Norman Finkelstein on Illegal Wars Abroad and Class War at Home
In a fiery and deeply personal return to The Big Picture Podcast, professor Norman Finkelstein explains why Israel and its allies in the West have destroyed the international order, and how the election of a Muslim socialist in New York threatens their grip on power.
Finkelstein is a political scientist and one of the world’s foremost scholars on Israel-Palestine, as well as a critic of culture and empire.
00:00 - Intro
05:00 - Zohran Mamdani and October 7
08:50 - Anti-Zohran propaganda
11:00 - NYC is the capital of capitalism
27:00 - Israel's war on Iran
44:00 - Nazis and the nature of evil
51:00 - Israel's starvation of Gaza
53:00 - Antisemitism on campus
1:00:00 - Sabra and Shatilla massacre
1:10:00 - The greed of Arab leaders
1:19:00 - What my parents would think
1:29:00 - They're scared of Mamdani
1:36:00 - It's about a class war
1:46:00 - They're afraid of the movement
This is a very incisive interview with Norman Finkelstein. He is the child of two survivors of the WWII Holocaust against Jews (The Slavic Holocaust, hardly mentioned, took 4 times the number of lives lost).
He’s been speaking out against the Israeli crimes against Palestinians for years, and in this extended interview points out what I have discussed earlier—the complete breakdown of the anti war movement.
He and I are same generation. I have argued that there was a real movement in the 1960’s demanding a mass cultural shift in consciousness. That failed. There were intermittent protests since then, opposing Reagan’s murderous policies in Central America, the anti nuclear movement of the mid 1980’s which produced an important arms control treaty, the INF Treaty, which Trump unceremoniously ditched in 2019.
In 2003, there were mass demonstrations opposing the totally illegal war on Iraq, which many of us knew at the time was based on brazen lies.
Recently, Israel attacked Iran’s embassy, assassinated its scientists, the US assassinated an Iranian general involved in peace negotiations.
And now that Israel attempted its decapitation strike on Iran on June 13th, there was no UN condemnation. Iran counterattacked to Israel’s surprise and chagrin. So Israel, faced with catastrophic defeat, got the US to add more insult to Israel’s injury, by its attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Thus, two gross violations of the UN Charter.
And yet, instead of the million person anti war march opposing the 2003 war on Iraq, only 400 people showed to protest the Israel and US illegal attacks on Iran in 2025.
Former CIA officer and now independent analyst Larry Johnson has pointed out that, on the one hand, President Trump and his crew bragged about ‘obliterating’ Iran’s nuclear program. And the treacherous IAEA, which probably spied on Iran and passed critical information to the Israelis, in total violation of its supposedly neutral observer status, demands Iran to allow inspections. As Larry points out, how can the IAEA inspect something that has been obliterated?!
I would add that if it were true that the US attacks were successful, where are the traces of radiation from the enriched Uranium in Iran’s possession?
In any case, Finkelstein adds a lot more context to this story as well as the recent electoral challenge of a Muslim Democratic Socialist as mayoral candidate for New York City, the supposed “Capital of Capitalism”, whom Jewish billionaires assumed belong to them, not the people of New York City.
In light of my contention that the US population has reached, not entirely, but to a large extent, exhaustion against opposing Empire, this election offers a glimmer of hope that the 99% of the population will awaken and take back the country.