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<p>Dershowitz writes too many books, making it inevitable that problems will appear in his subject expertise, fact checking, and consistency. Employing an army of student assistants doesn’t solve these problems, the delegation makes the work less reliable in some ways.</p>
<p>With that said, the “plagiarism” charges in this case expose Finkelstein and his master, not Dershowitz. Dershowitz correctly describes Finkelstein as a Chomsky minion, one who has adopted both the old man’s ideology and his methods.</p>
<p>Finkelstein’s assertion of plagiarism is that Dershowitz quoted sources X,Y,Z via transcription from an unattributed source “P” where they had also been quoted.
Let’s say that this is the case and that it’s a practice that, for whatever reason, would discredit an author. The problem is that if you accept that this practice is a problem, there are well-documented accusations against Chomsky (that he has never answered) showing much more serious violations of this kind. Neither Chomsky nor Finkelstein, nor any other Chomsky supporters, have ever answered the accusations in any detail.</p>
<p>The “Chomsky” variant of the “Dershowitz” problem is: quoting material X,Y,Z (whose original contains text detrimental to Chomsky’s goals) through its quotation in a biased source “B” editing out the detrimental items, when the original, unedited, uncensored and more credible source “A” is available and well known to Chomsky. </p>
<p>Werner Cohn in his book and web site, documented, among other things, that in Chomsky’s analyses of Arab-Jewish relations in British Palestine, and massacres etc that had occurred, although the original historical material comes from British accounts and investigative commissions, Chomsky cites these through expurgated compilations of the material produced by Palestinian historians.</p>
<p>Cohn also documented Chomsky’s abuse of other sources, but the above is the part directly analogous to the Dershowitz case. Where Dershowitz copied a quotation of the original source (thinking it correct, as evidenced by the copying of errors) and concealed only the intermediary source where he found the material, Chomsky concealed the material in the original source, by quoting an edited version from a biased intermediary. Cohn’s charges appeared in a book and in updated form on his webpage, and Chomsky has never answered the charges except by calling Cohn a liar. If Finkelstein thinks Dershowitz’ concealment is fraudulent one wonders how Chomsky’s conduct should be evaluated by the same standard.</p>