Blaming the victims: spurious scholarship and the palestinian question - christopher hitchens

Blaming The Victims demonstrates with cold precision how the denial of truth about Palestinians by the governments and the media has led to the current impasse in Middle East politics.

Controversial, forceful and honest, it attempts to redress a crime against historical truth to make a more rational future possible.

Since the 1948 war which drove them from their heartland, the Palestinian people have consistently been denied the most basic democratic rights.

Blaming the Victims shows how the historical fate of the Palestinians has been justified by spurious academic attempts to dismiss their claim to a home within the boundaries of historical Palestine and even to deny their very existence.

Beginning with a thorough exposé of the fraudulent assertions of Joan Peters concerning the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine prior to 1948, the book then turns to similar instances in Middle East research where the truth about the Palestinians has been systematically suppressed: from the bogus--though still widely believed--explanations of why so many Palestinians fled their homes in 1948, to todays distorted propaganda about PLO terrorism.

The volume also includes sharp critiques of the wide consensus in the USA which supports Israel and its territorial ambitions while maintaining total silence about the competing reality of the Palestinians.