True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 132: Norman Finkelstein Pt 2
Aired: 2021-01-24
Duration: 01:38:05


=== Women's Rights in Israel (02:15) ===

[00:00:00]  I'm doing a suck stack.
[00:00:01]  Sorry.
[00:00:04]  What's this suck stack?
[00:00:07]  It's not Israeli, is it?
[00:00:09]  You know that in Israel they invent podcasts.
[00:00:12]  I learned that we invent the podcast, the AOL, Instant Messenger, the cherry tomato.
[00:00:23]  See, my problem with this is that we discuss this off-air.
[00:00:28]  Apparently, Israel does claim to have invented the cherry tomato.
[00:00:30]  And I'm saying, why did we invent the girls' tomato?
[00:00:34]  Cherry tomato, indisputably the girls' tomato.
[00:00:36]  Israel is the only country that is respecting the rights of women in the Middle East.
[00:00:43]  If you look in Saudi Arabia, which is not an ally of Israel, merely a friend, they are just friends.
[00:00:52]  We are just being friends with them.
[00:00:53]  In Saudi Arabia, they can't drive.
[00:00:56]  But in Israel, women are allowed to drive.
[00:00:58]  There are many accidents.
[00:01:00]  There are accidents all the time from the women driving.
[00:01:05]  There is being legislation about it.
[00:01:09]  But I'm not up to date on these matters.
[00:01:14]  But yeah, look, podcasting, it is from Israel, I am telling you.
[00:01:42]  Noah, how old are you?
[00:01:44]  28.
[00:01:46]  We could still do our service.
[00:01:49]  Wait, how long do you have?
[00:01:51]  You have until you're 75.
[00:01:54]  to be in the IDF do you know my greatest enemy Well, not I had many enemies, but one of my greatest enemies in the Bay Area rock and roll scene was a former Israeli army guy who was like he was like an Israeli army like tech guy.

=== Israeli Accent Rivalries (06:58) ===

[00:02:15]  And so I hated for him for every single reason.
[00:02:18]  First, that he knew how to use computers.
[00:02:19]  Second, that he had that same accent that you just did, which, let's be clear, not a great accent, not very flattering to us.
[00:02:26]  We sounded better with the Polish kind of.
[00:02:31]  I'm sorry.
[00:02:33]  It's somehow more rapey.
[00:02:36]  I don't get it.
[00:02:37]  No, it's the hard age of colonialism.
[00:02:40]  The French, they gave up Algeria.
[00:02:41]  And you see, when they lost their colonial territory, they lost the spirit, the bloodthirstiness that forms the deep guttural noise that the Israelis are making.
[00:02:52]  It is apartheid that has sustained this dialect, this way of life.
[00:02:58]  It's very special, in my opinion.
[00:03:02]  Well, I will say it is special.
[00:03:05]  It is one of the, that, that accent has probably made more women ovulate than any other accent in humanity.
[00:03:14]  We like to say it's nails on a hockburg.
[00:03:20]  I can't do it anymore.
[00:03:22]  At that point, it's like, I'll wake up tomorrow.
[00:03:26]  I'll start signing enlistment papers.
[00:03:29]  I can't do it.
[00:03:30]  It starts taking you over.
[00:03:32]  Yeah.
[00:03:33]  Real quick, before you even introduce ourselves, I knew some guys who went on birthright when I was younger.
[00:03:38]  I did not go.
[00:03:39]  And I don't know if I, I don't think I've told the story in the podcast before, but they were trying to buy, they were like in a candy shop, I think in Tel Aviv.
[00:03:48]  And there was like a husband and a wife that owned it and working there.
[00:03:52]  And the husband starts having like a heart attack and like dying on the floor.
[00:03:57]  And this guy that was with my two friends, who's another guy I know, I mean, I was friends with him too, like sees all this happening.
[00:04:04]  Like the paramedics are coming.
[00:04:05]  They come and like take the guy out.
[00:04:07]  The woman's like crying, like, oh my God, my husband's going to die.
[00:04:11]  And he has a single gummy worm that he's been holding this whole time.
[00:04:15]  And he puts it down on the scale.
[00:04:16]  And it's like, you know, 0.004 shekels or whatever.
[00:04:21]  And the lady is like weeping.
[00:04:22]  He's like, excuse me.
[00:04:24]  Excuse me?
[00:04:26]  Excuse me?
[00:04:28]  Can I buy this gummy worm?
[00:04:30]  And she sells him the gummy worm.
[00:04:32]  Oh, my God.
[00:04:34]  An absolutely true story.
[00:04:35]  I can back that up.
[00:04:36]  Max was there.
[00:04:37]  In fact, this guy is name.
[00:04:38]  I won't spoil his name, but yeah, classic story.
[00:04:42]  And I used to be like, what a fucking puts.
[00:04:44]  And now I'm like, that's very funny.
[00:04:47]  My name is Brace.
[00:04:49]  I'm Liz.
[00:04:51]  I'm proud of the resiliency of the Jewish people and Noah Colwyn.
[00:04:56]  Whoa.
[00:04:57]  Liz and I both opened our mouths at the same time.
[00:04:59]  And you know what?
[00:05:00]  I'm going to turn it over.
[00:05:01]  Liz, tell them something.
[00:05:04]  We are, of course, joined by Young Chomsky.
[00:05:08]  You are listening to the podcast Truanon.
[00:05:11]  Hello, everyone.
[00:05:11]  Welcome.
[00:05:13]  Welcome back to the Finkelstein Files.
[00:05:17]  Yeah, this is part two of our highly anticipated two-part series interview with Norman Finkelstein.
[00:05:26]  These interviews have been a blast to conduct.
[00:05:29]  And I will say, for those of you who cannot see us on the super exclusive secret Patreon live stream that we do of my computer screen 24 hours a day, while conducting these interviews, Norman Finkelstein is sitting on a very large chair, like five feet from his computer.
[00:05:44]  And it feels very, it's very home, home, homey in a very cozy sort of interview to conduct.
[00:05:51]  Also chose not to wear headphones, which I respect too, because mine are starting to hurt my ears.
[00:05:56]  This was, this is, this is sort of the follow-up to the, to the, uh, well, it's not sort of, it is literally the follow-up to the previous episode that we just put out.
[00:06:05]  I don't know why I said sort of, I don't know, I don't need to qualify that.
[00:06:08]  Uh, we last left you on a cliffhanger about his, his, uh, dissection of from time immemorial.
[00:06:15]  We get some, some good stuff on that.
[00:06:17]  And no, tell them what else we got.
[00:06:20]  I mean, you know, Norman goes on to talk about the way that his critique of from time immemorial kind of informed the rest of his scholarship and the rest of his career, and then also how it, you know, formed his fights to save his career and to save it against the smears that he was a Holocaust denier.
[00:06:38]  And obviously, the primary antagonist and somebody who we spend a lot of time talking about is none other than Alan Dershowitz, enemy of the bod.
[00:06:48]  And his, his younger but more evil brother, Aaron Dershowitz.
[00:06:53]  I don't know.
[00:06:53]  That's not even funny.
[00:06:54]  I don't know why he said that.
[00:06:55]  It is good to appreciate it.
[00:06:56]  It is, yeah.
[00:06:56]  Just like imagining that he's just like some like practologist out there overbilling.
[00:07:01]  We didn't ask Norm, and I meant to, but it's, excuse me, Professor Finkelstein.
[00:07:06]  It's real hard to sometimes jump in, particularly when like, you know, something hits you and then suddenly we're on a different topic.
[00:07:14]  But we didn't ask him about the video upload of his meeting with Dershowitz, and I really wanted to ask him about that.
[00:07:20]  Strangers in the Night.
[00:07:22]  We will link the shit out of that in a couple of minutes.
[00:07:25]  Yeah, that's good.
[00:07:26]  Strangers.
[00:07:27]  Because he says, I mean, well, not to spoil it too much, but, you know, he talks about his feelings about his meetings with Dershowitz.
[00:07:36]  And he does not mention this one.
[00:07:39]  And this one, I think, is a very, it's a beautiful video.
[00:07:43]  In fact, basically every filmed encounter between Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein goes very poorly for Alan Dershowitz.
[00:07:51]  I remember Felix, I think at one point said, like, Alan Dershowitz seems like the kind of creature that like it's the secret cabal of neo-Nazis made to go up on TV and tell you why you should give all your money to Israel to make people hate Jews every couple months.
[00:08:06]  And apt description, because boy, what a fucking slime ball.
[00:08:11]  And Alan Dershowitz and rather, and Professor Finkelstein, I think, has a really like, he has a really novel and pretty sophisticated perspective on a guy like Alan Dershowitz, which, you know, there's been a lot of ink spilled and a lot of podcast airtime given to that schmuck.
[00:08:29]  And it was really interesting and exciting to hear something refreshing.
[00:08:32]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:08:34]  Well, let's get into it, shall we?
[00:08:36]  Let's do it.
[00:08:37]  We didn't actually talk about how your critique of that book was received.
[00:08:52]  And I think I'd be kind of interested, you know, when we get to talking about some of the stuff that happened to you later.
[00:08:57]  I am kind of curious about what happened, you know, like what maybe in the origins of that did you see when you initially critiqued Joan Peters' book?
[00:09:06]  Okay, I want to answer that question, but let me just again throw out some topics for you.

=== 14 Years of Unemployment (02:09) ===

[00:09:13]  Me, sure.
[00:09:14]  There is the ten-year battle.
[00:09:18]  There is my struggle to find work.
[00:09:23]  There was the 15-year, the 14 years of unemployment after I lost the 10-year battle.
[00:09:32]  There is my interactions with the left.
[00:09:35]  And even though I consider myself a person of the left, I would say my interactions have been overwhelmingly negative and something to talk about.
[00:09:49]  And the fact that at critical points I got support from unexpected quarters, the main supporter of mine became Raul Hilberg, who's a right-wing Republican.
[00:10:04]  But he thought what I was saying, oh, he was also the founder of Holocaust Studies.
[00:10:09]  He was the creator of the field.
[00:10:14]  And he became a staunch, not defender of me personally, but a defender of my scholarship as against my experience on the left.
[00:10:29]  And I guess also just some of my life's lessons as I am in the twilights.
[00:10:41]  Well, it's true.
[00:10:43]  Have to accept it.
[00:10:45]  And even though I continue to work, I don't know how many of you know, because I don't know your generation in general, its range of knowledge.
[00:10:55]  The greatest African-American scholar of the 20th century, by far, he was in a class altogether his own, was W.E.B. Du Bois.
[00:11:03]  And Du Bois, he wrote his great work, Black Reconstruction, when he was already 67.
[00:11:11]  He wrote three, not one, not two.
[00:11:14]  He wrote three autobiographies because he kept thinking, okay, this is the end.
[00:11:19]  I mean, he was like 90 or something when he died, right?

