How to Respond to Lies and Misinformation About Israel: The "Jewish Anti-Zionist Professor"

Part 2

Part 1 here

The following is Part 2 of my series “How to Respond to Lies and Misinformation About Israel.” The purpose of this project is to provide the language needed to combat lies from various influencers who have turned bashing Israel into their entire identity.

For my next installment, I bring you Dr.

Maura Finkelstein

, whom I have already skewered in a previous post. The purpose of including her in this series is because I believe that her words and her words alone require scrutiny, rather than simply relying on a third party source like the New York Times to package her. She’s a primary example of how one attempts to play the Jew card (and fails spectacularly) in her regurgitation of anti-Israel tropes.

To summarize: Dr. Finkelstein (I’ll call her Maura from here on out) got fired from her professorship at Muhlenberg College after voicing pro-Hamas vitriol both on social media and to her students. She’s continuing her advocacy in her unemployment by joining the podcasts of other angry anti-Zionists like

Katie Halper

, who got fired from her job at The Hill for similar hateful speech. They both would like us to believe that they lost their positions in media and academia due to the evil Zionists having a bias against them and not because of anything they did or said that goes against their former organizations’ codes of conduct.

Here is

Katie Halper

’s description of the podcast episode:

Maura Finkelstein is a tenured Jewish anthropology professor at Muhlenberg college (sic). Or at least she was a tenured professor until she was fired over speaking out about Gaza and posting a tweet. At Columbia University, non-tenured Israeli-American (sic) business professor

Shai Davidai

gets to keep his job despite the fact that there are 50 complaints of harassment filed against him. He did get temporarily banned from campus but that wasn’t for harassing students. It was for harassing administrators.

Please keep in mind that this podcast episode is completely and totally about Maura, not Shai. Can I ask why at least half of the video description talks about a completely unrelated character to Maura?¹

I am going to show you how Maura’s arguments fall apart quickly with some basic scrutiny. Let’s take it from the top:

“Over the past few decades with the War on Terror and the way in which our media landscape has circulated and re-circulated ‘the Arab as terrorist,’ the way we have totally normalized Islamophobia in this country.”

Here’s the proper historical context for what Maura refers to here: Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, which sparked two decades-long overseas wars, one of which against a country that had nothing to do with the attacks. Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, which provoked a response from a nation literally sharing their border. While each incident occurred more than two decades apart, they had some similarities. A radical Islamist organization violently attacked a western nation for the express purpose of inflicting terror on the targeted population. Of course, the events of 9/11 and Oct 7th are hardly the only crimes against humanity that Hamas, al-Qaeda, and other Islamist terror groups (i.e. Boko Haram) have perpetrated—just the most publicized. Speaking out against the actions of al-Qaeda and Hamas is not “Islamophobic” any more than speaking out against Trump or Biden is anti-American.

“We’ve so dehumanized Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, that we can be watching a livestreamed genocide, and our leaders, whether our political or university leaders, have so dehumanized these communities that it’s, you know, easy to open up the news today and see an article talking about how Israeli soldiers are dealing with the trauma of having genocided Palestinians and we need to worry about their mental health.”

She’s repeats “dehumanization” as her main grievance, and then abruptly transitions to sarcasm about how she thinks Israel is getting preferential treatment in the press. The reference to IDF soldiers’ trauma is a non-sequitur, and a lame one at that, because it’s actually a serious issue. So her thought pattern is muddled, and the reason it’s muddled is because her entire understanding of this conflict comes from social media, specifically from the livestream of #MrFAFO.

If Maura thinks that “dehumanization” is the problem, then why not seek to humanize the Gazans by telling us why we should care? I mean, I can think of a few key issues:

• Their government’s policy of throwing gays off of rooftops.

• The challenges that women and girls experience in both the public and private spheres.

• The fact that there hasn’t been a democratic election in Gaza since the early 2000s, when Israeli occupation there ended.

Could it be that Maura 1) doesn’t really know any Palestinians, just how they’ve been packaged by the western media; 2) she’s never actually visited Gaza or the West Bank for an extended period, and thus can’t comment on the conditions there; or 3) all of the above?

The reason that people are afraid of responding to useful idiots like Maura is because they do not want to be viewed as anti-Muslim, and definitely not as anti-Palestinian (which is obviously way worse). People like Maura like to fancy themselves as “pro-Palestinian” rather than pro-Hamas. They are also proudly “anti-Zionist,” which is an apt term to describe them, but it doesn’t make them virtuous—just idiotic. They also claim to be against “cultural appropriation,” yet they wear kaffiyehs everywhere. I guess if they’re the ones doing the appropriating of PLO scarf culture, then it’s fine.

Maura is a prime example of what happens when one chooses to martyr herself—in her case by losing her employment, in her field probably permanently—at the altar of a conflict she shows zero understanding of. That is why her thought process is muddled, confused, and not grounded in any real facts. She believes she’s acting out of a moral imperative to show solidarity with Palestinians who live at the mercy of their Zionist oppressors. But I can predict with 100% certainty that that no actual Palestinians care one iota about her sacrifice—and why should they?

“Dehumanization” has become the new “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

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Thanks for reading! If you made it this far, I have a small ask. The work of exposing lies and misinformation takes a lot of time and effort. I make all content of this series free so that as many people as possible can have access during these tough times in our war for truth. If you find my work informative and wish to support it, please consider either a paid subscription (link above) or a one-time donation (link below).

1. Side note: Katie Halper could really, really use a good editor. I’m available if she’s interested.