Speaking last Friday with radio host Zev Brenner, renowned Harvard law professor and political activist Alan Dershowitz, who turned 86 last week, announced: “I am no longer a Democrat. I am an independent.”
Among the reasons for his departure from the party, Dershowitz counted Vice President Kamala Harris’s boycott of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress last, and the stuff that passed for political rhetoric at the Chicago convention in August. “I was disgusted at the Democratic National Convention. Absolutely disgusted,” he told Brenner. “They had more anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist people who were speaking, starting with a miserable anti-Zionist bigot (her was referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – DI).
“Then, of course, they had Warren, who is one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate. Then they had Bernie Sanders, one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate,” Dershowitz added.
In March, Dershowitz was asked by Globes reporter Ariel Whitman, “Have you ever felt such extreme antisemitism and anti-Israel hostility?”
He responded with the following torrent which I, for one, am contemplating printing and putting on my fridge:
“Not even close. The closest this comes is to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, with demonstrations at the University of Munich, the University of Berlin, and other universities, in which Jews were attacked, in which classes were broken into and lectures disrupted. Nothing in America has come close to this. Remember, I was a lawyer for many of the protesters during the 1960s and the 1970s, and many of them were very radical but nothing comes close to this. This is essentially equivalent to Nazi youth. The protesters are mostly ignorant. They know nothing about Israel. They know nothing about Hamas. All they know is that they’re joining a demonstration based on intersectionality between oppressors and oppressed, and Jews are the oppressors and Palestinians are the oppressed. These are not pro-Palestine demonstrations. These are anti-Israel, anti-American, and anti-Jewish demonstrations. And they’re getting worse and they’re spreading beyond the campus. There were demonstrations the other day at a film festival and people were asked what river, what sea? They had no idea and they were asked about Hamas, and one of them said, well, Hamas is not in Gaza, only Jews are in Gaza. They were asked about the hostages and they expressed ignorance about that. These are emotional anti-Israel and anti-American demonstrations. Scratch an anti-Israel person and you will get an anti-American person, scratch a little deeper and you will generally get an anti-Jewish person as well.”
He then proclaimed:
“…I’m 85 years old. If I were 25 years old, I wouldn’t be talking to you today, I’d be in Gaza with a gun joining the IDF, but I’m not 25 years old and my pen is mightier than my sword, and so I continue to write and speak, but there are not too many of us in America.”
DERSHOWITZ & TRUMP
In an interview with PBS’s Frontline in July 2018, Dershowitz recalled Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, who ran Senator Joe McCarthy’s campaigns and later groomed the young Donald Trump:
“I grew up hating Roy Cohn, as all liberal Democrats did, anti-McCarthyites did. I met him, against my wishes, when Claus von Bulow hired him to represent his daughter in a challenge to the daughter’s disinheritance. I was representing Claus von Bulow in the criminal case. So, we had to work together, had several meetings with him, never saw him with Donald Trump or even knew about his association with Donald Trump until I read about it in the newspaper.
“But, you know, Ray Cohn was the quintessential fixer. It wasn’t what he knew; it was who he knew. He knew everybody. He knew every judge; he knew every justice. He knew everybody who had any influence on the judiciary, and you hired him to get access.”
Asked how Cohn’s views affected Trump’s, Dershowitz said: “Well, I think they have something in common. Neither are particularly ideological; they’re pragmatic. Roy Cohn didn’t really have any ideology, even anticommunist ideology. He was somebody who rewarded loyalty and punished disloyalty to him. I think there’s a lack of ideology in many respects in President Trump. They want to win; they want to get elected; they want to get re-elected; they want to get their programs through. But I think they are among the two least ideological people I knew.”