=== W. E. B. Du Bois: Enduring Scholar (05:00) ===

[00:11:22]  95.
[00:11:24]  He died.
[00:11:24]  He was born three years after the Civil War ended, and he lived to the March on Washington.
[00:11:33]  Yeah, yeah, it's incredible.
[00:11:36]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:37]  And each time he has a new autobiography, he's like, okay, I'm back.
[00:11:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:43]  So for those of us in our twilight, he does give inspiration.
[00:11:49]  He was a classical example of what Thomas Edison said, Edison's ethic.
[00:11:55]  He said, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
[00:12:02]  And I've seen that close up.
[00:12:04]  I've seen that with Professor Chomsky.
[00:12:06]  Chomsky, he was blessed.
[00:12:08]  He got the 1%.
[00:12:10]  But boy, oh boy, did he ever do that 99%?
[00:12:14]  That man works.
[00:12:16]  I don't know now what his output is, but that man put in 20 hours a day.
[00:12:25]  Yes, he put in 20 hours a day.
[00:12:28]  You know, sometimes, just a funny story, and then we'll move on.
[00:12:32]  I used to spend sometime during the summer each year at his summer home, he and his wife and myself.
[00:12:39]  And I was in the guest room downstairs, and the guest room was near the computer where he worked.
[00:12:46]  And sometimes in the middle of the night, I'd hear a pat, tat, tat.
[00:12:52]  And I would say to myself, okay, there are two possibilities.
[00:12:56]  It's raining, and it's the geraindrops on the roof, or that guy's on the computer.
[00:13:06]  He said, I don't want to know.
[00:13:09]  It's going to depress me.
[00:13:10]  So I'm keeping the door shut.
[00:13:12]  But of course, he was working.
[00:13:14]  Incredible.
[00:13:15]  Eight hours a day just answering the email.
[00:13:19]  He will answer, even to this day, right away, answers an email right away.
[00:13:23]  Any question you could have.
[00:13:25]  Yeah, but now it's a little different.
[00:13:27]  With all due regard to the great, you know, God is great, God is good, let us thank known for our food.
[00:13:33]  We've said the prayer.
[00:13:35]  I think now he answers so quickly the email.
[00:13:39]  He has it because he doesn't have the concentration anymore for the work.
[00:13:45]  You know, he is at 93.
[00:13:46]  Right, right, right.
[00:13:47]  So I think that, because he has a real, he's an old-fashioned kibbutznik.
[00:13:53]  And I'm not saying that's a joke.
[00:13:54]  He's a kibbutznik.
[00:13:56]  Hard work.
[00:13:58]  That's your resonant douche.
[00:14:00]  But of course, he gets it from his family.
[00:14:02]  But he has that kibbutznik ethic.
[00:14:05]  So I think in his mind, so long as he's typing, working, he's justifying his existence, even though it's emails and it's not books.
[00:14:15]  It used to be said there was a famous anti-war religious figure named William Sloan Coffin.
[00:14:25]  He was over at Yale.
[00:14:26]  And William Sloan Coffin, I remember once he said, he was introducing Professor Chomsky and he said, Professor Chomsky writes books faster than I read them.
[00:14:42]  And that is true.
[00:14:43]  It's crazy though.
[00:14:44]  I was thinking about that when I was looking at a copy of, I can't remember which book, one of Baja's books, and you look in the beginning of it and you see what he's published, and it's just, and it's not everything, and it'll go on for like three pages.
[00:15:00]  How are you writing?
[00:15:01]  I mean, that territory, you're getting into, I mean, two of my personal idols, the novelist Percival Everett, and of course, Howard Hunt, as far as their prolific literary output goes.
[00:15:14]  I have a couple of Howard Hunt books.
[00:15:16]  With all due regard, I cannot accept the equivalency here.
[00:15:23]  Please, it was not offered seriously, forgive me.
[00:15:26]  Because Professor Chomsky, first of all, he's not just writing, as it were, stream of consciousness.
[00:15:35]  No, yeah.
[00:15:35]  Every book comes with a voluminous scholarly apparatus.
[00:15:39]  I mean, this is just a huge amount of research that goes to each book.
[00:15:43]  And I can tell you with pretty much certainty, except for let's call it the last 10 or 15 years, but for the first period, I knew all of his books inside out, backward, forward, left to right, right to left, up and down.
[00:15:58]  He did not really repeat footnotes.
[00:16:01]  It was new research with each book.
[00:16:04]  It was, he was a force of nature because in so many levels, there was the correspondence, there was the lecturing.
[00:16:18]  He was on the go all the time here, there, around the world.

=== Robeson's Indignation (15:36) ===

[00:16:23]  I remember once his wife said to me, Carol Chomsky, they went to India, they come back from India, he then has to go the next day to Brazil.
[00:16:34]  He said, I'm exhausted.
[00:16:36]  He was just zigzagging the globe.
[00:16:39]  He once told me that in the plane, he could never sleep on the plane.
[00:16:44]  He said, his was the only light on in the plane.
[00:16:51]  He was reading.
[00:16:53]  He was reading.
[00:16:54]  He said, once there was a woman sitting next to him and she recognized who he was and she wouldn't shut up.
[00:17:02]  And finally, he turned up the music he said to pretend he can't hear her because she wouldn't leave him alone.
[00:17:10]  He wanted to concentrate on his reading.
[00:17:14]  He's a phenomenon.
[00:17:15]  He's a force of nature.
[00:17:16]  Do you guys still correspond?
[00:17:18]  No.
[00:17:19]  You know, I want to be honest about that.
[00:17:22]  I could pretend, you know, I'm one of Chomsky's special people.
[00:17:25]  No, it's not true.
[00:17:26]  And I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
[00:17:29]  I was close to him and I was close to his wife.
[00:17:33]  And they had very different, they're both, you know, she was a brilliant woman, but she was more, let's just call it down to earth.
[00:17:43]  And I'm also down to earth.
[00:17:46]  I mean, I liked going shopping with her in the supermarket, and she has her coupons, and you know, it reminds me of growing up.
[00:17:54]  And so I was sort of like a compromise.
[00:17:58]  They both liked me.
[00:17:59]  Now, that was unusual because she didn't like most people he liked, and vice versa, in general, in general.
[00:18:06]  So I was a compromise.
[00:18:08]  So they both liked me, and that made me tolerable around both of them.
[00:18:12]  But once she passed away, we kind of drifted apart, you know, and that was okay for me because occasionally we would see each other in the years after his wife passed away.
[00:18:27]  We'd meet up in Cambridge or Lexington.
[00:18:30]  No, no, Cambridge.
[00:18:31]  We'd meet up in Cambridge or Boston.
[00:18:34]  And we would talk, I'd ask how the kids are, you know, the usual Jewish sort of talk.
[00:18:40]  How are the kids?
[00:18:42]  How are the grandchildren?
[00:18:45]  But then it was like when we got around to talking about other issues, we were just repeating ourselves from the past.
[00:18:56]  It was the same stories, you know, the same war stories, the same things about the same people, you know, isn't she a shit?
[00:19:05]  Isn't he a schmuck?
[00:19:08]  Same thing.
[00:19:09]  And I realized I got everything out of him that I could.
[00:19:15]  He was a resource, a human resource for me.
[00:19:18]  I got everything out of him I could.
[00:19:21]  And if I were to persist, a lot of people persist because they want to be able to say they were close to Noam Chomsky.
[00:19:30]  You know, it's an honor.
[00:19:33]  It's a feather in your cap.
[00:19:35]  And I didn't need that anymore.
[00:19:39]  In fact, I didn't want it anymore because I didn't want to be derivative.
[00:19:44]  I wanted to be my own person.
[00:19:47]  If you want to know me, I want you to want to know me because of me, not because I'm close to Noam Chomsky.
[00:19:56]  It didn't feel good after a while.
[00:19:57]  It's nice to be a protégé when you're in your 30s.
[00:20:01]  It becomes a little bit problematic when you're in your 40s.
[00:20:05]  And it becomes downright humiliating once you get into your 50s.
[00:20:10]  Either you are your own person or you're not.
[00:20:14]  And I didn't, you know, I didn't struggle to be part of the inner circle.
[00:20:24]  I didn't struggle to be part of the inner circle.
[00:20:27]  I didn't want it.
[00:20:29]  I have my honor.
[00:20:30]  I have my pride.
[00:20:32]  I didn't want to be a groupie, which is effectively what it is to be a groupie, to cling to somebody just so you can go around boasting, oh, you're my friend.
[00:20:45]  That's why I never call Noam, never.
[00:20:48]  Everybody calls him Noam because he signs his letters, Noam, and they all want to show their buddy with him.
[00:20:56]  So they say Noam.
[00:20:57]  I always say Professor Chomsky.
