Finkelstein on Dershowitz: 'The Glove Does Fit'

[MikeWB]

Great letter!

Quote:Finkelstein Proclaims 'The Glove Does Fit'

Letter to the Editors

Published On Friday, October 03, 2003 12:00 AM

By NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=349123

Alan Dershowitz either cannot or refuses to understand why there is a
controversy surrounding The Case for Israel (Letter, “Plagiarism
Accusations Political, Unfounded,” Sept. 30). Perhaps I can enlighten
him. Quite simply, the book he claims to have written is a hoax: (1)
substantial swatches are lifted from another notorious hoax on the
Israel-Palestine conflict, (2) it is replete with egregious
falsifications, and (3) the few scholarly sources actually cited are
mangled beyond recognition. In this reply, I will only illustrate points
(1) and (2). These, along with point (3), will be fully documented in a
forthcoming monograph.

In 1984, Joan Peters published From Time Immemorial, which claimed that
Palestine was virtually empty on the eve of Zionist colonization, and
that Palestinians are in fact foreigners who surreptitiously entered
Palestine after the Zionists “made the desert bloom.” The book is now
widely recognized as a fraud. Baruch Kimmerling (of the Hebrew
University) and Joel S. Migdal, in their authoritative study,
Palestinians: The Making of a People, published by Harvard University
Press, observe that Peters’s book is “based on materials out of context,
and on distorted evidence,” and, citing my own conclusion that the book
“is the most spectacular fraud ever published on the Arab-Israeli
conflict,” report that “similar evaluations were expressed by notable
historians” in Israel and Europe.

Dershowitz states that he uses only a “few sources” cited in the Peters
hoax. In fact, fully 22 of the 52 endnotes in chapters 1 and 2 are
lifted straight from her without any form of attribution. In his
defense, Dershowitz claims that no foul play is involved because he
checked Peters’s original sources before citing them, a laughable
argument were an undergraduate to make it before a plagiarism committee.
Dershowitz focuses on a lengthy citation from Mark Twain to argue this
point. Yet, although Dershowitz reproduces Peters’s page references to
Twain’s book in his own endnote, the relevant quotes do not appear on
these pages in the edition of Twain’s book that Dershowitz cites.
Furthermore, Dershowitz cites two paragraphs from Twain as continuous
text, just as Peters cites them as continuous text, but in Twain’s book
the two paragraphs are separated by 87 pages. It would be impossible for
anyone who checked the original source to make this error.

Dershowitz similarly “checked” Peters’s other sources. Quoting a
statement depicting the miserable fate of Jews in mid-19th century
Jerusalem, Peters cites a British consular letter from “Wm. T. Young to
Viscount Canning.” Dershowitz cites the same statement as Peters,
reporting that Young “attributed the plight of the Jew in Jerusalem” to
pervasive anti-Semitism. Turning to the original, however, we find that
the relevant statement did not come from Young but, as is unmistakably
clear to anyone who actually consulted the original, from an enclosed
memorandum written by an “A. Benisch” that Young was forwarding to
Canning. One wonders if Dershowitz also consulted Peters’s original
source for the term “turnspeak”—a coinage of Peters, which she says was
inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, but which Dershowitz, confounded by
his massive borrowings from Peters, not once but twice credits directly
to Orwell (“George Orwell’s ‘turnspeak,’” “Orwellian turnspeak”). On
which pages of 1984 did Dershowitz find “turnspeak”?

“Let it be absolutely clear,” Dershowitz states elsewhere, “that my
demographic conclusions are very different from Peters’s.” Really? The
centerpiece of Peters’s book is a demographic study purporting to prove
that many of the 1948 Palestinian Arab refugees were actually recent
arrivals to the area of Palestine that became Israel from other parts of
Palestine. Far from reaching different conclusions on this key point,
Dershowitz repeats Peters’s fraudulent claim, even fabricating the
flat-out lie that the “United Nations recogniz[ed] that many of the
refugees had not lived for long in the villages they left.”

