Tuesday, May 29, 2007

An Unstable Academic Threatens Alan Dershowitz

An Unstable Academic Threatens Alan Dershowitz
By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 29, 2007
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28494 (go to
article for links)

On May 4, 2007, Professor Dershowitz took his campaign against Norman
Finkelstein to the Wall Street Journal, publishing an Op-Ed there entitled
"Finkelstein's Bigotry". In it Dershowitz again explains why no
self-respecting university should employ a fraud and pseudo-scholar like
Finkelstein, especially one with widespread ties to Islamic terrorists and
anti-Semitic neo-Nazis. Dershowitz notes that Finkelstein brags that
"never has one of [his] articles been published in a scientific magazine."
By that he means academic journals. Yes, Finkelstein has yet to publish a
scholarly article in a refereed academic journal, the sine qua non for
tenure at any serious university. His entire "record" consists of
anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda "books", which get published on
the basis of their commercial potential (bashing Jews is a great seller),
not their academic quality.

Finkelstein has been fired from every college job he ever held before
DePaul. Dershowitz notes that Finkelstein only went to DePaul out of
desperation, after "radical Islamist Aminah McCloud -- a follower of Louis
Farrakhan -- helped him land a job at DePaul." Dershowitz adds that
Finkelstein himself dismisses DePaul as "a third-rate Catholic
university."

In the Wall Street Journal piece, after reviewing Finkelstein's history of
fraud and anti-Jewish bigotry, Dershowitz concludes thus:

He (Finkelstein) has encouraged radical goons to email threatening
messages; "Look forward to a visit from me," reads one. "Nazis like [you]
need to be confronted directly." He has threatened to sue if he loses --
while complaining about outside interference. No university should be
afraid of truth -- regardless of its source -- especially when truth
consists of Mr. Finkelstein's own words. Whether or not he receives
tenure, Mr. Finkelstein will persist in his unscholarly, ad hominems
against supporters of Israel, Holocaust survivors and the U.S. But for the
time being, the question remains: Will his bigotry receive the imprimatur
of the largest Catholic university in the America?

Dershowitz was too much a gentleman to reveal to readers of the Wall
Street Journal the name of the toady for Finkelstein who sent him the
obscene threatening letter in question. But the perp has now "outed"
himself. It is none other than Rutgers University professor of
anthropology and biology Robert Trivers!

Ever since LeRoy Jones, a.k.a. Amiri Baraka, resigned from being New
Jersey's resident "poet laureate" thanks to his trashy, anti-Semitic and
anti-American"poetry", Trivers has arguably been the Garden State's most
notorious "intellectual" extremist. Besides biology, he is renowned as a
hater of America and Israel.

Trivers is a biologist, and . unlike most political extremists of his ilk
. actually has academic publications to his name, even distinguished ones.
He is also a close crony of Noam Chomsky and collaborates with Chomsky in
producing leftist agitprop. Here is a sample of the wisdom of
Trivers-cum-Chomsky: "We find repeatedly now.in wasps, in birds and in
monkeys.that when organisms realize they're being deceived they get pissed
off. And they often attack the deceiver." The two also claim there that
the American government intentionally let the Challenger space shuttle
blow up.

Trivers' letter in the Wall Street Journal taking credit for sending
vulgar threats to Dershowitz follows in full:

What I Said to Dershowitz
Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2007; Page A15
In regard to Alan Dershowitz's commentary "Finkelstein's Bigotry"
(editorial page, May 4): In it he asserts that "He [Norman Finkelstein]
has encouraged radical goons to email threatening messages; 'Look forward
to a visit from me,' reads one. 'Nazis like [you] need to be confronted
directly.'"

But all of this is untrue. I wrote the letter in question (April 15,
2007), but without Prof. Finkelstein's knowledge, interest or approval.
The key sentences had nothing to do with Prof. Finkelstein: "Regarding
your rationalization of Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians, let me just
say that if there is a repeat of Israeli butchery toward Lebanon and if
you decide once again to rationalize it publicly, look forward to a visit
from me. Nazis -- and Nazi-like apologists such as yourself -- need to be
confronted directly."

As for being an academic goon: I am late responding because I was in
Europe lecturing after receiving the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences.

Robert Trivers
Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences
Rutgers University
Somerset, N.J.

His juvenile boasting about getting a biology prize aside, Trivers is not
best known for his biological writings at all but rather for his long
collaboration with Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. Perhaps it is not
surprising that someone who cheers Hizbollah terrorism and thinks Israel
practices "butchery" when it retaliates against the Hizbollah should also
have long served as an apologist for Afrofascist racism and American
domestic terrorists.

