… (it’s unregulated, so deaths and mutilations happen) has outraged circumcision enthusiasts. But for UD’s money, no defender of the practice (look at what they’re up to in New York!) will ever come up to the standard of this 2012 piece by Jeffrey Epstein’s best buddy Alan Dershowitz, which compares anyone with the slightest objection to slicing the dicks of non-consenting infants to Adolf Hitler.

A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road… He had already shown himself capable of betraying friends and patrons who trusted him, but now he had advanced from the flagrant abuse of expense accounts to apparently absconding with hundreds of thousands of dollars… Epstein had lured investors in, used their money to book big profits and then refused to return their funds…

And there’s his BFF:

The year after meeting Epstein, [Alan] Dershowitz wrote an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times arguing that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 15. Epstein seemed to see the potential of nurturing a relationship with the prominent lawyer. [LOL]… Keeping Dershowitz happy proved prescient. He would become one of Epstein’s highest-profile and longest-serving defenders.

Both took/are taking far too long. Elites protect their own until absolutely pushed to the wall. Remember how lovingly Oxford clung to Tariq Ramadan! Remember Yale’s Michael Simons. Remember Robert “Two Chairs” Alpern.

[T]he connection between Summers and Epstein has long been public knowledge. Summers joined OpenAI in November of 2023, almost four years after the New York Times published a photo of him hanging out with Epstein at the sex trafficker’s Manhattan mansion, and six months after the world learned that Summers had solicited donations from Epstein on behalf of his wife’s poetry foundation. Undeterred, the Times itself hired Summers as a contributor to its Opinion section at the beginning of 2025... Prestigious institutions knew exactly who Summers was, and sought him out anyway, for years... [It all] reveals an American elite blinded to outrages occurring in plain view, due to the clubby nature of high society. All the way back in 2009, Summers offered some unsolicited advice to not yet-Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) about surviving in Washington. “Outsiders can say whatever they want,” he counseled, “but insiders don’t criticize other insiders.” As an empirical observation, Summers was right—the world does work that way, illustrated most grotesquely in the Epstein debacle. 

Harvard continues to affiliate itself not only with Summers, but with his buddy, Mister Female Genital Mutilation himself, Alan Dershowitz.

As vile a compendium of moral squalors as his French economist twin, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Summers has for decades evaded the reputational death he so richly deserves. Finally, this morning, his long, gushing intimacy with/admiration for Jeffrey Epstein has forced his hand a tiny bit – He’s going to keep teaching and also to hold on to many of his bigshot appointments in Democratic policy circles to be sure, but okay he’ll step back here and there somehow somewhere from ‘public life’ …

Like Prince Andrew, a degenerate protected for decades by the crown, Summers has for years depended on the kindness of powerful friends to misspend/ineptly manage public and private money, to hang with fellow degenerates, to turn Harvard University into a hedge fund, and to broadcast mentally retarded statements about women. The death of Elizabeth finally destroyed Andrew; the life of Epstein has perhaps done the deed on Summers. Perhaps! He’s not yet been banished to a cottage deep in the thousand acre Sandringham wood; the hapless Democrats are probably hapless enough to keep him front and center…

Seriously, read this rather long 2020 piece on the dude by Robert Kuttner and ask yourself why it took five more years plus domestic life with a convicted sex offender for fate to catch up with this guy, and the answer has everything to do with hated elites who make everyone else take a licking and who themselves just keep ticking. How in God’s name did Harvard prez Summers survive the Andrei Shleifer scandal? How did Shleifer survive it? Elites protect their own; elites aren’t like you and me. Greedy for money, hugely powerful, they have contempt for the little peoples’ silly rules of ethical conduct. Why shouldn’t they? Their intimate Alan Dershowitz is always there to bail them out.

Keep reading the Kuttner. I know it’s long, but it has to be, because it is touching on the serial sordid cavortings of Democratic Sage Larry Summers, who must have breathed a sigh of relief when Epstein died cuz Larry’s secrets died with him. But Epstein turned out to be another Rasputin, a man of many lives before and after the grave.

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Fun ‘degrees of separation’ fact: Summers buddy, protégé, and co-author Jason Furman bought his Cambridge house from UD‘s friend Peter. It’s a house UD knows well, but she’s certain Furman has totally redone the thing, so she probably wouldn’t recognize it. (I put that particular link over Furman’s name because a fawning 2008 NYT piece about Summers’ rehabilitation after the Harvard presidency fiasco ends with this wonderful quote: “Now, who talks about Harvard?” Mr. Eizenstat, the former deputy Treasury secretary, said. “It’s a thing of the past, a little blip on the radar screen.” In a few years, perhaps the same paper will roll out Furman to say “Now, who talks about Jeffrey Epstein? It’s a thing of the past, a little blip on the radar screen.”)

