The Palestine Solidarity Movement and their allies chant “Death to the Jews,” and “Death to America,” at what they describe as peace rallies; they characterize the mass murder of civilians as “resistance to oppression;” they preach the destruction of Israel and the murder of all infidels in Arabic; but then, in English, French, and German, claim that they have been misunderstood, that they really meant the opposite of what they said.
President Brodhead: Until now, I have been proud to be associated with Duke. However, as a Duke family member, I am distressed by Duke’s decision to host the PSM conference; but I am even more distressed by Duke’s failure, so far, to fund and host very different kinds of programs in this area.
Some academics and educators might say that PSM’s/ISM’s hate speech and lies are only words and cannot hurt anyone. They might also say that honoring diverse and controversial words are precisely what American universities should do. At some other time in history, and perhaps in terms of other subjects, I might agree with you. However, the level of hate-propaganda against Israel and Jews is surreal, global, sophisticated, and deadly.
During this latest Palestinian-led and Arab and Iranian-backed Intifada (2000-2004), such propaganda has both led to and yet rendered invisible the highest civilian body count in Israel’s history. In American demographic terms, by now America would have suffered approximately 45,000 civilian deaths at the hands of terrorists and approximately 280,000 civilians wounded, often seriously, and for life. More than half would have been women and children. Only Israel’s unilateral creation of a security barrier has begun to staunch the flood of Israeli blood.
The Islamists, whom the PSM supports, torture and impoverish their own people, sacrifice their own children, practice slavery, and commit genocide. They terrorize their own citizens, especially intellectuals, women, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, many “politically correct” academics have romanticized these barbarians — even the billionaire bin Laden and the multi-millionaire Arafat — as humiliated and impoverished freedom fighters.
I have written about this betrayal of the truth and of the Jews in my twelfth and latest book: The New Anti-Semitism. The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It. Most “politically correct” academics, including feminists, have joined left-alliances which single out only Israel for imaginary crimes and misdemeanors. They say that Israel is an Apartheid and Nazi state; it is not. But, as one of Duke’s pioneer feminists, let me indeed briefly focus on Apartheid as a feminist issue.
Islam today is the largest practitioner of both gender and religious Apartheid in the world. Women who live under Islam are, variously, murdered outright in honor killings and oppressed by forced veiling, segregation, sequestration, stoning to death for alleged adultery, female genital mutilation, polygamy, forced marriage to men old enough to be their grandfather, and by domestic and sexual slavery.
Women have few, if any, civil, legal, or human rights under Islam today. In addition, under Islam, all non-Muslims — Christians, Jews, Assyrians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, animists — have historically been viewed and treated as subhuman and accorded “dhimmi” status. Today, except for the small country of Israel, all 22 nation states in the Arab Muslim Middle East are Judenrein (free of Jews); Christians there remain at serious risk.
You will probably not hear anyone at the PSM conference address Apartheid in this way and to fail to do so is to fail the requirements of objectivity and scholarship. “Free” speech is not always “true” speech. Universities have an obligation to teach the truth as much as they may also wish to model tolerance for all speech, including that which bears no relationship to the truth. Thus, in the interests of free, true speech, may I suggest that Duke: