I HAVE NOT listened to the three hours plus that this twelve minutes plus have been taken from. I will say of the three in the discussion, the former ACLU executive director, Nadine Strossen, the former scholar, Cornel West and Norman Finkelstein I have the most respect for Finkelstein. I have long disdained Strossen and almost as long had disdain for the parody radicalism of West. Take these examples:
They have a right to spread their lies. Cornel West
She [Nadine Strossen] said you have the right to advocate anti-semitism and you have the right to advocate genocide. Norman Finkelstein summarizing what Strossen said, a summary she doesn't object to.
ANY ALLEGED SCHOLAR such as Cornel West has been, in academia and in the public sphere, saying that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" THE VERY THING WHICH VIOLATES EVERYTHING THAT THE PROFESSION OF SCHOLARSHIP IS ALLEGED TO EXIST TO UPHOLD, THE DISCERNMENT AND THE PROLIFERATION OF KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUTH should have their credentials as a scholar pulled. No one who has made their living as a scholar who can hold that there is any such a thing as "a right to lie" deserves to continue being paid as a scholar, should be employed to be a scholar, should be published as a scholar.* Cornel West's claim discredits him as any kind of scholar, or it would if the world of scholarship - that would be academia and the academic publishing industry - had any intellectual or moral integrity. I could go on to ask what it says about his other professional gig as an ordained minister but will leave that to you to fill in. That a Christian minister could hold that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" is even more outrageous.
It is one of the more grotesque pretenses of this whole thing, "the law" but, also, the modern scholars racket, that we can't discern the difference between lies and the truth, the advocacy of equality and inequality, the difference between equality based democracy and the most extreme kinds of the opposite of that. And that, given that pretense of intellectual and moral incapability, that we can't make those distinctions performative in even the most careful of decisions and actions. That scholars who supposedly spend their professional lives in discerning the most minute of differences and making categorical assignments on that basis get away with pretending the most glaring of real life differences can't only be discerned but held to be definitive in choosing the good over the most evil are some of the biggest fattest liars there are and I would put someone like West in that category, now.
I am far less shocked that a lawyer like Strossen would claim that there was a "right to advocate genocide" or "anti-semitism" or any other kind of bigotry because of all the allegedly scholarly pursuits, the study of, theorizing about and profession of practicing "the law" is a profession of practicing and excusing and holding up lying as a professional responsibility like no other. I have, over the last quarter of a century, ever more been impressed at how much of the legal, the lawyering racket is based in such pretense and willful nonfeasance, not only on the part of lawyers but even more so in the senior branches of the lawyering racket, the judges and most of all the "justices." I think the "civil liberties" lawyers are especially dishonest and disgusting, given their claims to moral stature. I could go into the Premiership of Keir Starmer at this point but I'll try to keep it on this side of the Atlantic.
I will say that only someone who believes, whether rationally or stupidly that they, their friends their families, their loved ones, those they might have the least comma of any care about has NO CHANCE OF BEING THE FOCUS OF MURDEROUS VIOLENCE AGAINST THEM AS INDIVIDUALS OR AS A GROUP could possibly advocate that there is such a thing as a "right to advocate genocide" or any other kind of racist violence which is guaranteed, once it is believed, once it falls on the ears of someone who is both disposed to take it as encouragement and act on it, that someone is going to be attacked and likely someone will be killed. Clearly, Strossen as well as the long line of lawyer-liars of the "civil liberties" industry don't really believe that they and theirs are going to be the recipients of the logical outcome of their pious (in a purely secular sense) professional pose or they would not claim that any such a thing as advocating genocide or forms of bigotry that have and still do lead to violence FOR OTHERS attains the status as "a right." Though I am fully prepared to believe that the professional (and you can certainly include monetary) interests of such lawyers will blind them to the possibility that they are calling down everything from individual violence to genocide against those they may care about and they'll still do it. I don't believe for a second that they really care about the lives and rights of the victims of those whose "rights" to advocate their oppression, violence against them and, in Strossen's chosen examples, their mass murder at the hands of the state all of which - as in Finkelstein's very real life historical example of an infamous spectacle lynching - proves to be a very, entirely probable possibility of the kind of lying that West and Strossen are advocating.
I clearly take Finkelstein's reasoning that it is a desecration of the memory of the victims of those who commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc. very seriously. But it is ever more important than that because such talk has the not only possibility but guarantee that eventually someone, some group, some conspiracy, some region or state or country is going to act out of such lies to repeat that violence, that discrimination, that genocide again and again. The desecration of the dead takes its most severe form in permitting, encouraging what was done to them to be done to others who are still living, now and into the future. Strossen's babble about them being honored by the protection of their killers and those who are inspired by their killers is among the most disgusting things that are current in the blathering, blithering "civic piety" that we are all spoon fed by the perverted notion of civics and, especially by the "civil liberties" industry and the mass media, news but most effectively entertainment which makes billions off of lies and next to nothing off of the rigorous telling of the truth.
About the only encouraging thing I have read about the "civil liberties" groups is that younger, Women and People of Color, for the most part, are fed up with the old lines that "we must protect Nazis, white supremacists, male supremacists, pornographers, etc. "
Despite all of the "never again" talk when it comes to the Nazi holocaust the official, required POV in these matters is that "never again" really means ALWAYS AGAIN. If I'd been on that stage with them, I'd have said that about both Strossen and West West's claim that he had an uncle who was lynched in this context - which I am prepared to believe him on - makes his stand especially putrid and discrediting. If I had had an uncle I had never known who was lynched I certainly would have had the moral integrity to question the received conventional POV on the falsely claimed "right" of those who incited and led the lynch mob to say what they did to encourage his terror-murder, every syllable of their lies and accusations and mere racist incitements, everywhere up to and including, perhaps, them actually putting hands on my uncle to kill him. It might do to claim that while sitting on your ass at your writing table or computer station as you coolly are in absolutely no danger yourself, anticipating how you will gain esteem by your postmortem burning of your uncle on the secular altar of the First Amendment, to me it just makes me think you are detestable. Though no less detestable than a "civil liberties" lawyer who doesn't even have that much ancestral skin in the game.
* Reading this through again, it occurs to me that if Cornel West thinks there's a right to lie in regard to inciting genocide and anti-semitism and, indeed, in the example he claims, inciting a lynching, I wonder if he holds there is a right to lie in the impotent, dusty, generally useless and irrelevant to anyone outside their often very obscure specialties, ream of scholarship. How can a right that he holds so dear when it gets People killed disappear when it's something as trivial as most "scholarship" is? Though I'll bet he'd never admit that such a "right to lie" in that one context, exists.
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