Dershowitz’s book is replete with absurd falsifications. The Mufti of
Jerusalem during the British mandate years, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was
undoubtedly a despicable human being. But rather than sticking to the
facts, he copies mostly from a single newspaper column by an obscure
right-wing Zionist ideologue. Dershowitz avows that “Adolf Eichmann
visited Husseini in Palestine;” the mufti was “taken on a tour of
Auschwitz by Himmler;” “The grand mufti of Jerusalem was personally
responsible for the concentration camp slaughter of thousands of Jews;”
the mufti organized a commando unit “to poison Tel Aviv’s wells”; “The
mufti was apparently planning to return to Palestine in the event of a
German victory and to construct a death camp modeled after Auschwitz
near Nablus;” and on and on. I have consulted the relevant secondary
literature and the leading authorities on the mufti and the Nazi
holocaust, but couldn’t find scholarly support for any of these
fantastic claims. Similarly, Dershowitz extensively details an alleged
plot in which “terrorist operatives” rape Palestinian women to recruit
them as suicide bombers. However, he never explains why they would need
to do so when the number of Palestinian women volunteering for suicide
attacks already exceeds the number of planned missions. Turning to his
endnote, we find that he gets this “information” from an official
Israeli government web site, which bases itself on a confidential
“Israeli Military Intelligence Report,” which is based on “reliable
Palestinian sources” — none of which are independently corroborated.

On an even more shocking note, Dershowitz maintains that “there is no
evidence that Israeli soldiers deliberately killed even a single
civilian” in Jenin during Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002. Yet,
Human Rights Watch reports that of the “twenty-two civilian killings”
during the Israeli siege of Jenin, “Many of them were killed willfully
or unlawfully, and in some cases constituted war crimes.
Fifty-seven-year-old Kamal Zghair, a wheelchair-bound man, was shot and
then run over by IDF tanks on April 10 as he was moving his
wheelchair—equipped with a white flag—down a major road in Jenin.
Thirty-seven-year-old Jamal Fayid, a quadriplegic, was crushed to death
in the rubble of his home on April 7 after IDF soldiers refused to allow
his family to remove him from their home before a bulldozer destroyed
it.” Dershowitz also maintains that Israel has “abolished any kind of
torture, in fact as well as in law.” Yet, turning to B’Tselem, the
Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories,
we read that, “Interrogation by torture is absolutely prohibited by
Israeli and international law. Despite this, Israeli security forces
breach the prohibition and torture Palestinians during interrogation.”

In his book, Dershowitz argues that it’s “fair” to impose “economic
sanctions” on Palestinians lending “emotional support” to terrorism. He
accordingly supports demolishing the home of a suicide bomber’s family,
which constitutes a “soft form of collective punishment.” In The
Jersualem Post, Dershowitz has urged the “automatic destruction” of an
entire Palestinian village after each Palestinian terrorist attack.
Isn’t this lending “intellectual support” to terrorism—and shouldn’t his
home be subject to the “soft form of collective punishment”?

“I am proud of my book,” Dershowitz concludes. Indeed, what Harvard
professor wouldn’t be proud of a book that cites a Sony movie and a
chronology appended to a high school syllabus to document casualty
figures from a major conflict, and an editorial in The Orlando Sentinel
to resolve the controversies regarding a crucial United Nations
resolution that has been the subject of numerous scholarly studies?

To “deliberately misinform, miseducate, and misdirect” students,
Dershowitz maintains, is “a particularly nasty form of educational
malpractice.” He further argues that the “fraudulent manufacturing of
false antihistory” is “the kind of deception for which professors are
rightly fired—not because their views are controversial but because they
are violating the most basic canons of historical scholarship.” To
paraphrase a colleague of Dershowitz, if the glove fits, we cannot acquit.

Norman G. Finkelstein

Oct. 1, 2003

[TeslaandLyne]

No mention of Rothschild and the British agreement on Palestine.

