It is a wonder, then, that he invested so much effort to suppress publication of it. Dershowitz denies this. There’s a simple way to determine who’s telling the truth. He should make available for public inspection the full correspondence beginning with his first letters to New Press in April 2004 and including the correspondence written on Cravath, Swaine and Moore letterhead. I would agree to post this correspondence on my website without comment.

Dershowitz says he won’t debate me because he claims that I am a Holocaust denier. Instead he will debate Noam Chomsky. These two statements pose problems:

(1) Dershowitz never cites a single statement of mine documenting that I am a Holocaust denier. I have written two books on the Nazi holocaust. The first, A Nation on Trial (co-authored with Ruth Bettina Birn), received glowing praise from the world’s leading authorities on the Nazi holocaust, including Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, and Istvan Deak, and was named a “notable book of the year” by the New York Times Sunday Book Review. The second, The Holocaust Industry, was blurbed by Hilberg, the undisputed dean of Nazi holocaust historians. Referring explicitly to my findings on Holocaust compensation, which Dershowitz finds so distasteful, Hilberg wrote: "He is a well-trained political scientist, has the ability to do the research, did it carefully, and has come up with the right results. I am by no means the only one who, in the coming months or years, will totally agree with Finkelstein's breakthrough";

(2) For many years Dershowitz has pilloried Professor Chomsky for Holocaust denial. To cite the most recent examples, in The Case for Israel, he deplores "Chomsky’s flirtation with Holocaust denial," and in his new book, The Case for Peace, he deplores Chomsky for "supporting, praising and working with Holocaust deniers."

It would appear that Dershowitz’s avowed reasons for refusing to publicly debate me are spurious. I suspect readers will have no trouble figuring out his real reason.

Yet another round to Finkelstein methinks.