[00:21:01]  Just, I don't want to be part of that groupie phenomenon.
[00:21:05]  It's degrading.
[00:21:07]  It's degrading.
[00:21:08]  And I have my personal honor.
[00:21:10]  Either I achieved something in my life or I didn't.
[00:21:13]  And if I didn't, the verdict is not going to change because I knew Noam Chomsky.
[00:21:20]  The verdict remains the same.
[00:21:23]  And so no, I wouldn't say we remain in close touch.
[00:21:30]  He moved out to Arizona around three years ago.
[00:21:34]  And before that, I occasionally saw him.
[00:21:37]  And now, no, I don't see him.
[00:21:41]  I don't feel bad.
[00:21:43]  I was blessed.
[00:21:45]  He entered my life for about 30 years.
[00:21:50]  And I learned a lot.
[00:21:53]  He gave me his time.
[00:21:55]  He read everything I wrote.
[00:21:58]  He returned it with extensive criticism.
[00:22:02]  He taught me in some respects, not totally.
[00:22:07]  He taught me how to think.
[00:22:09]  And that was important.
[00:22:12]  I did not get my moral core from him.
[00:22:14]  I got my moral core from my parents.
[00:22:18]  But what he gave me, which I didn't know how to do, I didn't know how you combine passion and reason.
[00:22:27]  I didn't know how you combine indignation and reason.
[00:22:31]  I didn't know how you mesh those two.
[00:22:34]  My late mother hated intellectuals and she hated intellectualizing.
[00:22:39]  She hated intellectualizing when people were talking about war and the idea of just sitting around and talking about it like you're talking about a book.
[00:22:56]  Right.
[00:22:57]  You know.
[00:22:58]  Like that distancing.
[00:22:59]  That distancing.
[00:23:02]  It wasn't even distancing because they had no idea what war was.
[00:23:06]  Right, right, right.
[00:23:07]  So I didn't know how to retain, preserve the indignation over what my parents endured, but at the same time, keep to the highest scholarly standards because I believe in the life of, you know, in my modest way, I'm not Kant.
[00:23:27]  I recognize that.
[00:23:29]  By my own modest way, I believe in the life of the mind.
[00:23:33]  It's just something I grew up with.
[00:23:37]  My friends were smart, and intellect was important, reason was important, and I didn't quite know how to do it until he gave me, he was like a practical example of how you do both.
[00:23:54]  You retain your indignation, but you also make the coherent, logical, evidence-based argument.
[00:24:04]  And that was important for me.
[00:24:06]  And I think that's sort of like a kind of natural segue to the publication of your to the earlier question, to your publication of your criticism of Joan Peters' book from time immemorial.
[00:24:21]  I think that there's, you know, like the when it comes to subjects like this and subjects like, you know, Palestinian indigeneity or Jewish settlement on Palestinian land, there's an enormous amount of indignation, especially from the pro-Israel establishment at sort of even, you know, kind of like just beginning to kind of, when you just begin to even question the basic facts of it, I guess.
[00:24:49]  And I think that the lid on that discourse was significantly tighter in the 1980s.
[00:24:55]  Could you talk a little bit about the immediate reaction and the experience that you got from when you first published that criticism?
[00:25:02]  Well, there are many aspects to it.
[00:25:04]  I'm going to try to limit myself to the aspects I'll cover.
[00:25:08]  Number one, you have to understand the context of the publication, the book.
[00:25:14]  Israel completely controlled all PR, all information when it came to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
[00:25:23]  There wasn't even a concept of an Arab site.
[00:25:26]  There was just the Israeli propaganda, which was really just a, I used to call it, it was Leon Uris's Exodus with footnotes.
[00:25:36]  Most of the Israeli propaganda was just, if you know that so-called novel, and then it became a major motion picture, a very influential motion picture, PR.
[00:25:48]  It was like D.W. Griffin's Birth of a Nation.
[00:25:51]  It was very influential.
[00:25:54]  Well, and that was just in the culture.
[00:25:55]  I mean, B.B. Netanyahu is now the prime minister back then.
[00:25:59]  He was an ambassador to the UN, and then he worked in Washington.
[00:26:02]  We're talking about a different era.
[00:26:04]  Well, but I think of this just to say that Israel's case was made very well known, even in the news media, in ways that Palestinians and Arabs obviously.
[00:26:12]  I'm even talking about earlier than B.B. Netanyahu.
[00:26:15]  Bibi Netanyahu comes with Reagan in the war against terrorism.
[00:26:19]  No, you know, you're right, because it was 84.
[00:26:22]  No, you're right.
[00:26:23]  I got the time wrong.
[00:26:25]  You're right.
[00:26:27]  In any event, Israel completely controlled the information flow, the scholarly flow on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
[00:26:37]  But the first big break comes with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
[00:26:43]  And in that, after the 19th, during and after the 1982 invasion, a part, it's still a small part, it's a marginal part, but it was a part of the support for Israel.
[00:27:02]  They lost it.
[00:27:04]  They lost it.
[00:27:05]  And that was mostly the old left and the Vietnam War, part of the Vietnam War New Left.
[00:27:15]  What happened was, you see, you have to always look at the present in history, as the Hungarian philosopher Lukash said.
[00:27:27]  It's forgotten now, but Israel was a leftist cause up until the 82 war.
[00:27:36]  Well, up until 1967, but especially up until 1982.
[00:27:40]  Remember, Soviet Union, first country in the world to recognize the state of Israel.
[00:27:49]  The Israel, the settlement, what was called the Yeshuv, it was mostly labor Zionists.
[00:27:58]  People like Ben-Ghorians saw themselves, literally, they saw themselves as little Lenins and little Bolsheviks in the Middle East.
[00:28:06]  They were fanatically part, part of the Israeli political establishment.
[00:28:12]  It came to be called the Mapam.
[00:28:14]  The Mapam was fanatically pro-Salin, supported Stalin during what was called the Doctor's Plot, not worth going into, but they were fanatically pro-Stalin.
[00:28:26]  Right.
[00:28:26]  I mean, the only thing to say for listeners is that during a period of like Stalin's greatest anti-Semitic crime, they maintained ties.
[00:28:38]  We'll have Grover Furra next week, too.
[00:28:40]  They supported what was called back then the Soviet interpretation of what happened.
[00:28:47]  In any event, or the Soviet claim as to what happened.
[00:28:50]  In any event, so that included a large part of the old left, people like Pete Seeger, okay, who was a standard-bearer of my generation.
[00:29:03]  Pete Seeger, his first big hit with the Weavers, you know what the first big hit was?
[00:29:08]  It was Senat Senat Sena, which was an Israeli folk song.
[00:29:12]  Senat Senatenat and the flip side of it was Irene Goodnight.
[00:29:22]  Irene, I don't know if you know any of this.
[00:29:25]  We actually, I will say, we actually did an episode with a guy who wrote a book about Pete Seeger and other folk musicians persecution by the FBI and the Weavers are a central part of the USA.
[00:29:38]  So that was the old left.
[00:29:40]  And come the 1982 war, they broke.
[00:29:45]  That was the first big, that was the first significant change in public opinion in the West.
[00:29:53]  So at the time, there was a full-page ad in the back page of the News of the Week in Review in the New York Times, which was very influential back then.
[00:30:07]  And it was a full page, and the headline read: 20,000 killed, 140,000 refugees.
[00:30:22]  And it was written, I was told later, it was written by Edward Said.
[00:30:29]  It was a very powerful ad.
[00:30:32]  But what was more powerful was the list of signatories on the bottom.
[00:30:39]  And then you saw we had crossed the Rubicon.
[00:30:45]  You saw Paul Robeson Jr.
[00:30:48]  Now, Paul Robeson Sr. was very close to the Jews, very close, especially during World War II.
[00:30:56]  And Paul Robeson Jr. was married to a Jew, Marilyn Greenberg, who became Marilyn Robeson.
[00:31:05]  And Paul Robeson's wife himself, herself, was partly Jewish.
[00:31:09]  She was a Cardozo.
[00:31:12]  So you saw Robeson's name.
[00:31:14]  Then you look on the ad and you see Pete and Toshi Seeger.
[00:31:21]  You knew something had happened.
[00:31:25]  You knew, by the way, Robeson's wife was Aslanda Good Cardoza Robeson.
[00:31:33]  She had some Jewish blood, as it's called.
[00:31:38]  And I remember the ad appeared twice.
[00:31:43]  And the first time, Daniel Ellsberg's name, Daniel Ellsberg was a very famous personality.
[00:31:49]  He leaked what was called the Pentagon Papers under the Ellsberg was indignant, angry, furious.

