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Feb. 21, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
45:48
20240221_israel-hamas-war-norman-finkelstein-vs-rabbi-shmul
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Judeo-Dementia and Genocide Claims 00:15:10
Israel says Hamas has just weeks to release all remaining hostages before it launches a deadly assault on the Gaza city of Rafah.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has rejected the Latin Israel negotiations as delusional.
With the Palestinian death toll now exceeding 29,000, pressure on Israel globally is mounting.
Brazil's President Lula said it's not a war in Gaza, but a genocide.
Is he right?
Is it time for Israel to end this war?
We've invited two of our most passionate contributors to debate this, the American Jewish political scientist, Norman Finkelstein, and the author, Rabbi Shmuly.
October 7th, 1,200 Jews were burned to death, slaughtered, and no democracy should allow that, except for one person, Norm Finkelstein.
He's suffering from Judeo-dementia.
It's not Shmueli who suffers dementia.
Rabbi Shmuly seems incapable of processing very basic facts.
Do you think that in principle Hamas should stay in power?
Answer the question.
Allow me to finish.
You're debating stuff.
It's a little drone-on, coma-inducing.
That's how you debate.
You try to put your opponents into slumber, for God's sake.
How about letting me decide whether it's a simple question?
I don't think you have to be a professor to answer the question.
Should Hamas stay in power?
Welcome to both of you.
Let me start, if I may, with you, Norman Finkelstein.
Good to have you back on Uncensored.
Thank you for having me.
We seem to be reaching a point here where something has to give.
Either Israel stops obliterating Gaza and killing so many innocent people in the process, or I'm not sure what the alternative is.
How do you read where we are with this war?
There are many ways to read it.
You can read it politically, you can read it militarily, you can read it strategically, or you can read it from a point of view of human rights and international law, so long as it bears on human rights.
Now, when it comes to the very last consideration, I think it's very clear how we should read it.
Namely, the International Court of Justice, the supreme judicial body in the world, has said that Israel is under two obligations.
Obligation number one is to honor the laws of war in what it's doing in Gaza.
And obligation number two, Israel has to provide humanitarian aid and assistance to the people of Gaza.
Those are its two obligations under international law.
The court also ruled that Israel is plausibly committing genocide.
And there is no evidence whatsoever, zero evidence, that since the court ruling, Israel has changed its tactics or its strategy in Gaza.
So as of now, as we speak, Israel is still, by the conclusion of 15 judges and the International Court of Justice, 15 of the 17 judges, Israel is committing genocide or plausibly committing genocide, and it's not honoring its obligations as they were spelled out by the International Court of Justice.
Okay, Rabbi Shmuly, you tweeted this morning when we booked you for this debate.
You called Norman Finkelstein an anti-Semite.
You said, you have my word that God willing, I will digitally decapitate, digitally disembowel, and digitally destroy him.
Do you think that was the right kind of rhetoric before you try and debate such a serious matter?
First of all, thank you for having me back, Pierce.
It's nice to see you.
And Norm, I hope you don't mind if I call you Norm.
You can please call me Shmuly.
Norman Finkelstein is on the show for only one reason.
If the journalistic idiom that Jews are news is true, because Israel's this big, it gets this much attention, then how much more so Jewish anti-Semites get the brightest headlights.
Norman Finkelstein is the foremost Jewish anti-Semite on planet Earth.
He actually attacked his own parents, whose only crime was to be Jewish.
Their entire family was annihilated in Warsaw.
They're not victims.
They hated Germans and wanted them dead.
He didn't think to himself, maybe my parents wanted the Germans to suffer to stop the war, to break the will of the German people to stop murdering, gassing 10,000 Jews per day.
His hatred of the Jewish people has extended even to his own family.
He calls Israel a satanic state that comes from the boils of hell.
He calls it a vandal state.
He said that the 15 people murdered in the Charlie Hebdo massacres, he has no sympathy for them whatsoever.
But this is the most telling thing of all, and you discussed this the last time.
He said on October 7th, hours after the massacre of 1,200 Jews started, he wrote, it warms every fiber of my soul to see the children of Gaza smiling as their arrogant Jewish supremacists have been humbled.
