Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Radl Karl
Title : Semitic Controversies 2008 Issue
Year : 2008

Link download : Radl_Karl_-_Semitic_Controversies_2008_Issue.zip

Dershowitz versus Scholarship: Some Brief Comments on Dershowitz’s 'Critique' of Walt and Mearsheimer. Sunday, 15 June 2008. Alan Dershowitz’s recent blog article ‘Double Standard Watch: Questions for Walt and Mearsheimer’ at the Jersusalem Post website is for any student of Dershowitz’s screeds; I won’t say writings because I personally don’t consider his written work on Israel and jews to be even educated polemics, an interesting one in terms of Dershowitz’s usual hysterics. To paraphrase Finkelstein in ‘Beyond Chutzpah’ Dershowitz desperately wants to prove something and will marshal any ‘evidence’ and make any tenuous connection to make his case. In this case; he wants to prove that Walt and Mearsheimer (and presumably his other opponents; such as Neumann and Finkelstein) base their research on ‘out-of-context quotes’ that they ‘lifted from anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi and radical Islamic hate sites.’ Now having read Walt and Mearsheimer’s book ‘The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’ fairly recently I don’t recall any conclusions from such supposed ‘bad sources’; the question of what about a ‘hateful’ site makes it a bad source of information is of course a more lengthy and more detailed discussion that I won’t enter into here, nor do I immediately recall any citation of such sources. Perhaps Dershowitz could be specific in what he means and where Walt and Mearsheimer are supposedly skimming their research from such sources. Walt and Mearsheimer do mention David Duke once and in passing as an example but they promptly condemn him. However as veteran Dershowitz readers will well know he makes these kind of charges on a regular basis in both his books and other published work; his enemies are always ‘haters’, ‘anti-Semites’, ‘Nazis’, ‘Shoah/Holocaust Deniers’ and lord knows else. It is also interesting that Dershowitz immediately does exactly what he did to Finkelstein in his ‘The Case for Israel’ in declaring the following to create the suggestion of considerable specific scholarly criticism and condemnation (in both cases one easily imagines Dershowitz with an animalistic sneer plastered across his face); ‘That is why so many of their own colleagues - Jewish and not Jewish -have trashed their work as "piss-poor" research (as one colleague put it).’ Have ‘so many’ of ‘their own colleagues’ ‘trashed’ their work; not according to what I’ve read although Dershowitz and associates have circled numerous petitions condemning them for invented offences (some of which I have been forwarded by gracious friends) and engaging in a covert; as well as overt, personal campaign against them; much as it was revealed he had considerable hand in Finkelstein being denied tenure at De Paul University. But perhaps it is better to ask; why; if some colleagues disagree so strongly, there has not been a devastating critique brought out against the book from the direction that Dershowitz argues from i.e. that the people of the United States love Israel so much and have so many ‘shared values’ they just want to give it $3 billion per annum. Alright; I am massively simplifying the argument here but it makes the point that needs to be made regardless. ...