As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

(This originally appeared as a blog on my own website. It was written before I started writing a blog for Pajamas Media. It also appeared in The Jewish Press.)

CNN’S Master Plan: Part One

Dhabah Almontaser, the nearly anointed principal of Brooklyn’s madrassa and CNN’s fully anointed Christiane Amanpour both agree that in Arabic, “Intifada” means a “shaking off.” Amanpour gave an example of how to use the word by saying that “Palestinian (terrorists) were (merely) shaking off the Israeli Occupation;” Almontaser, when challenged about the infamous tee-shirts, said that “Intifada-NYC” referred to young Muslim girls “shaking off oppression.”

In November of 2005, Fox’s O’Reilly showed live footage of the French Intifada as it raged in Paris. According to WorldNetDaily, Saudi billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, (aka Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud), who owns 5-6% of the Fox News Channel, personally called Rupert Murdoch and asked him to change the offensive (but accurate) caption: “Muslim Riots” to the less offensive (and less accurate) “Civil Riots.” Within thirty minutes, the Prince had his way.

To paraphrase New York Post columnist Cindy Adams: Only in America kids, only in America.

Our fine Saudi prince also owns shares in Times-Warner/AOL/CNN, which he first acquired in 2002. According to Forbes, the London Guardian, and other media outlets, in 2002 the Prince “claimed to own 1.4 billion in AOL stock…in 2003 he bought another 450 million of AOL stock.” God knows what he owns now. (Yes, he’s the very Prince whom Presidential hopeful Rudy Guiliani humiliated when he refused to accept his ten million dollar donation for humanitarian aid immediately following 9/11).

Has bin Talal’s ownership influenced Amanpour’s highly touted, highly slanted, and highly tedious three part series “God’s Warriors?” I have no inside information here but I doubt that any overt bribes were involved.

Amanpour dresses in safari-like bush jackets but they are never grungy, and are in fact glamorous in color and fit. She is no Oriana Fallaci, no Susan Sontag, but is probably the best CNN has to offer in terms of Talking Heads who presumably think. To those unfamiliar with Amanpour’s background, she lived in London (still does), attended schools in America, and her husband, James Rubin, is Jewish. He once worked for former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright–another Jew who did not know she was one.

After watching Amanpour’s segment on the Jews, I was disheartened and outraged. How long will people have to suffer Big Lies on our screens and be forced to react defensively, only after the fact? How much Saudi money might really be involved in CNN’s series? In addition to bin Talal, we do know that the Saudis have been buying up shares in the Western media, (UPI for example), influencing curriculum on campuses, and in some instances, buying certain journalists outright. (There is a scandal about this still under wraps in Europe right now. Stay tuned for an update).

Amanpour, whose father is a Muslim Iranian, her mother British, and who spent the first eleven years of her life in Tehran, set out to portray Jews as religiously driven terrorists, illegal land-grabbers, and fat-cat American lobbyists with dual loyalties. She interviewed former President Carter and John Mearsheimer (but not anyone of stature who can easily rebut what they say). Both men believe that Israel is an apartheid state and that the Zionist lobby controls American foreign policy. (See CAMERA’S excellent point by point refutation of Amanpour).

Amanpour makes sure to track down Israelis who have advised the government that “settling an occupied land” violates the Geneva convention and international law (such as Theodore Meron); the Jewish Israeli lawyers who defend Palestinians and who often successfully, challenge the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes. She has female settlers on camera who allegedly say that they believe Palestinians should be killed or expelled. She shows the security wall at its ugliest without context and she focuses on individual Palestinians who are indeed being seriously harmed by its creation. (No, she does not show the Jews being blown up, week after week, in a non-stop series of 9/11’s that might explain the desperate need for such a tragic but strategic structure).

In my no doubt alarmist and paranoid view, she is trying to position American and world Jewish support for Israel as essentially equivalent to American and world Muslim support for Hamas and for other Muslim terrorist organizations who also engage in humanitarian aid and social service projects. Just as the leaders of the Holy Land foundation are being tried as supporters of terrorist organizations in America today, Amanpour’s portrayal of Jewish support for an allegedly “illegal,” “racist,” or “apartheid” Jewish “settler state” with a “handful of Jewish terrorists” may now lead to similar attempts to shut down American-based fundraising for Israel and to dampen Congressional support for military foreign aid to Israel.

