Pyrrhic Victory

Oh, I bet hotshot Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz is very pleased with his hateful self today.even though he has actually reached the nadir of his career.

If you want to see the power of the pro-Zionist Israel lobby in US academic circles in microcosm, look no further than the Dershowitz/Finkelstein/DePaul/Chutzpah saga, in which wannabe fingernail-puller-outer and self-appointed sanhedrin Alan Dershowitz’s bullying worked, and fellow Jewish, but non-Zionist, scholar Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University.

The DePaul decision follows months of Dershowitz pressure on the tenure board:

The decision came at the end of several months of wrangling, both within the Catholic university and within the wider academic and Jewish communities in the US. Mr Finkelstein has argued in his books that claims of anti-semitism are used to dampen down criticism of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians and that the Holocaust is exploited by some Jewish institutions for their own gain.

Exploited? No duh! But that wasn’t all Finkelstein said, was it? Not only did he point out that Dershowitz’d passed off another scholar’s research as his own, he also packed his book with pesky facts:

The most important part of the [Finkelstein’s] book examines Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians during the second intifada, which began in September 2000. Since then Israel has killed three Palestinians for every Israeli killed. Dershowitz tries to defend this ratio, writing that “when only innocent civilians are counted, significantly more Israelis than Palestinians have been killed.” But Finkelstein cites Amnesty International’s conclusion that “the vast majority of those killed and injured on both sides have been unarmed civilians and bystanders.” That means Israel has killed something like three times as many unarmed civilians and bystanders as Palestinians have.

Dershowitz has a second argument: While Palestinian terrorists have targeted Israeli civilians intentionally, the killing of Palestinian civilians by the Israel Defense Forces is “unintended,” “inadvertent” and “caused accidentally,” because the IDF follows international law, which requires the protection of civilian noncombatants. For example, Dershowitz writes, the IDF tries to use rubber bullets “and aims at the legs whenever possible” in a policy designed to “reduce fatalities.” But Finkelstein’s evidence to the contrary is convincing: Amnesty International reported in 2001 that “the overwhelming majority of cases of unlawful killings and injuries in Israel and the Occupied Territories have been committed by the IDF using excessive force.”

Ah, now we come to it: Dershowitz doesn’t like the facts so he’s conspiring to bury them, shutting Finkelstein up by destroying his academic career. What a piece of work Dershowitz is. What is it with these tenured US law professors?

It seems Dershowitz will say pretty much anything to buttress his and fellow pro-Zionist views. Like him, Israeli universities and academics comtinually refuse to acknowledge the truths that are staring them in the face viz their complicity in the apartheid state they are living in. Many, like Derrshowitz, misrepresent suppress or distort facts so as to support their religio-political positions. This tendency to deny the truth is at the heart of the current boycott of Israeli universities by UK academics – so of course Dershowitz had to weigh in on the boycott too, in his usual charming fashion:

Alan Dershowitz, the prominent lawyer and Harvard law professor, says he has mustered a team of 100 high-profile lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic to “devastate and bankrupt” anyone acting against Israeli universities.

“If the union goes ahead with this immoral petition, it will destroy British academia,” Dershowitz told the Guardian last night. “We will isolate them from the rest of the world. They will end up being the objects of the boycott because we will get tens of thousands of the most prominent academics from around the world to refuse to cooperate and refuse to participate in any events from which Israeli academics are excluded. It will totally backfire.”

Nice guy, huh?

Like many Zionists, with the discovery of his capacity for zealotry he’s put on blinkers; everything Israel does=good, any criticism, no matter how minor=bad. He will distort, misrepresent and suppress evidence to support his positions, even thougn the facts are staring him in the face. As with the Israeli universities, it’s nothing but rank intellectual dishonesty.

Dershowitz may well be a Harvard law professor with a distinguished history, but he’s now become no more admirable a character than the most blatantly conniving, revival-tent, bible-thumping conman. He’s also becoming a self-interested, self-enamoured (not that he wasn’t pompous before) bigot and bully who’s politically and religiously vicious enough to insert himself into another academic’s career in order to wreck it.

Where a real scholar would let facts speak for themselves, satisfying themselves with actually establishing that they are indeed facts, Dershowitz twists the facts to fit his world-view; it’s the very opposite of academic rigour but the very definition of modern wingnuttery.

You may have guessed I have no respect for him as a human being, an academic, or a lawyer. Anyone who says that state-sanctioned torture is just fine and dandy gives up any claims to such consideration, howber previously distinguished they may have been. In that nororious CNN interview, Dershowitz revealed his inner moral core and there was nothing there.

My basic point, though, is we should never under any circumstances allow low-level people to administer torture. If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice. I don’t think we’re in that situation in this case.