The stars above in heaven are looking down.
Glory, glory, hallelujah.
Let's just go through this.
400 women shot in the genitals, their breasts cut off as terrorists played with their bloody breasts like a football.
Glory, hallelujah.
Women shot in their genitals, Norm.
Glory!
You should be a televangelist.
Glory, hallelujah.
Children burned to death and beheaded.
Glory, hallelujah.
Come on, come on.
You're a fear person, Pierce.
This is exactly what your friend Douglas Murray said, because he refuses to debate Norman Finkelstein.
He called him a sociopath.
He said Norman Finkelstein is a psychotic.
He's not on your show because he's a serious academic.
Wolfgang Benz, professor of Ellengen, who was one of the foremost German historians of the Holocaust, said the only thing interesting about Norman Finkelstein is that he needs a psychiatrist.
Professor Wolfgang, wait, Professor Wolfgang.
I want to just ask you this, though.
You've spent, you see, it's interesting.
Norman Finkelstein gave a, I thought, a pretty measured argument and response to my first question.
You've gone ad hominem immediately and attacked the man, not the issue and not the question that I asked you, which is to respond to what he was saying, which is a growing feeling around the world, by the way, that Israel is now committing, as he put it, as the courts said, a plausible genocide.
I don't happen to think it is genocide they're doing, but what I do think is happening is that there is a shameful number of innocent women and children being slaughtered on a daily basis, and I don't see what the end game is other than the obliteration of most of Gaza and many people living there.
So to answer that point.
So let me answer your question directly.
First of all, when you quote President Lula of Brazil, he is a criminal who served in jail for corruption.
He has zero credibility.
He also knows nothing about history.
10,000 Jews were gassed a day for four years after the Vonzi conference in January 1942.
To compare that to Gaza is an abomination.
Secondly, Norman Finkelstein is a liar.
The International Court of Justice specifically said that Israel is not committing a genocide.
So when you tell me, why do I go after him ad hominem?
I'm questioning his academic credentials.
He just lied on international TV.
South Africa sued to get the ICJ to declare that Israel's committing a genocide, and they said they're not committing a genocide, and they said they would not stop the Israeli offensive.
That is a straight-out library.
Okay, well, that was right.
If you're going to call him a liar, amongst other things you've called him, I'm going to go back to Norman Finkelstein and get him to respond to that.
Would you like me to respond now?
Yes, please, yeah.
I think it's only reasonable you should, yeah.
Well, I'm not sure what was the purpose to inviting either me or Mr. Shmueli to this program, because obviously we are in two entirely different wavelengths.
Mr. Shmueli is in the business, which is not surprising, of character assassination.
He's in the business of libel.
That's his job, because where he have to confront the facts, he would be in a very difficult situation.
So let me make one clarification.
None of my remarks bear on my personal opinions.
I simply am repeating what the documentary record shows.
Now, according to Mr. Shmuly, I am a liar because, according to Mr. Shmuly, the International Court of Justice explicitly concluded that Israel was not committing a genocide.
Now, I would say that Mr. Shmuley is suffering from what I would call a Judeo-dementia because there is no possibility on Earth that any rational human being could have read the opinion or the ruling rendered by the International Court of Justice after the South Africa application.
and after the oral proceedings.
There is no possibility on earth that any rational person can conclude that the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel was not committing a genocide.
So we now have two difficulties.
Number one, Mr. Shmuley seems to think his purpose to being on the program is to personally attack me, the Latin term ad hominem attacks.
Number two, Rabbi Shmueli seems incapable of processing very basic facts.
If Mr. Shmuley believes that the International Court of Justice ruled explicitly that Israel was not committing genocide, if that's what he truly believes, then I would say he's suffering from some form of Judeo-dementia.
Okay.
Can you bring in?
May I respond?
Yes, you may.
Okay.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you, Pierce.
You know, it's interesting, Pierce, that you and Norm are saying that I went ad hominem.
No, I did not.
I quoted his own words of Jewish anti-Semitism, vitriol, which are so extreme that they're shocking.
I told you, he called his own parents haters of Germans.
Not the Germans hated his parents and annihilated his family.