=== Simpson Report Revelations (07:01) ===

[00:32:00]  Why?
[00:32:01]  He hadn't been asked to sign the first ad, and he insisted on being in the second ad.
[00:32:08]  It showed you a real shift in public opinion.
[00:32:12]  And that's when Time Immemorial comes out, two years later.
[00:32:27]  So it's now 1984, and Israel and its supporters and its apologists are trying to recuperate.
[00:32:41]  from the public relations debacle of the 1982 war.
[00:32:47]  And from time immemorial was one data point in this propaganda barrage by Israel, its supporters and apologists.
[00:33:06]  The basic thesis of the book was to say that the whole cause is a fake.
[00:33:15]  That it's all a concoction, a conspiracy.
[00:33:19]  There were no Palestinians.
[00:33:21]  The whole thing is a fake.
[00:33:25]  And when I wrote my critique, I, of course, once Professor Chomsky said I was on the right track, I then expanded it from the narrow demographic study with the number that was fake.
[00:33:50]  I then proceeded to examine the whole scholarly apparatus and reached the conclusion the whole thing was just a hoax.
[00:33:57]  It was a fraud.
[00:33:58]  All the sources were fabricated.
[00:34:02]  They really were.
[00:34:03]  It was kind of shocking.
[00:34:05]  One source, it was called the Hope-Simpson Report.
[00:34:08]  It was one of the British investigations or inquiries into the Palestine conflict.
[00:34:16]  She falsified one paragraph 19 times.
[00:34:20]  Yes.
[00:34:21]  How do you falsify a paragraph 19 times?
[00:34:25]  Well, because she kept repeating it in different forms throughout the text as evidence of her claim that there was a surreptitious Arab immigration into Palestine from neighboring countries.
[00:34:41]  And each and every time it was a fake.
[00:34:44]  That was one of the optical illusions of her 1850 footnotes.
[00:34:51]  A lot of them were repetitious.
[00:34:54]  But it was a funny story.
[00:34:58]  So, you know, I'm just, as I tell you, I'm this graduate student living in a tiny apartment in Washington Heights.
[00:35:09]  But I had a lot of friends.
[00:35:11]  We were comrades, comrades.
[00:35:15]  So Peters was criss-crossing the country promoting the book.
[00:35:22]  This vast lecture tour, I think it was 250 speaking engagements.
[00:35:28]  And whenever she would be on like some community radio, my friends would ring me up.
[00:35:34]  Hey, Norm, she's now on community radio in Waco, Texas.
[00:35:38]  Why don't you call in?
[00:35:40]  So wherever I go, wherever she goes, the most obscure driving the poor woman.
[00:35:55]  What did those conversations go like?
[00:35:58]  Well, I would start off by saying that my name is Norman Finkelstein, and I think the book is a fraud.
[00:36:04]  And she would always say, he's a friend of Noam Chomsky.
[00:36:10]  Oh, my God.
[00:36:11]  Like, you know, saying he's a friend of the devil.
[00:36:14]  And what did the hosts usually do?
[00:36:16]  Do they just cut you off or do they just let you argue it out?
[00:36:20]  Absolutely not.
[00:36:21]  Did not cut me off.
[00:36:22]  No.
[00:36:22]  Because community radio, they're not yet commissars.
[00:36:26]  Right, right, right.
[00:36:27]  They actually believe in the idea of community radio.
[00:36:30]  Hold her for one moment.
[00:36:35]  Community radio didn't understand that their function is to manufacture consent.
[00:36:40]  They actually thought it was to facilitate the free exchange of ideas.
[00:36:45]  I mean, they're so stupid.
[00:36:46]  Those hoi polloi, those stupid people in the back woods.
[00:36:53]  They think you're supposed to have conversation and an exchange of ideas.
[00:36:57]  So she knew who you were.
[00:37:00]  Oh, yeah.
[00:37:01]  Oh, the stories I could tell you with me and her, but that's another story.
[00:37:07]  So then, so then she got the book comes out in the UK.
[00:37:12]  The book comes out in the UK.
[00:37:14]  Yeah, livelazers.
[00:37:15]  They're stricter there.
[00:37:16]  And a friend of mine, his name is Charlie Glass.
[00:37:19]  He's still a prominent journalist, but brilliant guy, brilliant guy.
[00:37:24]  Charlie calls me up and he says, Norm, Peters is going to be on BBC.
[00:37:30]  You want to be on the show?
[00:37:33]  What the hell not?
[00:37:35]  Why the hell not?
[00:37:37]  Oh, you can imagine.
[00:37:40]  Joan Peters is now in the UK.
[00:37:43]  She's thinking, I put that guy behind me.
[00:37:47]  He's gone.
[00:37:48]  I'm in the UK.
[00:37:49]  It's over.
[00:37:50]  The nightmare, the pesadilla, as astounding, of Norman Fingers.
[00:37:56]  And then she's on BBC.
[00:37:58]  She gets her usual spiel.
[00:38:01]  And then the announcer says, Okay, we're going to take questions.
[00:38:06]  And he goes like this: I'll never forget.
[00:38:08]  He says, our first call is from New York City.
[00:38:19]  So Joe Peters is sitting there.
[00:38:25]  And you know what she's thinking.
[00:38:27]  It can't be.
[00:38:30]  She's like, it can't be.
[00:38:31]  It can't be.
[00:38:32]  There's no way.
[00:38:33]  He followed me to the UK.
[00:38:35]  No way.
[00:38:36]  It can't be.
[00:38:38]  Your first call, New York City.
[00:38:41]  So I get on and I get my schmill and I said, she said this with the Joan, the Hope Simpson report, but that's not what the Hope Simpson report said.
[00:38:54]  So she's very cool.
[00:38:55]  She's very cool because she understands how the media works.

