What if a Harvard Student Did This? Alan Dershowitz Exposed

What if a Harvard Student Did This?
Norman Finkelstein, 26 September 2003

In the introduction to The Case for Israel, Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School asserts that his account is supported by "facts and figures, some of which will surprise those who get their information from biased sources" (p. 2). Yet, the evidence Dershowitz adduces will surprise no one familiar with the most notorious source of historical bias on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever published in the English language. The charts below document Dershowitz's wholesale lifting of source material from Joan Peters's monumental hoax, From Time Immemorial. Dershowitz not only copies Peters shamelessly, but knowingly does so from a book serious scholars have uniformly condemned. (For details on the Peters hoax, see Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, and Yehoshua Porath, "Mrs. Peters's Palestine," The New York Review of Books, 16 January 1986.) He is effectively no different from a professor lifting sources wholesale from a leading Holocaust revisionist in a book on the Holocaust. On a note both humorous and pathetic, Peters, in From Time Immemorial. and claiming to be inspired by George Orwell, coins the term "turnspeak" to signal the inversion of reality (pp. 173, 402). Dershowitz, apparently confounded by his massive borrowings from Peters, credits the term "turnspeak" to Orwell, accusing critics of Israel of "deliberately using George Orwell's `turnspeak'" (p. 57) and "Orwellian turnspeak" (p. 153). Is this scandalous scholarship, or is it plagiarism, or is it both?



Lots, lots more....

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner! :spank:

8th grade english student would get nailed on this "work" and i do know that in high school you`d receive serious penalities.. but if you`re "famous" i guess you can get away with it....

... of dershowitz's book? i haven't got the stomach to wade thru that much cr*p.

He recycles bullshit like Barak's 95% offer, says the Arab states were responsible for the refugee crisis on one page (p7) and then says no-one was on another (p9), plays fast and loose with figures, calls the Sinai "disputed", etc etc etc.

All in the first ten pages.

I couldn't stomach ripping apart the rest. The thread on that is on pg2 or 3 around here somewhere.

I'm sure Finkelstein could do even better BTW (being a professor with access to more materials and all).

Dershowitz was so red in the face and motor-mouthing that Finkelstein didn't even get to the facts.

I think the ration between Dershowitz ranting and Finkelstein coolly and calmly (trying to) make his point was 70/30. Poor Amy Goodman.

They had Dersh's mike about 50 decibels hotter than Finkelstein and let him talk maybe a total of five minutes.

I got an email from Finkelstein yesterday. He said he's going to be dissecting and refuting the book chapter-for-chapter. Look for the article or series of articles in about three months.

thanks tinnypriv..

most of this is actually rather petty. As clearly as you can see that he cribbed the whole thing from Peters, there are only so many sources you can go back to.

Part of his original complaint on Peters was that she used the standard materials (Peel commission papers, census data, etc..) and used elipses to turn the meanings on their head and the way she had put this all forward as "new" material or sources when there really aren't any outside the standards.

This seems to me something of a tempest in a teapot.

The Peters work, and the Finkelstein critique of it, are unfamiliar to me, but just going on what is referenced in the chart provided, there do not seem to be any glaring innaccuracies in the facts cited. It is not possible, of course, to check the details of the account of Ottoman justice, but no particular reason to doubt it, or to doubt the word of various travelers as to what they saw.

If Mr. Dershowitz had researchers check the citations in the Peters work, as he probably did, there does not seem to me any reason he should not then cite the origionals.

You believe his researchers went to the EXACT same sources, then copied from the EXACT same pages, with the EXACT same formatting?

Sure.

On the other hand, we could use the Oc's Razor principle: he just picked up Peters and lifted wholesale.

Pick whatever you think is more likely. :)

as a matter of fact what he seems to have done is basically revamp Peter's and dump the more egregious errors especially her excesses regarding when she cribbed Frankenstein's crappy little zionist propaganda tract citing a crusade era historian's census of Palestine.

Is that he used the one work as a sort of crib sheet, for it would seem to have collected in one place a large number of citations. He is a careful fellow, and certainly has a staff, so it does not seem unreasonable to suppose the precaution was taken of having some employee check to see that the citations were accurate. It does not seem a great ghastly thing if then, the origional is cited as the source. The whole thing seems of monumental unimportance.