‘After Dershowitz Dustup, Islanders Line Up for Pierogi‘

‘Hundreds of people attended the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market this week to show support for the pierogi vendor who refused to sell dumplings to prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz at the market last week…‘

When the Vineyard's most off-putting fogey
Demanded his share of pierogi
The seller said, "Alan,
You're just not my pal, and
I think you should move to Muskogee."

The UN has set a ridiculous target of ending female genital mutilation by 2030, and it’s time to get honest: If you can’t end the practice, at least end that target. In the few countries where the village butcher faces possible (faintly possible) criminal charges, much of the activity has simply been medicalized: doctors do it in their offices, like America’s own Hopkins med grad, Jumana Nagarwala, who did it right here, in and around Detroit, and who, with the help of Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, beat the charges against her, and I assume is still at it.

Hell, Gambia almost legalized it last year. Entire religious communities in Africa and Asia make FGM the very core of their tribal practice: No initiation without it. European countries with significant immigrant/Muslim communities are always putting this and that set of parents in jail, or deporting this or that young man found to have transported his twelve year old bride to be back to the homeland for cutting. It don’t make no nevermind – the global slashing at clitorises and vaginal lips and surrounding tissues thrives.

And yes, yes – keep funding grassroots efforts… But UD wonders whether an additional effort might be a good idea. Among Western elites, a depraved form of relativism, plus an understandable eagerness to look away – far away – from this repellent and disturbing behavior, has meant that people with money and power have long since backed off from FGM. Of course they don’t want to think about the fact that huge, huge, numbers of people in the world believe female sexuality to be an unspeakable abomination which must be rooted out, dug out, ground out, gutted, at the cost of lifelong pain/debility and grotesque deformation. And the sooner the better – there is no lower age limit to the practice. Britain has seen several cases of parents slashing their infants.

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It’s I dunno you know just really uh icky … almost kind of unbelievable that hundreds of millions of men in the world think the possibility of women deriving sexual pleasure is a demonic nightmare which must be fought with every sharp stone we can muster. Think of Norman Bates slashing at Marion Crane, only for Marion Crane substitute an unanesthetized splay-legged eight year old being slashed repeatedly between her legs. Yuck. You and I live in a pretty world where we’d really rather not…

What if the anti-FGM forces targeted us? Made a real effort to make us care?

LOL. We all enjoy watching a tool who used to tool around in a $300,000 Ferrari fall totally and publicly to pieces. It’s interesting and even feels sort of instructive to watch the self-decimation of a compulsive liar/gambler/asshole etc etc etc.

Better too when he splats, with cartoon loudness, from a great height (Supreme Court arguments! Akin Gump!).

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But where is Alan Dershowitz, Guardian Angel of the Gruesome, in all of this? Shouldn’t he be rushing to the defense of the great and good Tom Goldstein, down the street neighbor (okay he lives a couple of miles away) of none other than Les UDs? “The Justice Department harassment of this man is nothing more than envy of success.” UD predicts that’s the next thing that happens to this uber-greedy, tax-evading, income-hiding, fake-jobs-creator-for-his-bedmates, little shit. Alan Dershowitz to the rescue.

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But no. He’s going to represent himself.

Which can be risky (see 3:57)

… — the idiots almost legalized female genital mutilation — The Lancet runs an editorial which will really annoy Alan Dershowitz and other FGM enthusiasts.

Elimination of FGM has primarily focused on the role of traditional cutters—community elders with no medical training. What has been largely ignored in FGM elimination campaigns is the increasing role played by trained medical professionals. An estimated 52 million girls and women have been subjected to FGM at the hands of health-care workers—one in four cases. This medicalisation is gaining traction. Sudan, Egypt, and Indonesia have some of the highest percentages of medicalised FGM. The involvement of health-care workers not only promotes the false belief that FGM is safe, but also normalises and thereby perpetuates the practice, hindering elimination.

So ladies, take your pick: Filthy slashers, or killer docs.

So – Alan Dershowitz, Harvard’s most embarrassing emeritus, would not be booed. He would be laughed at. Not just for his take on Trump; for a complaint about other people not caring about justice coming from the most cynical, mercenary lawyer this side of Saul Goodman.

