Sunday, November 02, 2003

Dershowitz Antics 'Undermine the Case for Israel'

In the following letter, Tanweer Akram responds to Alan Dershowitz’s letter to the editor in the Oct. 23 issue of the Harvard law school newspaper, the Record. In his letter, Dershowitz was responding to a letter from Akram that had appeared in the Oct. 16 issue of the Record in which Akram had said Dershowitz’s “denial of plagiarisms rings hollow."

Editor
The Record
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, MA 02138-9984

Dear Editor:

Alan Dershowitz’s plea (“Plagiarism charge part of coordinated effort to defame,” The Record, October 23, 2003) would be comical were it not a rationalization of seriously flawed scholarship. Professor Norman Finkelstein has already shown that Dershowitz has taken more than 20 exact quotes from Peters’ fraudulent book, including the same mangled quotes that distort the meaning of the original. Dershowitz attempts to rationalize his tactics because he has used “very few quotes … fewer than a dozen out of approximately 2,500 sources cited in her [Peters’] book and mine.” Would that be acceptable for students’ term papers at Harvard Law School? Would a scholar use as a textbook a work that took more than 20 exact quotes from a book that has been shown be a fraudulent? Have standards at Harvard Law School fallen so low? Or is this a new standard that Dershowitz recommends be adopted by various manuals of style?

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Comments (1) | Posted on 11/02.

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