They attributed "turnspeak" to Orwell, when it is a phrase from Peters.

The Peters work is an utter and total fraud. Everybody knows this. It was absolutely ripped apart in the British press by everyone and denounced by anyone remotely serious.

Even Daniel Pipes distanced himself from it.

Nobody with a brain would "crib" from it. Period.

My engagement is solely with the question of the citations in the chart you were kind enough to provide.

It is quite possible for a polemicist to begin with accurate information, and turn it to specious argument and fallacious conclusion: indeed, it happens more often than not, particularly in writings concerning this issue. It does not mean that such works cannot provide a useful short-cut to origional source materials.

The "turnspeak" phrase is particularly unfortunate, since the perfectly good "blackwhite" exists already in Newspeak. Worse, perhaps, than lifting it, is the clear evidence doing so provides that Mr. Dershowitz has not read "1984", or assimilated it well, if he has. No one who has not can be counted educated, in my view.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: And plagiarism is . . . What is your definition of plagiarism?

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: We're not going to get involved dash in that now.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: You're using a word you're not going to tell us what you mean by it?

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: The documentation, you know what we'll let everybody else decide for themselves because documentation one last example. I want to make it very clear, in Joan Peters' book From Time Immemorial she coins a phrase. The phrase is “turn speak”.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: She borrows it from . . .

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Sir, I'm sorry she coins the phrase, you see you don't know what you're talking about that's pretty terrible. She coins the phrase, “turn speak,” she says she's using it as a play off of George Orwell which is all listeners know used the phrase “news speak”. She coined her own phrase, “turn speak”. You go to Mr. Dershowitz’s book he got so confused in his massive borrowings from Joan Peters that on two occasions I'll cite them for those who have a copy of the book, on page 57 and on page 153 he uses the phrase, quote, George Orwell's turn speak. Turn speak is not Orwell, Mr. Dershowitz, you're the Felix Frankfurt chair at Harvard, you must know that Orwell would never use such a clunky phrase as turn speak.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: I like it.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, maybe you like it. Evidently Joan Peters liked it. But George Orwell never heard of it to the best of my knowledge.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/24/1730205

Are equally guilty of the same attempt to publish a polemic triumph on the I/P situation. Peters used some fairly sloppy scholarship and analysis while Finkelstein committed the same crime when trying to show the problems with Peters work. Definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

As for the re-use of data, Dershowitz I agree with you that if he did go back to confirm the originals, then he is entitled to a large degree to cite them as such in his footnotes.

Have you read chapter 2 of Image and Reality?

What does "to a large degree" mean? Either he is or he isn't.

And he isn't. That isn't the way scholarship works.

This is not an academician's work, intended for the use of other scholars and for instructional purposes. It is a popular market polemic, tricked out with foot-notes to lend it class, like the spoilers and stripes on an automobile shaped a little like a fast racer.

If a work has footnotes, I hold it to standard scholarly standards.

Dershowitz not only comes up short on those, he doesn't even approach the level of polemic.

I personally do not believe he wrote more than two thirds of this book. The errors in it are that elementary.

He is a busy man, and many things are out-sourced nowadays.

He managed to quote from Ketavim Letoldot Hibbat Ziyyon Ve-Yishshuv Erez Yisra'el, (Odessa, Tel Aviv, 1919, 1925, 1932, vol. 3, pp. 66-67).

Funnily enough, so did Peters! :D

The same Peters who has a "woefully lacking" grasp of Hebrew and Arabic, according to Yehoshua Porath.

Fire those researchers! :bounce:

You may be sure there are people who make a living at it.

And the other ones as well...

One of Finkelstein's main arguments against Peters has to do with Peter's thesis of ad-hoc Arab immigration (to justify the claim that Palestine was empty - the reason for the inclusion of the Mark Twain quote). From what I've read, both play fairly free and loose with the census numbers, all of which proves the adage about statistics being lies and damned lies.


L-

You've also read the LRB article on the Peters hoax?

I only ask because I had to get it out of the microfiche archive. :shrug:

With regards to my original question, Finkelstein DESTROYS Peters in Chapter 2 of Image and Reality. There is no like for like. One is a serious scholar (occasionaly lapses into polemic notwithstanding), and the other is a fraud and a charlatan.