=== People Don't Read Books (15:03) ===

[00:39:01]  Nobody reads the books.
[00:39:02]  The people who interview you, they don't read it.
[00:39:06]  They have not a clue what's in the book.
[00:39:10]  If you ever write a book and you go with one of the, you know, the better publishers, they send you a questionnaire, an extensive questionnaire.
[00:39:20]  And one of the questions in the questionnaire is, what questions would you like to be asked?
[00:39:26]  No, that's absolutely true.
[00:39:28]  And that's what the interviewers do.
[00:39:30]  They ask you the questions that you want to be asked.
[00:39:33]  It's like a talk show, like late night show or something.
[00:39:36]  It's all just theater.
[00:39:37]  Yeah.
[00:39:38]  And so when I said, and she, you know what her answer was?
[00:39:43]  She said, I didn't write that.
[00:39:47]  She knew nobody would check.
[00:39:49]  Oh.
[00:39:50]  So, you know what I replied?
[00:39:53]  Well, whoever wrote the book did write that.
[00:39:59]  Very clever.
[00:40:01]  Yeah, slick.
[00:40:02]  I mean, that's just what's so incredible.
[00:40:04]  I mean, it's sort of famous that book, rather, books of, you know, nonfiction books have different fact-checking standards often than like reporting does at really any outlet, which I'll be honest, a lot of those fact-checkers are very ideologically motivated themselves.
[00:40:21]  So, you know, can't necessarily trust that stuff either.
[00:40:23]  But, you know, people can basically say whatever the fuck they want to it.
[00:40:26]  That's absolutely true.
[00:40:28]  Absolutely true.
[00:40:29]  I was talking about that yesterday with my college roommate, brilliant guy.
[00:40:35]  He was a biomathematician at NYU.
[00:40:38]  He just retired.
[00:40:39]  Wonderful guy.
[00:40:40]  And I said, on balance, on balance, I don't think, I know you won't agree with me, you're young people, you're not going to agree with me.
[00:40:52]  On balance, when it comes to research, I don't think the web has been an improvement.
[00:41:00]  I recognize it makes things so easy.
[00:41:04]  It makes things so much easier.
[00:41:07]  But you know what?
[00:41:09]  Sometimes easier is not better.
[00:41:13]  The fact that you used to have to go to a library, you have to research things.
[00:41:21]  It was an exercise to have to do that.
[00:41:27]  Nowadays, I'm returning to your point right now.
[00:41:33]  Nowadays, you have something you want to check.
[00:41:40]  You just plug in a fact in the Google search and 10,000 sites come up.
[00:41:47]  And you end up, for anything you want to state, any statement you want to make, any statement you want to make, the earth is flat.
[00:41:57]  You can have 10,000 citations in your footnote.
[00:42:01]  The citations are completely worthless, but they're citations.
[00:42:08]  If you ever look at a law journal, law journal, it's about one quarter of text to three quarters of citation, a footnote.
[00:42:18]  Because all they care about is the footnotes.
[00:42:20]  If you can find a footnote for the definite article the and a footnote for the definite article ah, then you have a Harvard Law Journal article.
[00:42:33]  Just footnote everything.
[00:42:36]  Why do I bring it up?
[00:42:38]  You take the case of Alan Dershowitz.
[00:42:41]  He writes the so-called book.
[00:42:43]  Well, he didn't write it, but whoever wrote it.
[00:42:45]  We'll just say, for argument's sake, he wrote it.
[00:42:50]  He writes the book, The Case for Israel.
[00:42:54]  And of course he didn't research it.
[00:42:57]  He's too busy trying to get wife murderers off.
[00:43:01]  You know, that takes time to get OJ off, to get Van Bulo off, to get Mike Tyson.
[00:43:11]  Okay, he didn't murder his wife.
[00:43:12]  He just battered her.
[00:43:14]  Possibly also to get himself off in whatever island he's on.
[00:43:19]  It takes time.
[00:43:19]  He's not going to waste time writing the book.
[00:43:22]  So what does he do?
[00:43:23]  He farms out the book, the research, to Harvard undergrads and graduates.
[00:43:30]  Natalie, what's her name?
[00:43:32]  The actress?
[00:43:33]  Portman.
[00:43:34]  Natalie Portman.
[00:43:35]  Natalie Portman.
[00:43:37]  Well, I mean, you know, Marty Peretz did the same thing at Harvard.
[00:43:39]  They use it as a farm team for the New Republic and for like, you know, pro-Israel ideologues there.
[00:43:45]  Let me just get to the point here.
[00:43:47]  So Natalie Portman was one of the researchers for the case for Israel.
[00:43:52]  Yeah, she was.
[00:43:53]  She used her non-stage name.
[00:44:01]  It ends with IG.
[00:44:03]  I could get it, but I'm not going to bother right now.
[00:44:06]  I have it right over here.
[00:44:07]  In any case, well, these are Harvard undergraduates.
[00:44:11]  They have better things to do.
[00:44:13]  So, what's the bottom line?
[00:44:15]  What happens?
[00:44:16]  I don't know if you ever saw the debate I had with him on this problem called Democracy Not.
[00:44:21]  I said, Professor Dershowitz, you're the senior most professor of Harvard Law School.
[00:44:27]  I checked some of your citations.
[00:44:30]  I checked some of your citations.
[00:44:33]  So, you have King Hussein of Jordan killed 6,000 Palestinians during Black September in 1970.
[00:44:42]  So, I said, You know, I was curious.
[00:44:44]  What was your source?
[00:44:44]  I was just curious.
[00:44:45]  What's your source?
[00:44:47]  So, I'm tracing back to the source, tracing back the source, tracing back the source.
[00:44:52]  You know what the source turned out to be?
[00:44:55]  Now, it's on tape.
[00:44:56]  It's on tape.
[00:44:57]  You can see me debating him.
[00:44:59]  The source turned out to be a high school syllabus in Central Mill, Michigan, to which they attached a chronology.
[00:45:11]  No, I'm dead serious.
[00:45:13]  It was a high school, I had to check it.
[00:45:16]  Where is this?
[00:45:16]  Where's he getting it from?
[00:45:17]  Where's he going?
[00:45:18]  So, I went to here, and then they said, go to here, or go to here.
[00:45:21]  Turned out to be a high school syllabus.
[00:45:25]  Then I looked for another source.
[00:45:28]  He says something about I forgot exactly.
[00:45:32]  It may have also been something to do with Black September.
[00:45:35]  No, it wasn't Black September.
[00:45:36]  It was the hijacking of a plane.
[00:45:38]  I looked for the source.
[00:45:40]  I looked for the source.
[00:45:41]  And I said, Professor Dershowitz, I have here in front of me the source.
[00:45:46]  I tracked it down.
[00:45:48]  It's www.sonypictures.com.
[00:45:55]  I said, You're a Harvard professor.
[00:45:58]  www.sonypictures.com.
[00:46:02]  You know what he replied?
[00:46:03]  Go watch it.
[00:46:04]  He said, It was a good movie.
[00:46:06]  Was it the movie Black September?
[00:46:09]  Yes, it was the movie, but that Black September was different than the Black September 1970.
[00:46:16]  That was the Olympics Black September.
[00:46:20]  So that's what the web did.
[00:46:23]  You see, the web enabled you, because of those search engines, it enabled you to document, footnote, cite anything, anything with no quality control.
[00:46:41]  I mean, but you had to deal with that.
[00:46:43]  You know, it was the same problem, was it not like two decades before with Joan Peters and her book?
[00:46:49]  And, you know, she had lots of citations, and that was bullcrap.
[00:46:52]  In her case, it's different.
[00:46:54]  She falsified the sources, and it was easy to demonstrate.
[00:47:00]  This with the web, you have a source for everything.
[00:47:05]  You do.
[00:47:06]  You can have any statement you make, you can find a source in the web now for anything.
[00:47:12]  And it's significantly lowered, in my opinion, the scholarly content of books.
[00:47:20]  Because the books would now have, for any statement, it would have like 20 citations because on the web you can find, you know, you can find literally 40, literally, you can find 40,000 websites that say Norman Finkelstein is a Holocaust denier.
[00:47:36]  I know, I'm behind 39,000 of them.
[00:47:40]  It becomes a fact.
[00:47:43]  It becomes a fact.
[00:47:45]  It's been, I want to tell you, in my opinion, and I'm not a part Luddite, but I recognize, I recognize things that do make life easier.
[00:47:57]  It's actually been, in many respects, it's been a complete disaster.
[00:48:01]  Let me just tell you another example with my work, trying to find a job.
[00:48:06]  You go into a room, you meet somebody, you're talking to them.
[00:48:12]  Literally, as you're talking to them, they're Googling your name.
[00:48:17]  They're Googling you as you're talking to them.
[00:48:20]  And then up on the screen comes 40,000 websites, Holocaust, Finkelstein Holocaust denier.
[00:48:27]  What do you do with that?
[00:48:29]  Even an honest administrator, and there are honest administrators, even an honest administrator, are they going to check 40,000 websites to see whether what's being said about me is true?
[00:48:42]  Well, I think that this, that's a good, like, I think this makes sense then to back up a second because, and to talk about like why that lie, the lie that you were a Holocaust denier, would appear on those websites in the first place.
[00:48:56]  And so this comes after, I mean, to the extent that a chronology even matters, like years after like, you know, your critique of the Peters review, you begin to publish more scholarship, including a book called The Show Industry on it comes from a different place.
[00:49:16]  The Holocaust industry.
[00:49:19]  The Holocaust industry.
[00:49:20]  Sorry, I mixed.
[00:49:21]  My dad calls it the show of business.
[00:49:24]  So I've, of course, mixed them up.
[00:49:27]  Are you sure he's not talking about show business, which is our other greatest passion?
[00:49:32]  That was the joke.
[00:49:34]  Aba Abin is he's usually credited as saying there's no business like show of business.
[00:49:39]  Yes, yes.
[00:49:40]  So and so I guess about you started dealing with the ways in which the memory of the Holocaust could be used or abused for political agendas, particularly in the case of Israel.
[00:49:55]  I guess, how does that, how do you start from making an analysis of that to being called a Holocaust denier?
[00:50:03]  Well, there are also many aspects to that question.
[00:50:08]  If you've ever read Mein Kampf, Hitler's Mein Kampf, in general, it's not a compelling piece of work.
[00:50:19]  Surprisingly poorly written, actually.
[00:50:21]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:50:23]  He's not a writer.
[00:50:24]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:50:26]  He was not a good, his control over German language is not good.
[00:50:30]  However, everybody has something to contribute based on their life experience.
[00:50:38]  He had a lot of insight.
[00:50:40]  I'm not saying it was original, but he had a lot of insight on propaganda.
[00:50:47]  And one of the interesting things he had to say was: it's counterintuitive.
[00:50:54]  It's counterintuitive, but the bigger the lie, the more credible it is.
[00:51:02]  The bigger the lie, the more credible it is.
[00:51:06]  The smaller the lie, the less credible it is.
[00:51:11]  What did he mean?
[00:51:13]  If I were to go along or go over to you and say, you know what?
[00:51:19]  I saw your mother and she was smiling and laughing with the rabbi, you would know.
[00:51:32]  To be clear, Norman, in my family, that would be accepted because my father is a rabbi.
[00:51:38]  So, you know, that's just happy home life.
[00:51:41]  Right.
[00:51:42]  As long as you keep the lie small, people think, well, maybe it's true.
[00:51:48]  Maybe it's not true.
[00:51:49]  Who knows?
[00:51:51]  But when you exaggerate it, people would think, that's got to be true because nobody has the effrontery.
[00:52:01]  Nobody has the gall, the audacity to make up something like that unless it were true.
[00:52:08]  It's got to be true because how would anyone say something like that unless it were true?
[00:52:14]  And people thought everybody knew about my family background.
[00:52:20]  It was pretty well known.
[00:52:23]  So if it were alleged that it was a Holocaust denier, it must be true.
[00:52:30]  Because why would anybody say something so insane like that unless there was something to it?
[00:52:37]  During my tenure battle, Alan Derschwitz did the same thing.
[00:52:44]  He was going around saying my late mother was a Nazi collaborator.
[00:52:48]  She was a capo.
[00:52:50]  And you know what else he said?
[00:52:52]  This is honest the truth.
[00:52:53]  You know what else he said?
[00:52:55]  He said, I wrote it.
[00:52:58]  He said, I wrote it.
[00:53:03]  Just look at what he wrote on the website.
[00:53:06]  I wrote that my mother was a Nazi collaborator, a capo.
[00:53:14]  People thought, wow, there's got to be something to it.
[00:53:18]  Would Alan Dershowitz say something so obscene unless it were true?
[00:53:26]  And that was the thing with the Holocaust denier.
[00:53:30]  You say something so outrageous.
[00:53:35]  I used to say to people, when that question came up, I would say, you know, when I spoke and the question came up, I would say, okay, everybody knows, it's well known, my mother was in Majdana concentration camp.
[00:53:53]  My father was in Auschwitz.
[00:53:56]  In fact, my mother was a witness at the trial of the guards in Majdana concentration camp in Dusseldorf in 1979.

