The Abuse of History: From Ancient Greece to Modern Israel

I was relieved when I found that The American Conservative magazine website had posted the full-text of It’s All Greek to Victor Davis Hanson, by Gary Brecher, since it saved me the trouble of posting large quotations from it myself. This much-needed review is a scathing critique of Victor Davis Hanson’s most recent waste of ink and paper entitled A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. As Gary Brecher astutely points out, this book is so “confused” that even the title contradicts the author's line of argument in the actual text: “If Hanson believes that the Peloponnesian War was really so unique, why does he spend his first chapters making far-fetched connections between that war and every other war in history? If he wanted his title to reflect what he actually argues, Hanson should have called this book A War Like Nearly Every Other, Especially Iraq.”

Even though I’ve neither read the book—and after reading the review in question, I don’t plan to—nor spent much time reflecting on Hanson’s analysis of the Peloponnesian War, based on some of his articles that I have read, I've reached the conclusion that he doesn't have any business commenting on Islam or the Middle East (or much else, for that matter). If you think Bernard Lewis is an example of a highly-educated academic who sometimes comes to baffling (if not idiotic) conclusions, then Victor Davis Hanson's sloppy thinking also earns him a seat at the table of those whose education exceeds their intelligence. Overall, I see him as an uncritical cheerleader when it comes to his own values and civilization, but who suffers from being proverbially blind in one eye and unable see out of the other when it comes to those unfortunate "others". In the above-mentioned review, Gary Brecher concludes that: "This book is just a point on the graph of Hanson’s decline. It shows him in the late stages of a wild ego trip, getting more and more thoughtless as he starts believing his own press. The whole book stinks of vanity, from the idea of thinking you could improve on Thucydides to the careless writing, the sleazy connections between alien cultures, and the big blind spot at the center of it all." This review is well worthwhile, so please take the time to read it all…

Another must-read review, which is also found on The American Conservative site, is The Chutzpah of Alan Dershowitz, by Michael C. Desch. This thoughtful review of Norman G. Finkelstein's latest book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, can also be found here in Adobe Acrobat format [4,262 KB]. Like the book, this review exposes and discusses the tired antics and intellectual dishonesty of Alan Dershowitz—who is well known as a Harvard Law Professor, an advocate of torture, a talking-head commentator on cable news and a former defense lawyer for O.J. Simpson. For more details on his path to infamy, check out The Dershowitz Hoax section on Norman G. Finkelstein's website—and you might have to read quite a bit of this material to get a full appreciation of how slimy and underhanded Alan Dershowitz really is…but it’s worth the effort.

An even more recent review of Beyond Chutzpah can be found here. It's by Ilan Pappé, an Israel historian who teaches at Haifa University, and bears the name Occupation Hazard: Norman Finkelstein Challenges the Conventional Line on Israel. Overall, he's got a lot of good things to say about Normal Finkelstein's work, which is expressed in his conclusion that the "book cracks the wall of deception and hypocrisy that enables the daily violation of human and civil rights in Palestine. As such, it has the potential to contribute to the removal of the real wall that shuts out those in the occupied territories".

Before closing, I’ll take this opportunity to mention that NormanFinkelstein.com, in addition to those materials just mentioned, is full of a lot of great content. If you want to read Doctor Finkelstein's diagnosis of a case of foot-in-mouth disease, have a look at The Cowardly Commissar: An e-mail correspondence with Prof. Froma Zeitlin of Princeton University. Likewise, there's a considerable amount of audio and video material on this site, or linked to from it, that's worth downloading. Among my favorites are Is Criticism of Israel Anti-Semitic? and Video: Finkelstein at Yale, 10.20.2005, which can be downloaded in several parts and formats. And while we’re on the subject of audio, video and Alan Dershowitz, the recent (29-Nov-2005) debate between him and Noam Chomsky can be found here. This debate is well worth watching, and I would have expected that Dershowitz—with all of his stand-up lawyer oratory and spin-doctor skills—would have done better, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re trying to defend a tenuous and immoral case in the face of facts that just won’t go away.

In spite of their often xenophobic views, concerted opposition to multiculturalism and other distasteful tendencies, I give The American Conservative credit for thinking outside the box (at least once in awhile) and exposing not only the sloppy thinking of neo-cons but for seeing through the smoke screen of Israeli-Zionist propaganda as well...

Deen On...