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About this Episode
In 2006 I was for all intents and purposes expelled from the American academy as a 9/11 heretic. The ADL was already calling me an antisemite, though at that point I was downplaying Israel’s role in the attacks on New York and Washington.
During the six-month media firestorm, ignited by Rep. Steve Nass and the Wisconsin Republican Party’s demand that the University fire me outright, U.W.-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell repeatedly advised me to decline interviews and lay low. I refused, instead opting to accept most interview requests and court controversy. I hoped that intelligent people in general, and academicians in particular, would hear about my academic freedom fight, support it, and take a second look at the self-evidently ridiculous official story of 9/11.
Though plenty of intelligent people did wake up to the 9/11 problem after seeing me debate Sean Hannity, I was disappointed by the tepid reaction of the professoriat. Most offered halfhearted support for my academic freedom, but few were willing to openly challenge the official story of 9/11. I suppose they didn’t want to find themselves in my position, raked over the coals of mostly-negative mainstream media attention. The few who did speak out, like William Woodward, also endured media attacks, albeit on a smaller scale than mine.
By the time Rep. Steve Nass and Fox News ambushed me in early July, 2006, over 100 professors had already signed on to Scholars for 9/11 Truth. I hoped and expected that the controversy over my case would quickly bring hundreds more onboard. Based on my experience with academic colleagues, I believed that more than a few of them were smart, cantankerous, and (hopefully) unlikely to put up with rank 9/11 b******t, once the issue had been called to their attention.
Herbert Feinstein: Recovering Mob Lawyer, Black Humorist
One of the smartest and most cantankerous academics I ever met was the late Herbert Feinstein, a scholar-fan of Mark Twain and Buster Keaton who taught comedy-related classes at San Francisco State University while I was collecting MAs and teaching there circa 1986-1993. Herb was fond of Racine’s line about how life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. I shared his appreciation of humour noir, gallows humor, absurdist humor, and combinations thereof, and he gets some of the credit (or blame) for my penchant for satire.
Herb Feinstein was famously crotchety, not known for suffering fools gladly, and far from the most popular member of the SFSU faculty. He exuded inner torment and barely-veiled self-loathing, which seemed somehow inseparable from his charmingly dark sense of humor. I enjoyed his wit and gradually got to know him over the course of a couple of comedy classes.
Feinstein told me that he had worked in Hollywood and had firsthand knowledge of the sexual blackmail that goes on there. He said many A-list actors got their start in the porn industry, assured me that a great many such films were in private hands, and mentioned Sylvester Stallone. He made several allusions to his own bad experiences in that milieu. So I wasn’t surprised that his obituary included these lines:
He began practicing law at MCA in Los Angeles in the early ’50s, working for film studio boss Lew Wasserman, which is where Feinstein fostered interests and relationships which would span the course of his five decades of professional life. Perhaps it was the proximity of the mafia to the film business, perhaps his inner scholar calling, but Feinstein left Hollywood for the Bay Area in the mid-’50…
Feinstein’s inner pain and self-loathing, and the dark humor he treated it with, presumably stemmed in part from his experiences with the Hollywood (Jewish) mafia and the adjacent intelligence agency milieu. Having earned his BA from Columbia while still in his teens, Feinstein quickly picked up a Harvard law degree, served in Naval Intelligence, became a mob lawyer for LA kingpin Lew Wasserman…and then had some sort of non-lethal falling out with that world, moved to Berkeley, did a Ph.D. on Mark Twain’s legal affairs, and wound up teaching comedy at San Francisco State.
I never got a chance to talk to Feinstein about 9/11. Given his background and outlook, I assumed he probably wouldn’t be first in line to join Scholars for 9/11 Truth, so I didn’t reconnect with him. But looking back, I wish I had. He probably knew or suspected that Israel did it, though I doubt he would have wanted to say that in public.
Their Own Worst Enemies
Herb Feinstein’s outlook on life turned on his frequent observation that people are their own worst enemies. Irrationally self-destructive behavior, he believed, is so common as to be almost ubiquitous.
Feinstein’s “own worst enemies” worldview struck me, even then, as quintessentially Jewish. At the time (the 1980s) I had largely bought into the Jewish victim narrative, so I saw the Jewish penchant for dark humor about people digging their own graves as a response to the ubiquitous persecution that Jews had experienced for thousands of years. I figured Jews used gallows humor to laugh off their pain, and to wonder whether they were somehow bringing it on themselves.
Today, after further research, I’ve concluded that Jews have very definitely been bringing it on themselves. They really are their own worst enemies. Goy persecution stems from Jewish behavior, not some mysterious irrational Jew-hatred that would have persisted, for no reason, across every culture for millennia.
