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The high cost of defending Israel

I will continue to fight back and respond every time the dogs of defamation are unleashed against me.

Norman Finkelstein waved a banner during a protest
Photo by: AP
Whenever I speak in support of Israel or in criticism of its enemies, the dogs of defamation are unleashed against me.  The attacks, all from the hard Left, seemed coordinated, focusing on common ad hominem themes. They accuse me of being a plagiarist, a supporter of torture, a right wing Zio-fascist, a hypocrite, an opponent of the two-state solution and a supporter of Israel’s settlement policies.  All these allegations are demonstrably false but this does not seem to matter to those whose job it is to try to discredit me. 

Let me begin with the charge of plagiarism—a charge originally made by the discredited academic, Norman Finkelstein, who has falsely charged virtually every pro-Israel writer with the same academic crime.  In my case, the charge centered around a one-paragraph quotation from Mark Twain in my book The Case for Israel.  I cited the paragraph to Mark Twain, but Finkelstein said that I should have cited it to a woman named Joan Peters, because he believes I found the quote in her book.  But the truth is that I found the quote ten years prior to the publication of Peters’ book and used it repeatedly in debates and speeches.  When Finkelstein leveled his absurd charge, I immediately reported it to the Harvard University President and to the Dean of the Law School and ask that it be thoroughly investigated.  Harvard appointed its former president, Derek Bok, to investigate the charge.  After a thorough investigation he found it to be utterly frivolous.  But to the dogs of defamation this only goes to prove that Harvard must be part of the pro-Israel conspiracy. 

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