THE HANDSTAND

july 2005

I should like to draw your attention to the words of Saral Sarkar, the German Green of Indian origin, who deeply investigated the possibilities of an environment-friendly eco-society: “The (present) situation … has given rise to a great confusion and lack of perspective. Socialism (as it existed) has failed, radical environmentalism has failed to achieve anything worth mentioning; but capitalism has also failed and is failing increasingly to solve any of the problems of the world. One need think only of the vehemence with which the ruling elites of even the richest capitalist countries are today trying to dismantle the welfare state. They are not even justifying this with the argument that it has to be done in order to protect the environment.” … “I reject eco-capitalism, not only because it cannot function, but also and mainly because of the values the capitalism represents: exploitation, brutal competition, worship of mammon, profit and greed as motive. And I am mainly for socialism because of the values it represents: equality, co-operation, solidarity. Freedom and democracy are compatible with these values, although they did not exist in the socialist regimes we have experienced up to now, but they are not compatible with the values of capitalism, especially not with inequality in wealth and power.”

The World in My Mind, My Mind in the World by Igor Aleksander (Imprint Academic)

Alok Jhar
Thursday June 23, 2005
The Guardian

A few years ago, Igor Aleksander was describing his work on artificial vision to a group of children. When he finished, one unimpressed six-year-old stood up and addressed the distinguished engineer matter-of-factly. "Seeing is the easiest thing in the world," she said. "I do it, my little brother does it. But can you build a machine that can do my sums for me?"

Aleksander smiles as he tells the story. For him, it underlines the counter-intuitive nature of his work for the past 40 years: the things that humans do most easily - recognise faces or interact naturally with other people, for example - are the hardest things to replicate in machines.

He began his career trying to model individual brain cells by soldering together small electronic circuits. Now that he is officially retired (a time of life he cheerfully calls his most productive) he is working on his most ambitious project: to understand consciousness and to build a machine that can achieve it artificially.

"Consciousness is an incredibly delicate subject because it offends," says the emeritus professor of neural systems engineering at Imperial College London. "It's a subject that scientific groups kept away from. They said it was a philosophical concept."

Traditionally, research on making a computer do anything remotely human-like has been the domain of artificial intelligence. Aleksander says he is too much of a maverick to follow that herd. "I never went along with the mainstream of artificial intelligence," he says. "I don't like the words artificial intelligence because the intelligence of a human being has to do with being good at this, being good at that. Whereas the intelligence of an artificial system consists in doing very simple things." And despite frequently grappling with ideas that brush philosophy, Aleksander is an engineer through and through.

Born in Zagreb, Aleksander's family fled the second world war to Italy when he was three. They didn't stay long, leaving for the comparative safety of South Africa as war overtook Europe. With a degree in electrical engineering from Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, he set out for England, flush with inspiration about the creative potential he saw in engineering.

Part of that enthusiasm came from a lecture he heard from an Imperial College professor visiting South Africa, Colin Cherry. "He was saying, you know about engineering, now you can use this knowledge to study things in nature," says Aleksander. "The brain's a pretty complicated machine and it's possible for an engineer to do that."

After a PhD at Queen Mary's College in London, Aleksander built his first network of artificial neurons. The inspiration came from the way the brain stores information: groups of neurons fire in a certain sequence when a person sees or experiences an object, and that firing pattern is how a memory of the object is formed.

This work was simple, but Aleksander's goal was to understand how the brain recognises objects. An artificial neural network could be made to switch on when it "sees" something it knows - a tortoise, say - and it will learn to associate a certain pattern of neuron activity with it.

"That was, in those days, called brain-like because it learned to recognise patterns, the learning was important," says Aleksander. "But I didn't think it was brain-like at all because those sorts of systems can't answer the question, what does a tortoise look like?"

Aleksander wanted to mimic one of things people can do without much effort but which posed problems for artificial systems: holding an image of a tortoise in their head without having one in front of them. In the human brain, this is done by feedback loops in the neural networks; the output of each network plugs into its input. "It's on these feedback wires that you can have stored knowledge," he says.

He proposed building an artificial system with these feedback loops in the late 1960s but a career in academia got in the way. For the next decade, he moved between collaborations with industry at Brunel and Kent Universities before landing at Imperial in the early 1980s to head a new information technology department.

