PanachelessNihilist

Your screenplay, "Gay Kid and Fat Chick", was near the top of the "Black List" of the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood. Is that the script you'd been working on with Judd Apatow? Can you tell us a little bit about the movie, and what the next steps are going to be?

Also: Season 2 of Zach Stone? Please?

Lastly, do you #StandWithPhil?

Are they drilling for oil because there's oil there?

~~~ Note that Norman Finkelstein has responded, below. ~~~

Mr. Finkelstein,

You have defended Hamas, its actions in Gaza, and its right to exist and to perpetuate armed violence against the Israeli people, including attacks on civilians as justified by Israeli policy, stating, of Hamas's policy of rocket attacks against Israeli civilian population centers, that "the scales of morality weigh in its favor." You assert that Israel is the greatest impediment against a peace deal and a two-state solution.

How do you reconcile that with the fact that in Hamas' own charter, "peaceful solutions" are explicitly rejected in favor of murder of Jews to reclaim the whole of Israel?

Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion. Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight. "Allah will be prominent, but most people do not know."

Indeed, how can you profess to have sympathy or support for a group that explicitly calls for your murder as a Jewish-American?

"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).

Similarly, you have decried the "Holocaust industry" as co-opting the suffering of your parents, both Holocaust survivors, to perpetuate pro-Israel policies. Yet last month, Mahmoud Abbas claimed that Jews in Europe brought the Holocaust upon themselves:

They say hatred against Jews was not because of their religion, it was because of their social profession. So the Jewish issue that had spread against the Jews across Europe was not because of their religion, it was because of usury and banks.

In fact, Abbas's entire doctoral thesis alleged a connection between early Zionists and Adolf Hitler to drive the Jews into Israel, and that Zionists created the "fantastic lie" that 6 million Jews had died. See generally here.

First, given how much your parents suffered - and rising anti-Semitism and violence against Jews throughout the Western world - do you agree that there is a need for a Jewish state?

Second, given that so much of your academic work alleges that the lessons of the Holocaust have been distorted, why have you aligned yourself with outright Holocaust deniers and apologists like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Abbas? At its core, the policies of Likud aside, why is it reasonable for any Jewish Israeli - especially those on the center and left - to expect to find common ground and peace with Palestinian leadership that either was elected on a platform of destroying Israel and the Jewish people, or at best decries the Holocaust as a pernicious lie and pretense to steal land and engages in ludicrous anti-Semitic conspiracy theories? Why should Israelis believe that after ending the blockade of Gaza, unilateral disengagement from the West Bank, land swaps to approximate pre-1967 borders, and taking any of a number of other actions, they could live in peace with an independent Palestine, especially when unilateral disengagement of Gaza brought only the election of Hamas a year later?

Finally, you have called for the 1967 borders as a starting point for an independent Palestinian state. Do you believe that the state of Israel should not include the Western Wall, the holiest place in the Jewish religion, which sits on what would otherwise be the Palestinian side of that border?

All quotes from the Hamas Charter, indexed here

Hank is a mass of incandescent gas.

This is a better question than mine. I'd prefer to see it answered.