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This could just a easily go on the Mid East Issues section. Norman Finkelstein is Jewish American, and was a brilliant graduate scholar at Princeton, about to embark on his Thesis. He researched and discovered a very serious academic fraud.

Now read what happened to him- it's in a very easy style, from a talk given by Noam Chomsky, who became his friend and was intimately acquainted with the whole thing as it happened. It will give you a big insight into the real world in action, academia, belief systems and how seeming experts are no more objective or honest than Politicians. More of Finkelsteins later work to come.

If you are at all interested about the real world and the sysem we live in, this is required reading.

The Fate of an Honest Intellectual
Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, pp. 244-248

" I'll tell you another, last case—and there are many others like this. Here's a story which is really tragic. How many of you know about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? There was this best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters—or at least, signed by Joan Peters—called From Time Immemorial. It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants [i.e. to the Jewish-settled areas of the former Palestine, during the British mandate years of 1920 to 1948]. And it was very popular—it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it. Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there's no moral issue, because they're just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. And there was all kinds of demographic analysis in it, and a big professor of demography at the University of Chicago [Philip M. Hauser] authenticated it. That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake.Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He's a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: "Here's what I've found in this book, do you think it's worth pursuing?"

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