Alan Dershowitz - Harvard's intellectual terror
By Jenny Attiyeh / Correspondent
Wednesday, December 4, 2002
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"What I'd like first please, are very critical questions, people who fundamentally disagree with me and who think I'm absolutely wrong on every score," said Harvard Law School Prof. Alan M. Dershowitz, following his talk at the Boston Public Library earlier this autumn. The lecture focused on Dershowitz's new book, "Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge. "
Dershowitz likes to spar. But in order to do so, he needs a sparring partner, someone willing to stand up to his verbal assault.
"I don't want anybody saying, 'I really agree with everything you've said,'" Dershowitz continued. "My mother gives me enough of that."
But to his disappointment, few in the audience dared enter into a debate with this world-renowned expert in constitutional law, who has defended the likes of Claus von Bulow, O. J. Simpson and Mike Tyson.
Only last month, while speaking out against censorship, he managed to intimidate and offend members of Harvard's Black Law Students Association, who are pressing for a speech code that would ban harassing language. Insisting the students be more prepared before asking for such a code, he challenged them to defend their opinions in a specific, organized manner. not everyone was pleased with Dershowitz's confrontational approach, but that's not new.
"I'm an agent provocateur, an intellectual provocateur," Dershowitz explained at the talk. "I love to provoke, I do. I'm a teacher, that's my job."
And his new book on terrorism, published this September by Yale University Press, is a case in point. Its main thesis is a startling one: that terrorism "works" because the international community - specifically the United Nations, the Europeans, and, yes, even the United States - has rewarded it. Dershowitz will discuss his book at 7:30 p.m. tonight, as part of the Cambridge Forum lecture series at First Parish Church in Harvard Square.
"The first time you're attacked by terrorists, the feeling is to give in to them, maybe it will go away. Virtually every country has had that response," Dershowitz explained during a recent interview in his office at Harvard Law School. "But then, when you reward them, you notice that they're doing it again and again."
Clearly, Dershowitz is not describing the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks, for the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan could hardly be called a "reward." To make his point, Dershowitz looks back in time, devoting much of his book to the history of Palestinian terrorism from 1968 to 2000. The result is a catalogue of hijackings and murders, followed by appeasement and capitulation.
"They made a calculated judgment - France, Germany, Italy, particularly - that if they cooperated with the terrorists, they would be spared future attacks. It worked for a while," Dershowitz said. And so, as in the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985, in which the terrorists were quickly released from Italian custody, their cause gained attention and - in the minds of many - sympathy.
Dershowitz argues that the Palestinians have been rewarded because of their terrorist acts, not in spite of them. To support his case, he points to, among other examples, the U.N. observer status granted to the PLO in 1974 and the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Yasir Arafat in 1994 - both during periods of Palestinian terrorist activity.
In condemning terrorism, Dershowitz is an absolutist. He asserts that the legitimacy of the cause is not relevant, arguing that terrorism in pursuit of a worthy motive is no less barbaric or more justifiable than any other kind. As a result, in his study of Palestinian terror, Dershowitz provides little context for the Palestinian uprisings, and pays scant attention to the tit-for-tat nature of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
"Certainly the book is strongly pro-Israeli, and you can tell from the cover, with the pictures of Arafat and bin Laden, that he wants to tie them together," said Richard A. Posner, a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, who has reviewed Dershowitz's book.
"In Why Terrorism Works," Dershowitz implies that Al Quaeda, observing the media attention and political status awarded the Palestinians, learned the lesson that terrorism pays, and chose to emulate their strategy, albeit in apocalyptic form.
"I thought the bracketing of bin Laden and Arafat does tend to blur certain important distinctions," Posner added. "Certainly Arafat, put aside Hamas and Hezbollah and so on, seems to have a more limited objective than killing all the Jews in the world, so I thought he might have done more with the distinctions among the different forms of terror."
But Dershowitz isn't moved by such arguments. His goal is to dis-incentivize terrorists, not to haggle over nuance.
"[Palestinian terrorism] has been one of the many factors that's shaped my life, along with the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement in the United States," he explained. He vehemently disagrees with the concept that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. But as Dershowitz acknowledges, he'd have a very different point of view on the subject if his circumstances had been different.
"Sure there are relative points of view," he admitted, "and sure, I'd see the world through a different lens if I were born a Palestinian."
But he wasn't.
"I'm a product of my upbringing," Dershowitz said. His identification with his Jewish heritage -and his desire to protect that heritage - started early. Growing up in Brooklyn. N.Y. during World War II, Dershowitz was only 7 when he learned that most of his family had been killed in the Holocaust.
"These are scarring events, but they are also energizing events," Dershowitz said. "They made me work very hard, and push very hard, not only for my own personal success, but for civil liberties. 'Never again' was not just a slogan when I grew up. It was a reality."
