Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Dershowitz's Denials Fail to Convince

In the following letter, Tanweer Akram challenges Alan Dershowitz’s denials that he lifted quotations from Joan Peters’ book, From Time Immemorial. The letter was originally published in the Oct. 16, 2003 issue of the Harvard law school newspaper, The Record.

Alan Dershowitz’s denial of plagiarisms ("Dershowitz denies plagiarism charges,” Oct.. 9) rings hollow. The wholesale lifting of quotations from Joan Peters’ fraudulent book “From Time Immemorial” (1984) cannot be justified (see www.normanfinkelstein.com for a table documenting this). To use more than twenty exact quotes from another book without making due acknowledgments really does constitute a fatal failure of scholarship.

One certainly hopes that first-year Harvard Law students will not follow Dershowitz’s examples!

Dershowitz’s attack on Finkelstein is also unfounded and baseless. Finkelstein’s scholarly work has been praised by, among others, Christopher R. Browning, Raul Hilberg, Ian Kershaw, Arno Mayer, and William Quandt. His four books, “Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict,” “The Rise and Fall of Palestine,” “A Nation on Trial,” and “The Holocaust Industry” are major contributions, which were highly regarded by experts. His papers have been instrumental in exposing Peters’ fraud and the errors of Goldhagen’s book. Finkelstein’s scholarship is guided by humanitarian values, as taught by his parents, both of whom lived through the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentrations camps.

Whereas Dershowitz has rationalized collective punishment against Palestinian villagers and denied that Israel uses torture on Palestinians (in spite of reports from international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International), and given tacit approval of the use of torture, Finkelstein has expressed solidarity with Palestinians and indeed stayed with Palestinian families living under Israel’s brutal military occupation.

Tanweer Akram

Akram’s papers have appeared in Applied Economics, Bangladesh Development Studies, Journal of Emerging Markets, Kyklos and Third World Quarterly. He is also a columnist for pressaction.com.

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