Alan Dershowitz is up to his old tricks again. Reaching into his bag of decades-old allegations, half-truths, and innuendos, he tries to put Noam Chomsky among the ranks of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers.
Noam’s sin? His support of the Israel divestment petition.
The key piece of evidence? The Faurisson affair, of course. How predictable.
Perhaps Dershowitz’s intellectual laziness has become so extreme that he can’t even look up a source (in this case, Noam himself). After all, even plagiarism requires some effort. Effort that he seems to have exhausted on copying Joan Peters‘ fraud.
Leaving aside the ad hominem and patently absurd attack on Chomsky, Dershowitz’s point comes down to this:
There is no intellectually or morally defensible case for singling out Israel for divestiture[…] Universities invest in a wide array of companies that have operations in countries that systematically violate the human rights of millions of people. Nor are these countries defending themselves against those who would destroy them and target their civilians. Yet this petition focused only on the Jewish State, to the exclusion of all others, including those which, by any reasonable standard, are among the worst violators of human rights. This is bigotry pure and simple, and those who signed the petition should be ashamed of themselves and shamed by others.
Mr. Dershowitz is right, but neither are these countries subsidized by American taxpayers to the tune of $3 billion a year with no oversight. That is why the petition focuses on Israel, a fact which Mr. Dershowitz is (no doubt) intimately familiar with.
There is pure and simple bigotry at work here but it is Mr. Dershowitz’s own.
