[lbo-talk] more Churchill

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Thu May 18 04:36:35 PDT 2006


On 5/18/06, Dennis Redmond <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> the Rightwing stalwarts of academic integrity and
> honesty

If researchers of Norman Finkelstein's forensic ability looked into books and articles by right-wing academics, they would surely find more problems than what's found in Ward Churchill's writings and even more than what Finkelstein found in Alan Dershowitz's _The Case for Israel_.

<blockquote>Finkelstein somehow obtained a copy of the uncorrected page proofs of The Case for Israel containing some devastating footnotes, which he reproduces in Beyond Chutzpah--including one that says "Holly Beth: cite sources on pp. 160, 485, 486 fns 141-145." Holly Beth Billington is credited on Dershowitz's acknowledgments page as one of his research assistants; the pages to which he refers her are from Peters's book. The note doesn't tell Holly Beth that Dershowitz is going to the Harvard library to check the original sources, nor does it tell Holly Beth that she should go to the library to check; it says she should "cite" them--copy the citations from Peters into his footnote, presumably to give readers the impression that he consulted the original source. That's not plagiarism in the sense of failing to put in quotation marks the words of somebody else, and the Harvard administration has taken no action in response to Finkelstein's charge. But it's clearly dishonest for Dershowitz to have passed off another scholar's research as his own. (Jon Wiener, "Giving Chutzpah New Meaning," The Nation, 11 July 2005, <http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050711&s=wiener>)</blockquote>

Not only didn't Harvard take any action, but Dershowitz dared to try to suppress the publication of Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (in which he takes apart _The Case for Israel_), by appealing to the governor and the president of the University of California and having his lawyers send "threatening letters" to editors at the press, etc.:

<blockquote>But if you're Alan Dershowitz, you don't stop when the governor declines. You try to get the president of the University of California to intervene with the press. You get a prominent law firm to send threatening letters to the counsel to the university regents, to the university provost, to seventeen directors of the press and to nineteen members of the press's faculty editorial committee. A typical letter, from Dershowitz's attorney Rory Millson of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, describes "the press's decision to publish this book" as "wholly illegitimate" and "part of a conspiracy to defame" Dershowitz. It concludes, "The only way to extricate yourself is immediately to terminate all professional contact with this full-time malicious defamer." Dershowitz's own letter to members of the faculty editorial committee calls on them to "reconsider your decision" to recommend publication of the book. (Jon Wiener, "Giving Chutzpah New Meaning," The Nation, 11 July 2005, <http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050711&s=wiener>)</blockquote> -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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