Noam & Dersh
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070528&s=chomskydershowitz060107
Correspondence Match Point by Alan Dershowitz & Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky:
It is always intriguing to see just how far Alan Dershowitz will go
in his efforts to conceal the fact that Norman Finkelstein exposed
him as a vulgar and fraudulent apologist for Israeli human rights
violations–carefully, judiciously, with extensive documentation
(”Taking the Bait,”, May 21). Knowing that he cannot respond,
Dershowitz is reduced to a torrent of slanders and deceit about
Finkelstein’s alleged misdeeds–which would, transparently, be
irrelevant if there were a particle of truth to his easily-refuted
charges. The latest chapter in Dershowitz’s efforts at self-
protection is a campaign to undermine Finkelstein’s tenure
appointment, actions that are utterly without precedent, even
reaching to an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. In an attempt to
obscure what he is up to, along with other little fibs that I’ll
ignore, Dershowitz has now invented a new fairy tale: that he is
following my course when I “led [my] own jihad” to deny Kissinger a
faculty position at Columbia.
As reported in such exotic sources as the national press (e.g., The
Washington Post, May 27, 1977), when Henry Kissinger left the
government, the Columbia administration created a special endowed
chair for him, apparently without faculty consultation or normal
review procedures. That elicited widespread opposition on campus,
including a front-page denunciation in the student newspaper,
protests signed by hundreds of faculty and students, and much more.
My role in this was precisely zero, as Dershowitz knows, with one
exception: I was invited by Columbia faculty members to speak at one
of the events they organized. So much for the precedent Dershowitz
invents to try to defend his disgraceful efforts to block
Finkelstein’s tenure.
Why does he drag me into this? For the same reasons as his
Finkelstein rampage. I have been the target of a deluge of Dershowitz
deceit and inventions since 1973, when I responded to his slanders
about the Israeli League of Human Rights, even gross falsification of
Israeli court records as he sought to defend serious violations of
elementary civil rights that the court barred–exactly contrary to
his claims (The Boston Globe, April 29, May 17, May 25, June 5, 1973,
available online). As always when his performances are exposed,
Dershowitz knows he cannot respond, and makes no effort to do so,
instead resorting to the device that comes naturally to him: a
torrent of vilification and deceit, of which his “Cambridge Diarist”
submission is the most recent. As of today.
Noam Chomsky Cambridge, Massachusetts
Alan Dershowitz responds:
It is not surprising that Noam Chomsky would leap to the defense of
his ideological soul mate Norman Finkelstein. He always supports the
academic freedom of those with whom he agrees, never those with whom
he disagrees. But even Chomsky cannot actually cite any scholarly
contributions that Finkelstein–who admits that he has never had an
article published in a peer-reviewed journal–has made. What passes
for Finkelstein-scholarship is charging me, and virtually every other
pro-Israel writer, with plagiarism for citing material to their
original rather than secondary sources. Anti-Israel as well as pro-
Israel scholars use the same citation method because it is the one
preferred by the Chicago Manual of Style and other authoritative
sources. For example, Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer
repeatedly cite primary sources for material they found in secondary
sources. I proved this and challenged Finkelstein to level the same
charge against these anti-Israel writers as he did against pro-Israel
writers. He refused, because his is not scholarship; it is propaganda.
Finkelstein’s other claim to scholarship is to cite the conclusions
of anti-Israel human rights organizations as proof that I and other
pro-Israel writers must be wrong when we come to independently
researched conclusions that are different. He never provides
independent research and when asked why not, he replied: “Why should
I interview people?”
Finkelstein’s only contribution to public discourse is to coarsen the
level of debate about the Middle East. In a recent speech,
Finkelstein called for all “monsters and freaks in the White House
and their collaborators in Tel Aviv” to “drop dead.” When Irshad
Manji, the Canadian Muslim dissident, was subject to death threats,
Finkelstein supported those threats and wrote to a website that was
collecting petitions against the death threat the following: “Is
there a petition supporting the death threats?” He has also
supported, he claims in jest, my assassination. Some of his followers
did not understand his humor and have made threatening phone calls to
me. He has called me a moral pervert, a Nazi and commissioned a
cartoon showing me masturbating in ecstatic joy to dead Lebanese
civilians.
That is what passes for scholarship on Planet Chomsky. I challenge
Chomsky to cite specific pages of Finkelstein’s writings that warrant
the grant of tenure. Since Finkelstein writes only for popular
audiences and never for scholarly ones, his work can easily be
evaluated by lay readers. The pages please!
Chomsky characterizes my input into the Finkelstein debate as
“disgraceful.” Yet he admits that he, as an MIT professor, spoke at a
rally against Columbia University granting an academic position to
Henry Kissinger. He claims that he was invited to speak by Columbia
faculty members. I too was invited to write about Finkelstein by a
DePaul faculty member. Moreover, my comments about Finkelstein have
mostly been responsive to attacks by him against me. Would Chomsky
deny me my freedom of speech when attacked? Has Chomsky ever remained
silent in the face of criticism?
In addition to distorting the record with regard to Finkelstein’s
scholarship Chomsky distorts the history of my criticism of him. It
began when he endorsed a notorious neo-Nazi Holocaust denier named
Robert Faurisson by writing an introduction to his book. He also
legitimated his falsification of history by characterizing
Faurisson’s fabrications–he claimed that Hitler’s gas chambers never
existed and that the Holocaust “never took place”–as having been
based on “extensive historical research”. Chomsky also legitimated
Holocaust denial by writing that he saw “no anti-Semitic implications
in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the
Holocaust.” Chomsky once told a group of people that he himself was
“agnostic” on whether the Holocaust occurred. When professor Robert
Nozick, who was part of the group, confronted Chomsky with this
outrageous statement following a debate at Harvard Medical School,
Chomsky shoved Nozick, saying, “How dare you quote an off-the-record
remark I made to a small group at Princeton.” He did not deny making
the statement.
Chomsky then championed another anti-Semite, this time a Jewish one
named Israel Shahak who has written that Jews worship the devil and
that Israel is comparable to Nazi Germany. Shahak, like Chomsky, was
a phony civil libertarian who believed in defending only the rights
of the left, tried to hijack an Israeli human rights group.
Now Chomsky is once again championing an anti-Semite who has made a
career out of rewriting the history of the Holocaust and denying the
reality of Holocaust survivors. Chomsky and Finkelstein deserve each
other. The DePaul community deserves better.
Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard
and author of Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways. Noam Chomsky
is a professor of linguistics at MIT and author, most recently of
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.