I’ve now listened to half of this and I can say that my esteem for @normfinkelstein has dropped precipitously. 1) he asks incredulously and rhetorically whether anyone can possibly believe right wingers care about suffering and oppression, dismissively concluding they don’t and all ostensible concern for Palestine is really just about antisemitism. I know a number of right wingers, including @Villgecrazylady and @CurtMills reasonably well and I guarantee they are driven by Palestinian suffering more than concern for America first. They are also driven more by genuine concern than many left-wingers who simply use Palestine to virtue signal and are willing to destroy the pro Palestine movement from within in order to do so. 2) Finkelstein posits America first and concern for Palestinian suffering as antithetical values. Actually, the point I’ve heard many right wingers cogently make, including @TuckerCarlson and @RealCandaceO (who I disagree with on many other issues, btw) is that it is automatically detrimental to America to enable and ratify gross human rights violations. So the two are complementary. We can’t advance our values when we are actively destroying them in other parts of the world. 3) apparently, right wingers do not talk about the holocaust enough for Finkelstein’s satisfaction, which he believes evinces inherent antisemitism. Isn’t this the same guy who wrote the book of the Holocaust industry? Maybe it’s time to concentrate on the holocaust happening now, not the one that happened 80 years ago, with many others in between, by the way. And given how the Nazi holocaust has been weaponized to kill Palestinians and ironically commit a new Holocaust, I think it’s reasonable to determine we’ve discussed it enough and the right lessons haven’t been learned 4) Finkelstein warns about handing your enemies their arguments on a silver platter. He did just that in this podcast.
