THINK-ISRAEL

HOME November-December 2006 Featured Stories Background Information News On The Web


 

MANIFESTO FOR SURVIVAL

by Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D.

  

In late November, mobs in Paris once again shouted "Death to the Jew" -- the very chant that came to characterize the Dreyfus case. The Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer team had won its match with the Paris Saint-Germain team. An angry mob surrounded a French Jew named Yanniv Hazout and yelled "kill the Jew," "dirty Jew," "dirty Negro," with many raising their arms in Nazi salutes. A black French policeman rushed to Hazout's defense. The crowd threatened to kill them both. The officer fired his gun and killed one demonstrator and wounded another.

I see the noose tightening around Israel's neck and the necks of the world's Jews. The fix is in -- Arab oil money can do that over a fifty- or sixty-year period. Today, Jews and Israel can do no right -- even or especially when that is precisely what we do -- and the nations who persecute us and others can do no wrong, no matter how many genocides or other human-rights atrocities they commit.

The propaganda has no limits, and it does not stop coming. No matter how many Big Lies you defeat, ten more immediately spring up to take their places.

Today, the truth goes begging for a scrap of respectful attention while every Naked Emperor is regularly given front-page headlines and invited to join the UN Human Rights Commission. If one tries to tell the truth about radical Islam, especially about Islamic gender and religious apartheid, or tries to say what I have been saying about anti-Semitism and jihad, one quickly finds oneself a pariah, scorned as a racist and "white supremacist."

The cultural wars are as hot as the military wars. Concepts such as free speech and academic freedom are being used to protect Big Lies and hate speech and to silence truth-telling.

Those with views such as mine have been subjected to a silent boycott. We do not get invited to speak on campuses. Even some Jewish-American student groups are careful not to invite speakers who might "offend" Muslim students.

Simultaneously, those who are invited to speak on campus are mainly people who agree with the works of America- and Israel-bashers Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky and the late "post-colonialist" Edward Said. And when views such as theirs are exposed as anti-scholarly and bogus, guess what happens? They cry "persecution," blame the "Zionist lobby" and attempt to silence all views but their own.

Careful exposure of such Naked Emperors does not stop them. They move on from publishing a paper to having their shoddy pseudo-scholarship defended at great cost in full-page ads in The New York Times -- and then they garner book contracts with prestigious publishing houses. I refer here to Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer of "Israel Lobby" fame -- their publisher is now Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

How do campuses deal with truth-tellers? Many who have been invited to speak are suddenly disinvited, as happened to Nonie Darwish at Brown University in November. (After a firestorm of negative publicity, the university president re-invited Darwish.)

Recently, Cambridge University in Britain invited me to deliver a keynote address at a major international feminist conference -- but then they disinvited me. Every other speaker is, predictably, on record as being in favor of abolishing the Jewish state or has been signing petitions to boycott Israel. One keynoter, hailed as a champion of human rights, routinely conducts anti-American protests outside the American Embassy in London. (They subsequently did invite me to deliver a stand-alone lecture but not when an international group would be present to hear it).

Often, pro-America and pro-Israel truth-tellers who are invited to address a college audience are subjected to a hostile work environment, peppered with hostile questions, booed, jeered, picketed.

In many cases, truth-tellers are confronted with audiences that have been unexpectedly diminished in size. This happened to ex-terrorist Walid Shoebat at Columbia on October 11 -- at the last minute, three hours before Shoebat was scheduled to speak, Columbia, e-mailed disinvitations to hundreds of people who had reserved seats. Only Columbia faculty and students were allowed in.

I find it ironic, almost suicidal, that so many "politically correct" Western intellectuals who rail against American and Israeli "imperialism" and "colonialism" are absolutely blind to the extraordinary number of Islamic imperial outposts in our midst. Saudi Arabia gives twenty million dollars to Georgetown and -- presto! -- Christians are exiled from the Middle East Interfaith Institute (which was already Judenrein) and the Palestinian Solidarity Conference holds its fifth annual Hatefest there. Coincidence?

Our intelligentsia do not view Jew-hatred or Israel-bashing as racism. Instead, telling the truth about radical Islam or even mentioning that the majority of the 9/11 suicide killers were Saudi Arab Muslims is condemned as racist. Acknowledging that Islam is the largest practitioner of gender and religious apartheid on earth is viewed as inflammatory hate speech.

The situation is quite Orwellian. And yes, we are facing a potential Islamification of America.

With that in mind, here is what I propose.

Iran's Ahmadinejad is the closest thing to Hitler in our time. He means what he says. He wishes to annihilate Israel with nuclear weapons and he wishes to convert all infidels to Islam. He wants a Caliphate.

Just as Hitler was appeased until it was too late, so too has Ahmadinejad been appeased. Remember how President Jimmy Carter appeased Khomeini when Americans were being held hostage in the American Embassy? Similarly today, Ahmadinejad is being appeased by Europe, the UN, and even to an extent by America. Iran will not hesitate to sacrifice millions of Iranians to destroy Israel.

We are up against a new kind of enemy -- people who loves death more than they love life; who have been indoctrinated and brainwashed to view the Jews as the source of all evil and who are joyfully ready to die in order to destroy Israel, Jews, America, the West, and even other Muslims.

According to German scholar and activist Matthias Küntzel, the Ayatollah Khomeni dispatched 450,000 children between the ages of 12-18 to fight in war between Iran and Iraq. Few survived. They swept the fields for mines, they comprised human waves that did not stop advancing even as other "basiji" sent before them were shot down or blown up. They carried little plastic keys around their necks that would open the gates of Paradise -- or so their handlers told them. Only after Khomeini perfected this Shia-based death cult did the Palestinian suicide killers start blowing themselves up in the name of Allah.

We must render Iran's nuclear capacity ineffective. We must stop Iran's arming of Hizbullah and Hamas. (When Ahmadinejad was here in New York being feted, I repeatedly asked people: "Why is this man still alive?") At the very least, we must begin by isolating Iran in every conceivable way.

We must fund long-term projects to combat Big Lies with truth. We do not do so at present. What we do is scattershot, reactive, immediate. Combating lethal propaganda has not been a Jewish priority.

As Jews, we must continue to love life but we must plan for war -- a very long war. We cannot afford to hope for the best or wait for someone else to handle it for us. We cannot deny that we are at war, nor can we trust the UN (especially now that John Bolton will not be there), NATO, or our European allies. But, as Israeli Major General Ya'akov Amidror has pointed out, Israel and America might find some unexpected, temporary allies among the Saudis, Egyptians, and Jordanians who do not want a Shi'ite, Iranian take-over of their region.

We must live life in the moment -- but also remember that we are an Eternal People obligated to eternal tasks. We cannot expect the battle between Good and Evil to cease -- at least not until the Messiah comes. Evil triumphs when good people do not oppose it.

I have a distinguished friend who prefers not to use his own name here. Let us call him Wolf Papiermeister. Let me share with you some of his suggestions.

 

Dr. Phyllis Chesler is the author of many works, including the bestseller "Women and Madness" (1972), "The New Anti-Semitism" (2003) and "The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle for Women's Freedom" (2005). Her forthcoming book is titled "The Islamization of America." An Emerita professor of psychology and women's studies and the co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology and the National Women's Health Network, she is currently on the board of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and may be contacted through her website, www.phyllis-chesler.com.

This article was published December 13, 2006 in the Jewish Press
www.jewishpress.com/page.do/20115/Manifesto_For_Survival.html

 

Return_________________________End of Story___________________________Return

HOME November-December 2006 Featured Stories Background Information News On The Web