How you can possibly compare the two in the same sentence is absolutely mind-boggling.

Seriously, I'm amazed.

You have to say everyone is equally bad all around. It doesn't matter if it is true or not about specifics, it's even easier than the Palestinian or Israeli narrative.

No, I have not read either David and Ian's Gilmour article in the LRB nor have I read Albert Hourani's earlier article. If you have them on in a textual format, I would be grateful if you send them privately (my own library here does not go back that far). I have read Chomskey's citations of both of these articles.

Here is one of the more lucid commentaries I have found. Note: While I am not a fan of much this site offers (it is Libertarian), I did find this analysis to be fairly good.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2135

While Finkelstein himself did a fair job in pointing out numerous errors in the document (particularly Hope-Simpson), he himself did a shoddy job of back tracking the much more crucial census numbers which were the core of Peter's fantastic assertions that Palestinians immigrated into the Jewish settlement areas to follow the success that they were generating. Discrediting this seemed to come from other people.

So I will give Finkelstein credit for being among the first to point out the hoax in the general press, but it seems to me the real scholarship and real weight that destroyed Peter's work came from others much more deeply involved in the field including Porath, Hourani and Ian and David Gilmour.

As Porath is quoted by Chomskey in his work _Understanding Power_ to have said:

The whole "Palestinian" issue, Miss Peters claims, is a "big lie" that has caused "bewildering, squeamish reactions" of "doubt and guilt" among Israel's supporters. Yehoshua Porath, an Israeli historian of the Palestinian Arabs who teaches at Hebrew University, was asked in a telephone interview from Jerusalem about the book. "I think it's a sheer forgery," he replied. "In Israel, at least, the book was almost universally dismissed as sheer rubbish except maybe as a propaganda weapon," the historian said. Mr. Porath described his politics as centrist. He has written an essay on the book for The New York Review of Books that will be published soon.

This tells me that the Peter's work was immediately discredited by those in the know and that Finkelstein's work was not a crucial element in pointing this out. I suspect the same is true for Albert Hourani as well whose own initial reading provided similar commentary.


L-

Always a pleasure to see competent work. Also, it is worth noting that Prof. Hourani stands against this thing: he is an excellent scholar.

It is utterly irrelevant to my point.

You said: "From what I've read, both play fairly free and loose with the census numbers" (emphasis added).

Even assuming every word on the web page you cite is accurate (I don't have time to check, it appears so), it doesn't back that up.

To illustrate, it says:

"From Time Immemorial is work of propaganda, with all the bad connotations that term carries. Peters' case rests upon distortion and fabrication" (emphases mine, 'From Time Immemorial - Peters' Book From Time Immemorial Lacks Objectivity', Capitalism Magazine, April 20 2002)

Before coming to this conclusion, it counts precisely three errors in Finkelstein's work (again, I'll just assume they're accurate for the sake of argument).

So let me get this straight, three errors on the one hand, and utter fabrication, distortion, lying, inventing sources, quoting selectively etc on the other; equals:

"From what I've read, both play fairly free and loose with the census numbers" ?

I'm sorry, that is BS and you know it.

Moving on to the irrelevant parts of your post:

<< "So I will give Finkelstein credit for being among the first to point out the hoax in the general press, but it seems to me the real scholarship and real weight that destroyed Peter's work came from others much more deeply involved in the field including Porath, Hourani and Ian and David Gilmour" >>

Finkelstein (as your own source you give points out), was the first (not "among the first") to publish criticism of the Peters hoax in the left wing journal In These Times (where it was run after Noam Chomsky contacted the publication incidentally, which is not noted since it is not widely known). Obviously, that isn't the "general press". The second author was Bill Farrell, in the Journal of Palestine Studies. Later, Alexander Cockburn in The Nation.

Further, before the first article was ran, Finkelstein contacted scholars in the field and distributed to them a primer on the book, with his initial, preliminary findings (it was about 25 pages long). This is after about a hundred rave reviews in the American press lauding Peters. He did not receive a single response. He also wrote a critical letter pointing out the fraud to virtually every newspaper that ran a review of the Peters book (none were published).

Note that this is before Porath had even set eyes on the book.

