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Alan Dershowitz Cast In New Role of Plagiarist And Fraudster
(Gordon Thomas, Globe-Intel.net, October 9, 2003)
Professor Alan Dershowitz, the darling of the Anti-Defamation League, the defender of OJ Simpson, Jonathan Pollard and Ariel Sharon, who often speaks like he is the personal representative on earth of Moses, and is a vicious attacker of anyone who dares reproach Israel for the smallest infraction of human rights, is now revealed as a crude plagiarist and a fraudster. . . . In a devastating onslaught on Dershowitz on MSNBC�s prestigious Scarborough Country, Finkelstein slammed the Harvard professor of law for �falsifying information, plagiarising, and lifting from other books� and violating the most basic canons of historical scholarship�. . . . A transcript of the recording shows Dershowitz at his blustering best. . . . Dershowitz is the man whose every word is slavishly recorded by his powerful media contacts. He is the authentic voice of Right Wing Judaism � some would say extremism � in America. . . . To challenge him, it has been said, it is best to carry a cross and a piece of garlic for ever after. . . . The New York Times, the pillar of the Jewish establishment in the United States, has lavished his new book with the kind of unstinted praise it once gave to Jason Blair, the archetypical fraudster who stoked his reporting ego and fooled his readers for many years. . . . Finkelstein has traduced Dershowitz with the kind of language the Harvard professor usually reserves for anyone who dares challenge him. . . . �There�s only one conclusion one can reach having read the book. Mr Dershowitz has concocted a fraud, which amazingly in large parts he plagiarised from another fraud. I found that pretty shocking, coming from a Harvard professor. I found it shocking coming from any professor�, Finkelstein told the MSNBC�s Amy Goldman and her radio audience. . . . Throwing his own words back at Dershowitz live on air, Finkelstein slammed the holder of the Felix Frankfurter Chair of Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School: �There was no extensive historical research. Instead, there was the fraudulent manufacturing of historical anti-history. It was the kind of deception for which professors are rightly fired � not because their views are controversial, but because they are violating the most basic canons of historical scholarship�. . . . with the remorseless piling of fact upon fact, Finkelstein set about destroying the credibility of Alan Dershowitz.

[Interesting side-note . . . the above article came to me from a friend who added the following historical information about what is going on here.

OK people, there is something I need to explain here before you read this rather amusing if odd piece.

This talks about an incident on Amy Goodman's Radio show where Alain Dershowitz, Harvard professor of Law and one of OJ's lawyers, made most famous by his successful defense of Claus Von Bulow, where Dershowitz reversed Bulow's guilty verdict for attempted murder of his wife, the heiress Sunny Bulow, at an appeals hearing (later very well depicted in the movie "Reversal of Fortunes" with Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons as Bulow) was accused by Prof Norman Finkelstein, author of "The Holocaust Industry" of Plagiarism.

The accusation comes due to the fact that Dershowitz, a right wing Zionist, has produced a book called "The Case for Israel". In it he makes a passing reference to another famous right wing Zionist book, the most famous one actually, called 'From Time Immemorial" written by a certain Joan Peters. Peters' book was the classic "A land without a people for a people without a land" type of book with every lie and clich� thrown in. When it came out it got the usual hoopla from the New York Times, and when it got discredited as a fraud, it was simply tucked away under a convenient carpet.

Still with me? OK, now the complication comes in when I identify the person who denounced "From Time Immemorial" as a fraud, none other than Norman Finkelstein.

Finkelstein was a PhD student at Princeton University when he decided to do his thesis on Zionism. To cut a long story short, he studied Peters' "From Time Immemorial" religiously and to his amazement was able to prove that it is a fraud (cross referencing endlessly between text and footnotes, things start to not add up and fall apart). Eureka! you would think, not quite. By blowing the whistle on Zionism's official book, he got the establishment on his back when still at college and not yet a secure Professor at a University somewhere with a nice tenure to protect him (i.e: Edward Said and Noam Chomsky). That is why so far Finkelstein has paid the biggest price of all non-Zionists.

Anyway, Dershowitz, although claiming in his book that he did not use Peters' "From Time Immemorial" as basis for his own argument, is proven here by Finkelstein to have not only used the book extensively, but to have simply plagiarized whole passages. SO we have someone plagiarizing a fraud! Work it out for yourselves!
S.

posted by LoZo 8:19 PM