While listening to him, both male and female students would also be cupping their genitals protectively, because Dershowitz is a ginormous genital mutilation enthusiast.

Is Harvard preparing to concede that President Gay should be let go?

The controversy swirling around Dr. Gay raises questions about what it means for a premier American university when its scholarly leader — who at Harvard has final approval on all tenure decisions — has been accused of failing to adhere to scholarly standards. The allegations against her [have] prompted some to wonder whether Harvard is treating its leader with greater latitude than it would its students.

Says the NYT. Then it takes a trip down memory lane. Devoted UD readers will recall these earlier stunningly hypocritical Harvard plagiarism cases.

In 2005, after two prominent law professors, Charles Ogletree Jr. and Laurence Tribe, were publicly accused of plagiarism, The Harvard Crimson ran an editorial decrying the “disappointing double standard,” noting that “students caught plagiarizing are routinely suspended for semesters or even entire academic years.”

In both cases, the investigations — which were led by Derek Bok, a former Harvard president, and unfolded over months — found that each had in fact committed plagiarism. The professors were publicly chastised by the administration, but Harvard did not say whether there were any sanctions, according to news reports at the time.

In an apology, Mr. Ogletree, who died this year, acknowledged that his 2004 book “All Deliberate Speed” included several paragraphs from another law professor almost verbatim, without any attribution, according to a New York Times report at the time. (He said it was the result of a mix-up by his research assistants.)

In Mr. Tribe’s case, he was deemed by Harvard’s president and the law school dean to have unintentionally included “various brief passages and phrases that echo or overlap with material” in a book by another scholar, who was not credited. Mr. Tribe, who still teaches at Harvard, apologized.

These were ATELIER plagiarism (read about UD’s tripartite scheme here], plagiarism committed by the flunkies who write your books for you because you’re far too busy and important to write them yourself. (See, among other Harvard luminaries, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jill Abramson, and Alan Dershowitz.)

The getting off scot-free bit is a prototypical instance of oligarchic privilege, an outcome no one in any of the world’s many class-based, corrupt from top to bottom, countries would have any trouble recognizing.

So Eli’s in trouble with the law again – an occupational hazard for the very worst of career criminals – and having helped get his buddy Trump to pardon Eli the last time, one assumes Alan Dershowitz is now hard at work on a second pardon.

Eli and his partners in crime hail from Lakewood NJ, a hotbed of theft which you already know about if you read University Diaries.

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What? You say there’s no way Fuckface can be reelected?

Silly. Everyone said there was no way he could be elected the first time.

What a distinction for Harvard, which gets a prominent mention every time Alan Dershowitz steps in another pile of shit, that he’s now been sanctioned for his involvement in Lake’s frivolous, time-wasting, and destructive suit against the integrity of Arizona’s electoral system. Hard to think of a more embarrassing old fart than Harvard’s highest-profile emeritus.

Color UD mildly shocked but pleased to see this quite explicit article. Reading its concern about how best to have a clitoris, and then enjoying the sometimes hilarious comments on the piece (“Yes, yes. But what about inflation?”), UD kept thinking about the simple solution to the problem offered all over the world to more than two hundred million women.

Haha, I mean not offered; imposed. When they’re children.

IF THEIR CLITS OFFEND THEE, CUT THEM OFF.

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As long as we have people like Alan Dershowitz in the United States (and, on the other side, Ilhan Omar), female genital mutilation will continue to be a popular option among some groups even here. England’s got a rampant case of it.

Entire religious groups, like India’s Dawoodi Bohra, make it the centerpiece of their spiritual practice.

It’s nice that the 164.8 million women in the US get to live in a country whose paper of record cares about their sexual pleasure. It’s disgusting that 200 million (and growing) women – children – outside the US endure the forced amputation of sexual pleasure.

[T]he regime should have let go of hijab,… even if we consider nothing but its self-interest in surviving. The younger generation would have persisted in their blissful political inactivity, and the poor horny basijis would have soon learned to acclimate to the new situation, their libido subconsciously adjusting to the new normal.

It’s all so neat and easy. What’s so hard to understand? You remove girls’ clitorises so they don’t sexually excite themselves; you remove their hair, faces, and bodies from the public realm so they don’t excite men. Women happily, proudly wear the hijab, because “it is the duty of women.” Men protect their spiritual well-being by draping cloth over women and numbing women’s capacity to feel anything sexual, thus making them even less threatening to men’s spiritual well-being. A beautiful world any of us would wish to live in.

Or, you know, failing that – a really … interesting, different world we would never think of judging.