=== Questioning The Unthinkable (13:00) ===

[00:54:04]  I accompanied her.
[00:54:07]  So those are indisputable and never, and not disputed.
[00:54:11]  They're not disputable facts.
[00:54:12]  It's not only they're indisputable, nobody will deny them.
[00:54:17]  So I would say to the audience: if it were true that growing up in that family, if it were true, I'm a Holocaust denier, then I must be certifiably insane.
[00:54:36]  That could be the only possible conclusion.
[00:54:39]  Coming from that background, I have to be certifiably insane.
[00:54:44]  I have to be a virgin.
[00:54:46]  I don't know if you guys know or even remember.
[00:54:48]  There was a great chess player, Bobby Fisher.
[00:54:51]  And Bobby Fisher went off the cliff.
[00:54:55]  You know, he became a Holocaust denier, actually.
[00:54:57]  Yeah, an actual denier.
[00:54:59]  But it was clear he was insane.
[00:55:02]  So if you say to me, I'm a Holocaust denier, I must be insane.
[00:55:08]  So I'd say to the audience, well, you just heard me speak for two hours.
[00:55:13]  Does it appear to you that I'm insane?
[00:55:18]  It was breathtaking.
[00:55:19]  I didn't honestly, as you can see, I try to be candid.
[00:55:25]  You know, you asked me about my relationship with Chomsky.
[00:55:27]  I didn't say, oh, yeah, we're best friends and we're best.
[00:55:30]  No, I said, no, we're not.
[00:55:31]  I try to be honest about things.
[00:55:34]  I didn't really care, personally, because it was so ridiculous.
[00:55:41]  I'm not going to sort of like try to prove I'm not a Holocaust denier.
[00:55:47]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:55:48]  How do you prove that?
[00:55:50]  Completely lunatic.
[00:55:53]  However, there is a caveat.
[00:55:55]  I have no doubt to this day, and I'm being literal, I'm not being hyperbolic, I'm not being poetic, I'm being literal.
[00:56:06]  After Professor Dershow had said publicly that my late mother was a Nazi collaborator, I know my mother.
[00:56:15]  She loved me to death too much, you know, the olding Jewish mother.
[00:56:20]  I was the youngest son, you know, the whole deal.
[00:56:23]  However, as much as she loved me and barely let me leave the house for fear that, you know, a brick might fall on my head.
[00:56:36]  If I didn't go down, take the first Amtrak down to Cambridge and I didn't kill the guy, she would not speak to me again.
[00:56:48]  Oh, I'm dead, I'm dead serious.
[00:56:51]  I'm dead serious.
[00:56:53]  I'm deadly serious.
[00:56:57]  When we were in the trial in Dusseldorf, without going into the details, it turned out that at night, when the trial was over, the guards were released, the guards from my downing camp, the defendants, they were released on their own recognizance.
[00:57:19]  Very common in those kinds of trials.
[00:57:21]  They just walked out of the courthouse with us.
[00:57:25]  And one night, I was walking down the street of Dusseldorf after we got out of, after the day my mother gave her testimony.
[00:57:35]  And on my left side was my mother.
[00:57:39]  The right side was one of the guards, the worst guard in my mother's recollection.
[00:57:44]  Her name was Birgitta Birgitta.
[00:57:49]  And I turned, I saw Birgitta.
[00:57:52]  I was just shocked.
[00:57:54]  I was breathless.
[00:57:56]  I couldn't believe what was happening.
[00:58:01]  She's just walking near my mother.
[00:58:06]  I waved for Brigitta to be around 100 paces down from where we were.
[00:58:14]  And I turned to my mother and I said, Mom, do you know who that is?
[00:58:20]  And my mother squinted and her eyes just glew up.
[00:58:26]  Birgita?
[00:58:28]  I said, yeah.
[00:58:30]  I said to my mother, you want me to get her?
[00:58:33]  And my mother just went into a kind of she was transported mentally.
[00:58:43]  She started screaming, get her, get her.
[00:58:46]  They think we're sheep.
[00:58:47]  Get her.
[00:58:51]  Without telling you what followed, what ensued, I know that after what Dershowitz did, my mother would never forgive me if I didn't exact revenge for what was done.
[00:59:09]  And I didn't.
[00:59:13]  I didn't.
[00:59:14]  I got into a big back and forth with Elena Kagan, who now sits in the Supreme Court.
[00:59:22]  Yeah.
[00:59:23]  Because she was at that point the dean of Harvard Law School.
[00:59:28]  And he posted that about my mother on his official Harvard Law School website.
[00:59:35]  So I contacted her and I said, do you have any limits on what you allow on your website?
[00:59:47]  She said, yes, we have limits.
[00:59:49]  They're very broad limits.
[00:59:52]  So I said to her, I have two questions.
[00:59:57]  Question number one, do you have any evidence whatsoever that my mother was a collaborator with the Nazis?
[01:00:05]  She refused to answer that question.
[01:00:08]  So I said then to ask her again, do you have any limits?
[01:00:13]  She said, broad limits.
[01:00:16]  So I said to her, okay, let me ask you a question.
[01:00:21]  Here's my question.
[01:00:24]  If somebody posted on your website, on their website, Harvard Law School website, that your mother was having an affair with the rabbi, would you take it down?
[01:00:40]  Or would you leave it up because of broad limits?
[01:00:45]  Now I asked, what's more disgusting to say your mother is having an affair with a rabbi or to say that my mother during World War II collaborated with the people who exterminated her mother, father, two sisters, and brother.
[01:01:05]  They ended up in gas chambers.
[01:01:07]  And you're saying my mother collaborated with the people who exterminated my family.
[01:01:13]  So she replied through, oh God, my memory.
[01:01:19]  Probably my memory doesn't want to remember.
[01:01:22]  I have all it's all written down.
[01:01:24]  But I don't doubt that.
[01:01:26]  She replied, I don't think we'll have anything more to do with him after what he said about the rabbi, living with the rabbi.
[01:01:35]  That was really all I did.
[01:01:37]  That was all I did.
[01:01:39]  I did nothing, you know.
[01:01:41]  Yesterday, Justice Kagan swore in the new Vice President of the United States.
[01:01:46]  Yeah, Justice Kagan.
[01:01:51]  That's a bitter taste.
[01:02:08]  I mean, why did Alan Dershowitz target you?
[01:02:11]  Alan Dershowitz didn't target me.
[01:02:13]  What happened was after I appeared on The Democracy Now, I remember Amy Goodman.
[01:02:21]  I was friends with her then.
[01:02:22]  I'm not friends with her anymore.
[01:02:24]  But at the time, I was friends with her because we had a mutual friend in common.
[01:02:29]  The investigative journalist, Alan Nairn, probably the most brilliant guy I know.
[01:02:34]  One of the most brilliant.
[01:02:37]  So she was Alan's girlfriend for many years.
[01:02:43]  So I knew her.
[01:02:44]  I knew her before.
[01:02:44]  She was Amy Goodman.
[01:02:45]  I just knew her as Amy.
[01:02:51]  And she called me up afterwards.
[01:02:57]  And she said, and I'm calling her, I remember the words well.
[01:03:01]  She said, Norman, be careful.
[01:03:06]  You're now like red meat to him.
[01:03:11]  He's so, he lost it.
[01:03:15]  He went berserk after what I did in public.
[01:03:18]  Yeah.
[01:03:19]  I mean, for those who haven't seen the interview, we will link it in the description.
[01:03:24]  It's a very, it's a, it's a very well-or not the interview rather, but, but, but.
[01:03:28]  Debate.
[01:03:29]  The debate on Democracy Now between Norman Fegelstein.
[01:03:32]  It has two parts.
[01:03:35]  And you have to really watch both parts.
[01:03:37]  What happened was, in the middle of the second part, I couldn't take it.
[01:03:43]  No, I'm serious.
[01:03:44]  I couldn't.
[01:03:45]  He was just.
[01:03:47]  He was the first time in my life, I really met a pathological liar.
[01:03:56]  It was a very strange experience for me because he kind of had the perfect MO of a lawyer.
[01:04:10]  He absolutely believed every word he was saying, but simultaneously, he knew it was all a lie.
[01:04:25]  So if you want to convince a jury, you have to absolutely believe what you're saying.
[01:04:34]  But if you want to be an effective attorney, you have to retain control over reality.
[01:04:42]  You can't just lapse into your own crazy world.
[01:04:47]  And he was able to do both simultaneously.
[01:04:51]  Totally believe what he was saying, but simultaneously know that what he's saying had no connection to reality.
[01:05:04]  And so he had total control over the real world that's unfolding about him.
[01:05:12]  It was really, it was really, it was diabolical.
[01:05:17]  And I got so nauseous, nauseous being in this company that in the middle of the second half, I took off my earphones.
[01:05:31]  I said, I'm out of here.
[01:05:33]  I'm out of here.
[01:05:34]  I can't take it.
[01:05:36]  And Amy said, get back over there.
[01:05:39]  Put on your earphones.
[01:05:41]  So you'll see, if you watch closely the second half, you'll see that the last half of the second half, I'm not wearing the earphones.
[01:05:50]  It was so creepy.
[01:05:52]  Yeah.
[01:05:53]  It was so creepy to be around this guy.
[01:05:57]  Well, to see someone who can like dissociate that much from reality and then manipulate it with literally no qualms.
[01:06:06]  Yeah.
[01:06:07]  And he had one physical manifestation.
[01:06:15]  If you watch carefully, every time he lies, he gets this tick.
[01:06:21]  No, it's true.
[01:06:23]  It's so classic.
[01:06:24]  He gets this tick.
[01:06:26]  And during the second half of the date, I said, Professor Dershowitz, you're lying again.
[01:06:30]  The tick.
[01:06:32]  The tick.
[01:06:34]  It was creepy.
[01:06:35]  It was creepy.
[01:06:37]  But I never, honestly, I never really, I never really got angry at him because, and you may not like the analogy, but for me, Alan Dershowitz was like Michael Jackson.
[01:06:59]  He is what he is.
[01:07:02]  There's a pathology there.