His parents hated the Germans.
But he just now says, I suffer from Jewish dementia.
Notice, it's not Shmuly who suffers dementia.
It's always Jewish dementia.
It's always Jews.
Norman Finkelstein has now accused Israel of five different genocides.
1982, he accused Israel of genocide in Lebanon.
It went on 2006, 2009, 2015.
Now, this is the fifth.
That means we Jews, I always thought Jews suck at sports and PR.
We suck at genocide because we've attempted it five times, and yet in all the Arab-Israeli wars, Jews and Arabs together, the numbers that have died, including terrorists, are less than 100,000.
Bashar al-Assad next door killed 600,000 in two years.
We Jews ought to go to him and ask him, how do we finally do this?
Because according to Norm, we've tried it for 30 years and we can't do it.
In fact, since 1967, when Gaza came under Israeli control, the population of Gaza grew by 1 million people.
How is that a genocide?
Now, when Norm says that the ICJ said that Israel is committing a genocide, I repeat, Norm, respectfully, you are a fabricator.
They said specifically that Israel has an obligation not to.
South Africa asked for a cessation of hostilities.
They refused.
They repeated that refusal last week.
How you could get on this program and actually fabricate.
Well, I guess I know why, because even your mentors, Chicago professor Peter Nozick, calls your scholarship, quote, trash.
And this is trash because anyone can Google what we're saying.
I'm going to jump in again because again, what you're doing is attacking your other debater here.
He said I suffer from dementia.
Don't you call him out on dementia?
Seriously?
With respect.
With respect, what you're not doing is answering the specific questions.
There are many people.
You know, there are many, many people around the world increasingly concerned about the scale of Israel's response, the appalling death toll of children, the appalling number of children also being orphaned, the appalling number of women being killed, innocent women, and they don't see an end game.
They just see Israel continuing to bomb, bomb, bomb, kill, kill, kill.
But how does this end?
If the next stage is Rafah, which now has six times as many people in it as it did four months ago and is a huge refugee camp, and you're trying to find just a few thousand Hamas amongst over a million and a half people, then you're going to get even more people around the world saying, well, this is a senseless way of conducting war.
Now, what are you saying?
I hear you.
I hear it.
Okay.
In the lifetime of your parents, the greatest statesman of the 20th century, Winston Churchill, fought the greatest evil the world had ever seen.
Now, the Americans used something called a Norden bombsite, and they only bombed during the day, and they lost so many crews as a result.
That's a phenomenal new Apple series called Masters of the Air that shows this.
The British came to the Americans and said, are you guys crazy?
You're sending your pilots to die during the day?
And the Americans said, well, we want to make sure we are not hitting civilians.
We're hitting military sites with this great, it was the second greatest invention after the atomic bomb of the Second War, the Norden bombsite.
That's not what you and the British did.
You bombed at night, indiscriminately, murdering millions of civilians.
So by the definition of Norman Finkelstein, who says that whether you intentionally target civilians, which Israel does not, Israel loses hundreds of soldiers.
Bombing Civilians in Gaza 00:02:30
The whole point of misogynical rabbi.
Wait, wait, wait, no, but I'm asking, but I need to respond to this.
I'm going to ask Norman Finkelstein.
Let me respond to your argument.
Was Britain a terrorist state fighting the Nazis?
Yes or no?
Bible countries.
Indiscriminately.
I'd like to hear his response.
Let me ask Norman that.
What I would say to that, for what it's worth, is that there was huge regret over things like the carpet bombing of Dresden, which led directly to the United States.
Fair enough.
Fair enough to say that.
Cologne, S in Dresden.
We were laid down, by the way.
It was April 1946.
Let's leave that alone.
Let's be finished.
Let's go to Hamburg.
Let me finish.
Led directly to the Geneva Convention to try and prevent these things happening again.
Many people think what's happening now in Gaza is a form of that happening again.
Norma Finkelstein.
No, no, no.
What's happening in Gaza is what the Americans did with a Norden bomb site.
The Israelis are using surgical targeted strikes to the US.
Well, they're killing a lot of Hamas.
Because Hamas lives under their homes.
If Israel.
