Almost everyone in the journalistic world is still trying to wrap their heads around the Jason Arday debacle. Meanwhile, much of the media—including Fox News, the BBC, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Atlantic, The Daily Mail, and others—has seized the opportunity to weigh in with its own brand of “analysis” on the situation. The issue is not that these outlets should refrain from reporting on it. The more fundamental problem is the striking inconsistency with which many of them approach similar controversies when a Jewish figure is involved. In such cases, the same outlets often appear to treat the matter with considerably less enthusiasm, scrutiny, or attention.
Let’s take this slowly. We’ll begin with the troubling case of what happened to Norman Finkelstein after he demonstrated that Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz had plagiarized material and promoted what Finkelstein characterized as fabrications and fraudulent claims in books such as The Case for Israel. But before turning to the Dershowitz controversy, it is worth examining the academic fraud of Joan Peters (born Joan Friedman), who died in 2015 and whose work was admired by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Joan Peters, Plagiarism and the Fabrication of History
Norman Finkelstein’s break with the prevailing academic group-think—particularly on Israel and, later, what he calls the “Holocaust industry”—began during his doctoral studies, when he first encountered Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. The book had been endorsed by prominent Jewish writers and historians, including Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, Daniel Pipes, and Lucy Dawidowicz.[1] Dawidowicz herself praised Peters for having “dug beneath a half-century’s accumulation of propaganda” and brought “into the light the historical truth about the Middle East.”[2]
Finkelstein subjected Peters’s claims to close scrutiny and examined the serious historical documentation underlying her citations. His findings were startling. As he later wrote, “It quickly became obvious that Joan Peters had concocted—and, more revealingly, that the American intellectual establishment had lent its name to—a threadbare hoax. As it happened, documenting the fraud…proved by far the easiest task as compared to publicizing my findings.”[3]
Later Finkelstein noted that the book
“is among the most spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In a field littered with crass propaganda, forgeries, and fakes, this is no mean distinction. But Peters’s book has thoroughly earned it. The fraud in Peters’s book is so pervasive and systematic that it is hard to pluck out a single thread without getting entangled in the whole unraveling fabric. To begin with, the fraud falls into two categories. First, the evidence that Peters adduces to document massive Arab immigration into Palestine is almost entirely falsified. Second, the conclusions that Peters draws from her demographic study of Palestine’s indigenous Arab population are not borne out by the data she presents. To confound the reader further, Peters resorts to plagiarism.”[4]
https://www.unz.com/article/who-gets-fired-when-a-negro-and-jew-are-guilty-of-academic-cheating-and-fraud/