Finkelstein then approached the publishers of Peters and explained that they had a fraud on their hands. They essentially told him to get lost. So Finkelstein just kept at it, writing letters, submitting articles to journals etc.

Note that even after Finkelstein had done this for months, and contacted almost every major scholar in the field in the United States with his findings, there were still no “general press” critical reviews. Now, thanks mostly to Finkelstein, at this point, a lot of the NY intellectual community knew Peters was a fraud and sooner or later it would be exposed. This is why the editor of the New York Review of Books did not a review (neither did the Village Voice or Dissent, probably for the same reasons although I can't confirm that).

Then, the publishers of Peters decided to go overseas.

Now, BEFORE the book was published in England, Noam Chomsky sent copies of Finkelstein's work to people like Hourani, Gilmour etc. as well as a number of other scholars and journalists. That is why the British reviews were so devastating. Several actually used Finkelstein's work without acknowledgement by the way (which is fairly clear if you compare the articles and his work side by side, even if you don't know the back story).

Finkelstein's work was one of the crucial elements in bringing the hoax into the public domain (not entirely, The New Republic has still not run a promised critical review for example). However, the later articles did build on his scholarly apparatus (Farrell excepted, his work was independent). It was Finkelstein's work that was the weight that destroyed the fraud, and others helped (as is the nature of scholarship).

In addition, Porath's was one of the worst reviews - it barely mentioned the utterly fraudulent nature of the book (despite it being specifically brought to his attention), and there was nary a word on the falsification of sources, nor the suppression of the hoax that preceded it in his article in the NY Review of Books. Obviously he was aware of both since he is an outstanding scholar.

<< As Porath is quoted by Chomskey in his work _Understanding Power_ to have said: >>

Sorry, you're making the same mistake Dershowitz made. Porath is not "quoted" by Chomsky in the paragraph you give (which you copied from the appendix notes to Understanding Power, available on the internet). Colin Campbell, a journalist for the New York Times, quotes Porath.

The Campbell article where Porath calls Peters work a "sheer forgery" was actually ran, but also suppressed. It was run in the thanksgiving day issue (I assume you know what that means for readership), and it did not even have a listing in the index.

Even after that article was ran, the NY Times editors commissioned a laudatory column on Peters entitled "There Were No Indians" (Jan 1986, Anthony Lewis).

It was then that Porath's (vastly unimpressive) review was ran in the New York Review of Books, on Jan 16 1986.

Note that it was commissioned almost a year earlier, only as a consequence of the huge criticism in the British press (Times Literary Supplement etc). Porath submitted it within a month or so of that commission, so even it was suppressed for a long time.

Once even the New York Times wrote about the suppression (in a round-about way), it was finally ran.

<< This tells me that the Peter's work was immediately discredited by those in the know and that Finkelstein's work was not a crucial element in pointing this out. I suspect the same is true for Albert Hourani as well whose own initial reading provided similar commentary >>

As I have amply demonstrated, that is simply incorrect.

I suggest reading the postscript to Chapter 2 of Image and Reality by Finkelstein, pages 45-50, and pages 244-48 of Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky since I assume you have those available to you.

For the Gilmour article, I will have to see if there is a way of retrieving it electronically. If there is, I will send it to you at no cost. :)

Particularly on Page 5 of 6 where it talks about Finkelstein's mathematical errors.

Personally I find it interesting that no one cited Finkelstein's work. Serious scholars such as Hourani and Porath would have done so if they had used it as a basis.

Rather what I think happened is that Chomskey's reputation caused people to take the time to critically read Peter's work and not pass it off like Daniel Pipes did. Those issues which were problematic to Finkelstein would be immediately noted by experts such as Hourani and Porath and raised again.

Again The quote from Porath intimated that he and his colleagues knew immediately (not needing any prompting from Chomskey & Finkelstein) that the book was problematic. But you are right I should have used the word "cited", not "quoted".

As I correctly stated, there are three errors in Finkelstein's work according to the article you referenced (the spread of 150,000-600,000 figures, multipler 2.7, the non-census of 1947).

Again, you're walking away from the relevant point which is that to say "both Peters and Finkelstein play fast and loose with census figures" is an utterly ridiculous statement (emphasis added).

To compare the two in any way beggers belief, and I'm not sure you even disagree with that.