Rabbi Schmuley, with respect, if Israel's being that precise, why is it killing so many children?
Firstly, I want to know what is the accuracy of your numbers, because I trust Hamas as much as I trust they're complete liars.
Secondly, Hamas, unfortunately, wants these children to die, because the more that die, the more you're going to challenge me on TV.
Israel wants them to live.
Israel withdrew in 2005.
Hamas builds their military installations under these children's homes, under their kindergartens, under their nurseries, under their hospitals.
All right, let me know.
We now found 350 miles of tunnels under children's homes.
That's the size of the race system.
I want to be fair to both sides on time.
Norma Finkelstein, your response.
What would you like me to respond to?
I suppose the analogy with World War II and the fact that indisputably, you know, many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians died in that conflict, and the argument is it was for the greater good of defeating the Nazis.
Do you see any parallel with wanting, and I completely understand Israel's desire, fervent desire, to eliminate Hamas after what they did October the 7th, particularly as Hamas has stated again and again, they want to keep repeating it again and again.
So on that particular argument about when you wage a war against whether it's the Nazis or Hamas, a lot of civilians tragically will get killed in the process, but ultimately that shouldn't stop you going ahead with the war to try and achieve your goal.
Metrics of Destruction and Death 00:03:29
What do you say to that?
What I would say to that is there's a very good reason why this case was brought before the International Court of Justice.
That is, as I'm sure you know, that if you examine what Israel has done in Gaza since October 7th, by virtually every dimension you examine it, the intensity of the bombing, the density of the bombing, the magnitude of destruction of civilian dwellings, civilian infrastructure, the percentage,
the absolute number of children killed, the relative number of children killed to combatants killed, the percentage of women and children versus men killed, the number of medical personnel killed, the number of journalists killed,
the number of UN workers killed, by virtually every dimension that you examine the conflict, by virtually any and every metric that you examine the conflict,
Israel's assault on Gaza, which we should bear in mind is among the most densely populated places on God's earth, and it has been sealed off from humanity since 2006.
As Giora Eiland put it in March 2004, Giora Eiland was the head of the Israel, excuse me, yes, of the Israeli National Security Council.
He described Gaza, and I'm quoting him now, as a huge concentration camp.
That's not me.
That's Giora Eiland, the former head of the Israeli National Security Council.
So, if you put all of these metrics together and you put in and you add in the context, the context being a concentration camp in which half the people are children, 70% are refugees.
If you add in the context and the metrics, there is a very good reason why Israel was brought before the International Court of Justice.
Now, Mr. Shmuley has every right to question the authority of the numbers, the figures, and so forth.
I am a strong believer in the right of Holocaust deniers to make a case before the public because, as John Stuart Mill once put it, we are all fallible and being fallible, we have to always have a place in our minds open to the possibility that we are wrong.
Removing Hamas from Power 00:14:44
So, like Holocaust deniers, I do believe that Rabbi Mr. Shmuley should have the right to speak.
However, granting that right, he has a very tall order.
If a Holocaust denier wants to deny the Nazi Holocaust, he or she has to refute a vast corpus of scholarship attesting to the reality of the Nazi Holocaust.
In the same way, Rabbi Shmuley, if he wants to deny that a plausible case for genocide can be made in Gaza, he has to refute a vast body of documentation.
And that documentation ran as it was presented by the South African application.
It ran to 84 single-space pages with literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of footnotes.
Now, that's the first hurdle.
Allow me to allow you to finish.
No, no, no.
Allow me to finish.
You're debating stuff.
That's how you debate.
You try to put your opponents into slumber.
For God's sake, you made your point.
It's time for me to respond.
That's a dialogue.
No, I'm not dominating.
Like you did with Alan Dershowitz, and you dominated.
You took three quarters of the time.
I won't allow it.
Now, let me respond.
First of all, Pierce, I'm glad that Norm has at least had the intellectual honesty to concede the first point.
But the ICJ, the Judas, never ruled against Israel.
Now notice he's saying that South Africa brought the case.
They lost the case.
First point.
Because I've been attacking his credibility.
For you to say, Pierce, I'm attacking him ad hominem, his personality.
I'm not.
