Love of the Land: Dershowitz Throws Down the Gauntlet to Obama

Dershowitz Throws Down the Gauntlet to Obama

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
23 March '10

Let’s give credit where it’s due. In the past, I’ve written about Alan Dershowitz’s defense of the Obama administration as well as about his recent attack on J Street.

Despite Dershowitz’s outstanding pro-Israel record, I’ve taken him to task for his loyalty to Obama and refusal to call the president out for his decision to downgrade the alliance with Israel. But it looks as if the Harvard Law professor is finally starting to lose patience with the man whose candidacy for the presidency he supported so enthusiastically. In today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Dershowitz stops short of condemning the administration, but he delivered as stark a challenge to the president as one could imagine regarding Iran.

Pulling no punches, Dershowitz instructs Obama that no one remembers that Neville Chamberlain was a successful reformer who not only helped restore Great Britain’s financial stability during the Depression but also passed landmark legislation on unemployment and retirement benefits. Instead, all history remembers is Chamberlain’s “failure to confront Hitler.” It is, he writes pointedly, “Chamberlain’s enduring legacy.” And if Obama does not act to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, anything he achieves on health care or the economy will count for nothing when compared to the impact of a failure on Iran.

“History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world’s first suicide nation,” Dershowitz writes. Like Chamberlain with Hitler, “Mr. Obama will come to symbolize the failure of the West if Iran acquires nuclear weapons on his watch.”

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Love of the Land: Dershowitz Throws Down the Gauntlet to Obama

Love of the Land: How Some Israeli and American Jewish Media Incite Violence

How Some Israeli and American Jewish Media Incite Violence

Alan M. Dershowitz
Hudson New York
09 February '10

(I had to laugh but it seems Prof. Dershowitz has been initiated to our world of media)

It all began with an innocent enough request for an interview about the Goldstone report and my 49 page response to it. (http://www.alandershowitz.com/goldstone.pdf) The Israeli Army radio station asked to interview me. The interview was conducted by an experienced host, Razi Barkai. Unbeknownst to me, Barkai had an agenda. He wanted to get me to say that I thought that Goldstone was a “moser.” He wanted me to use this Hebrew word, whose meaning I did not understand, because in Israel, this obscure theological term has taken on a meaning of its own. According to The Forward, “the term moser entered Israeli political discourse in 1995 in the wake of Rabin’s assassination by radical settler supporter Yigal Amir, when Amir cited some rabbis’ designation of Rabin as a moser as part of his justification for carrying out the murder.” The Forward quoted Michael Karpin, an Israeli journalist and the author of a book on Rabin’s assassination, as follows: “After the assassination, when Amir was interviewed by the police and he mentioned the term moser, people tried to find out what it is…Nobody used it here before the assassination.”

Unfortunately, I was totally unfamiliar with the “inside baseball”—or in this case “inside Israel”—use of this esoteric term.

Several times during the interview, Barkai tried to get me to agree that Goldstone was a moser, a word he pronounced with a thick accent. Since the interview was being conducted in English, I thought he was asking me to agree with him that Goldstone was a “monster.” I would never use the term “monster” since it suggests an inherent, even genetic, flaw in a person, without regard to what he has said or done. I was clear throughout my interview that I believed that Goldstone had exploited his Jewishness to lend illegitimate credibility to a false report.

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Love of the Land: How Some Israeli and American Jewish Media Incite Violence