To address your other points:

<< Personally I find it interesting that no one cited Finkelstein's work. Serious scholars such as Hourani and Porath would have done so if they had used it as a basis >>

I agree.

It doesn't change the fact that most of the initial scholarly work on Peters used Finkelstein as a basis without acknowledgement.

I personally find it highly unlikely that either Porath or Hourani needed to rely on Finkelstein, however they did have access to his work privately before they published a word on Peters and certainly assimilated it before they did publish. Of course, that doesn't change the independence of their work in the least.

If you wanted to speculate about why most of those who used Finkelstein did not cite him, the most reasonable interpretation I could think of would be that he had only recently graduadated from Princeton and was a young scholar with no published works to his name at the time. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.

<< Rather what I think happened is that Chomskey's reputation caused people to take the time to critically read Peter's work and not pass it off like Daniel Pipes did. Those issues which were problematic to Finkelstein would be immediately noted by experts such as Hourani and Porath and raised again >>

I think that may be very close to the truth.

<< Again The quote from Porath intimated that he and his colleagues knew immediately (not needing any prompting from Chomskey & Finkelstein) that the book was problematic. >>

Finkelstein had distributed his work before Porath even read the book.

<< But you are right I should have used the word "cited", not "quoted". >>

I accept the clarification and withdraw the comparision to Dershowitz. :hi:

Starting page 36 of _Image and Reality_, The Strange Case of Area IV

Peter's highly touted demograhic study is the centerpiece of "From Time Immemorial". Yet, this study is marred by serious flaws: (1) several extremely significant calculations are wrong; and (2) numbers are used selectively to support otherwise baseless conclusions

At this point Finkelstein goes on to examine for several pages her analysis of census data and to project his own calculations to prove his own statements. Yet Finkelstein's own calculations are off (as shown in the footnotes I mentioned above) which is problematic considering his first point of contention above. So, yes, Finkelstein does play games with numbers to try and prove his case.

But I agree that he is correct in point (2) and thankfully he rescues his own case by his very strong arguments he makes concerning her erroneous use of Citations.

Now, the point which I am more interested in academically is why no one has brought up the connection to Philip M. Hauser, ex Director of the US Census, Professor at the Univ. of Chicago and former liason to the UN on demographic issues?

Prof. Hauser obviously from the introduction had some say in the numbers and modeling for "From Time Immemorial", yet no one to my knowledge has ever explained the hows and whys of how he could let such a conclusion be reached?



L-


On Edit: A couple of spelling mistakes. (Only had the textarea box available to edit in).

According to him, Peters was a "family friend" and he only checked "some figures" for her (presumably as a favour).

He also claimed to have "no competence" in Middle East history FWIW.

Personally, I think he gave Peters a standard boilerplate positive blurb for the book and did only check a few figures (which Peters clearly made sure were accurate in order for him to be able to say "these are correct, yes").

Anything else attributed to him was embellishment by Peters. Hauser clearly didn't sign-off on it all and also didn't expect the whole thing to blow up in the face of the intellectual community either.

My personal belief is that he did not know Peters was concocting an absolute fraud, thinking instead that at most it would only be a partisan polemic. He probably got a hellva shock.

He didn't actually retract his support until after the explosion though, so he is obviously an intellectual coward. However, whether he is a knowing party to plagarist fraud seems unlikely.

Other than that, your speculation is as good as mine.

I think Dershowitz being a professor and all should have been aware of the correct way to footnote secondary sources, especially when so many have been taken from that Joan Peters book. All I know is that if a first-year student like me did what he'd done, I would have scored a fail for my 'efforts'. And if my lecturer was publishing stuff as sloppy with the footnoting as Dershowitz's appears to be, then I'd be having a go at him about double standards. All in all it's a kind of trivial issue, except the timing of the thread's interesting because this morning I was holed up in a library and read a quote from someone that the author had gotten from another book, so I went and grabbed that other book, flicked through it real quick, spotted the quote without really reading anything much in the book, and then agonised over whether I should do the safe thing and reference it as having come via the first book I looked at and actually read...