=== Pathology Of Deflection (15:44) ===

[01:07:05]  There's a definite illness there.
[01:07:08]  Alan Dershowitz effectively killed his first wife.
[01:07:12]  Yeah.
[01:07:12]  And he's carried out.
[01:07:14]  It's been the skeleton in his closet.
[01:07:19]  And there's a pathology there.
[01:07:21]  There's an illness.
[01:07:23]  It was like with Michael Jackson.
[01:07:24]  I never blame Michael Jackson.
[01:07:27]  Michael Jackson is who he is.
[01:07:30]  He had a mental illness.
[01:07:33]  He couldn't control it.
[01:07:35]  And he was, I mean, it was, he was abused.
[01:07:37]  It's pretty well documented.
[01:07:38]  Even whatever it was, it wasn't him.
[01:07:42]  It was everyone who enabled him.
[01:07:45]  It was everybody who knew what he was doing, but wouldn't say, Michael, I'm not supporting you anymore.
[01:07:54]  What you're doing is wrong.
[01:07:57]  Either you get help or I call the police.
[01:08:00]  Nobody would do that.
[01:08:02]  Johnny Cochran was negotiating $15 million settlements with the kids, parents.
[01:08:14]  And that's what a lawyer is supposed to do.
[01:08:18]  No, you stupid fuck.
[01:08:20]  That's not what a lawyer is supposed to do.
[01:08:22]  Aren't you a father?
[01:08:24]  Aren't you a human being?
[01:08:26]  You have children.
[01:08:29]  Why don't you turn to Michael and say, I don't want the money.
[01:08:35]  You have to turn yourself in, or I'm turning you in.
[01:08:39]  You know, that was the problem.
[01:08:41]  All these kids now who are complaining that you were abused by him, hey, folks, I have no sympathy for you at all.
[01:08:49]  You shouldn't be suing the Michael Jackson estate.
[01:08:52]  You should be suing your parents.
[01:08:55]  You should be suing your parents.
[01:08:58]  You're telling me that your parents did not know that there was something fishy here, something awry?
[01:09:04]  Have we really forgotten when he made the thriller album and when they had the song Beat It?
[01:09:10]  And whenever he did beat it, he was ejaculating.
[01:09:16]  Your father didn't know that, your mother didn't know that.
[01:09:18]  Why were they sending him over, your kid, you over at night?
[01:09:24]  My parents wouldn't have done that.
[01:09:26]  You want to stay over at Michael Jackson's?
[01:09:28]  Oh, no, you're not.
[01:09:31]  I would have gone over like that.
[01:09:32]  No, you're not.
[01:09:34]  Smack one, smack two, smack three.
[01:09:37]  And my parents were not averse to smacking.
[01:09:40]  You're not staying over at Michael Jackson's.
[01:09:42]  He's a freak.
[01:09:43]  The parents wanted the money.
[01:09:46]  They wanted the fame.
[01:09:48]  Same thing with Dershowitz.
[01:09:50]  You think they didn't know?
[01:09:52]  They didn't know about him.
[01:09:54]  They call him a civil libertarian.
[01:09:57]  I know his career.
[01:09:58]  I've studied it.
[01:09:59]  I'm serious.
[01:09:59]  When I got into problems with Dershowitz, I sat down and read through the whole record.
[01:10:04]  What's his claim to civil liberties?
[01:10:07]  1970s.
[01:10:08]  He was a great supporter and advocate of pornography.
[01:10:12]  First cases defending I Am Curious Yellow.
[01:10:16]  It was the first pornography case, a movie that came to the United States, a major case.
[01:10:22]  Then he defends Deep Throat.
[01:10:28]  Then when Linda Lovelace sues Harry Reams for abusing her on stage.
[01:10:40]  Who was Harry Reams' lawyer?
[01:10:43]  Who was the lawyer?
[01:10:45]  Alan Dershowitz.
[01:10:46]  Alan Derschwitz.
[01:10:47]  Who was the lawyer for Klaus Van Bulow?
[01:10:50]  Alan Derschowitz.
[01:10:50]  Who's the lawyer for O.J. Simpson?
[01:10:52]  Alan Dershowitz.
[01:10:53]  Who's the lawyer for Mike Tyson?
[01:10:55]  Alan Dershowitz.
[01:10:56]  You fucking Harvard sacks of shit.
[01:10:59]  You didn't see anything there.
[01:11:02]  Nothing occurred to you.
[01:11:05]  Nothing occurred to you until Alan went astray.
[01:11:11]  He defended Trump.
[01:11:13]  Then Martha's Vineyard is very upset.
[01:11:17]  All the woke sacks of shit at Martha's Vineyard.
[01:11:21]  Now they're upset.
[01:11:23]  Nothing else before.
[01:11:25]  Nothing else before.
[01:11:26]  That he was lying through his teeth about Israel for his whole adult life.
[01:11:31]  That he was a main defendant in the cases where Palestinian detainees claimed they were being tortured by Israel.
[01:11:39]  And he was the one that went in the witness stand and said it's not true.
[01:11:43]  Israel doesn't commit torture.
[01:11:46]  That was never a problem for you.
[01:11:48]  That he destroyed my career.
[01:11:51]  Oh, who gives a shit about Finkelstein?
[01:11:53]  He's at his third-rate school.
[01:11:56]  You know, none of that bothered them, only that he ended up supporting Trump.
[01:12:03]  That's the only thing that upsets Martha's Vineyard.
[01:12:07]  I think that that's been like a really interesting lesson from the Trump years: and Dershowitz is like a prime example of exactly what you're saying, where it was like all these people or all these policies coming to light, and suddenly, because they were associated with Trump, they were so offensive, or all these things that crossed the line now.
[01:12:25]  But they, you know, just like you said, Dershowitz has been a fucking piece of shit slime ball his entire career, his entire life.
[01:12:33]  His whole adult life.
[01:12:35]  You know who his other cases are?
[01:12:38]  There was a rabbi Bernard Bergman.
[01:12:41]  Bergman had his nursing home empire.
[01:12:45]  He was a phenomenally rich rabbi.
[01:12:49]  And it turns out the residents in the nursing homes were all being tortured.
[01:12:55]  Who was Bergman's lawyer?
[01:12:57]  Alan Dershowitz.
[01:12:59]  Leona Helmsley, you know her at the Helmsley Hotels?
[01:13:03]  They called her the queen of mean.
[01:13:05]  Yeah.
[01:13:06]  The way she abused all of her help there.
[01:13:09]  She said, taxes.
[01:13:12]  Only little people pay taxes.
[01:13:14]  Who was her lawyer?
[01:13:16]  Alan Dershowitz.
[01:13:17]  Yeah.
[01:13:18]  None of that ever fazed him for the woke sacks of shit on Martha's Vineyard.
[01:13:25]  Only because, and you know, it's the only reason he supported Trump.
[01:13:29]  I know the guy.
[01:13:31]  I know the guy because the charges against him by Virginia Giffrey in the Epstein, they're true.
[01:13:40]  Of course.
[01:13:43]  And he wanted the pardon.
[01:13:47]  He thought that if push comes to shove, wait, hold on for one moment.
[01:13:52]  Hello?
[01:13:52]  Hello?
[01:13:54]  Yeah, I'm doing an interview.
[01:13:55]  I'll call you back when it's over, okay?
[01:13:58]  Okay.
[01:14:00]  He wanted the pardon from Trump.
[01:14:04]  That point.
[01:14:06]  I never put that together, but that actually makes total sense.
[01:14:09]  I think Harvard, my opinion, I mean, I've talked about it with people who are knowledgeable, and there's some disagreement, but I'm confident.
[01:14:16]  Not confident.
[01:14:18]  I still believe, you know, Dershowitz loved that Harvard pedigree.
[01:14:24]  You know, senior most professor, Felix Frankfurter, professor of law at Harvard.
[01:14:29]  And you know, professors.
[01:14:30]  Professors never retire.
[01:14:32]  Professors, you have to drag them out in the box.
[01:14:34]  Yeah, they're like CIA agents in many ways, but that's in one way.
[01:14:39]  So why did Dershowitz leave Harvard?
[01:14:44]  Why did he leave?
[01:14:47]  They claim he retired.
[01:14:48]  No, I don't believe that.
[01:14:50]  He didn't retire.
[01:14:52]  When you're at that stage, first of all, you don't have to do any real teaching.
[01:14:57]  You don't have to do anything.
[01:14:58]  They give you your office.
[01:15:01]  And I think he was forced to retire.
[01:15:06]  Because when you're in Harvard Law School, you know what's coming up, what's coming up, because there's so much pre-trial paperwork.
[01:15:15]  And they knew the Epstein thing was going to come out.
[01:15:19]  So I think they told him to retire.
[01:15:22]  That's my opinion.
[01:15:24]  Well, he facilitated all that money that Epstein donated to the school.
[01:15:28]  And the other thing, too, about Virginia's charges against him, every single other person that it has been sort of not litigated, but investigated that she is accused of doing it outside of one mistaken identity that she had, which she later corrected, has been proven true.
[01:15:45]  And so with Alan Dershowitz, I mean, it's not exactly like she's telling fucking ghost stories over here, you know, talking about Martians or anything.
[01:15:53]  It's a very believable story.
[01:15:54]  And Dershowitz does something that is very smart and very loyally in which he says, produce the video evidence, produce the video evidence, knowing damn well that it's not like CNN can show a video of a child having sex with an adult on prime time or anything, but also that a lot of that evidence is probably locked up.
[01:16:16]  He kept saying, make the charge public and then I'll sue you for libel.
[01:16:26]  And guess what?
[01:16:28]  She did.
[01:16:31]  And what did he do?
[01:16:33]  He tried to get the whole thing dropped.
[01:16:35]  He didn't want to go to court.
[01:16:37]  You said you wanted to go to court.
[01:16:40]  Say it publicly.
[01:16:41]  I want to go to court with you.
[01:16:43]  I want to go to court with you.
[01:16:44]  She did it.
[01:16:46]  And then he tried to prevent the court trial.
[01:16:51]  I don't want to, you know, I'm always on the side of the underdog.
[01:16:58]  That's my nature.
[01:16:59]  I'm always on the side of the underdog.
[01:17:02]  I don't want to get in Dershowitz's case.
[01:17:04]  You know, he's destroyed.
[01:17:06]  Even in Martha's Vineyard, he's no longer welcome.
[01:17:11]  You know, what more suffering can you endure in life than really?
[01:17:18]  Could you imagine the pain, the anguish of not being wanted at Martha's Vineyard?
[01:17:23]  I mean, I mean, in his whatever mind palace he's like, you know, created for himself, like, maybe that is like a psychic wound that is that deep.
[01:17:35]  Maybe, I mean.
[01:17:36]  Actually, I don't believe that because Dershowitz is a complete cynic.
[01:17:41]  If you read his one of his books, he says about professors.
[01:17:46]  He says, but professors, nobody's on earth, no one's on earth is more cowardly than professors, which is absolutely true.
[01:17:55]  It's absolutely true.
[01:17:56]  No backbone, no spine.
[01:17:58]  He has pure contempt for these people at Martha's Vineyard.
[01:18:01]  So I don't really think it's a wound to him.
[01:18:05]  What is a wound is, what is a wound is, look, he basically came from nowhere.
[01:18:13]  He came from Borough Park in Brooklyn, went to, as I've told you before, Monas College.
[01:18:20]  And he had built up this reputation as, the New York Times used to say, the famed civil liberties lawyer.
[01:18:27]  That was always Alan Dershwartz, the famed.
[01:18:31]  And now he was reduced to an object of ridicule.
[01:18:36]  And really, everyone was just making jokes about him.
[01:18:40]  And that must have hurt.
[01:18:42]  That, I think, probably hurt him.
[01:18:45]  Not the Martha's Vineyard people, because he has no respect for them because they're all sexist shit.
[01:18:50]  That's why they're in Martha's Vineyard.
[01:18:52]  Yeah.
[01:18:52]  It's the story in the New York Times about the stuff at Martha's Vineyard that probably hurt him the most.
[01:18:58]  I do think that there's something that you can kind of also extrapolate from this as a matter of principle, though, to what you're talking about in terms of like, you know, shouldn't have Harvard have looked at his record of defending evil pieces of shit and thought about not hiring a guy like that and giving him that platform and that prestige?
[01:19:13]  And that's that like that kind of like lawyer.
[01:19:16]  He always says his standard defense was that's what I'm hired to do.
[01:19:25]  And in a way, in a way, you have to acknowledge, you see, that's one of the problems.
[01:19:32]  It's the nature of our whole legal system.
[01:19:36]  So when Alan Dershowitz was asked about getting Jeffrey Epstein off, he said, I was his lawyer.
[01:19:46]  If I had my way, he said, Epstein wouldn't have served a day in jail.
[01:19:53]  That's my job.
[01:19:55]  That's what I get paid for.
[01:19:58]  And in a way, there was some truth to that.
[01:20:01]  But you see, the problem is that's the problem with the whole legal system.
[01:20:06]  Well, I agree.
[01:20:07]  The point I was going to make was Eric Holder really recently in like a trade publication, the former attorney general, he's somebody who I've interviewed before directly.
[01:20:16]  And he made the case that, like, listen, like, everybody who's getting upset about people having represented corporations and then going into government, like going to work for the Biden administration, if you think that if you're accusing them, if you think that they may have conflicts of interest, then you are assaulting the foundations of the American legal system and you are putting, you know, like our entire legal system at threat, which is, you know, in a true, but not in the way that he means it, because,
[01:20:45]  but I think it's the same principle that's sort of in play here.
[01:20:48]  First of all, let's ask a basic question.
[01:20:52]  I mean, these are the kinds of things that really, they just rub me the wrong way.
[01:20:58]  They rub me the wrong way.
[01:21:00]  They make me very angry.
[01:21:02]  First of all, let's apply that principle.
[01:21:06]  Let's say Dershowitz were Eichmann's lawyer.
[01:21:12]  It wasn't Dr. Servanius.
[01:21:14]  It was Alan Dershowitz as the lawyer.
[01:21:16]  And let's say he did what, according to his profession, he's supposed to do.
[01:21:20]  He cleansed.
[01:21:21]  That's what I'm supposed to do.
[01:21:22]  Okay?
[01:21:23]  Do you think Alan Dershowitz would have said if he got Eichmann off?
[01:21:30]  Do you think he would have said, I'm happy he didn't serve one day in jail?
[01:21:35]  Would he have said that?
[01:21:38]  Would he have said that?
[01:21:41]  It's such a disgusting thing to say.
[01:21:47]  No, I can't stand to hear things like that because they're so foul.
[01:21:54]  They're so foul.
[01:21:55]  I can't live in a world like that.
[01:21:58]  I can't.
[01:21:59]  I'm serious.
[01:22:01]  I'm not trying to be dramatic.
[01:22:02]  I just can't.
[01:22:03]  I had a friend who went through a divorce case.
[01:22:08]  And it was a terrible case.
[01:22:12]  Horrible case.
[01:22:14]  I hate divorce lawyers.
[01:22:17]  I hate the whole system.
[01:22:19]  They were blackmailing him.
[01:22:21]  I don't know if any of you know anything about divorce law.
[01:22:24]  It's the most horrible law.
[01:22:26]  I mean, all the laws sucks, but this is like the most horrible.
[01:22:30]  And what they do in divorce law is in divorce court, they have a moment where they ask, let's say, the spouse, can we look at your husband's tax records?

