Noam Chomsky's The Fate of an Honest Intellectual (an excerpt from his
2002 book Understanding Power). Here are some quotes from that article:
From Time Immemorial ... was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of
footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent
immigrants ... 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.
... 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 ...
Finkelstein's very persistent: he took a summer off and sat in the New
York Public Library, where he went through every single reference in the
book � and he found a record of fraud that you cannot believe. Well, the
New York intellectual community is a pretty small place, and pretty soon
everybody knew about this, everybody knew the book was a fraud ...
Well, as soon as I heard that the book was going to come out in
England, I immediately sent copies of Finkelstein's work to a number of
British scholars and journalists who are interested in the Middle East �
and they were ready. As soon as the book appeared, it was just demolished,
it was blown out of the water. Every major journal, the Times Literary
Supplement, the London Review, the Observer, everybody had a review
saying, this doesn't even reach the level of nonsense, of idiocy. ...
Anyhow, by that point the American intellectual community realized
that the Peters book was an embarrassment, and it sort of disappeared �
nobody talks about it anymore.
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