For a spectacular exhibition of Jews being their own worst enemies, look no further than the Jewish state of Israel. Its genocide of Gaza has long since exhausted any sympathy the uninformed may have felt in the wake of October 7, 2023, and is driving the irreversible delegitimization of the Zionist project.
Even more starkly, Israel’s June 13 attack on Iran—the culmination of Netanyahu’s decades-long campaign—has backfired spectacularly. The war had two goals: removing Iran’s “nuclear threat” and triggering regime change. Israel didn’t just fail to achieve those goals. It brought Iranian nuclear weapons much closer, and made regime change even less likely, than would have been the case in the absence of war. Iranians of all stripes have united behind the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republican form of government. And a consensus is forming, not only in Iran but in nuclear nations including Russia, Pakistan, and North Koriea, that the Islamic Republic of Iran needs a nuclear weapon ASAP to deter further attacks.
Perhaps even worse for Israel’s prospects, the aborted war on Iran punctured the Zionist myth of invincibility. Iranian rockets rained down on strategic targets in such numbers that Netanyahu had to run to Trump for an exit. Had Iran wanted to destroy Israel’s life-supporting infrastructure it could have done so. Salim Mansur writes:
Iran possessed the capability to destroy the water desalination plants in Israel as much as the main power grids and reduce Israel into what Israelis have done to the people in Gaza. But Iran did not target the source of drinking water in Israel, nor the power grids. Would Iran have done so if the ceasefire was not agreed upon? I don’t think so. The red lines for Iran in a war imposed on Iranians are self-imposed based on their religious tradition…
The small Zionist settler colony squatting on stolen land has underlined its own vulnerability. It no longer has escalation dominance. Its nuclear deterrent is of dubious relevance given the mutual assured destruction that Iran can threaten with non-nuclear means (and which will likely be supplemented by nukes, whether homemade or purchased, in the not-so-distant future).
Israel’s current predicament is just a more acute version of its longstanding one: Who could ever have believed that the best way to protect Jews from the universal persecution they have always supposedly experienced would be to pack them all together in a small genocidal settler colony, surrounded by people who hate them? The Zionists who dreamed up that “solution” to their version of the Jewish Problem were quintessential examples of “their own worst enemies.”
Today, thanks to its ill-conceived genocide and war, Israel has undermined whatever chance it may have had of becoming a peaceful and prosperous regional country with an assured future. It is its own worst enemy on steroids. And its vision of “Hamas savages” is a self-projection. Israelis, who have made killer-rapists their national heroes, are the savages. Deep down inside, they know it. They hate themselves, and project that hate on the other. The Zionist Jew is his own worst enemy, in the sense that the unbearably evil enemy he fears is a disguised image of himself…a terrible truth that just makes the whole thing that much more unbearable.
Herb Feinstein sought to understand humans’ propensity for self-destruction by way of Sigmund Freud’s death wish. Herb wasn’t an ideologue, much less a card-carrying Freudian, but he did think the death wish hypothesis was one of the few serious attempts to explain the “own worst enemy” syndrome.
The Source of Self-Hating Jew Syndrome?
Today, a revisionist anti-Freud school holds that psychoanalytic woo-woo about kids wanting to have sex with their parents is itself a classic defense mechanism against the terrible truth that many children suffer all-too-real abuse. Jumping on that bandwagon, I propose that “self-hating Jew syndrome” is largely the product of circumcision. When the rabbi inflicts unspeakable torture on the week-old baby by taking a knife to the most sensitive part of the child’s anatomy, he isn’t just instilling lifelong PTSD in his victim: He is breaking the child’s “secure attachment” bond with its Jewish mother, who will spend the rest of her life overcompensating for having turned her baby over to a torturer.
Subjected to an unspeakable atrocity, his bond with his mother deeply wounded, the Jewish male baby grows up damaged, and first blames himself for his suffering. But gradually he is inculcated into the tribal belief that the evil aggressor, the boogieman-torturer whose awful image lingers in his unconscious memory, is the archetypal goy, the non-Jew, who has pursued and persecuted the poor innocent Jews across thousands of years and countless locations out of sheer unadulterated villainy.
A bizarre blend of that self-hate and other-hate persists, cements the Jewish tribe together, and manifests itself in the ghettos Jews build for themselves, including the genocidal horrorshow ghetto known as “Israel.” (Those who begin to recover from self-hatred by recognizing that the hate stems from the Jewish side, not the goyish one, are insulted as “self-hating Jews” by the ones who are still mired in hatred.)
My frequent radio guest Alan Hart, who passed away in 2018, titled his trilogy Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. And while Alan Hart understood that the state of Israel was indeed the enemy of the Jews, I’m not sure he fully grasped how the Jewish State exemplifies the larger Jewish genius for being one’s own worst enemy.
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