I know you're all probably thinking "not another Piers Morgan interview". I think Norman Finkelstein did pretty well in this interview.
The name card that Piers Morgan used for Norman Finkelstein was: Critics have labeled Finkelstein "Poison" and "Self-hating Jew". This is disgusting for the Piers Morgan show to label Finkelstein this way.
Norman Finkelstein upheld his comparison of Hamas to John Brown and Nat Turner. He refused to condemn Hamas when asked by Piers to condemn Hamas. He told Piers that if he were in the same position of Hamas, that he might do the same as October 7. Norman says that he refuses to condemn the victims of a concentration camp and compares Palestinians to Susan Boyle, saying that Susan Boyle was also never given a chance, a bit dated of an analogy in my opinion.
Towards the end of the interview Piers Morgan tries to guilt Norman Finkelstein by asking how his parents would feel about what Finkelstein had said about October 7 after his parents had come out of a concentration camp. Norman Finkelstein says his parents would be pleased if the victims of a concentration camp (referring to the Palestinians) had burst the gates of the concentration camp. Norman says that he once asked his mother how she felt about the german civilians being bomb during WWII and said his mother replied "If we were going to die, we should take some of them with us." Norman says that what his mother believed may not have been moral but she had the right to hate the people who destroy her life. After this, Piers Morgan cuts him off and says that they ran out of time.
I think it was quite a good interview and Norman Finkelstein is correct.
Finkelstein managed it brilliantly. He knew Piers would take him out of context, and phrased everything very well to avoid getting hit by a 'gotcha'.
I think he may have made a slight error at the end when Piers asked him what he thought his late parents would think about his statement on the Oct 7 events. He gave that quote and then said that Palestinians have a right to hate their oppressors. While I think that's true, it's pretty weak as a response because one could easily reject the idea that every Israeli is an oppressor (just as not every German who was carpet bombed in Dresden was a Nazi or even supported the regime). I appreciate that he probably could have phrased it a little better with more time.
I disagree with the premise of judging his phrasing here, there's no wording a person in Norman's position, opposing the main stream talking points, could use that will be immune to deliberate misinterpretation. It seems to me that criticizing him for phrasing something sub-optimally or whatever is kinda ceding a lot of ground to the right, because it sets up a framing where the reason for right backlash is because leftists didn't do a good enough job, know what I mean?
Edit: clarity
Yeah, that is true. I might be
bing out a bit. Our victory or defeat doesn't rest on the correctness of our rhetoric.
well said comrade, we're all trying our best.