Glenn Greenwald is a Scumbag

And no, his views on free speech are not "consistent"

Two days ago, a Substack user has found this post and left a hateful comment. At the time, this post had 8 likes. Because the comment made me restack the post again, as I felt its urgency, the post now has 23 likes, over 40 comments, and the Restack note has just as many. Since I am not a very visible author, this is not much, and yet, I have quadrupled engagement with this post. So if you want to leave a hateful comment, think twice. I will immediately delete your comment and ban you indefinitely from viewing my posts and commenting. And I will significanctly increase traffic for this post.

For everyone else: enjoy.

If you really want to meet the abyss, meet people from the US anti-Zionist left. I will not go into details about left-wing antisemitism, whose history is as long and complicated as it is odious: my teacher Moishe Postone, the famous Jewish-Marxist scholar, has already done the most accurate and poignant job of dissecting left-wing antisemitism, and its alliances with Nazi ideology, in the 1980s and 1990s. But let me just say: you have not seen the abyss of hatred a person can consist of if you haven’t met a US anti-Zionist leftie.

Glenn Greenwald, US journalist residing in Brazil, and a self-avowed anti-Zionist, like many well-educated US Jews from “progressive” households, has put all his money on destroying the Israeli state – with his modest means of reproducing Hamas propaganda and relativizing the call for Jewish genocide, coming from students of Palestine “solidarity” groups all over US campuses, but most notably the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, and Harvard. Anything that helps, man, if it drives a wedge into the Zionist dream!

The way he positions himself is breathtakingly vile, perhaps knowingly so. His dishonesty – as though he doesn’t know what “intifada” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means – alone is telling (and we heard “Jews to the gas” chants all over Berlin city streets this fall, so don’t tell me US keffiye-wearing students of Gender and Colonialisazion studies would shy away from that), but that he wants proof – proof he’ll take the opportunity to instantly smear as “fake”. It’s surprising he hasn’t demanded proof for Auschwitz gas chambers yet. But there is time. The David Irving-Glenn Greenwald pipeline is real.

Greenwald’s whole spiel, even in his criticism of the censorship-industrial complex and state interference on free speech, as is now clear, was driven by his decades-old resentment-by-proxy against his home country: the “imperialist” USA that supports the “settler-colonial” state Israel. This, again, is the prototype form of US Leftism: while their hatred of the USA is not the original one, they cannot forgive the US State for supporting the evil Zionist state in the Mediterranean. Fuck the Biden administration for supporting Israel. And take them on with anything else that comes to mind, like the Ukraine war or the Deep State’s interference on the first amendment.

For if this had ever been about the Constitution of the United States – and for all their faults, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger had an honest interest in this non-partisan issue – Glenn would understand that calling for genocide is not a protected civil right. Nowhere in the world, by the way, except, and this is significant, Sharia states in the Middle East and maybe some weird totalitarian ones that have fallen off my map, like – perhaps – Ireland.

There is nothing emancipatory in a view that condemns infringement of free speech based on the call for the murder of people of a certain religion. Or belief. Or race. Or sexual orientation.

Hell, not even defamation is “protected free speech” in a democratic civil society, if it leads to social exclusion and job loss. Jordan Peterson was right to sue that organization who called him a “Nazi”, and it was right he won. A violation of the first amendment, i.e. state censorship, to the contrary, occurs when censored information includes, for example, verified studies on the ineffectiveness of Covid vaccines, reports about vaccine-injuries and deaths, footage of J6, or journalistic reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop material, which constitute vital information for the electorate in a functioning democracy. But no one has called for the murder or defamation of a person or a group of people. There is no point in declaring death threats “protected free speech”, when murder is a crime. It can be one thing – or the other.

Glenn, then, has never been particularly interested in the free speech rights of citizens, but in watering down those rights to include open calls to intifada, which directly contradicts the safety and right to live – arguably human rights, just like free speech – for every religious group.

What, you may ask, drives Glenn’s very particular abyss? Jewish self-hatred could be a hot contender, but is just not very specific, as Jeffrey Goldberg pondered a while ago[1]:

In my experience, those Jews who consciously set themselves apart from the Jewish majority in the disgust they display for Israel, or for the principles of their faith, are often narcissists, and therefore seem to suffer from an excess of self-regard, rather than self-loathing. "Self-hater" is a euphemism, then, for "auto-anti-Semite," or some other such locution. 

This certainly holds for a lot of people on the Jewish anti-Zionist left. But the Greenwald case seems more particular:

In the case of Greenwald, here is what I think, from afar, since we've never met. When I write that Greenwald's ostentatious anti-Israelism is "fine, of course," I'm not endorsing his views, I'm simply acknowledging that he has a right to say whatever he wants -- he has a right even to defend the use of the neo-Nazi-derived anti-Semitic slur "Israel-Firster" to describe Jews with whom he disagrees -- and I'm also acknowledging, in a way, that he is not sui generis: There have always been Jews who define themselves in opposition to Judaism, Marxists mainly, in the style of of Isaac Deutscher's so-called "non-Jewish Jew." 

We need more info, I’m afraid, Jeff:

I don't know anything about Greenwald's Jewishness. He could be a Marrano Chabadnik for all I know, though, based on the way he writes about Israel and American Jewish organizations, I often suspect that some really bad shit happened to him in Hebrew school. (I mean, worse than the usual soul-sucking anomie). 

Goldberg continues:

But about what he writes: I do know that he evinces toward Israel a disdain that is quite breathtaking. He holds Israel to a standard he doesn't hold any other country, except the U.S. 

For reasons I mentioned above. But Goldberg goes on to make a very interesting observation. One that does not quite get the attention it deserves:

Greenwald has written millions of words (well, written and block-quoted, anyway), and I haven't read them all, so he may have said something positive about Israel, but I don't know. I've never seen him write with any sort of affection about Israel, Zionism, Judaism, the Jewish people, and so on. Of course, he doesn't write with affection about very much at all.

Greenwald does not write with affection about anything much at all. Not even Palestinians, his Brudervolk. What seems to drive him on is the hatred of Israel and Judaism, more than his supposedly tender feelings for Arabs. And that, I’m afraid, points back at some psychoanalytical observations that have been made in relation to Jew-hatred. A riveting mix of self-hatred and omnipotence that explains the lack of affection for anything, the inability to be motivated by anything else than resentment.

The parliamentary building in Dublin, Ireland, has displayed the Palestinian flag yesterday, next to the Irish one. If you wonder what vital national interest Ireland has in supporting Palestine, do not. Because it doesn’t. But the current thing is always the one that shrouds the display of hatred in alleged “solidarity” with the enemy. And if Glenn thinks he should use his position to defend the same hate-intoxicated rage in the name of a civil right, he is, as I indicated, not just a scumbag, but a dishonest one.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/01/more-on-glenn-greenwald-israel-firsters-and-idiot-editors-updated/251852/