I want to end my 2023 blogging activity by posting a quick story about one of my truly pet hates, who happens to be the only faculty member in the 387-year history of Harvard University to resign, which is a polite way that the Harvard Corporation Board fires someone for behaving like a complete asshole, which is the only way to describe how Alan Dershowitz has behaved since he started bringing his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein around to the Cambridge campus after he defended Epstein for his sexual proclivities back in 2008.
Dershowitz has since gone on to burnish his career and legal work by representing Donald Trump in the first impeachment, even though Trump turned down an offer by Dershowitz to be his go-to lawyer for the paltry fee of one million bucks. Meanwhile, Dershowitz was later fined $12,000 by a judge for his role in a phony lawsuit filed by another Trump shithead, Kari Lake, who claimed her 2022 election loss for Governor was just another instance of Democrats stealing votes.
Having spent the last several years talking in front of right-wing, pro-Israel groups, Dershowitz has now taken on a new target, none other than the President of his former employer, Harvard’s President Claudine Gay. Jumping on the dump-Gay bandwagon, Dershowitz has released a statement calling for Gay to resign in order to restore Harvard to its position as a ‘great research university rather than a place of ‘propaganda’ which it has become today.
Ever since John F. Kennedy brought a group of Harvard faculty and alumni down to D.C. to help him plan and justify the Viet Nam war, I have never been terribly impressed with the so-called ‘commitment to academic excellence’ which Harvard claims to promote. But for Alan Dershowitz to publicly denounce Harvard for being a fount of disinformation is far worse than the pot simply calling the kettle black.
I have no problem with even a scumbag like Jeffrey Epstein or another scumbag like Donald Trump availing themselves of legal representation when they are charged with such crimes as trying to overthrow a democratically elected government or kidnapping some teenage girls from Honduras and bringing them into the United States to give blow jobs to Jeffrey Epstein’s friends.
But the idea that Dershowitz should now be passing public judgement on the institution which had no problem keeping him on the payroll while he collected nice emoluments from pieces of shit like Epstein and Trump should at least give Dershowitz some pause before he shoots off his mouth.
Alan Dershowitz likes to recount how he started off as an Orthodox Jew in a religious family and community in Brooklyn, New York. He uses this narrative to explain and justify his defense both of the State of Israel and of monsters like Jeffrey Epstein who was also born to observant Jewish parents living in a Brooklyn neighborhood known as Sea Gate.
These early experiences made Dershowitz sensitive to the legal problems of the ‘underdog,’ hence his defense of clients unjustly accused or convicted of a serious crime.
Funny, but all of these poor bastards defended by Dershowitz somehow always seemed to have lots of money to pay Alan’s legal fees. Which is why the most accurate description of Dershowitz is not that of being an internationally known legal champion for the underdog, but being what Grandpa would call a ‘grubbe Yid.’ (read: Jewish person who will do anything, no matter how disgusting or ill-behaved for cash.)
I happen to believe, and I have said so in print, that Claudine Gay’s performance in front of that bunch of GOP rednecks led by Elise Stefanik was ill-timed, ill-prepared and ill-advised. And the fact that Harvard is taking a public-relations pasting from everyone who considers themselves to be experts on academic freedom, or free speech, or anything else having to do with what happens in a college classroom is no reason to accord a shitass like Alan Dershowitz any notice on any social media space.
Here’s wishing everyone a happy, safe, and healthy 2024, a hope I’ll even extend to Alan Dershowitz, particularly if he will just shut the fuck up and go away.
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