Coverage Of Carter Book Lectures Was Disappointing

To the editors:



Re: “Dershowitz Lambastes Former President,” news Feb. 28.

I am deeply disappointed with your coverage of recent lectures on campus about Jimmy Carter’s book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” and the conflict in Palestine and Israel. On Tuesday, Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz gave a talk in Emerson Hall criticizing the former president and his book. The next day his picture graced your front page and an article detailed the event and some responses to it.

Last Thursday, Feb. 22, Norman Finkelstein gave a lecture in support of the book to a packed Weiner Auditorium at the Kennedy School of Government. Many undergraduates were present, both supporters and detractors of the DePaul University Professor. Since then, however, the event has earned not a single mention in your pages. Both events were publicized over e-mail lists and the Finkelstein event was also listed on Facebook—why wasn’t a Crimson reporter there?

Your lack of coverage of the Finkelstein lecture is especially disappointing considering a Crimson editorial from two years ago. In “Keeping it Civil” (editorial, Nov. 8, 2005), you supported the invitation of Finkelstein to speak (about Dershowitz’s book) and condemned students who heckled and shouted at the professor throughout his lecture. This was of course not because you supported his views but rather so “that all ideas, however incendiary, can be voiced and judged in a true marketplace of ideas.”

If, as you claimed, you are in fact concerned “that the principle of free and uninhibited debate is defended as paramount to our academic institutions,” then as a campus newspaper you must do your part in “present[ing] all opinions in the open marketplace, thereby enabling people to arrive at the correct understanding of the truth.” In this instance, by only covering the lecture of an ideologue from one side of the issue, you have failed to do so.



RICHARD COZZENS ’07 - ’08

Cambridge, Mass.

February 28, 2007