The Fate of an Honest Intellectual
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

Former Israeli Soldiers Tell of Harassment of Palestinians
When Israeli soldiers opened an exhibit this month documenting some of their own misdeeds while serving in the tense West Bank city of Hebron, they caused a brief stir. At a photographic institute in Tel Aviv, the soldiers, all recently discharged, offer video testimony of gratuitous harassment and abuse of Palestinians, like firing tear gas just to get a reaction. Hanging on the wall are dozens of car keys confiscated from Hebron residents, a punishment both common and unauthorized, soldiers say. And a photo taken by a soldier shows graffiti, presumably written by civilians, which reads, "Arabs to the gas chambers."

US agents were told to 'back off Bin Ladens'
Special agents in the United States probing relatives of Saudi-born terror suspect Osama bin Laden before September 11 were told to back off soon after George W Bush became president, the BBC reported on Tuesday. The BBC's Newsnight current affairs programme said that Bush at one point had a number of connections with Saudi Arabia's prominent Bin Laden family. It added there was a suspicion that the US strategic interest in Saudi Arabia, which has the world's biggest oil reserve, blunted its inquiries into individuals with suspected terrorist connections - so long as America was safe.