The question is whether this man is a scholar or not.
He has no tenure.
He was denied tenure at DePaul University.
He is only known because he's a Jewish anti-Semite.
Now, number two, this is the fifth time he accused Israel of genocide.
He started in 1982 in Lebanon.
Now, what does genocide mean?
It was coined by a Holocaust survivor in 1947 named Rafael Lemkin.
Genno is an ethnicity.
Side means murder.
It is the murder of an ethnicity.
Norm needs to make the case that Israel is slaughtering Palestinians because they're Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims.
Well, then how does Israel have 1.9 million totally safe Israeli citizens who vote in the Knesset, an Israeli Arab judge who put an Israeli, sorry, an Israeli Arab judge who put an Israeli Jewish president in jail for rape, by the way?
Why is that that none of the Israeli Arabs have risen up to stop this genocide?
Because it has nothing to do with the US.
Let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.
It has to do with a date called October 7th.
Let me ask you this.
1,200 Jews were shot in the genitals, burned to death, slaughtered, and no democracy should allow that, except for one person, Norm Finkelstein.
No, no.
Because he has an irrational hatred of Jews.
Rabbi Schmoly, with respect, Norman Finkelstein is not the only person seriously concerned about what's happening in terms of Israel's.
Genocide?
Using the word genital.
I would say the majority of the world right now is concerned about what's going on in Gaza.
Is President Biden?
And believes that Israel's response is now becoming wholly disproportionate.
And again, I ask you this question.
Netanyahu, incredibly unpopular back home in Israel.
You know, probably wouldn't even be prime minister now if it hadn't been for this war, given the scale of the social unrest and protests over his attempt to thwart the power of the Supreme Court.
So you've got a deeply unpopular prime minister, particularly with Israeli's own people, right, waging a war, and many people cynically think he's just going to keep doing this because it buys him more time.
But if I could ask him, and I can't, because he won't come on again on this program to date, I would simply say, when does this end?
How many people are you prepared to kill on the other side before you declare mission accomplished?
And why would you think, by the way, that killing so many innocent people in Gaza and destroying so much of the homes in Gaza, north and south, why would you think that that would end radicalization of people who may be sympathetic to Hamas?
Why would it not have the opposite effect?
When I saw you face to face in your studio in London a few months ago, I told you I think that you've been fair on this conflict.
So I respect your question and I want to take it seriously.
First of all, Netanyahu's unpopularity means nothing.
Churchill destroyed the Nazis, saved Western civilization, and immediately was kicked out by the British.
He actually lost the election, as you well know.
So that means nothing.
It doesn't mean Churchill wasn't a great man.
It means that it means nothing.
Number two, let's say, for example, look where I am.
I'm in the beauty of South Florida.
This is where I grew up.
Imagine that 6 million Jews living in Israel say, you know what?
We've had it.
We've tried this state 75 years.
The whole world hates us.
They want to kill us.
We have people like Norman Finkelstein calling us satanic, saying that we come from a boil of hell.
We have Norman Finkelstein saying that he cheered, hallelujah, when the women were shot in the genitals and raped.
So we're going to move to South Florida.
They do a deal with Biden.
Biden says, you know, it's cheaper for us to just move you guys to beautiful Florida than it is to give Israel.
And Israel disappears, God forbid, in a very humanitarian way.
No one dies.
Now you're left with no Israel.
Will that change for one moment, Pierce, all of the women in Gaza now under Hamas, the teenage girls who have tires put around their heads who are burned to death by their brothers because they have sex before marriage?
Will it change the fact that LGBTQ Palestinians have their genitals cut off and are castrated?
Will it change the fact that any political protests on the part of Palestinians, no Israel anymore, against Hamas, have some shot 20 or 30 at a time by hooded terrorists?
Will it change the fact that Palestinian authority officials are thrown off rooftops by Hamas, who did this in 2006 in a coup?
Will it change the fact that there isn't one Arab democracy?
Will it change the fact that in Syria, 600,000 Arabs, 600,000, Norman Finkelstein doesn't give a damn about them, were killed between 2011 and 2014.
Israel is not the problem.
Arab dictatorships, tyranny.