"It's after that, when I came here, I said, bugger all this industrial stuff, I want to build a system which is a bit like a brain," he says. "The point of a brain is that it's not one huge neural network with feedback, it has up to 50 to 60 identified areas, all of which have feedback and all of which are capable of knowledge storage. We've got a complex system and, within this complex system, we can start discovering what the mechanisms that support deliberation are. Consciousness must come out of these interactions."

Approaching consciousness from a mechanistic viewpoint was a tough sell for many of his colleagues. Things had started to change when DNA pioneer Francis Crick wrote The Astonishing Hypothesis in 1994. Crick concluded that consciousness is simply a product of the interaction of neurons, that there is nothing special about it.

Studies on the brain in the early 1990s also began to suggest that consciousness must be driven by particular mechanisms, since researchers often saw that when people's brains were damaged, their consciousness, their view of the world and their place in it, would often become distorted.

At a meeting in the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory in 2001, the few dozen leading researchers in the field formalised the scientific study of consciousness. "We started building machines with which one could study hypotheses about the creation of consciousness," says Aleksander. "In some quarters it's still seen as a dodgy subject."

At one end of this research are people who want to build machines that behave in ways that a conscious organism might. Computers that could interact with people's unpredictability - on a telephone booking line, for example - would be a boon. Aleksander works at the other end of the spectrum, using models of machine consciousness to understand how consciousness functions in animals.

"I'm not interested so much in behaviour from which you infer consciousness because that is a mug's game," he says. "I don't know whether you're conscious. I take a good guess that you are and you can take a good guess that I am but it's not something you can prove. We can't work out what someone else feels."

Aleksander decided that systematic study of consciousness needed objective guidelines. "What are the things about my consciousness that are important to me? These five things come up." These five traits he calls the axioms of consciousness. They are what anything needs to exhibit to be called conscious: a sense of self, imagination, focused attention, forward planning and emotion.

"These seem to me to be absolutely necessary. If you're not studying those five axioms or mechanisms that underpin those five axioms, then you're not studying consciousness," he says. "If you've got those five and you discover they exist in a system like a bee, for example, then you can safely say that that organism is conscious."

But how would consciousness be useful in a machine? "It may be advantageous for a robot you're putting on a distant planet for exploration to be conscious of dangers, to be pleased with its own successes," he says. "Then you would look at the five axioms as a spec for designing that robot."

In biology, the axioms translate into a way of understanding how brain damage - whether genetic or because of disease or accident - can distort a person's consciousness.

"We do quite a lot of work on mental illness with our neuroscience department," he says. "In axiom one, eye movement is important. Parkinson's being a disease of movement through lack of dopamine and all that, the eyes don't attend to things as well. That leads to a distorted consciousness."

Aleksander's work with biologists is important to his research. "Most of the data we use comes from neuroscience. When we build a model of the visual system, for example, it all comes from what neurologists have discovered." What he adds to biological data is a method of analysing complex systems that is second nature to engineers but goes over the heads of most biologists.

The biological data feed directly into the models of consciousness that Aleksander builds in his virtual machines. These computer programs, which adhere to one or more of his axioms, are useful tools and, perhaps, the precursor to fully-operational conscious robots and computers.

"People very often ask me - these virtual machines that you make, will they some day be conscious like I am? That's a category mistake," he says. "It's like saying, is a horse like a dog? In some ways it is, in some ways it isn't. In the business of consciousness, the most vital question people often forget is that if you've made a conscious object, the question is what's it conscious of? A bee is conscious of having discovered a yummy field with flowers. I'm conscious of famine in Somalia."

A conscious robot, for example, should be aware of being a piece of tin with silicon circuits just as a person is conscious of being a biological organism. If an artificial device sophisticated enough to hold a discussion with a person insists that it is conscious like a human then, says Aleksander, it is malfunctioning.

Science fiction is full of intelligent robots and computers that somehow go wrong and end up hurting people or worse. "The ethical question of any machine that is built has to considered at the time you build the machine," says Aleksander. "What's that machine going to be capable of doing? Under what conditions will it do it, under what conditions could it do harm?"

