Professor
Alan Dershowitz has written a passionate defense as part of his very public
effort to clear his name.
Dershowitz
was accused of having sex with underage girls during a period when he
represented perhaps the world’s most notorious pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.
One woman,
Virginia Roberts Guiffre, filed a defamation suit against the famous lawyer in
April 2019, in which she claimed heavy punitive damages based on claims of him
having sex with her on numerous occasions when she was under-aged.
Dershowitz
suffered further aggravation against his character when a Sarah Ransome alleged
that she had participated in a threesome with him at a time when she was
employed by Epstein.
Dershowitz
was exposed to vile accusations at a time when he was, as he writes in his
book, at the apex of his career.
The book’s
title is Guilt by Accusation. The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of
#MeToo.
The book is
the cry of an innocent man prevented from shouting his innocence in the public
forum by a wall of opinion that favors perceived victims. In his case, young women
involved in a global seedy under-age sex scandal involving lots of money and
very important people.
In the
public talking-place, too often justice and truth gets lost. Scandal is all.
Guilty people are protected. Innocent people get tossed into the broiling pot
of publicity. Reputations and lives are ruined. That is not to say that injured people should
not have their day in court.
A major
emphasis of Dershowitz’s book is the contemporary experience of an innocent man
being swept up by a movement which occasionally leaves innocent men desperately
swimming against a maelstrom of public opinion that demands a woman’s complaint
be sanctified without question, leaving the accused man to prove his innocence.
This is a reverse of normal standards of justice in which the accused is
innocent until proven guilty.
One standout
example of the “always believe the woman” syndrome was the excruciating
spectacle of the Judge Kavanagh Senate Star Chamber in which TV viewers watched
a fine and innocent man being pilloried by the inquisitors of the #MeToo
Movement and those who hated the President so much they were willing to cast a
fine man to the gossip dogs.
That is not
to say there are no monsters or innocent female victims. Epstein and Weinstein
are just two ugly examples of a very serious problem.
Dershowitz
cries out against this movement and the cacophony of media bias that destroys
people while promoting titillating claims of women without bothering to
thoroughly investigate the legitimacy of their accusations. His whole life, he
felt, was being dishonored “because of a demonstrably false accusation by a
woman with a long history of lying.”
Dershowitz
claims that, when the accusations emerged against him, Meghan McCain, co-host
of The View and ABC contributor, demanded that he not appear on TV because he
was “accused” of sexual misconduct in the Epstein matter.
The
accusation, Dershowitz claims, was sufficient to establish guilt in McCain’s
mind to the extent that he was prevented from appearing to protest his
innocence.
There was
something eerily familiar with Dershowitz’s story. And then it hit me. His
story reflects Israel’s experience.
Replace
#MeToo with #BDS, and you have the same construct.
Replace “women
are innocent and must be believed and all men are guilty until they can prove
their innocence, with “Palestinians are innocent and must be believed
and Israel is automatically guilty,” and there you have Israel’s dilemma in
the age of BDS.
In fact, Israel has experienced the same shocking experience. Talk about "demonstrably false accusations by a woman with a long history of lying," how about what we Israelis and Jews have suffered from the mouth of Ilhan Omar, not to mention from Linda Sarsour and Rashida Tlaib.
In fact, Israel has experienced the same shocking experience. Talk about "demonstrably false accusations by a woman with a long history of lying," how about what we Israelis and Jews have suffered from the mouth of Ilhan Omar, not to mention from Linda Sarsour and Rashida Tlaib.
How many Israeli
advocates have found it impossible to get a public forum in which to make our
case and present our evidence? How many
of you have been hounded off campus and been shouted down by people with raging
accusations unwilling to hear your voice?
This has
become the challenge of proving Israel’s innocence in the age of BDS, unable to
make your case, guilt by accusation.
Today,
Israel is guilty, not by facts, history, or legitimacy, but by accusation.

The broad
campaign against us, whether by both factions of the Palestinian political
movements, by malevolent actors in the UN and EU, by radical lecturers and
campus groups, by the BDS Movement and other pro-Palestinian (read “anti-Israel”)
groups, have decided and prejudged we are guilty by their false accusations.
They do this
because they have an agenda that take no account of Israel’s innocence. They
are exclusively bonded to a singular cause. BDS uber alles. Any opposing voice
must be threatened and silenced. No rational argument can be made against them.
They have prejudged us and will tolerate no defense.
Dershowitz
is a lucky man. He is a powerful and successful advocate. His detractors were
foolish to take him on. He has access to an unbiased court who will
dispassionately hear his case and consider his evidence. Then he is likely to
receive justice and compensation for the damage caused against him.
Sadly,
Israel does not have that luxury. On the contrary, the “courts” are
stacked against the Jewish State.
The UN is
just one example of a biased chamber. The ICC is another. Hamas and Palestinian
Islamic Jihad launch hundreds of rockets from civilian areas at Israeli
civilians and we are the ones accused by this ICC court of committing war
crimes in Gaza.
Israel only
has the court of public opinion to make its case, and we need an army of
Dershowitzs to win our case.
Hope is on
the horizon. We are chipping away with victories in a number of campuses,
states and countries, who are only now slowly taking up legislation against the
discriminatory and racist nature of BDS.
We need a more sympathetic media to support our case.
For Israel,
the challenge of proving innocence in the age of BDS is a long and uncharted
road.
Barry
Shaw is the International Public Diplomacy Director at the Israel Institute for
Strategic Studies. He is the author of ‘Fighting
Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism’ and ‘BDS for Idiots.’
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