Dershowitz also had a heated encounter with another [CAMERA] conference presenter, Melanie Phillips, later in the day.
The fierce critic of radical Islam and author of Londonistan outlined what she termed “a mass derangement, a complete departure from reason altogether over the issue of Israel.”
She said the trend goes beyond “conventional” explanations like anti-Semitism to being part of “a much wider repudiation of reason, particularly among people on the Left who consider themselves to be progressive,” including on issues such as global warming and the war in Iraq.
Dershowitz objected to her tying the issue of Israel to a set of stances associated with one part of the ideological spectrum, which he contended would alienate the very college students he and others hoped to reach.
“Don’t you think that the worst way to try to get young people to support Israel is to give them a litmus test on global warming?” he asked to applause. “You’re turning Israel into an extreme, rightwing-driven agenda issue, and that’s not Israel.”
Phillips countered, also to applause, that Dershowitz was in essence saying that “right-wing is a synonym for ‘don’t listen to her, don’t go there, she shouldn’t even be on the platform.’ I don’t think that’s an enlightened way to behave. I don’t think it’s helpful.”
She continued, “The suggestion that I can’t possibly influence young Jewish people to have a more sympathetic, helpful attitude towards Israel because they will be so upset by all these terrible right-wing things that I’m saying presupposes that no young person could possibly agree with me. I have to tell Professor Dershowitz, I’m sure he’ll be horrified to learn this, that a very large number of people do.”
And look who is upset about lies - the lying head of J Street:
Dershowitz enumerated several “lies” that he said campus detractors frequently used against Israel, including that it doesn’t want peace, that it is risking US soldiers’ lives in the Middle East and that it has one of the worst human rights records in the world.
“One of the lies that facilitates these lies on college campuses is that J Street is a pro-Israel organization,” he charged. “That has become a tragic, tragic lie on American campuses.”
He seized on the recent revelations that billionaire financier George Soros – whom Dershowitz described as unwilling to support pro-Israel organizations – as shedding doubt on the credibility of the organization’s claim to support Israel.
In response, J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami said that he was “gravely disappointed” with Dershowitz’s “spiral of halftruths and outright lies.”
“These ad hominem attacks hardly befit a professor at Harvard Law School, but the real tragedy here is that his nonsense distracts attention from the dire choices Israel now faces and turns off a whole new generation to pro- Israel activism.”
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