A legal question

I won’t waste your time mocking this Marty Peretz post, which is an act of considerable constraint. He statements about the quality and reputation of Catholic Universities as a whole are flatly false (see comments about Notre Dame, Georgetown and BC) and his method of evaluating the quality of a University (scanning the faculty roster for people he’s heard of) almost as comically self-important as it is stupid. What I’m interested in is this statement:

The fact is that Finkelstein is not a scholar. He is a nut case. There are many contentious issues in Holocaust history. But he is a Holocaust denier. That is like denying that slavery existed in America and that the economy of the South was based on slavery.

There’s no support for the underlying claim, unless posting a crude political cartoon of Alan Dershowitz is now evidence of holocaust denial. This is appalling, but is it a possible foundation for a libel case?

Furthermore, does Peretz have a chance to surpass Mickey Kaus? Or has he done it already?