Rufus_Leakey
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Phylo
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Ian Carroll - How the Israel Lobby Controls Our Government
Public diplomacy of Israel
Public diplomacy of Israel - Wikipedia
The art of deception: How Israel uses ‘hasbara’ to whitewash its crimes
How Israel uses ‘hasbara’ to shift narratives in its favour
How Israel uses ‘hasbara’ to shift narratives in its favour
We’ll delve into Israel’s intricate art of shaping perceptions also known as ‘hasbara’.
Journalist Ian Carroll on censorship in media, Israel-Palestine conflict
Phylo
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On From Time Immemorial
Finkelstein's doctoral thesis formed the basis for his interest in examining the claims made in Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, a best-selling book at the time.[27] Peters's "history and defense" of Israel deals with the demographic history of Palestine. Demographic studies had tended to assert that the Arab population of Ottoman-controlled Palestine, a 94% majority at the turn of the century, had dwindled toward parity due to massive Zionist immigration. Peters radically challenged this view by arguing that a substantial portion of the Palestinians were descended from immigrants from other Arab countries from the early 19th century onward. It followed, for Peters and many of her readers, that the picture of a native Palestinian population overwhelmed by Jewish immigration was little more than propaganda, and that in actuality two almost simultaneous waves of immigration met in what had been a relatively unpopulated land.[citation needed]From Time Immemorial was praised by figures as varied as Barbara Tuchman, Theodore H. White, Elie Wiesel, and Lucy Dawidowicz. Saul Bellow wrote in a jacket endorsement, "Millions of people the world over, smothered by false history and propaganda, will be grateful for this clear account of the origins of the Palestinians."[28]
Finkelstein called the book a "monumental hoax".[29] He later opined that, while Peters's book received widespread interest and approval in the United States, a scholarly demonstration of its fraudulence and unreliability aroused little attention:
According to Adam Shatz, "when Finkelstein showed that Peters had manipulated Ottoman demographic records to make her case, the book's supporters attacked him as an anti-Zionist. By 1986, though, Zionist scholars having published articles that bolstered Finkelstein's case, his version was the conventional wisdom."[31]
In Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky wrote that Finkelstein sent his preliminary findings to about 30 people interested in the topic, but no one replied, except for him, and that was how they became friends:
According to Chomsky, the controversy over Finkelstein's research caused a delay in his earning his Ph.D. at Princeton University. Chomsky wrote that Finkelstein could not get the faculty to read his dissertation, and that Princeton eventually granted Finkelstein his doctorate only "out of embarrassment" and refused to give him any further professional backing.[16]
Norman Finkelstein at Solidarity stage in 2013.In a 1996 Foreign Affairs review of a subsequent book, William B. Quandt called Finkelstein's critique of From Time Immemorial a "landmark essay" that helped demonstrate Peters's "shoddy scholarship".[32] Israeli historian Avi Shlaim later praised Finkelstein's thesis, saying that it had established his credentials when he was still a doctoral student. In Shlaim's view, Finkelstein had produced an "unanswerable case" with "irrefutable evidence" that Peters's book was "preposterous and worthless".[33]
Criticism of Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel
Shortly after the 2003 publication of Alan Dershowitz's book The Case for Israel, Finkelstein derided it as "a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism, and nonsense".[45] During a debate on Democracy Now!, Finkelstein said that Dershowitz lacked knowledge of specific contents of his own book. He also claimed that Dershowitz did not write the book and may not have even read it.[45]Finkelstein said there were 20 instances, in as many pages, where Dershowitz's book cites the same sources and passages Peters used in her book, in largely the same sequence, with ellipses in the same places. In two instances, Dershowitz reproduces Peters's errors. From this Finkelstein concluded that Dershowitz had not checked the original sources himself, contrary to his claims.[46] Finkelstein suggests that this copying of quotations amounts to copying ideas.[47] Examining a copy of a proof of Dershowitz's book he managed to obtain, he found evidence that Dershowitz had his secretarial assistant, Holly Beth Billington, check in the Harvard library the sources he had read in Peters's book.[48] Dershowitz answered the charge in a letter to the University of California's Press Director Lynne Withey, arguing that Finkelstein had made up the smoking gun quotation by changing its wording (from "cite" to "copy") in his book. In public debate, he has said that if "somebody borrowed the quote without going to check back on whether Mark Twain had said that, obviously that would be a serious charge", but said that he did not do that and had indeed checked the original source.
Asserting that he did consult the original sources, Dershowitz said Finkelstein was simply accusing him of good scholarly practice: citing references he learned of initially from Peters's book. Dershowitz denied that he used any of Peters's ideas without citation. "Plagiarism is taking someone else's words and claiming they're your own. There are no borrowed words from anybody. There are no borrowed ideas from anybody because I fundamentally disagree with the conclusions of Peters's book."[51] In a footnote in The Case for Israel that cites Peters's book, Dershowitz explicitly denies that he "relies" on Peters for "conclusions or data".[52]
On Dershowitz's behalf, Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan asked former Harvard president Derek Bok to investigate the assertion of plagiarism; Bok exonerated Dershowitz of the charge.[49]
In April 2007, Frank Menetrez, a former Editor-in-Chief of the UCLA Law Review, published an analysis of the charges Dershowitz made against Finkelstein and concluded that Dershowitz had misrepresented matters.[56][57] In a follow-up analysis he concluded that he could find "no way of avoiding the inference that Dershowitz copied the quotation from Twain from Peters's From Time Immemorial, and not from the original source", as Dershowitz claimed.[56][57][58][59]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein#:~:text=As examples, Suchar said that,by a 4–3 vote.
Phylo
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How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories
How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories
Palestinian news outlets have seen a steep drop in audience engagement since October 2023.
www.bbc.co.uk