Trivers started his academic career at Harvard. As a Harvard
undergraduate he had a nervous breakdown and was denied admissions into
the University's Law program. Instead, he moved into biology in 1967 to
study lizards. After getting his PhD, he taught at Harvard for a while
but got turned down for tenure. In embittered response, he stopped
academic work altogether for many years. The Guardian (UK) on August 27,
2005 wrote, "Robert Trivers could have been one of the great romantic
heroes of 20th-century science if he'd died in the '70s, as some people
supposed he would." Early on, he proposed a theory about the effects on
the gender of offspring in animals that was later largely debunked.

From Harvard he moved to the University of California at Santa Cruz, long
a hotbed of political radicalism. (UCSC employed Angela Davis gave the
Black Panthers' Huey Newton a "PhD".) Trivers later described the move
to UCSC thus: "It was a once-in-a-lifetime mistake, in the sense that I
can't afford to make another one like that. I survived, and I helped raise
my children for a while; but that was all."

Biological research having lost its attraction for him at the time, he
devoted his energies to the Black Panthers. According to John Brockman as
cited in the Boston Globe, ''Over the years there were rumors about a
series of breakdowns; he was in Jamaica; in jail. He fell off the map.''

He established contact with Huey Newton while the latter was in prison.
Newton liked Trivers' theories about "self-deception." They became close
chums. Trivers officially joined the Panthers in 1979. He turned out
articles for them claiming that IQ tests were being used to oppress black
folks. Newton and his co-terrorists were willing to forgive Trivers the
fact that he is white. Trivers had grown up in Jamaica; his father was a
Jewish refugee from Lithuania. (Burney Le Boeufas calls him "the
blackest white man I know.")

Trivers published "research" together with Newton, including an analysis
of the role of self-deception by the flight crew in the crash of Air
Florida Flight 90 (Trivers, R.L. & Newton, H.P. Science Digest 'The crash
of flight 90: doomed by self-deception?' November 1982). Newton was
godfather to Trivers' youngest daughter. Trivers still features large in
the "Dr. Huey Newton" collection at Stanford University.

Trivers has never abandoned his leftist extremism and PC wackiness.
Trivers' career includes ten days in a police lock-up over a disputed
hotel bill. According to the Guardian, " His language matches the macho
clothes: for an Ivy League professor, he says 'fuck' a lot."

Trivers thinks population growth and "reproductive success" (which drives
evolution) are more dangerous than nuclear war and endorses
zero-population growth. At Rutgers he has been involved in "Palestinian
solidarity" activities and efforts to "divest" from Israel. As the Wall
Street Journal letter shows, Trivers thinks Israel defending itself from
terrorist aggression is "butchery", and we can just imagine what he thinks
of the unjustified American "aggression" against Iwo Jima in World War II.

Trivers has tried to deploy his biological theories on "self-deception" as
ammunition for the Left's attempt to force an American capitulation in
Iraq. He says: "Then the 1990s, the era of Clinton and feel-goodism: when
he lied, nobody died. Well, half a million Iraqis died in the 1990s, and
that's just counting children, .. I fear that we'll spend our lives always
describing in retrospect what deceit and self-deception just did to us and
not getting to the point where we can try to prevent some of the bullshit
ahead of time."

So much for his scientific discourse and accuracy.


2.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28469
The Islamic Reconquest of Palestine
By P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 29, 2007


3. Fighting the Jihadists at UCI
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28497


4. Well, the Labor Party primaries are over and the Labor Party members
basically demonstrated that they do not want any of the three candidates
to lead the party. I share those sentiments. None of the contenders got
the required 40% of the primary votes. That means the two with the most
votes now will face one another in a runoff.

Thosee two are both incompetent leftwing capitulationist McClellenist
ex-generals. The Labor party often choses as its leaders incompetent
leftwing capitulationist McClellenist ex-generals. The Labor Party thinks
that if it is headed by an ex-general, then the voters will overlook the
fact that it is a party of national self-annihilation, capitulation,
incompetence and corruption.

The two ex-generals now facing one another in the runoff are Ehud Barak,
known in these quarters as Ehud NeBARAKnezzer, thanks to his attempt at
destroying Jerusalem in 2000 by offering it to the Palestinian Authority,
and Ami Ayalon, the bald version of Yossi Beilin. Ayalon was head of
Israel's navy and later of military intelligence and so bears blame for
some of the
collosal failures of Israeli military intelligence. Barak is the sleazy
corrupt politician who was Prime Minister from 1999-2001 and who invited
the Hezbollah to drop 4000 katyusha
rockets on Israeli civilians when he ordered Israel's cowardly unilateral
surrender to the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2000.

What a choice!

The kingmaker in all this is Amir Peretz, who will auction off his
contingent of 22% of Labor Party members (who voted for him in the
primaries) to the ex-general making him the best set of promises.

5. Israel's contribution to Western security:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3405913,00.html


6. The Suspense is Over!
Syria's Assad wins second term
Some 97.62 percent of voters reelect Bashar Assad, interior minister says






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