What was Rotberg’s crime? First, he did not demonize Israel. Second, he did not choose a “neutral” position, somewhere between Hamas’s and that of the settlers ejected from Gaza. He dared speak about Israel positively, truthfully, and soulfully. Most of all, he dared speak the truth about Palestinian and Islamic terrorism against Israel. He did not deserve to be labeled a “racist” for any of this nor did he deserve to be called “a [expletive] Jew.”
More important, he was reading aloud from a work of fiction which means that his protagonist should have been allowed to say and do anything. Here are our Alice-in-Wonderland rules again: Western critics still proudly insist that the Palestinian suicide killers depicted in the film “Paradise Now” cannot be confused with the film’s Palestinian creator who has, after all, engaged in a “fictionalized” depiction of psychological reality. But someone like Howard Rotberg can be verbally attacked and called a “racist” for creating a fictional character who dares question the motives and actions of Palestinian and Muslim terrorists. Only Jews and their allies are held to such Catch-22 standards.
Second, there is the 2004 case of De Paul University professor Thomas Klocek. Klocek, who had taught at De Paul for fifteen years, visited a student fair on campus and engaged in dialogue with some Muslim student supporters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He defended Israel. He questioned whether Palestinian sympathizer Rachel Corrie had indeed been murdered in cold blood and whether Israelis were really treating Palestinians in the same manner that Hitler treated the Jews – as the students’ literature and posters suggested. He insisted that “the Israeli Armed Forces have exercised very careful restraint in their responses to what has been almost daily suicide bombings.”
Whereupon eight students descended on the single professor. A verbal melee ensued. The students felt “harassed” and “threatened” and characterized what Klocek said as “racist remarks.” The students met with their advisors who in turn alerted various administrative deans who in turn apologized to the students and suspended Professor Klocek. As of this writing, a lawsuit is under way.
Third, on October 14 of this year, when I spoke at the CUNY Graduate Center for the National Organization for Women of New York State, prominent leftist feminists, including Katha Pollitt of The Nation magazine and NOW-NYC agitator Pam Martens, wrote a series of letters to intimidate and humiliate both NOW and the Graduate Center for having invited a “pro-Bush, pro-war, neo-conservative” speaker (that’s me, folks). They or their minions arranged for WBAI, a listener-sponsored hard-left radio station, to come and tape the evening. In December, WBAI’s “The Joy of Resistance” broadcast a one-hour “feminist” program that aired a spliced-and-diced version of my talk mainly for the purpose of denouncing me as a “racist.”
These geniuses correctly characterized me as “the Christopher Hitchens of the women’s movement,” but incorrectly interpreted my opposition to multi-cultural relativity as “racism.” My denunciation of the atrocities being perpetrated against brown- or black- or olive-skinned Muslim, Jewish, and Christian women and men was offered as proof that I am a “racist.”
Oddly enough, when I testified in the Senate earlier in December about Islamic gender Apartheid, one Iranian feminist said: “Finally! An American feminist leader who is not willing to abandon us to her theories of cultural relativity.” She “gets” it; my leftist feminist detractors do not.
One might understand why many (but not all) Muslims often hotly allege racism even where it may not exist. Caucasian Christian westerners have held “racist” views of people who were neither Christian nor Caucasian and they have, in the past, colonized the immediate known world. Some leftists have also argued that the French caused their own Intifada by holding “racist” views of France’s Muslim immigrant population.