De Pro Israel Lobby 9

De Electronic Intifada bericht: 'Israel Lobby WatchInterview with Prof. Norman Finkelstein. Christopher Brown, a grassroots radical journalist, conducted the following interview with Prof. Norman Finkelstein:Christopher Brown: Prof. Finkelstein, in your estimation why does it seem that when someone challenges Israel on its policies towards the Palestinians they are accused of anti-Semitism?Norman Finkelstein: I think the answer is that in the past, if you take the 1960s. 1970s and early 80s, the scholarly record and the documentary record, it seemed to be supporting Israel's position. And so Israelis and their supporters didn't typically charge anti-Semitism. What they did was tell you to look at the record, look at the history and see that it supports their claims. Beginning in the late 1980s and 1990s the work of important Israeli historians as well as the documentary record of human rights organizations, Israel's record not as good as it once did. And it turned out that many of the things that people thought were the case when they came to Israel actually turned out not to be the case. Thus Israel's position both historically and in terms of its current human rights record as that position became more indefensible; it was then that the charges of anti-Semitism began to be hurled with reckless abandon. Because there was no other way to respond to the charges that Israel has done and is doing. It's wrong.CB: We often here in this county that the mainstream media is objective in it's coverage regarding Israel/Palestine. But recently, when Israel fired more than 300 tank shells a day for over a week into populated civilian areas of Gaza, which caused death and injury to women and children, the corporate media remained silent. In this same time span, a suicide bombing occurred in Tel Aviv and the coverage of the event dominated the news cycle, in some places for three days. Could you speak about this phenomenon?NF: Well I think to begin with I don't think that anyone believes that American coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict is evenhanded. I don't even think that journalists and editors who are responsible for that coverage believe it. The coverage in the American media of the Israel/Palestine conflict is, frankly, useless. I don't read it at all, I'll be perfectly honest, and I stopped reading it. I don't read the editorials, I don't read the op-eds, and I don't read the news columns. You learn absolutely nothing from it. The best sources are; European sources, Israeli sources, and human rights organizations. But, you won't learn anything about the Israel/Palestine conflict from the American media that you can't learn by simply going to the official Israeli foreign affairs website. As far as the disparity between coverage, I think the record is pretty clear. If you look at what human rights organizations have to say. At this point, the figures are about 3,500 Palestinians have been killed and 1,000 Israelis since the beginning of the second Intifada till today. On both sides, the Palestinian side and the Israeli side, about two-thirds on each side have been civilians, innocent bystanders. And so, on the record of killings of civilians and innocent bystanders, Israel's record is about three times as bad as the Palestinian record. Some times people make the claim that; Palestinians purposely target Israeli civilians, whereas the Palestinian civilians killed by Israel are collateral damage or accidents and so forth. But no human rights organizations take those claims seriously. B'Tselem, Israel's leading human rights organization, puts it: "When so many civilians are killed intent is irrelevant." Israel is still responsible. And the principle is pretty straightforward for any rational person; If Hamas blows up a bus in Tel Aviv and says; "Well we didn't really mean to kill the passengers, we wanted just to destroy the bus" people would laugh. So shouldn't we also laugh if Israel drops a one-ton bomb in a densely populated neighborhood in Gaza, and didn't want to kill innocent civilians it only wanted to kill a terrorist leader? Which by the way is also illegal, but lets leave that aside. The claim is ludicrous. When you are firing indiscriminately into crowds, when your aiming at the heads of people at the heads o children and so on and so forth, the claim that this is collateral damage or unintentional is an absurd claim as human rights organizations have pointed out. CB: Your latest book, BEYOND CHUTZPAH, deals with the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history. It takes books like Joan Peters' FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL and Alan Dershowitz's THE CASE FOR ISRAEL to task as academic hoaxes. Could you talk more about this and about the difficulties of getting your own book published and the reception it has received since publication?NF: I can't say the work I do takes very little intelligence. But I have to be honest about these sorts of things. The kind of work I do doesn't take much intelligence, it just takes application because the sorts of frauds that I expose are so transparent, they're so silly, and so preposterous, that any seventh grader can do it. And it takes, usually, in the case of Peters or Dershowitz it took just a few months to assemble the data in readable form and complete the manuscript. The challenge always has been is getting the findings publicly acknowledged. In the case of the Dershowitz book, Prof. Dershowitz himself launched a major campaign to block publication of the book, hired what reputed to be the most powerful law firm in the country Cravath, Swain and Moore, went to the governor of California Arnold Swartzennegger to block publication of the book from coming out on the University of California Press, and as it happened his efforts proved unsuccessful. But I have to admit, that there were some close calls, like the book wouldn't come out because of the pressures he was exerting. But that's only half the story. Because once the book came out it was completely ignored. Now you would think that if a book documents that the senior most professor at Harvard Law School has plagiarized from a hoax (FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL), that he falsified records, mangled documents, put forth preposterous claims in a book which became a national best seller, and it's on the topic of the Israel/Palestine conflict, you would think reviewers would be interested. Leaving apart the whole scandal surrounding it, and his efforts to block publication of the book, notwithstanding the fact that he's a senior most professor at Harvard Law School, he plagiarized a hoax, engaged in fabrication, falsification and mangling of sources, the book bears on the Israel/Palestine conflict, a huge scandal surrounded its publication, the book didn't receive a single mainstream review in the United States. It's as if the book never came out.CB: Prof. Finkelstein, Israel is the only country that sanctions certain forms of torture to extract information from "alleged" resistance fighters. They have stated that The Wall is necessary for Israeli security. Yet, rather than building it along the "Green Line" they have built more than 80% of the wall in occupied Palestine displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, land, and neighbors. In addition, Israel has also placed more than 300,000 of its own citizens onto Palestinian land, which is a clear violation of the 4th Geneva Convention of which Israel is a signatory which states that no occupying power shall transport it's own citizens onto the land which it is occupying. Dr. Finkelstein, why does the West sit by and allow these gross violations of human rights to go on?' Lees verder: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/printer4739.shtml