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.

Advertisement




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?

Advertisement

1
2
3
SHARE
Previous articleSteve Reich: World Class Composer, World Class Jew – A Personal Reminiscence
Next articleAn Unforgettable Forty-Year Shabbos Journey
Dr. Phyllis Chesler is a professor emerita of psychology, a Middle East Forum fellow, and the author of sixteen books including “The New Anti-Semitism” (2003, 2014), “Living History: On the Front Lines for Israel and the Jews, 2003-2015 (2015), and “An American Bride in Kabul” (2013), for which she won the National Jewish Book Award in the category of memoirs. Her articles are archived at www.phyllis-chesler.com. A version of this piece appeared on IsraelNationalNews.com.