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From: blp Category: Art Date: 15 June 2007 Time: 06:16 AM Review: No, it absolutely doesn't seem absurd to suggest it MIGHT be a factor. I'm open to that argument when it's intelligently presented, with due sense of the need to convince. Dershowitz harms whatever validity his position might have by chucking the anti-semitism slur around as a priori fact so viciously and so indiscriminately. He recently tried it on with Jimmy Carter. Dershowitz is supposed to be a lawyer, yet he predicates his position on an idea that is disputed by rabbis: Israel is so fundamental to Judaism that opposition to it is Jew hatred. Also, please note, many of Israel's most prominent critics, notably John Pilger and Noam Chomsky, actually are diligent critics of repressive regimes around the world and have been for years. Anyway, whenever the argument about the focus on Israel is made, it implicitly acknowledges that Israel is indeed a human rights violator - which is, at other times, denied, notably by Dershowitz, whose outright distortions and dissimulations on the subject have been scrupulously catalogued by Norman Finkelstein. See the comments at the foot of the Times piece for more on Finkelstein, who could be said to have been the subject of an academic boycott at the Dersh's hands himself for his views.