Alan Dershowitz thinks leftwing blogger Glenn Greenwald hates America.
After critiquing National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden on CNN Wednesday, the Harvard Law School professor turned to Greenwald, who first printed Snowden’s leaks for the Guardian newspaper.
“As far as Greenwald is concerned, you know, he’s an ideologue,” Dershowitz told CNN’s Dana Bash. “I don’t think he would have revealed this information if it had been critical of Venezuela or Cuba or the Palestinian Authority. You know, he doesn’t like America. He doesn’t like Western democracies. He’s never met a terrorist he didn’t like. So he’s a very hard left ideologue that uses this to serve his political agenda, not simply to reveal information in a neutral way. That makes him different from Wikileaks I think.”
Bash noted that Greenwald, who had just appeared on CNN in the segment before Dershowitz’s, was “not here to defend himself.”
“Just to be fair, I think he would call himself somebody who’s for civil liberties and not that he doesn’t like America,” Bash added.
“Let’s see him reveal information critical of countries he supports rather than countries he opposes,” Dershowitz retorted. “Then I’ll believe him.”
Dershowitz’s view of Greenwald may have been influenced by a long article in Commentary magazine from October that documented Greenwald’s antipathy towards the United States and rationalizations of terrorist attacks against America as inevitable consequences of American foreign policy.
“Greenwald can always be relied upon to provide a defense for those who wish to do America and its allies harm,” foreign policy writer Jamie Kirchick concluded in the piece. “Greenwald has ranked his perverse sense of ‘anti-imperialism’ ahead of any and all other considerations, including what many would expect to be his own self interest. After all, how else could a gay Jew become the world’s most verbose Western apologist for homophobic, anti-Semitic fanatics and murderers?”
Greenwald responded to Dershowitz’s comments on Twitter.
“I already left the studio. It’s fine. Alan Dershowitz excels at discrediting himself,” Greenwald wrote in one post.
“It’s like being attacked by a cartoon just arrived in a time machine from McCarthy era: you hate America & luv The Terrorists!” he wrote in another.