He found out who pulls the string now.

Vatican money in MR R's bank, thats what, LOL



also on CC more

[Ognir]

MEMRI is �propaganda machine,� expert says

By Lawrence Swaim, Staff Writer
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) provides daily English translations of film and print media stories originating in Arabic, Iranian and Turkish media.

It also furnishes original analysis of cultural, political and religious trends in the Middle East.

It sends its daily postings to every news outlet in the United States and Europe, in addition to politicians and cultural leaders.

And it’s free, which makes it a Godsend for journalists, editors and policy analysts.

But according to its critics, it is also a dangerous, highly sophisticated propaganda operation, disseminating hate and disinformation on an unprecedented worldwide basis.

"They use the same sort of propaganda techniques as the Nazis," Professor Norman G. Finkelstein, a well-known scholar on Israel/Palestine, told InFocus. "They take things out of context in order to do personal and political harm to people they don’t like."

Take the case of Professor Halim Barakat, a novelist and scholar associated with the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.

In 2002, he published an article on Zionism in London’s Al-Hayat Daily, but says that in certain instances, MEMRI selectively edited what he wrote.

"I know how to make a distinction between Judaism and Zionism, but they distorted the article," Barakat told InFocus. "They left out certain things and tried to make it look anti-Semitic."

Shortly afterward, Campus Watch, the brainchild of notorious Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, used the allegedly doctored translation in an effort to smear Georgetown University.

Finkelstein, an outspoken critic of Israeli policies and the U.S. pro-Israel lobby, also had a run-in with MEMRI.

In 2006, he gave a TV interview in Lebanon on the way the Nazi Holocaust is used to silence critics of Israel.

Finkelstein later wrote on his Web site: "MEMRI recently posted what it alleged was an interview I did with Lebanese television on the Nazi Holocaust. The MEMRI posting was designed to prove that I was a Holocaust denier."

Far from being a Holocaust denier, Finkelstein’s own parents were Holocaust survivors, a fact he has often spoken about.

But MEMRI was able to create the opposite impression, as Finkelstein demonstrated on his Web site, by editing out large chunks of the actual interview.

When some comments by the moderator were included, it appeared that Finkelstein’s interview was about nitpicking the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust rather than about Israel/Palestine.

MEMRI’s obsessive interest in protecting Israel derives from the people and interests that founded, fund and manage the institute’s international operations.

It was founded in 1998 by Yigal Carmon, a former colonel in the Israel Defense Forces (Intelligence Branch) from 1968 until 1988, acting head of civil administration in the West Bank from 1977 to 1982; and Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser, an extreme rightwing neoconservative now affiliated with the Hudson Institute.

Meyrav is married to David Wurmser, at one time an American Enterprise Institute "scholar" and then a State Department apparatchik under John Bolton.

Both participated in the collective writing of "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," a seminal 1996 neocon document that advocated an end to negotiations with the Palestinians and permanent war against the Arab world.

They also worked with Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle and other rightwing ideologues who promoted and embellished the fiction that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

MEMRI has offices in Jerusalem, Berlin, London, Washington and Tokyo, and in a 2006 Jerusalem Post interview, Carmon claimed to have one in Iraq.

It translates film and print into English, German, Hebrew, Italian, French, Spanish and Japanese.

Tax returns for 2004 indicate American funding of between two to three million dollars, much of it from conservative donors and foundations - but those who have followed its far-flung operations suspect much higher expenditures.

Besides Carmon, several MEMRI staffers are former Israeli intelligence specialists. Especially troubling are suspected links between MEMRI and the current Israeli intelligence establishment.

According to a 2005 article in Israel’s Ha’aretz, the Israeli Defense Forces plants fake stories in the Arab media, which it then translates and tries to retail to Israeli journalists. How much of MEMRI is simply an extension of such IDF operations?

