Alan Dershowitz: Who’s Spewing Hate?
Posted on March 24th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
In the New York Sun, Dershowitz accuses Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, author of the controversial paper discussed below, of lifting quotations from neo-Nazi hate sites.
“The wrenching [of quotes] out of context is done by the hate sites, and then [the authors] cite them to the original sources, in order to disguise the fact that they’ve gotten them from hate sites,” Dershowitz claims.
Dershowitz cites this example (and I quote from the Sun): Under the section “Manipulating the Media,” on pages 19 and 20 of the paper, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer write: “In his memoirs, for example, former Times executive editor Max Frankel acknowledged the impact his own pro-Israel attitude had on his editorial choices. In his words: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert.’ He goes on: ‘Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognized, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.'” The footnote cites Mr. Frankel’s 560-page book, “The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times,” published in 1999. Yet the Frankel quote used by Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt, Mr. Dershowitz said, is nearly identical to the quote used by a neo-Nazi Web site in its own take on Jewish press influence, “Jewish Influence in the Mass Media.” Dershowitz’s argument is logically fallacious and intellectually indefensible. Let us say that this quote appears in three places: the original source, the Neo-Nazi site, and Mearsheimer and Walt’s paper. Dershowitz assumes that W & M must have taken the quote from the web…because, apparently, two writers writing about how Israel is covered in the media would never conceive of reading a memoir by the Jewish former executive editor of the most important newspaper in the world.
That argument is so dumb, it would be laughable if it weren’t wrapped in the context of a very serious accusation.
In any event, it’s a safe bet that this quote has appeared in numerous places other than the memoir and neo-Nazi websites. It is, after all, a pretty provocative lineâ”I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I cared to assert.” It is entirely plausible that W & M would have come across this line during their research in places other than neo-Nazi websites. (I’d bet that the neo-Nazis themselves didn’t read the memoir, but got the quote from other sources.)
Let us acknowledge what Dershowitz is really saying: W & M troll neo-Nazi websites. That is a hideous accusation, and if this is all the “evidence” that Dershowitz hasâevidence that would surely never be allowed in a courtroomâhe shouldn’t make it. Because it is a short skip and a jump from saying that W & M read neo-Nazi websites to saying that they are neo-Nazis. And Dershowitz is well on the way to implying that.
I will leave it to people smarter than I to evaluate the level of scholarship in W & M’s paper. But you don’t have to be a legal genius to see that Alan Dershowitz’s intellectual standards do not impress.
5 Responses
3/24/2006 12:41 pm
wow. Dershowitz’s behavior is so indefensible that I have to wonder if he’s crossed the line to the point where HLS will be forced to distance itself from him, as he’s forced KSG to distance itself from Walt. This makes the Wisse/Eck tangle look civil. I would be beyond livid if a colleague behaved as irresonsibly as Dershowitz has. Walt’s silence in the face of this idiocy is impressive.
3/24/2006 1:44 pm
I must say I am shocked. It seems as if Alan is losing credibility by the hour lately.
3/24/2006 4:53 pm
I hate to say it, but this may, alternatively, be a case of the media manipulating the truth about, um, the media manipulating the truth. Before you jump down Dershowitz’s throat (who, it must be said, is an obviously biased grandstander of high distinction on this and other subjects) you should consider the possibility that the Sun writer has somewhat mispresented the good professor’s real emphasis. The issue he purports to be tackling is bad scholarship. The example he gives is the coincidence of the Frankel quote being both in the KSG paper and on a hate site. Whatever implication you may be reading into his choice of this example (i.e., that the authors are neo-nazis themselves), it does in fact support his main assertion, which is that they are using web sites to gather support for their thesis rather than doing original work — if, that is, you accept Dershowitz’s presumption that they didn’t really read the Frankel book but instead just quoted selectively from it to suit their thesis. The authors are entitled to use the quote to support their argument, but I think Dershowitz is also entitled to suggest that they may have gotten the quote from a dubious source. The question, of course, is whether he’s right, and the Sun article doesn’t really delve into the comparison document that Dershowitz is preparing, which would tend to support the presumption he is making. The Sun writer has an interest in obtaining a flaming quote, just as Dershowitz has an interest in giving one, but to say that Dershowitz diverges from Marquis of Queensberry rules in waging ideological warfare is not to say that he is engaging in defamation. Pointing out that the argument put forth by the paper’s authors overlaps to some degree with the assertions put forth by neo-nazis is perfectly valid. The sin of asserting without real evidence that the authors used such websites as their scholarly sources is a relatively minor one.
3/24/2006 10:46 pm
Its really ironic for Dershowitz to be shouting bad scholarship, considering his recent book “The case for israel” was taken apart from Norman Finkelstein, and shown to be plaigarized. See the Democracy Now debate between Dersh and Finkelstein - Finkelstein really wiped the floor with him.
3/25/2006 12:04 am
Dershowitz is beyond the pale. Richard is right in noting that W and M quote an utterly relevant sentence from a past editor of the NY Times in support of their cogent argument that the mainstream US press is part of the pro-Israeli lobby in this country. That editor wrote “I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I cared to assert.” As a consequence he helped, while editing the major newspaper of the US to contribute to a certain spin, and that fact is part of the case concerning the Israel Lobby that W and M examine.
The fact that this quote may also have been picked up by neo-Nazi groups is irrelevant, and would even be irrelevant if (as obviously did NOT happen) W and M stumbled across it while surfing neo-Nazi web sites-the insidious and nasty implication of Dershowitz and/or the New York Sun. The quote is a quote from the NY Times editor in question. Dershowitz’s innuendo and paradigm shifting are typical of the sort of red-herring sensationalizing that we now expect of this “borrower” of the words of others, abuser of language, manipulator of rhetoric, and defender of the likes of O. J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and Claus von Bulow. Nothing he says, particularly on the subject of Israel, should be taken seriously.