DePaul's holocaust-minimizer Norman Finkelstein usually teams up with MIT's far-left guru Noam Chomsky to attack noted author and Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz.
But here, they seem to differ on the correct tactics to go after Dersh.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky, for example, thought that he should focus on the "facts of the matter" with regards to Dershowitz and "his devastating refutation of Dershowitz's claims (either unsourced, or distorting the few sources) supporting Israeli criminal actions" rather than on the allegations of plagiarism, particularly since he says it is unclear what counts as plagiarism. Dershowitz, for instance, has responded to extensive claims by Finkelstein that he plagiarised from Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial (which argues that Palestinians do not have a strong claim to Israel) by saying that he may have used some of the same sources, but he had them checked independently from the original documents. Shlaim believes the plagiarism charge "is proved in a manner that would stand up in court."
Chomsky says he told Finkelstein that if he insisted on the plagiarism line, Dershowitz would "seize on it to try to evade the main topics", as would the media "which tend to prefer gossip to contents" and that this would marginalise "the crucial parts of the book, which have to do with the real world and what is happening to people - and for the US in particular, the decisive role the US is playing in blocking a political settlement for 30 years and supporting serious crimes". He adds: "The interesting question is what we learn about the intellectual/moral culture from the fact that [Dershowitz] can get away with it."
Technorati tags: Alan Dershowitz Noam Chomsky Norman Finkelstein Harvard MIT DePaul
No comments:
Post a Comment