Would it change the fact that Ismail Hania is worth $4 billion?
Would it change the fact that Khaled Mashallah is worth $7 billion?
It would change nothing.
If Israel left the Middle East, the Arab world is still in crisis, killing teenagers, killing LGBTQ, destroying democracy, all dictatorships, kleptocracy.
You have Mahmoud Abbas, who's a billionaire.
You have Yasser Arafat, who not only died on the Forbes, 400 richest men in the world, which is shocking, but his wife still lives in a penthouse paid for by the Palestinians in Paris.
And one final thing.
When Norman Finkelstein fabricates and says about the terrible plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, they were given about $100 billion over the past 18 years.
That is triple per capita what the Marshall Plan was given to Europeans.
Look what they did with it, Germany, France, England.
And do you know what the Palestinians did with it?
With what Hamas?
They built tunnels with giant television screens where the Hamas Hitler, Yichya Ayash, is living now with his family.
They didn't build one bomb shelter.
Let me go to Norman Finkelstein.
Norman, the question I would have for you is this.
Do you accept that Hamas need to be removed from power in Gaza?
I would say that the preeminent...
Excuse me.
I would say that the preeminent question at the present moment ought to be, do I accept the fact that the Israeli government ought to be removed from power?
Well, hang on, that's a different question.
No, with respect, that's a different question.
I can ask you that separately.
The specific question I have for you, particularly given what you said after October the 7th, is simply, should Hamas remain in power?
And should Hamas remain in power?
I think that the Palestinian people should be able to determine their own future and determine their leadership.
That's just the basic democratic.
What is your personal opinion?
I don't decide what people should do with their leadership.
I can do an interview, thank you.
The problem I have with that response is you're very quick to level the charge of genocide at Israel.
And many people would agree with you, many wouldn't.
But you're not so keen to be held to account for your view about Hamas.
And I don't see how anyone, after what they did on October the 7th, could possibly conclude they should stay in power.
Piers, I don't want to have to redo the interviews you did with me.
I was very clear about my opinion when you asked about October 7th.
I was also very clear as to what I believe Hamas should or shouldn't do regarding its leadership or its current power in Gaza.
I've not tried to evade any of your concerns.
Okay, for those who are not in the middle of the past, for those who may not have seen our previous conversations, I simply ask again.
That's fine.
Here's a simple question.
Should Hamas stay in power?
Because Israel's whole argument is that they have to keep going with this warfare to eradicate Hamas.
And my question for you is: do you think that in principle Hamas should stay in power?
Well, Piers, I'm going to answer you because I never fear the truth, and I'm not going to try to evade your question.
Let's take a simple metric.
We'll take the question of children killed.
Answer the question: Should Hamas stay in power or these are answers to different questions.
Just answer the question, Norm, for God's sake.
You said you don't want to evade the truth.
Should Hamas stay in power or not?
Answer the question.
Piers, either you're going to moderate the program or there's honestly no point in continuing.
I do think it's a very simple question.
I have to say, I do think it's a very simple question.
And it goes right to the heart.
No, it's not.
It goes right to the heart of Israel's argument about why they are continuing to execute the war.
Piers, Piers, how about letting me decide whether it's a simple question?
How about letting me decide?
Well, either Hamas stays in power or it doesn't, doesn't it?
I don't think you have to be a professor to answer the question.
Piers, there's a difference between whether or not Hamas stays in power and whether Hamas should be in power.
So let me get into the stays in power is a military question.
Should be in power.
Well, let's look at it.
I say if Hamas, which is responsible for the killings of 36 children on October 7th, should not stay in power, then you must certainly agree, Piers, and I'm going to kindly ask you to please answer me.
You must surely agree then that Israel, which has killed now approximately 12,000 children and is plausibly accused of having killed them in the course of a genocide.
Now I'm going to ask you, Piers, to take a look at the power of the power of the power.
What is your source for 12,000 children?
What's the source?
What is your source, please?
What's your source?
What is the Palestinian Health Authority run by Hamas?
We know that.
Run by Hamas.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, no, Brother Schuli, you don't interrupt.
This is actually an important question and an important moment in the debate.