[…]

…that’s why [we could use] a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture. I would talk about nonlethal torture, say, a sterilized needle underneath the nail, which would violate the Geneva Accords, but you know, countries all over the world violate the Geneva Accords. They do it secretly and hypothetically, the way the French did it in Algeria. If we ever came close to doing it, and we don’t know whether this is such a case, I think we would want to do it with accountability and openly and not adopt the way of the hypocrite.

Dershowitz helped lay the groundowrk for the normalisation of torture. He is, at the very least, partially complicit in the acceptance of the Gonzales and Yoo torture memos, for Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and all that has come after. Desk-bound he may be but he has blood on his otherwise unsullied hands.

To a man who’d consider torture a potential public good, career assassination must seem very small beer, but Dershowitz has pursued Finkelstein with as much gusto as he advocated needles under the nail.

He even went so far as to ask California governor Arnold Schwartzenegger to personally have Finkelstein’s book pulled from the University of California Press. From The Nation:

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.

This wasn’t just Dershowitz going, “Oh, maybe there’s something you should know before you make your decision” -this was a well-organised, regimented attack on a man’s life and acadenic career, simply because he failed a religious test, ie, not believing in the tenets of Zionism and worse still, pointing out its supporters’ wrongdoing.

And Finkelstein? How did he respond? He did what academics do: he wrote a book.

The dispute has roots that go deeper still, with Mr Finkelstein devoting much of his most recent book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History to an attack on Mr Dershowitz’s own work, the Case for Israel. Mr Dershowitz threatened to sue.

I’d love to see Dershowitz sue and have this all dragged out in court. He may once have been a brilliant lawyer, but now he’s little more than a pro-torture, pro-occupation, violently inclined religio/political crackpot who uses his privileged position as a tenured Harvard professor to go on personal crusades against individuals. Let’s see if he can still cut it in the courtroom without his homies behind him and the uncomfortable facts entered into evidence.

It’s sad, though, to see a once-fine intellect sunk so morally low, but it’s even sadder that the state of of Israel, American pro-Israel groups and influential individuals like Dershowitz have so much power that a once-well-thought-of university has caved in to their bullying demands.

Mr Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, has responded to the decision to, in effect, sack him from his job at DePaul by condemning the vote as an act of political aggression. “I met the standards of tenure DePaul required, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the political opposition to my speaking out on the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

More…

This is an act of naked political aggression, both personally by Dershowitz and more strategically by Israel and it’s supporters in US academia, media and politics. All know damned well that faced with a charge of antisemitism most public bodies will cave in rather than face the sustained barrage of abuse they are likely to recieve from Israel’s army of flying astroturf monkeys.

How does Harvard feels about being dragged into this by one of it’s own academics? It seems Harvard has it’s own problems with the Israel loibby’s flying astroturf monkeys too and some Harvard academics are not keen:

In an attack on what they termed the “Israel Lobby,” the Kennedy School’s Stephen M. Walt and the University of Chicago’s John J. Mearsheimer argued in a recent article that supporters of Israel have seized control of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, making it reflect Israel’s interests more than those of the U.S

This was Dershowitz’ response:

Dershowitz, who is one of Israel’s most prominent defenders, vehemently disputed the article’s assertions, repeatedly calling it “one-sided” and its authors “liars” and “bigots.”

He criticized three piece on three grounds, alleging parallels with neo-Nazi literature, saying that Walt and Mearsheimer’s characterization that Israeli citizenship is based on “blood kinship” is a “categorical lie,” and taking issue with the representation of the lobby as all-encompassing.

Dershowitz said that the article used “quotes from [Israel’s first prime minister] David Ben-Gurion and [former president of the World Jewish Congress] Nahum Goldmann that are found repeatedly on hate sites,” and that in asserting that the Jewish state was founded on “blood kinship,” the authors were mistakenly conflating the right of Jews to immigrate to Israel with citizenship.

What was it? Ah yes, misrepresentation, suppression and distortion.. The more you read Dershowitz’ own words, the more Finkelstein’s criticism looks spot-on.

One of the more unfortunate things about Dershowitz is that he’s also the man who’s trained a preponderance of the country’s elite lawyers in criminal law and one has to wonder – what’s he been training them in? Dishonesty, character assassination and how to run a succesful political vendetta? Given the state of the nation’s federal judicial system, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

As a final aside, I must say I do find it somewhat ironic and grimly amusing to see that it’s a Catholic university, whose own faculty handbook mentions little about any religious requirement, that’s religiously even-handed in its hiring, effectively applying what amounts to a Jewish religious test to academic appointments. The tenure review committee should be ashamed of themselves. Dershowitz apprently knows no shame.