He says these are engineering problems rather than ethical dilemmas. "A properly functioning conscious machine is going to drive your car and it's going to drive it safely. It will be very pleased when it does that, it's going to be worried if it has an accident. If suddenly it decides, I'm going to kill my passenger and drive into a wall, that's a malfunction," he says. "Human beings can malfunction in that way. For human beings, you have the law to legislate, for machines you have engineering procedures."

Many of the questions in Aleksander's work tread on the toes of philosophers and, unlike some colleagues, he says he finds the philosophy useful. "I have a lot of respect for philosophy because it raises the right questions. I think it doesn't provide the answers and a scientific study of consciousness is more about providing mechanisms, how do things happen?"

His research team at Imperial College is now adding detail to the five axioms, and even considering adding new ones. "One obvious thing is language. But then you're restricted to studying human consciousness," he says. So far, there are more questions than answers. "The five axioms span out a research programme," he says. "They're absolutely necessary but they're not sufficient. We're just at the beginning of a very long path."

Life at a glance

Education: In Italy and South Africa. Arrived in Britain in the late 1950s.

Career: Joined Standard Telephone and Cable (STC) as graduate engineer ; lecturer, Queen Mary College, London (1961); reader in electronics, University of Kent (1968); professor of electronics, Brunel University (1974); professor of management of information technology, Imperial College London (1984); head of electrical engineering and Gabor professor of neural systems engineering (1988); emeritus professor (2004).

Awards: Fellow, Royal Academy of Engineering (1988); outstanding achievement medal for informatics, Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (2000)

He says: "I wouldn't say pioneer, I would say maverick. I never went along with the mainstream."

They say : "Dan Dennett once said that if he hadn't become a philosopher, he might have become an engineer. I think Igor has shown us that the gap between the two professions may be smaller than we think" Professor Owen Holland, computer science department, Essex University

Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History,by Norman Finkelstein
University of California Press (August 1, 2005)
Price: 15.30
Edition: Hardcover
Language: English
ISBN: 0520245989

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520245989/qid=1119661167/sr=8-1
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Editorial Reviews
Book Description

In this long-awaited sequel to his international bestseller The Holocaust Industry, Norman G. Finkelstein moves from an iconoclastic interrogation of the new anti-Semitism to a meticulously researched expose of the corruption of scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Bringing to bear the latest findings on the conflict and recasting the scholarly debate, Finkelstein points to a consensus among historians and human rights organizations on the factual record. Why, then, does so much controversy swirl around the conflict? Finkelstein's answer, copiously documented, is that apologists for Israel contrive controversy. Whenever Israel comes under international pressure, another media campaign alleging a global outbreak of anti-Semitism is mounted.

Finkelstein also scrutinizes the proliferation of distortion masquerading as history. Recalling Joan Peters' book From Time Immemorial, published to great fanfare in 1984 but subsequently exposed as an academic hoax, he asks deeply troubling questions here about the periodic reappearance of spurious scholarship and the uncritical acclaim it receives. The most recent addition to this mendacious genre, Finkelstein argues, is Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz's bestseller, The Case for Israel.

The core analysis of Beyond Chutzpah sets Dershowitz's assertions on Israel's human rights record against the findings of the mainstream human rights community. Sifting through thousands of pages of reports from organizations such as Amnesty International, B'Tselem, and Human Rights Watch, Finkelstein demonstrates that Dershowitz has systematically misrepresented the facts. Thoroughly researched and tightly argued, Beyond Chutzpah lifts the veil of contrived controversy shrouding the Israel-Palestine conflict, enabling readers in search of a just and lasting peace to act on the basis of truth.

From the Back Cover
"A very solid, important and highly informative book. Norman Finkelstein
provides extensive details and analysis, with considerable historical depth and
expert research, of a very wide range of issues concerning Israel, the
Palestinians, and the U.S."--Noam Chomsky, author of Hegemony or Survival

"The scholarship is simply superb. Finkelstein has clearly done his homework,
and consulted and mastered a breathtaking range of material: primary sources
and documents, scholarly works, reports old and new, correspondence with
relevant individuals, and numerous other sources too. He has left no stone
unturned."--Mouin Rabbani, Contributing Editor, Middle East Report

"Accurate, well-written, and devastatingly important."--Daniel Boyarin,
author of Unheroic Conduct and A Radical Jew

The Author,Norman G. Finkelstein, teaches Political Science at DePaul University. His
books include The Holocaust Industry (2000); A Nation on Trial (1998; with Ruth
Bettina Birn), named a notable book for 1998 by the New York Times Sunday Book
Review; and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (1995).