Here's what Harvard says about citations, and I'd be surprised if professors there don't have this stuff coming naturally to them:

"When qouting or citing a passage you found quoted or cited by another scholar, and you haven't actually read the original source, cite the passage as "quoted in" or "cited in" that scholarÑboth to credit that person for finding the quot ed passage or cited text, and to protect yourself in case he or she has misquoted.or misrepresented (see "Indirect Source" p. 44). Always read for yourself any source that's important to your argument, rather than relying on an abstract or a summary in a nother source."

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources/chap2.html

Violet...

However, this was a mass market edition book and not an attempt at a scholarly work. Hence different standards are at work. But even so, Dershowitz claims that he had researchers go back to the original sources for validation purposes.

Scholarly works tend to also be peer-reviewed which was certainly not the case here.

and Mr. Finkelstein, who is clearly enjoying himself,
has allowed himself to be suckered into it.

however, the consequences are not quite so dire..

I think that this whole thing is a rather worthless endeavor; it isn't clear that he plagiarized, and I would rather spend time addressing his points then arguing over little details that may or may not have been copied from someone else's book.

plagiarized or not, it is shock full of non-sequiturs, the mark of a demagogue.

It's a fraud not necessarily because the sources are incredible to start with (yeah, Mark Twain with his deep insights into tribal culture and presence) but because of the elipses (I just love that word).

The ultimate scholarly book is one that references sources only to make a point (which Dershowitz claimed to be doing on the Democracy NOW show) but he is about as far from that as John Grisham. It's a story, an entertaining one at that and I would encourage everybody that seeks entertainment to buy this book (in spite of it's devious intentions that are laid out all too clearly) but it does not leave the conclusions up to the reader. This is where it breaks down.

It's a 30 second TV clip stretched out over 200 odd pages.

If you want to learn about Palestine, read Said (bless him), Chomsky and Segev. These are scholars. History recounted is not a courtroom where a good show sways the jury.

Dershowitz is out of his league. He should have stuck to teaching law.

the torture comment and his support of basically everything Israel does is rather damning.

His book seems to be a worthless bit of propaganda; even Encyclopedia Judaica gives a more fair and balanced look at the peace process and the Israeli/Arab conflict and Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I probably should wait to read it before I judge it, but as with Treason I don't want to add to his sales.

Mr. Twain is a favorite of mine, and certainly one of us. Be nice to the old fellow....

Respect is due.

:thumbsup:

I think Dershowitz was clobbered and rightly so.

Which show did you watch, Jim?

...:beer: (hint)

* Just interchange 'watch' with read, examine, look-at, think about, listen to etc, whenever you address that standard question to the irrepressible Jim. :)

Got it.

:toast:

We know you have an afinity for the Finkster!

:loveya:

Finkelstein will be publishing a comprehensive review and examination of what he calls the "hoax" of 'The Case for Israel' soon.

Should be fun. :spank:

For a preview (-ish!), see my DU post on the topic:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=printer_friendly&forum=124&topic_id=11155&mesg_id=11184

any information that is "common knowledge" or quoted in three separate sources can not be called plagarism. Plus one has the liberty of using or not using sources for common knowledge.

As for people using the same sources...your point is?

Dersh boy is in deep shit over this.

I wouldn't bother defending him. Just a heads up. You might not like what is revealed in the future.

that within the next 180 days Jim Sagle will post the word "shit" at least one time. The chance of this, IMO, is 99.9%.

Prediction isn't too hard...

:thumbsup:

But I'll take what applause I can get.
Thnx.

I wouldn't be surprised.

Below is the letter Dershowitz sent: The Globe article is not yet on line - but it says it has investigated and agrees with Dershowitz that he did no wrong - Every quote is valid and refers to the original in the notes.

To the editors:
I simply do not understand the charge of plagiarism leveled against me by Norman Finkelstein and Alexander Cockburn ("News, “Dershowitz Accused of Plagiarism,” Sept. 29). It is not that I use anyone else’s words without attribution, since they acknowledge that every quote is properly identified and cited. It is not that I use Peters’s ideas without attribution, since I do not agree with her ideas or conclusions, and I do cite her on eight occasions; their claim is that several of the quotes I use in my book, I originally came across in her book. This is factually untrue of the Twain and Peel quotes, which I found before her book was published. It is true of a few other quotes, some of which I cite to her, others of which I cite to the original source. That is simply not plagiarism. It is scholarship.