The questions raised by the Ha’aretz story caused Proffesor Juan Cole to write, "How much of what we ‘know’ from ‘Arab sources’ about ‘Hizbullah terrorism’ was simply made up by this fantasy factory in Tel Aviv?"

British journalist Brian Whitaker, Middle East editor of the Guardian, dismisses MEMRI as "basically a propaganda machine."

Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, accuses them of "outright distortion," and former CIA case officer Vince Cannistraro has written that "they (MEMRI) are selective and act as propagandists for their political point of view, which is the extreme-right of Likud."

With characteristic bluntness. Norman Finkelstein has written: "MEMRI is a main arm of Israeli propaganda. Although widely used in the mainstream media as a source of information on the Arab world, it is as trustworthy as Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer was on the Jewish world." (Der Sturmer was a rabidly anti-Semitic newspaper, and Streicher a notoriously cruel Nazi.)

In an e-mail to InFocus, Cole characterized MEMRI as "a Right-Zionist propaganda organ, which usually does its propaganda unobtrusively, by being very selective in what it translates."

Indeed , MEMRI appears to view the Arab world as a malevolent, mind-numbing monsters’ ball, populated almost exclusively by fanatics, freaks and fundamentalists.

Every story that could possibly make Middle Eastern people look deranged, hateful or diabolical gets translated; anything that could make them look informed, talented or admirable is ignored.

MEMRI says it covers reformers in the Arabic-speaking world, but longtime observers point out that people who make Islam or Arab culture look attractive rarely get translated, regardless of their position.

Nor does MEMRI feature stories about Palestinian suffering, Israeli dissenters, moderate Islamists, Christians in Arab governments or the growing nonviolent movement against the apartheid wall in the Occupied Territories, especially around Bal’in.

Instead, it promotes highly-edited footage featuring people like Wafa Sultan.

It was MEMRI that translated the sound bites from her famous al-Jazeera debate with Dr. Ibrahim al-Kouly that ended up on YouTube, making her an instant rock star to those who promote an international clash of cultures.

It is said by TV viewers who watched the entire debate that al-Kouly was rather patient with Sultan despite her extreme opinions.

(Among other things, Sultan has declared herself an atheist.) But MEMRI never bothered to translate and promote the whole debate.

MEMRI President Yigal Carmon was contacted to ask why the entire Sultan debate wasn’t translated and circulated, at least in a print version.

"MEMRI couldn’t do the whole interview because of the limitations of our resources," Carmon told InFocus. "And it was just our best judgment of what was fit to translate." He said he thought there was an "almost" complete version in the archives.

InFocus asked Carmon why MEMRI didn’t post more stories about domestic events in Israel and the OTC.

"Eighty percent of such stories are already in English," Carmon said.

Then why not buy a few every week and send them out in order to give a more balanced picture of the Middle East, InFocus asked, "It probably wouldn’t be legal ," he responded.

That brought up the thorny issue of copyright, ownership and power.

Why, Carmon was asked, does MEMRI copyright all the stories it translates, when most stories are written by Arab authors?

"Of course we copyright," Carmon told InFocus. "Once we translate a story into another language, it becomes ours, because it’s our work."

To test this theory in an American context, InFocus contacted The New York Times.

"If you translate copy from the Times, it would still belong to us, because we originated it," said an employee of the Rights and Royalties Department who did not wish to be named.

When war and peace hangs on the translation of a single word or phrase, nuance is everything.

But can we trust the translator?

According its critics, until MEMRI starts translating Hebrew stories about the rightward drift of Israeli society, torture of Palestinians in Israeli jails, the forced exile of Ilan Pappe and Azmi Bishara, and the elevation of the neo-fascist Avigdor Lieberman to deputy prime minister of Israel, they aren’t really covering all Middle Eastern media.

"I think it’s a reliable assumption that anything MEMRI translates from the Middle East is going to be unreliable," Finkelstein said.

http://www.infocusnews.net/content/view/15069/135/