=== The Whole Judicial System (08:23) ===

[01:22:50]  Yeah, because this is dividing up marital assets, so you have to look at tax records.
[01:22:56]  Now, you, you, you, and you, all four of you know everybody fudges in taxes.
[01:23:01]  It's just, you know, a deduction here, a deduction there.
[01:23:04]  I don't care.
[01:23:05]  Hey, for anybody listening.
[01:23:06]  Yeah, for anybody listening, I don't fudge on my taxes.
[01:23:10]  I give you a tax.
[01:23:10]  Norman, this is a civil service podcast.
[01:23:12]  We're listening exclusively to Outstanding Citizens Podcasts, Norman.
[01:23:16]  I don't think you got the picture.
[01:23:17]  What happens?
[01:23:18]  They say, can you look at line 26?
[01:23:22]  On line 26, it says that your ex-husband, he has a home office.
[01:23:33]  Does he have a home office?
[01:23:36]  So she says, I don't remember any office in our home.
[01:23:42]  You know where it's all going.
[01:23:45]  Right?
[01:23:47]  So I said to the guy, his name was Chetkov.
[01:23:52]  God works in mysterious ways.
[01:23:54]  He was one of the first people to die from COVID.
[01:23:57]  I won't say more.
[01:24:00]  I said to Chetkov, he said to me, if your friend, meaning my friend who is going to the divorce case, if your friend doesn't sign the stipulation, that's the fancy word for the final settlement, he's stupid because he's going to jail.
[01:24:20]  And I said, that's blackmail.
[01:24:26]  He said to me, I just do what's best for my client.
[01:24:31]  That's my job.
[01:24:33]  You know?
[01:24:34]  Like some Gestapo agent putting electrodes on the person they're interrogating.
[01:24:41]  I just do what's my job.
[01:24:45]  You know?
[01:24:47]  That's how I felt with Dershowitz.
[01:24:49]  I just do what's my job.
[01:24:51]  My job is to get him off.
[01:24:53]  It's like that logic taken to its most grotesque possible extreme.
[01:24:57]  So what does that mean?
[01:25:00]  You're happy that Jeffrey Epstein can go on molesting little girls?
[01:25:05]  That's the consequence.
[01:25:07]  Well, that's the way our judicial system works.
[01:25:12]  Fuck you.
[01:25:14]  Take your judicial system and shove it up your fucking ass.
[01:25:18]  No, I can't even stand to hear this stuff.
[01:25:22]  I can't stand.
[01:25:23]  It's like you have no conception.
[01:25:27]  You have no conception of what you're doing.
[01:25:31]  You mean you want to get Jeffrey Epstein off without one day in jail so he can go back to doing what he's doing.
[01:25:42]  And you have no moral qualms, no reservations, no doubts, because I'm just doing what's my job.
[01:25:54]  Fuck you.
[01:25:56]  Fuck your whole legal system, which nauseates me.
[01:26:02]  Every word you ever hear about the legal system, if you've ever gone through it, and I've been arrested many times and spent many dights in jail, every word you read about in your classroom is a lie.
[01:26:18]  Right to a speedy trial?
[01:26:20]  Oh, sure, very speedy.
[01:26:23]  Very speedy trial.
[01:26:25]  After five adjournments and you're paying the lawyer $400 an hour?
[01:26:31]  Oh yeah, speedy trial.
[01:26:33]  Right to defend yourself?
[01:26:35]  Try to defend yourself in court.
[01:26:36]  I've tried.
[01:26:37]  I teach law.
[01:26:39]  I teach international law.
[01:26:40]  I teach Supreme Court law.
[01:26:42]  Try to defend yourself in court.
[01:26:45]  Try.
[01:26:46]  The judge is ready to throttle you.
[01:26:48]  You're defending yourself?
[01:26:51]  You're defending yourself?
[01:26:53]  Habeas corpus, really?
[01:26:55]  Habeas corpus?
[01:26:56]  Oh, yeah, that doesn't exist.
[01:26:57]  No, that's crap as corpus is fake in America now.
[01:27:00]  How come I got arrested twice, and in the end, all the charges were dropped against me?
[01:27:09]  Where is that with habeas corpus?
[01:27:10]  I spent 17 hours in jail.
[01:27:13]  Can you tell me, where does that connect with habeas corpus?
[01:27:17]  Everything is a lie.
[01:27:20]  Everything is a lie.
[01:27:21]  It's just, you have to experience it.
[01:27:26]  I said once, no one should be allowed to be a lawyer.
[01:27:30]  No one should be allowed to be a lawyer until they've gone through one day of the system from the moment you get arrested.
[01:27:38]  Oh, yeah, then the right to attorney.
[01:27:39]  Oh, yeah, you have a right to an attorney.
[01:27:41]  Sure.
[01:27:42]  It happens that the attorney, the public advocate, also has 86 other cases on the same day as yours.
[01:27:50]  So your attorney, if you're lucky, if you're lucky, if you're lucky, the attorney knows your name.
[01:27:57]  Right to an attorney.
[01:27:59]  Such a farce.
[01:28:00]  But when I hear the justifications, the piety, well, if you don't like that, then you want to get rid of our whole legal system.
[01:28:12]  No, Eric Holder, you're a fucking sack of shit.
[01:28:15]  You're always a corporate lawyer.
[01:28:17]  You came in here for a few years in the Obama administration to build up some cachet so that when you get out, you can be a nice influence peddler.
[01:28:28]  Nobody forced you to work for a corporation.
[01:28:31]  You chose to work for a corporation.
[01:28:34]  So why shouldn't it be the case that if you work for a corporation, then you can't be attorney general?
[01:28:40]  I don't see a problem with that.
[01:28:42]  You can do a lot of other things.
[01:28:43]  You're making $10 million a year, literally.
[01:28:46]  So I think you should be disqualified from Attorney General because it's influence peddling for people with power, for people with power.
[01:28:54]  Yeah.
[01:28:55]  Oh, the whole judicial system.
[01:28:57]  Take your fucking, you fucking sack of shit.
[01:29:00]  You were a sack of shit before Obama appointed you.
[01:29:04]  It's a complete fake.
[01:29:06]  A complete fake.
[01:29:07]  So he took in Holder because he knew Holder would do the right thing.
[01:29:11]  Holder would do not to prosecute anyone who was responsible for the meltdown in 2008.
[01:29:18]  He knew Holder would not prosecute anyone.
[01:29:21]  Not prosecute anyone who was responsible for torture under the Bush administration.
[01:29:26]  You got the right guy.
[01:29:28]  One sack of shit hires another sack of shit.
[01:29:31]  And then they get so pious.
[01:29:34]  They get so pious.
[01:29:35]  The whole judicial system would be jeopardized.
[01:29:40]  As if I give a flying fuck about that judicial system being jeopardized.
[01:29:45]  You know, like, oh, I won't sleep that night.
[01:29:50]  Listen, Arnold and Porter attorneys, they need your blood and don't talk to me about lawyers.
[01:30:00]  Well, I was going to say another system, I mean, the system that functions really similarly in a lot of ways.
[01:30:06]  You know, if you want to talk about bureaucrats who don't really question anything and have, you know, careerist motives is academia.
[01:30:15]  I would say academia is very corrupt.
[01:30:19]  I wouldn't say, look, I'm not making any defense of academia because they kept me out.
[01:30:25]  You know, I'm not going to defend a system that wouldn't let me in the classroom to teach.
[01:30:30]  But it's not, the lawyering is, in my opinion, it's of a different order, how our legal system functions.
[01:30:45]  It's a very depressing sight to behold.
[01:30:50]  Academia, the problem is not the corruption.
[01:30:53]  The main problem is the pettiness.
[01:30:56]  You know, the only true thing that Henry Kissinger ever said, and he probably didn't even say it, he probably stole it from someone.
[01:31:04]  He said, in academia, because he was a Harvard professor, the battles are so vicious because the stakes are so small.

=== Rare Display of Contempt (04:18) ===

[01:31:13]  Yeah.
[01:31:15]  You know, it's this battle of the egos of very little people.
[01:31:21]  That's what's so contemptible.
[01:31:24]  I'm going to have to check.
[01:31:25]  What time is it?
[01:31:27]  I have to, I have to go.
[01:31:28]  Well, it has been a pleasure.
[01:31:30]  So, so nice to talk to all of you.
[01:31:33]  And I do hope in the course of time we get to know each other.
[01:31:38]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:31:39]  Yeah, that would be fantastic.
[01:31:41]  Okay.
[01:31:42]  A nice, nice, nice, and have a good night.
[01:31:46]  What a jaw.
[01:32:06]  It's very defined.
[01:32:09]  Very defined.
[01:32:10]  As are the man's thoughts and his words.
[01:32:12]  Oh, there you go.
[01:32:13]  That's nice.
[01:32:15]  Yeah, my God.
[01:32:16]  That was a blow.
[01:32:18]  I have no idea how long that was.
[01:32:19]  I feel like every time we record, even if our episodes are only like an hour long, it takes us two and a half hours.
[01:32:24]  So I'm not sure how long that actually took us.
[01:32:27]  I will say, like, we were, you know, after we wrapped the interview, we were talking off recording.
[01:32:33]  Spoiler alert, we didn't just wrap the interview.
[01:32:36]  We took a little time.
[01:32:39]  And we were talking about how, you know, as you're kind of like, you know, as you're progressing through what Professor Finkelstein is talking about, it becomes very clear, whether he's talking about the law or, you know, there's a lot of other, you know, instances of this.
[01:32:58]  It's all his like anger at the system is very much framed, like his worldview and anger at, I guess, like use, like, you know, useless bureaucrats who just kind of like follow, follow the rules for their own, for their own benefit seems like very much framed by his family's experience and then also echoed by his own experience, which I found very, I don't know.
[01:33:22]  It's, there's something very comforting about seeing such a solid moral fiber, I guess.
[01:33:29]  You know what I mean?
[01:33:30]  Like it's so clear where his, he just has a very, very strong moral code that's very defined.
[01:33:39]  And I really like, much like his jaw.
[01:33:44]  It's rare to see that, I think.
[01:33:46]  Increasingly rare.
[01:33:48]  Yeah.
[01:33:48]  I mean, it's the, he has, he has a real rigorous system of morality that he applies, you know, to like, like whatever discussion, wherever turn our conversation took, he, you know, it's he, like, his mind approaches it in the same systematic, in the same, like, you know, systematic according to his own, you know, moral order in that same systematic way.
[01:34:10]  And I think that's refreshing.
[01:34:13]  Yeah.
[01:34:13]  I mean, it's a special thing.
[01:34:16]  Yeah.
[01:34:18]  I, feel like a lot of that rigidity has sort of been lost in the sands of time probably since Norman came up.
[01:34:25]  Um, but he he certainly has it in spades.
[01:34:28]  My God.
[01:34:28]  You know, it is, it is a guy.
[01:34:31]  It is, it is, you know, no one could accuse Norman Finkelstein of just following orders at any point in his life.
[01:34:37]  I mean, Jesus Christ.
[01:34:39]  Yeah, I think we could all like do well to be a lot more like him and apply things as rigorously, whether it's you know, moral codes or or what have you, um, as Professor Finkelstein does.
[01:34:54]  It's a good virtue, rigor.
[01:34:56]  And to stop doing research on the internet.
[01:35:00]  Yeah, go to the library, get some books.
[01:35:02]  It was so key when he was like, oh, I'm a Luddite.
[01:35:04]  And I was like, have you?
[01:35:05]  Yeah, you haven't listened to us ever.
[01:35:08]  I'm not sure he's a big podcast guy.
[01:35:11]  No, are you, what are you kidding me?
[01:35:12]  He was telling us before about how much he loves Rogan.
[01:35:16]  Oh my God, Finkelstein on Rogan.
[01:35:20]  Whoa.
[01:35:20]  Oh, that just like blew my mind.
[01:35:23]  Yeah, like that.
[01:35:24]  I just, that was a full body thing.
[01:35:25]  All right.
[01:35:27]  Thank you guys.
[01:35:28]  Thank you guys for having me on.

=== Esther Names It! (02:34) ===

[01:35:31]  Thank you, Noah, for coming on.
[01:35:33]  Noah, there is no good way to do this.
[01:35:34]  So I'm going to force you to do it right now.
[01:35:37]  I am doing a Patreon every five days.
[01:35:40]  I will write something.
[01:35:41]  I will have an or I will have an interview written or recorded.
[01:35:45]  But it's basically, yeah, like if you like the kinds of interviews that I've been helping Liz and Brace do and you like the other writing that I do, you can find it at noahwen.com.
[01:35:54]  There's just more information there.
[01:35:56]  And the Patreon itself is called NKUltra, like my initials.
[01:36:00]  It's patreon.com/slash nk ultra.
[01:36:05]  It's a better name.
[01:36:06]  Yeah, it's a better name than the Patreon deserves at this stage, honestly.
[01:36:09]  Nah, I'm kidding.
[01:36:10]  You know, the Patreon's.
[01:36:12]  I was telling him to call the daily Noah.
[01:36:15]  Which is also very funny.
[01:36:15]  NK Ultra is much better.
[01:36:16]  Which is also very funny.
[01:36:18]  I will say he did some very intimate interviews with Dua Lipa, who I hadn't heard of before the interview, and a woman named Dojo Cat, which was fantastic.
[01:36:29]  And various other features.
[01:36:30]  He did them about eight months ago, which is what, yeah, really good stuff.
[01:36:36]  You know, well, we won't get into Albania stuff until later, but it's a lot there.
[01:36:42]  Big country.
[01:36:45]  Anyways, we are coming to you live from occupied northern Macedonia.
[01:36:51]  My name.
[01:36:53]  We should say, I do really want to say real quick before we sign off that we're hoping to have Professor Finkelstein on again.
[01:37:02]  Yes.
[01:37:02]  And so I don't think it's the last time that we'll all be getting together.
[01:37:09]  Saga isn't over.
[01:37:10]  No.
[01:37:10]  No, no, we'll keep it going.
[01:37:12]  So on that note, I'm Liz.
[01:37:16]  My name, what's a really my name is Esther.
[01:37:22]  You know what?
[01:37:23]  You know what?
[01:37:24]  I like that name.
[01:37:25]  Let me, if I may, no one's named Esther anymore.
[01:37:31]  Lots of, lots of lots of women are named Esther.
[01:37:34]  Okay, my name is Brace.
[01:37:36]  I'm Noah.
[01:37:38]  We are, as always, joined by young Chomsky.
[01:37:42]  And this is Truanon.
[01:37:43]  We'll see you next time.
[01:37:44]  Bye.
[01:38:02]  Just Jeffrey Lexter.
[01:38:04]  Come out.
[01:38:05]  Come out.