I trust the scholarly conclusions of James O. Freedman—who was the President of Dartmouth, the University of Iowa and the American Academy of Sciences—more than the biased, ideologically driven accusations leveled by two rabid anti-Israeli polemicists, whose views I have repeatedly attacked over the years. Finkelstein and Cockburn have a long history of leveling unfounded charges against their ideological opponents. This is the conclusion reached by Freedman after reviewing the relevant materials:


I do not understand Mr. Cockburn’s charge of plagiarism against Alan Dershowitz. There is no claim that Dershowitz used the words of others without attribution. When he uses the words of others, he quotes them properly and generally cites them to the original sources (Mark Twain, Palestine Royal Commission, etc.) Cockburn’s complaint is that instead he should have cited them to the secondary source, in which Dershowitz may have come upon them. But as the Chicago Manual of Style emphasizes:

“With all reuse of others’ materials, it is important to identify the original as the source. This...helps avoid any accusation of plagiarism.”

This is precisely what Dershowitz did. Moreover, many of the sources quoted both by Dershowitz and Peters are commonly quoted in discussions of this period of Palestinian history. Nor can it be said that Dershowitz used Peters’s ideas without attribution. He cites Peters seven times in the early chapter of his book, while making clear that he does not necessarily accept her conclusions. This is simply not plagiarism, under any reasonable definition of that word.


I first came upon the Mark Twain quote in 1970 (14 years before the Peters’ book was published) when I was doing research for a TV debate about Israel on The Advocates. I have quoted it repeatedly in speeches and debates since then. It would be absurd for me to cite it to Peters rather than to its original source. I also read the Royal Commission report on Palestine (The Peel Report) from cover to cover before Peters published her book, and I rely on it much more than she does. I cite it numerous times, quote it repeatedly in the text and devote an entire chapter (six) to its findings and recommendations. It is preposterous to suggest that I should have cited these quotes to Peters, just because she also cites one or two of them in her book—generally in very different ways and for very different conclusions. I did discover a few sources in Peters that I found useful. On eight occasions, when I could not check the original source directly, I cited them to Peters. In other instances I cited the original sources. That is the proper method.

Let it be absolutely clear that my demographic conclusions are very different from Peters’s. Moreover, her 600-page book is all about 19th and early 20th Century demography. My 264-page book is primarily about the modern conflict in the Middle East, since I expressly argue that there must be some “statute of limitation for ancient grievances” (p. 5).

I argue that, “It is impossible to reconstruct the demographics of the area with any degree of precision, since census data for that time period are not reliable, and most attempts at reconstruction—by both Palestinian and Israeli sources—seem to have a political agenda.”

Accordingly, the estimates I offer in my book are more general and rough. Moreover neither Finkelstein nor Cockburn take issue with them, as they do with Peters’s.

How can I be accused of plagiarizing ideas with which I disagree?

Finally, a word about the Finkelstein chart. By juxtaposing quotes from my book with quotes from Peters’s book, he makes it appear that I am borrowing words from her. But these are all quotes—properly quoted and cited in my book—from third parties. Of course they are similar, or the same. One does not change a quote. And since I did find some of the quotes in Peters’s book, as she found them in others, it should come as no surprise that the ellipses are sometimes similar or the same as well.

I am proud of my book. I did nothing even arguably wrong.

Alan M. Dershowitz
Sept. 29, 2003

Dershowitz states that he uses only a "few sources" cited in the Peters hoax. In fact, fully 22 of the 52 endnotes in chapters 1-2 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. - Finkelstein.

Knock out! :spank:

Give it up Dersh.

as in Knocked the fuck out!

:nopity:

:spank:

:pals:

:nuke:

:hi:

continuous text - Globe/Alan say they verified that they were correct quotes

and they were.

And that is all one need do under the rules.

The fact he read Peters book and then liked her end notes and verified that they were correct - as in quotations - was always admitted.

"continuous text" is just not on point. Allthough it does indicate that the reseach on validity came back with yes/no on the quotes - and no editing on the end notes wording.

If they'd have looked up the edition Dershowitz cites, they wouldn't find the quotes, would they?

How can you verify something that isn't there? Just leaf through hoping you'll find the two paragraphs and not mention they were cobbled together in the exact same manner as another book?

You're reaching, and so is the Globe.