Giving Chutzpah New Meaning
by JON WIENER
[from the July 11, 2005 issue]
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050711&s=wiener

What do you do when somebody wants to publish a book that says you're completely wrong? If you're Alan Dershowitz, the prominent Harvard law professor, and the book is Norman Finkelstein's you write the governor of California and suggest that he intervene with the publisher--because the publisher is the University of California Press, which conceivably might be subject to the power of the governor.  

Schwarzenegger, showing unusual wisdom, declined to act. The governor's legal affairs secretary wrote Dershowitz, "You have asked for the Governor's assistance in preventing the publication of this book," but "he is not inclined to otherwise exert influence in this case because of the clear, academic freedom issue it presents." In a phone interview Dershowitz denied writing to the Governor, declaring, "My letter to the Governor doesn't exist." But when pressed on the issue, he said, "It was not a letter. It was a polite note."  

Old-timers in publishing said they'd never heard of another case where somebody tried to get a governor to intervene in the publication of a book. "I think it's a first," said Andre Schiffrin, managing director at Pantheon Books for twenty-eight years and then founder and director of the New Press. Lynne Withey, director of the University of California Press, where she has been for nineteen years, said, "I've never heard of such a case in California."  

But if you're Alan Dershowitz, you don't stop when the governor declines. You try to get the president of the University of California to intervene with the press. You get a prominent law firm to send threatening letters to the counsel to the university regents, to the university provost, to seventeen directors of the press and to nineteen members of the press's faculty editorial committee. A typical letter, from Dershowitz's attorney Rory Millson of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, describes "the press's decision to publish this book" as "wholly illegitimate" and "part of a conspiracy to defame" Dershowitz. It concludes, "The only way to extricate yourself is immediately to terminate all professional contact with this full-time malicious defamer." Dershowitz's own letter to members of the faculty editorial committee calls on them to "reconsider your decision" to recommend publication of the book.  

Why would a prominent First Amendment advocate take such an action? Dershowitz told Publishers Weekly that "my goal has never been to stop publication of this book." He told me in an e-mail, "I want Finkelstein's book to be published, so that it can be demolished in the court of public opinion." He told Publishers Weekly his only purpose in writing the people at the University of California Press was "to eliminate as many of the demonstrable falsehoods as possible" from the book before it was published.  

Everyone knows who Alan Dershowitz is--the famed Harvard professor, part of the O.J. Simpson defense team, author of the number-one bestseller Chutzpah, portrayed by Ron Silver in the film Reversal of Fortune, about his successful defense of accused wife-murderer Klaus von Bülow. He's also one of the most outspoken defenders of Israel, especially in his 2003 book The Case for Israel; it reached number twelve on the New York Times bestseller list. That's the book Finkelstein challenges in Beyond Chutzpah.  

Norman Finkelstein is not so famous. The son of Holocaust survivors, he is an assistant professor of political science at DePaul University in Chicago. He's the often embattled author of several books, of which the best known is The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering--an exposé of what he calls "the blackmail of Swiss banks." It was originally published by Verso in 2000, with an expanded second edition in 2003, and has been translated into seventeen languages. The book was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by the distinguished Holocaust historian Omer Bartov, who holds a chair at Brown University; he wrote that the book "is filled with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current media hype over the Holocaust; it is brimming with the same indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics and dubious contextualizations; and it oozes with the same smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority." (A positive review, written by Neve Gordon, appeared in these pages on November 13, 2000.)  

Finkelstein's Holocaust Industry, however, has some prominent supporters, and not only leftists like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn. Most significant is Raul Hilberg, the semi-official dean of Holocaust studies and author of the classic The Destruction of the European Jews, who wrote of The Holocaust Industry, "I would now say in retrospect that he was actually conservative, moderate and that his conclusions are trustworthy.... I am by no means the only one who, in the coming months or years, will totally agree with Finkelstein's breakthrough."  

