To buttress your incomprehension of the article, you then resort to ad hominem – the same self-laid trap that Mr Dershowitz fell for. As for Wikipedia, it should be, as any source, be regarded with requisite skepticism.

Finally, I never alleged anything about any ad hominem screed from Mr Dershowitz. I pointed directly to what he wrote with footnotes so that readers could draw their own conclusions. I also pointed readers to books by both Mr Dershowitz and Mr Finkelstein so that they could draw their own conclusion. Progressivist writers are not about indoctrination.

Sam Livingston, you also fall for the Dershowitzian mistake of proffering iteration as argumentation. You offered no facts to counter the thesis of the article. Consequently, there is nothing for me to refute.

This charge of “anti-Semitism” has been thrown into the Orwellian word proccessor to join other words which used to have literal non-emotional trigger meanings such as communist or terrorist. Some users of it could give you a definition of it, but never an accurate description of what they mean when they use it. It’s become hateful slur used by angry screamers.

The fact that Finkelstein’s books have been published by prestigious presses, including the University of California, which is highly competitive for individual authors, and that his file was reviewed externally and praised on top of solid teaching evaluations, makes him a shoe-in for tenure. Except that in this case, where the tenure process at De Paul has been politicized in the most overt way it makes me laugh. I am certain that the AAUP will investigate this case, as it is the clearest case of a violation of academic freedom of any

If she had bothered to check available sources, she would see that he has written scholarly articles in virtually every major law review, plus twenty-six books, including several that have won prizes for scholarship. The law reviews of Yale, Harvard, University of Texas, University of Cincinnati, Penn, Cardozo, among others, have all published articles by Professor Dershowitz. Rights from Wrongs, Preemption, America Declares Independence are but a few of the scholarly books he has written. In fact, Prof. Dershowitz is regarded as an important scholar on issues totally aside from the Middle East, which anyone would notice if they bothered to check.

All of this Ms. Peterson would know if she bothered to perform even the most basic search. But Ms. Peterson won’t check the authenticity of her sources. Instead, she selectively excuses Finkelstein’s downright anti-Semitism and ignores even the most blatant examples of shoddy scholarship. We could expect such excuses for she cites Wikipedia, a website she knows can be – and is – heavily edited by the users sympathetic to Finkelstein. If this weren’t enough for her, she alleges that Dershowitz is writing ad hominem screeds, while ignoring some of Finkelstein’s most blatant attacks on students and academics. He called Eli Wiesel, a clown, and offered to sign a petition in favor of assassinating Irshad Manji, a Muslim refusenik, and commissioned a cartoon by a Holocaust denier showing Dershowitz masturbating to dead Lebanese civilians.

– Charles Johnson

I think you two should first read his book before making such pronouncements of racism. I don’t recall him ever denying there was a holocaust or saying anything against holocaust survivors. The fact of the matter is he is a Jew himself whose parents were holocaust survivors. Are you unaware of this?

“Just as Israelis … courageously put unruly Palestinians in their place, so American Jews courageously put unruly blacks in their place”

with unreal sophistry such as:

“Although I prefer accuracy in language, it is a part of normal human discourse to generalize about a group. The generalization can be negative, and it can be positive. People often speak about groups as though they were homogeneous without implying anything of the sort”

Talk about cognetive dissonance, which kicked in and make a “liberal” person find excuses for otherwise obvious bigotry.