Continue, Norman Finkelstein.
So I have to ask you, Piers, if you believe that Hamas should not stay in power because it killed 36 children on October 7th,
then you must surely agree several times, thousand times more emphatically that the Israeli government should not be in power because it killed 12,000 children,
not as collateral damage, but plausibly, according to 15 of the 17 judges on the highest judicial body.
Okay, you said that point.
Okay, here's my answer.
Plausibly and a genocide.
Here's my answer.
You haven't so far answered my question.
If you do, I will give you an emphatic answer to yours.
So let me just ask again, should Hamas stay in power?
My answer is, if we apply one standard across the board.
No, that's not an answer.
If we apply one standard across the board, I am perfectly happy to say Hamas should be removed from power if you agree that several thousand times more distinctively the Israeli government should be removed from power.
Well, I think there are two completely separate questions, and I would answer it like this.
No, they're not.
Historian Credibility and Temptation 00:07:36
Well, I'm going to explain to you why.
I'm going to explain why I believe they are.
Because Israel's response was a response to an appalling terror attack.
I believed after October the 7th, Hamas rescinded any right to continue having any power over Gaza and should be removed.
The only debate would then be how would that best be done?
And I have serious question marks about Israel's response.
In response to whether the current...
Hang on, hang on.
Let me finish my sentence, please.
And in response to your question, Norman Finkelstein, about Israel's government, no, I do not believe they should continue, actually.
I think this government has lost the faith of its people.
I think Netanyahu in particular has lost all confidence and popularity with the Israeli people who blame him for what happened on October the 7th.
And so, no, I don't think they should stay in power, actually.
I think both countries should have new leadership and new governments.
That's my answer.
But again, I'm just coming back to you.
Hang on.
Hang on.
I don't equivocate either with the other.
You can divorce the two questions.
You can say, after October the 7th, should Hamas stay in power, yes or no?
And then you can have a question mark about whether this current Israel government should stay in power because of the way they responded.
They're two different questions.
But you, Norman Finkelstein, so far...
Well, hang on.
Wait a second, Rabbi School.
I just want to get one answer out of Norman Finkelstein as to whether you will answer my question about whether Hamas should stay in power.
Pierce, if you use a single standard across the board, then I accept your conclusion.
So long as you're being morally as well as legally consistent, I have personally no problem with that conclusion.
However, I would want to say, Pierce, and I'm trying to be honest, but also intellectually consistent in this matter.
You said that Hamas disqualified itself from leadership because of the atrocity that was committed or atrocities that were committed October 7th.
Now, if you agree with the head of the National Security Council of Israel at the time in 2004, that Hamas is a huge concentration camp.
I'm quoting him now.
Gaza, you mean?
Would you also agree, would you also agree that October 7th was a reaction to confining one million children in a concentration camp?
Okay, Pierce, he's not in the middle of the day.
I want to see.
He never will.
But Pierce, I have to say, let me bring in Rabbi Smith.
Because he's been waiting patiently.
More patiently than you know.
Every time, every time...
There's one main reason I wanted to do this debate.
And Pierce, thank you for having me.
I'll tell you what it is.
There were six million Jews who were turned into ash and lampshades and shot and they're in graves.
They have no voice.
Their only tomb is our memory.
Norman Finkelstein is a Holocaust denier.
He has said that David Irving, the number one Holocaust denier on earth, who Britain despises to their credit, who lost huge against Deborah Lipstadt, he said he's a great historian.
Every time he calls Gaza a concentration camp, as if there's gas chambers there, as if there's SS Einsatzgruppen going around shooting Balestinians, he denies the whole.
He is a Holocaustanizer.
Now, why does this matter?
Because why won't Norman Finkelstein answer your simple question about why whether Hamas should stay in power?
And you're going to, and don't tell me this is ad hominem.
In 2016, he gave an interview where he said that he essentially makes his income through giving speeches.
He said that he gave 40 slips to his accountant for speeches against Israel.
That doesn't mean he doesn't name what he said.
Wait, one second, hold on, hold on.
He doesn't complain, he doesn't matter.
But it was reduced to four.
No, no, one second.
Hold on.
