I am constantly perplexed by Alan Dershowitz’s ability to maintain his respectable status in spite of his extensive record of intellectual dishonesty. Despite his history, he’s still being published in major outlets, joining the drumbeat for an attack on Iran, and is taken seriously as the “go-to” guy for so-called “pro-Israel” groups seeking to counter the growing BDS movement. Is he really so brilliant that no one has caught on to his fraudulent “scholarship” yet?
A few years ago, I watched Norman Finkelstein debate Alan Dershowitz on Democracy Now! In the course of that debate, Finkelstein systematically demonstrated that Dershowitz was guilty of academic misconduct and had distorted human rights reports in order to white-wash Israel’s atrocious record of abuses against the Palestinian people. At the time, I thought that would mark the beginning of the end of Dershowitz’s career as a credible public intellectual. Judging by how hard Dershowitz fought to keep Finkelstein’s book on the same topic from being published, it seems that he may have shared my suspicion.
So many years later, not only has Dershowitz managed to maintain his career and status in spite of the exposure of his intellectual dishonesty, he has actually continued on the very same course, launching further indefensible and baseless attacks against those who exposed him and those who disagree with him politically on Israel. There are many articles and books out there that extensively outline Dershowitz’s distortions of the truth (I name a few in the video), but animated graphics can clarify just how truly outrageous this man’s statements and accusations really are.
