The "REAL" Case for Israel; Dershowitz unveiled
It is not everyday that a professor hires a prestigious law firm to threaten the University of California Press.
Yet, for months, Alan Dershowitz, Harvard’s Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, tried to stop UC Press from publishing Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah. When the Press’ director Lynne Withey replied that she believed in academic freedom and would therefore go ahead with the book, Dershowitz sent letters to the university’s board of trustees and even to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, asking them to intervene on his behalf. Following both the trustees’ and governor’s decision not to get involved, one would have thought that the struggle would end. But now that the book is on the shelves, it seems that a new campaign is underway to cancel the author’s reading engagements, for example, at Harvard Bookstore and Barnes and Noble in Chicago. So what is the controversy about?.......Finkelstein’s second move exposes how the rhetoric of the new anti-Semitism is used as a political tool to ward off and delegitimize all criticism of Israel. He writes:
The consequences of the calculated hysteria of a new anti-Semitism haven’t been just to immunize Israel from legitimate criticism. Its overarching purpose, like that of the “war against terrorism,” has been to deflect criticism of an unprecedented assault on international law.
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