Finkelstein on Dershowitz on Carter

I'm posting this Counterpunch article largely because I haven't posted anything on Jimmy Carter's new book titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and also I enjoy Norman Finkelstein taking the occasional swipe at Professor Alan Dershowitz. In the article, titled Slime Throwing as "Debate" - The Dershowitz Treatment, Finkelstein exposes the sheer hypocrisy of Dershowitz in denouncing Jimmy Carter for refusing to "debate" him at Brandeis University.

As Beyond Chutzpah was going to press and after its publication Dershowitz embarked on an unremitting campaign of defamation, hurling wild and, frankly, obscene ad hominem calumnies. Disseminating these slanders under such juvenile titles as The Committee to Expose Norman Finkelstein's Close Connections to Neo-Nazism, Holocaust Denial, and His "Big Lie" of an "International Jewish Conspiracy," he asserted that this writer was a "notorious Jewish anti-Semite" and "Holocaust revisionist," had "praised" Osama Bin Laden, and had been let go from a teaching post due to "mental instability." He even threatened to show up during the tenure process at the university where this writer teaches at his--Dershowitz's -- "own expense" to "document the case against Finkelstein." Although he hasn't yet acted on this particular threat, Dershowitz is currently inundating the university's faculty and administration with lurid allegations to block this writer's tenure.

Dershowitz posted on Harvard Law School's official website the insinuation that this writer's late mother was a "kapo" who had been "cooperating with the Nazis during the Holocaust." Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan held that Dershowitz's gross defamation fell within the parameters of what was permissible to post on its website. For the record, this writer's late mother was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Maidanek concentration camp and two slave-labor camps, lost every member of her family during the war and after the war served as a key witness at a Nazi deportation hearing in the U.S. and at the trial of Maidanek concentration camp guards in Germany.

There's another article by Finkelstein on the Carter book here and a round up of the whole Finkelstein/Dershowitz saga here.