Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Controversial Professor Norman Finkelstein on Israel, Wars, Identity Politics, and Failures of US Liberalism | Access Granted
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June 01, 2023
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There's something I've noticed about people who launch new programs like this one. Perhaps you've noticed it, too. I've seen it many times over the years. People launch a new show and they announce that this show is going to be devoted to airing voices and viewpoints you don't hear in other places and oftentimes people mean that when they say it. It's very well-intentioned and authentic but what ends up happening is that they end up having people and voices and viewpoints that you can, in fact, hear in many other places, or the only people who end up on the show who might some way be marginalized elsewhere are fully aligned with the viewpoint of that show.

Well, we vowed that we were going to be a show that aired viewpoints and views that aren't available elsewhere. And I was very adamant both to myself and to my colleagues, that we go out of our way to make certain that we make good on that pledge because the inertia is very easy to simply call on otherwise available people because that's the easiest course. The most difficult course is to actually interview people who are genuinely banned or canceled or marginalized, whatever term you prefer. Not people like, say, Dave Chappelle, who has $40 million deals with Netflix and was just invited to host Saturday Night Live a few months ago. He's widely criticized. I wouldn't say he's been canceled. People who are actually canceled are people who are rendered unemployable, or who are not welcome in almost any media space by the expression of controversial political views.

We obviously don't want to just interview people for the sake of interviewing them just because they happen to be reviled. Some people deserve to be reviled. Some people who are reviled or genuinely canceled don't have interesting things to say. We want to confine ourselves to speaking with people who have been relegated to the margins because of their political views, but who are very substantive and thoughtful about how they express those views and the work that goes into forming them, even if they're people whose views are extremely inflammatory.

A few weeks ago, we interviewed one such person, the University of Pennsylvania Law professor, Amy Wax, who has all sorts of quite polarizing and definitely radical views on things like race and how to think about various racial groups. And those views have caused her to be very much at risk of being fired or losing her tenured position at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, despite having among the most impressive academic and scholarly credentials of anyone in the country. She not only graduated from a top school and became a lawyer at Harvard, but also for many years was a neurologist. I believe she went to Harvard Medical School as well. So, when we interviewed Professor Wax, she was as candid and blunt as she typically is. Some of her statements were shocking, even to my audience that generally is receptive to those kinds of views.

But we also, as part of that show, put on Professor Norman Finkelstein, who himself had his own controversy with academic freedom. He was – he is – a scholar who graduated with a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University. He had written two or three very influential and well-regarded, though controversial books, primarily about his critical analysis of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and his advocacy for Palestinian rights. He has also very frequently spoken of what he regards as the tendency for American Jews to self-victimize, and he contrasts it with the actual success and career success, the economic success that Jews in the United States have had, very similar to the way conservatives often claim that African Americans and Latinos or LGBT or Muslims self-victimized as well. You just don't hear it said much about American Jews. Professor Finkelstein says it.

In 2007, when he was a professor at DePaul University, Alan Dershowitz led a very vindictive campaign to have Professor Finkelstein's tenure denied as a result of his criticisms of Israel. Alan Dershowitz is obviously a steadfast defender of Israel. It wasn't so much a claim that Professor Finkelstein’s scholarship was lacking or faulty. I found him to be one of the most rigorous and fastidious scholars I've ever interviewed. He just reads and reads and reads and has an amazing recollection. It was the fact that his views, as expressed in his books, not just being critical of Israel, but especially his argument that American Jews have exploited the Holocaust as an industry to not just extract money but shield Israel from critique and get other benefits, including enormous sums of money in operations from Germany. That is obviously very radical and for a lot of people an offensive thing to say. But as I said, he says it in a way that is very scholarly, based on all kinds of evidence. And so, when Alan Dershowitz succeeded in destroying Norman Finkelstein’s academic career, he's been unemployable ever since. In any academic institution, it had a kind of ripple effect where he was also excluded from almost every major media outlet as well, except for some left-wing media venues where he was welcome – in places like Democracy Now! and a couple of left-wing YouTube shows or podcasts. It is pretty much the only place where he would be heard.

He now has a new book that he wrote in 2022. It is entitled “I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It” – Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture and Academic Freedom. In that book, Professor Finkelstein offers a very emphatic and unflinching critique of left-liberal politics. So, he's critiquing the political faction, the only one left, really, that had still given him a platform in some ways by claiming that leftism in the United States has lost its radicalism, that it no longer risks anything, that it instead is about lending support to the Democratic Party – people like Angela Davis or Judith Butler. And the only courageous things they do are things like changing their pronouns. And he really is not critiquing wokeism or identity politics for its own sake but he's arguing that the obsession with things like the trans debate and other issues of that kind have distracted the left from what used to be their primary focus – things like opposing the U.S. Security State or engage in class politics on behalf of the working class – and instead they're now captive to the Democratic Party and obsessed with these culture war issues that have very little to do with how power is dispersed. And as a result of that critique of the Democratic Party – and not just the Democratic Party but the left wing of it – he's almost become persona non grata among the one faction he had left, hence the name of his book – “I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.” But I've always found him to be a very compelling thinker, somebody who is absolutely worth hearing, even if you don't agree with him. We put him on the program with Professor Wax for him to give his views on the limits of academic freedom, using his experience as somebody who was denied academic freedom and to talk about her case. But as part of that interview, we also conducted a wide-ranging interview with him on many topics. Time constraints prevented us from finishing, so we finished this week taping it.

 

 

We begin by talking about his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict, how it is that, as the son of actual Holocaust survivors – both his parents were actually in German concentration camps, his father in Auschwitz, his mother in several others, and they came to the United States as immigrants, fleeing, when they were liberated from the camps. Why, as a son of Holocaust survivors, who loved both of his parents – it wasn't some act of rebellion or self-hating pathology or anything – he came to these views academically and intellectually? Why did he make a defense of Palestinian rights as a cause? Why did he so vehemently oppose the idea of Jewish self-victimization in U.S. support for Israel? But we also spend a lot of time talking about his critique of the Democratic Party when it comes to the war in Ukraine and militarism and corporatism, and especially their fixation on these culture war issues as a way of distracting from the much harder challenges that the left used to take on of challenging military power, the intelligence agencies, and especially how capital and wealth are distributed in that state. So, I found this interview with him incredibly engaging, at a point, it's very entertaining. He is very aggressive in his rhetoric. He has a lot to say about MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, about political life generally, and its flirtation with the very ideas that he used to one stand again. So, I hope you'll listen to this interview with an open mind. Even if you're somebody who believes in support of Israel, even if you believe someone who is on the side of Israel against the Palestinians, even if you're somebody who sympathizes with the left-liberal view on culture war issues, he always has something to say that makes you think. And it's in that spirit that we offer him tonight as an interview. But also this will be an ongoing segment where we intend to speak with people of this kind, people who have things to say, but who have been genuinely relegated to the margins or the fringes or otherwise silenced by those views in the spirit that we think Rumble represents, that this show represents, of allowing a free flow of information and free inquiry and allowing you as adults to decide what it is that you think.

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
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The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
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There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

 

We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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