If he attacks Hamas, he said that his speeches went from 40 to only four.
He'll be down to zero.
Now, here's the point.
You're right.
It doesn't mean that.
But when you pressed him in your first debate, and you did so admirably, Pierce, ours, Shani Luke's parents stayed at my house for the past 10 days.
She was the woman who, within an hour or two of the attack, a German Israeli woman, was put dead, shot in the head, stripped naked.
I maintained that she was the most desecrated woman in world history in terms of how many people saw her naked body.
As that was happening, Norman Finkelstein wrote, it warms every fiber of my soul about these scenes in Gaza.
And glory, glory, hallelujah.
Now, to your credit, you pressed him on this in the first interview.
And you know what he said?
He said, I had no idea.
I only thought 50 Jews had died.
I didn't know 1,200.
So two questions.
Number one, Norman Finkelstein, how many Jews need to die before you are no longer celebrating their death and saying, glory, hallelujah.
Is it 51?
Is it 500?
You know, one black man was murdered in Minnesota.
His name was George Floyd, and tens of millions of people marched against his murder.
God bless them.
But for you, it would have had, we need 49 other dead black men before they start marching.
Number one.
Number two, what you're confessing, Norm, is that you are a joke of a historian.
Because your defense to Piers Morgan was, I didn't know.
I have three people who do my Twitter.
I gave it to them.
By the way, I'd love to know even one name of those three.
I dare you to mention their names because I'd like to question them because I believe you're fabricating that as well.
I think you wrote this yourself.
You did not give it to three people who worked for you on Twitter.
But here's my question.
You claim to be a serious historian.
What kind of serious historian, before they even know the facts, says, I love seeing dead Jews.
You admit you knew nothing.
You say that you had no knowledge and you were saying, glory, hallelujah.
May more Jewish women be shot in the vagina and have their breasts cut off.
Now, later when Piers Morgan said to you, hey, Norm, at least take it off.
At least delete it.
You now admit 1,200 died.
And you know what you said?
It's part of the historical record.
So you are a fraudulent historian by your own admission.
You said this fraud that you are thrilled that Jews were shot in the vagina, women were gang raped, is part of history.
But it's a false history.
So to be fair, Pierce, when you tell me ad hominem, come on.
The man either has credibility or he has no credibility.
There's no tenure.
Let me give the final words to Norman Finkelstein.
The issue before us is Gaza.
It's not me.
Now, there is a temptation, obviously, on my part to defend my professional honor and my personal honor, but I am going to forego that.
I'm going to withstand that temptation and end on the note that this conversation began and was supposed to continue.
And so I would say that if you are indicting me, then you are also indicting the sanity of the 15 judges on the International Court of Justice, including, quite surprising to me, including the American judge.
ICJ Judges and Genocide Findings 00:02:15
Now, if you examine the proceedings closely, which I did, each judge had the option of including in their decision what's called a declaration.
And the German judge did exercise that option and wrote a five-page declaration in which he distanced himself from certain of the findings.
However, it was very noticeable that Israel's main ally in the world, the judge from that country, the American judge, did not issue a declaration, which is to say, she went along with the conclusion without qualification, without qualification, that Israel is plausibly committing genocide.
Now, I would want to end on the note, as you know, Pierce, genocide is the crime of crimes under international law.
To be plausibly, plausibly guilty of the crime of genocide, it's a very, very high standard, a very high standard.
And it seems to me, require a very high degree of dementia to deny that crimes on a vast scale are occurring in Gaza.
Okay.
Thank you.
We're going to leave it there.
That is a blood libel.
That is a blood libel.
It's a lie.
The ICJ never said that.
That is pure blood libel.
Norm, you may as well say that we Jews mix blood of Christian children into our matzahs, poison the wells of Europe.
You are guilty of a blood libel.
The ICJ never said that they ruled in Israel's favor.
You, sir, are a liar, and you are guilty of a libel against your own people and against your own parents.
Your parents were not haters.
They were victims.
They did not hate Germans.
The Germans hated them and tried to murder your parents' memory and apology.
We're going to leave it there.
Norma Finkelstein, Rabbi Schmurli, thank you both very much.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Pierce.
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