Dershowitz did not see the manuscript for Beyond Chutzpah before writing his letters, which were based instead on statements Finkelstein had made in interviews and lectures. Dershowitz's attorney objected first of all to Finkelstein's statements that Dershowitz "almost certainly didn't write [The Case for Israel], and perhaps didn't even read it prior to publication." He also objected to the charge that Dershowitz is guilty of plagiarism--more on that later--and that "every substantive sentence" in the Dershowitz book "is fraudulent." Finkelstein has been telling this to anyone who will listen, and wrote as much in an e-mail to me: "I devote some 200 pages to documenting that every substantive fact in the book is a flat-out lie." (Emphasis in original.)  

Now that the "uncorrected pages" of Beyond Chutzpah are being sent out to reviewers, it's possible to see what Finkelstein's book actually says. (Disclosure: A senior editor of The Nation served as a freelance editor of Beyond Chutzpah.) The claim that Dershowitz didn't write The Case for Israel has been removed--the UC Press explained in a statement accompanying review copies that "Professor Finkelstein's only claim on the issue was speculative. He wondered why Alan Dershowitz, in recorded appearances after his book was published, seemed to know so little about the contents of his own book. We felt this weakened the argument and distracted from the central issues of the book. Finkelstein agreed."  

But the rest of the claims Dershowitz and his attorney railed against are still there: Beyond Chutzpah describes Dershowitz's Case for Israel as "among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict." In Dershowitz's book, "It's difficult to find a single claim...that's not either based on mangling a reputable source or referencing a preposterous one, or simply pulled out of the air." He charges that Dershowitz "plagiarizes large swaths" of his book from Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, whose scholarship Finkelstein had debunked in an earlier book. The introduction concludes by calling The Case for Israel "rubbish."

The body of Beyond Chutzpah shows Finkelstein to be an indefatigable researcher with a forensic ability to take apart other people's arguments. The core of the book challenges Dershowitz's defense of Israel's human rights record by citing the findings of mainstream groups, including Amnesty International, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem and Human Rights Watch.

The most important part of the book examines Israel's treatment of Palestinian civilians during the second intifada, which began in September 2000. Since then Israel has killed three Palestinians for every Israeli killed. Dershowitz tries to defend this ratio, writing that "when only innocent civilians are counted, significantly more Israelis than Palestinians have been killed." But Finkelstein cites Amnesty International's conclusion that "the vast majority of those killed and injured on both sides have been unarmed civilians and bystanders." That means Israel has killed something like three times as many unarmed civilians and bystanders as Palestinians have.  

Dershowitz has a second argument: While Palestinian terrorists have targeted Israeli civilians intentionally, the killing of Palestinian civilians by the Israel Defense Forces is "unintended," "inadvertent" and "caused accidentally," because the IDF follows international law, which requires the protection of civilian noncombatants. For example, Dershowitz writes, the IDF tries to use rubber bullets "and aims at the legs whenever possible" in a policy designed to "reduce fatalities." But Finkelstein's evidence to the contrary is convincing: Amnesty International reported in 2001 that "the overwhelming majority of cases of unlawful killings and injuries in Israel and the Occupied Territories have been committed by the IDF using excessive force." Amnesty cited the use of "helicopters in punitive rocket attacks where there was no imminent danger to life." As for the rubber bullets, Amnesty reported in 2002 that the IDF "regularly" used them against demonstrators who were children "at distances considerably closer than the minimum permitted range...and the pattern of injury indicates that IDF practice has not been to aim at the legs of demonstrators, as the majority of injuries suffered by children from rubber-coated bullets are to the upper body and the head."  

Another of Dershowitz's examples of Israeli protection of Palestinian civilians concerns Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh. Dershowitz writes that on several occasions, the army passed up opportunities to attack him "because he was with his wife or children." But in July 2002 an Israeli F-16 dropped a one-ton bomb on Shehadeh's apartment building in Gaza City, killing Shehadeh and fourteen Palestinian civilians, nine of whom were children.  

Most of Beyond Chutzpah consists of these kinds of juxtapositions--arguments by Dershowitz on Israeli practices of torture, assassinations, treatment of Palestinian children, and water and land rights, refuted by documentation from human rights organizations. The cumulative effect is a devastating portrait of widespread Israeli violations of human rights principles and international law.  

Finkelstein has won support for his book from leading scholars, whose statements appear in the book's publicity materials: Baruch Kimmerling, who holds a chair in sociology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and whose book on Palestinian history was published by Harvard University Press, calls Beyond Chutzpah "the most comprehensive, systematic and well documented work of its kind." Sara Roy of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, whose book on political Islam in Palestine has just been published by Princeton University Press, calls Beyond Chutzpah "a vigorous, intelligent, succinct and powerfully argued analysis." Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at Oxford, calls it a work of "erudition, originality, spark, [and] meticulous attention to detail." Daniel Boyarin, professor of Near Eastern studies at UC Berkeley, calls the book "accurate, well-written, and devastatingly important."  

The argument about plagiarism, which has figured prominently in the pre-publication controversy over the book, has been relegated to an appendix. Finkelstein's evidence has already been presented in these pages by Alexander Cockburn and debated by Dershowitz in letters exchanges with Cockburn [October 13, October 27 and December 15, 2003]; thus it can be summarized here briefly. In the Dershowitz book, twenty-two out of fifty-two quotations and endnotes in the first two chapters "match almost exactly" material quoted in Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial--including the placement of ellipses in quotations. Beyond Chutzpah has an eleven-page chart comparing these quotations. They are virtually identical. But Dershowitz never acknowledges Peters as the source for these quotations; instead, he cites the original sources that appear in Peters's footnotes.  

The official policy on plagiarism at Harvard, where Dershowitz teaches, is clear on this issue: "Plagiarism is passing off a source's information, ideas, or words as your own by omitting to cite them." Dershowitz in an e-mail made three arguments in his defense: first, for three of the quotations in question, "I have incontrovertible evidence that I was using those quotations in the 1970s in debates," and thus "I did not originally find them in the Peters book." Second, although he did not cite Peters for the quotations listed by Finkelstein, he did cite her as the source of "at least eight" others. As to why he failed to cite Peters for the quotations in question, Dershowitz acknowledges that he found them originally in Peters, but "I then went to the Harvard library, read them, and cited them in the original," without indicating that he found them first in the Peters book--a citation practice that he (and some of his defenders) regards as proper.  

But Finkelstein somehow obtained a copy of the uncorrected page proofs of The Case for Israel containing some devastating footnotes, which he reproduces in Beyond Chutzpah--including one that says "Holly Beth: cite sources on pp. 160, 485, 486 fns 141-145." Holly Beth Billington is credited on Dershowitz's acknowledgments page as one of his research assistants; the pages to which he refers her are from Peters's book. The note doesn't tell Holly Beth that Dershowitz is going to the Harvard library to check the original sources, nor does it tell Holly Beth that she should go to the library to check; it says she should "cite" them--copy the citations from Peters into his footnote, presumably to give readers the impression that he consulted the original source. That's not plagiarism in the sense of failing to put in quotation marks the words of somebody else, and the Harvard administration has taken no action in response to Finkelstein's charge. But it's clearly dishonest for Dershowitz to have passed off another scholar's research as his own.  

The Finkelstein book was originally under contract to the New Press, and Dershowitz claims he succeeded in persuading the New Press to drop it. He told me in an e-mail that after he wrote the New Press pointing out "numerous factual inaccuracies in Finkelstein's manuscript, New Press cancelled it's [sic] contract with him." New Press publisher Colin Robinson says that's not true: "We did not cancel the agreement to publish Norman's book and never wanted to do so." Finkelstein said the same thing in an e-mail: "I was the one who pulled out of the contract when publication was delayed due to Dershowitz's letters. In fact, Colin urged me to reconsider the decision and stay with New Press."  

Now, despite Dershowitz's best efforts, UC Press is publishing the book--to the great credit of director Withey and history editor Niels Hooper. The book is appearing in August rather than June--because, according to the press statement, "editing and production took longer than we hoped." Hooper explained that California published the book not as part of a personal feud between Finkelstein and Dershowitz but because the chapters on human rights "show what is going on in the Occupied Territories and Israel." Dershowitz is relevant as a prominent defender of Israeli policies and practices.  

Will Dershowitz now sue for libel in federal court in Boston, or in London, where the law makes it easier for libel plaintiffs to win--as his attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore has threatened? That would be another shameful act by a man who claims to be a defender of free speech.