So, apparently, was anti-Semitism. "I grew up poor, I grew up discriminated against," Dershowitz said. "I couldn't get a job in a big law firm, although I was first in my class [at Harvard Law School], because I was Jewish."
Nonetheless, Dershowitz succeeded in nabbing clerkships with the Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals, two highly enviable positions. And, at the age of 28, he became the youngest professor to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. All this success came as a bit of a surprise to Dershowitz, for he was initially viewed as a "failure" by the standards of his community.
"I really had a hard time during my second decade of life, from 11 till 18, because I was a bad student. I was a good basketball player, I was funny, and my friends liked me, but I was a bad student."
All that changed at Brooklyn College, where Dershowitz excelled. But the message had managed to sink in. "I always had a lot of self-confidence coupled with some self-doubts," he admitted. "I'd been told for so many years that I was stupid, there was always the lingering doubt that maybe I was."
There is a soft side to Dershowitz, but it's rarely on display in public. "People, when they meet me, they're very shocked to see that I'm shy in my personal life," he explained. "I'm not at all confrontational. I can't make phone calls canceling reservations at restaurants - I get very upset when I have to do that."
Dershowitz calls this aspect of himself "the real me." It's the man behind the bluster, the pugilistic arguments, the striving Brooklyn-born overachiever. Perhaps it's the man who gets tired of the fight, of having to prove himself, over and over again.
Today, Dershowitz remains an outsider. Despite his fame, wealth and obvious success, he says he's seen as "a smart guy who doesn't know his place."
Not that he minds. "When I first came to Harvard, people thought that I was kind of rude because I wasn't playing by the rules of Harvard etiquette," Dershowitz said with relish. "I'm immediately taking on presidents and deans, and speaking my mind and criticizing Harvard."
His penchant to criticize, to go on the attack, goes back to his childhood, he says.
"I was always tough as a kid," Dershowitz recalled. "I was a street fighter. I would get into brawls." Now, at the age of 64, not much has changed. For Dershowitz, at least in public, lives for the intellectual fistfight. It's his modus operandi, his breath of life. And in "Why Terrorism Works," Dershowitz takes on the establishment yet again.
In typically provocative form, he suggests that - were we an amoral country - we could take specific steps to help us win the war against terror - such as the use of torture. We could also control the media, restrict the movements of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike, and resort to targeted assassinations and preemptive attacks. Surprisingly, many of these proposals have already been adopted, on the quiet, he said. For example, we ship out suspects to torture-friendly allies; we detain Muslims; we shoot down terrorist ringleaders with missiles.
But despite the pyrotechnics, Dershowitz is, at heart, a supporter of civil liberties. After shocking readers with his "amoral" propositions, he then backs off to present less effective, but more acceptable alternatives to deterring terrorism, such as the introduction of voluntary national identity cards. "We have to surrender a little bit of our collective right of anonymity in my view," he said.
On the whole, Dershowitz remains concerned with finding and also preserving a healthy balance between the opposing goals of freedom and security. "It's a new world disorder, and it's a world disorder that's very [threatening] to civil liberties because there will never be a day on which we proclaim victory," he said, fearing that an endless war against terror could make permanent the Bush administration's crisis-inspired erosion of individual rights.
Viscerally opposed to the secret detentions of Muslims, and to the racial profiling that has followed the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Dershowitz is no fan of the government's current policies. Nor, ironically, is he enthusiastic about the after-effects of our war in Afghanistan. Following the Al Quaeda attacks, we hit back, hard, just as Dershowitz has suggested we do in response to terrorism. No appeasement, no diplomatic compromises, no fussing about with votes at the United Nations.
So far, so good. But the end result? We may have temporarily driven out the Taliban, but in the process, Al Quaeda slipped over the border into Pakistan and disappeared into teeming cities like Karachi, where they're much harder to trace.
"We did it badly," Dershowitz said. "It's metastasized. It's no longer a local lesion. And we're part of the problem."
What should we have done differently? "I think our first goal should have been to keep them in Afghanistan, and basically build a wall not letting them out, but instead we let them escape, " he said, with the benefit of hindsight.
So perhaps the problem of terrorism does not easily succumb to convenient intellectual slogans; it cannot be made to simply stop "working" by responding with force rather than reward or capitulation.
"There's nothing we can do which will totally stop the problem of terrorism," Dershowitz admitted. It's a disappointing realization. But Dershowitz didn't write "Why Terrorism Works" to serve as a manual for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he wrote it for his readers - to provoke us into foreign intellectual territory, territory which we may find irritating, even upsetting.
But that's the whole point. Back at his lecture at the Boston Public Library, Dershowitz concludes with an argument in favor of openness, of candid, uncensored discussion, even on topics the public might not want to confront: "My view is that we're much better taking these issues from beneath the surface, and bringing them up to where they can be debated."