Perhaps Amanpour does not envision this at all but merely wishes to show that there is terrorism on both sides of the divide. But this is not true. While there is indeed a “handful” of “Jewish terrorists” or ideologue of Jewish reprisals, (Meir Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, Yigal Amir, and the Jewish Underground are named), such figures are just that–a handful, and their attempts at indiscriminate violence have either been prevented or immediately and seriously punished by the Israeli government.

Further, Amanpour fails to draw the right conclusions from what she does show on camera. In every instance, Israeli government officials, including former Shin Bet and IDF spokesmen are the ones who prevent Jewish terrorists from striking, who arrest and imprison them when they commit violence, who sentence them to between 7-15 years in jail or to life sentences. There are no posters all over Israel glorifying their violent deeds as there are on the West Bank for their shahids and shahidas and in the no-longer occupied Gaza strip. Israeli textbooks and television videos do not sing their praises in Israel as is the case among the Palestinians.

It gets worse. She views the Muslim claim to Al Aqsa and the Temple Mount, not as equal to but as superior to the ancient Jewish claim. She fails to draw a single conclusion from the fact that Muslims did not–and still do not–allow non-Muslims access to their holy Jewish or Christian religious sites although Jews guarantee that access to all religions.

So, there I was, licking my wounds when I turned on the TV to see Amanpour’s second segment.

Amanpour has never met an Iranian or for that matter a Muslim whom she does not like; yes, even the terrorists and one fundamentalist imam in “the holy city of Quom” receives only a flirtatious wag of her finger when he rather cheerfully admits that women are not allowed to do certain things and are condemned to other things–but that’s for their own good, to protect them. She is warm with him, much less warm with his so-called Israeli counterparts.

She opens her segment on Muslim Warriors with a charming, well-spoken, highly westernized young man, Ed Husain, who was deceived, or who rebelled and became associated with a terrorist group in his native London. Once he realized that they are killing innocent people, even children, he backed away. He has written a book about leaving Islamism.

Ed Husain does not represent most Muslims who at best remain silent and who do not condemn Islamist imperialism, religious fundamentalism, or America- and Jew-hatred. There are a handful of Muslims who criticize Islam openly. Many are tortured, killed, forced into exile, impoverished, live in hiding, publish under pseudonyms. Her interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali was very, very brief –no more than a minute altogether. On the contrary, she kept returning to former nun Karen Armstrong whose views on Jews, Israel, and Zionism are anti-Semitic with a vengeance. Armstrong also defended veiling and compared it her own habit as a nun. (Stay tuned for more to come about this).

As to women? Amanpour does not tell us any stories of honor killings or women who avoided being honor-murdered but instead focuses on a happy, modestly veiled Muslim-American woman who describes how her choice to “cover” is denigrated and held suspect in America.

Each and every portrait of a Muslin or of a Muslin terrorist’s family presents soulful, thoughtful people, perhaps a bit “different” than you and I but still human, likeable, charming–maybe even made of better stuff than you and I in the west who crave material possessions, display female bodies, allow men and women to intermingle in sexually charged ways, drink alcohol, and refuse to live in a God-centered world.

Amanpour is worse than all the others (writers mainly) who have been blasting Judaism and Christianity but mainly in order to be able to also blast, but in a lesser way, Islam. The thesis is that we are all guilty, all to blame, that each religion is clannish, “different,” its texts support violence; its extreme followers are but a handful, nothing for the world to worry about.

These are all false assumptions and outright lies.

August 23, 2007

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

(This essay is based on a speech I delivered at the 2008 National Convention of Emunah Women of America on a panel that consisted of Ari Goldman, Marty Peretz and myself. A version appeared in The Jewish Press, April 23, 2008.)

Only yesterday, in 2001, I wrote that “Now we are all Israelis.” The same Intifada against Israel that the world chose not to stop swiftly and inevitably became a global Intifada against all civilians. Ironically, governments everywhere are now learning how to guard themselves from terrorist attacks by copying Israel, who had to do so first.

In 2002-2003, I wrote that anti-Zionism is the new-Anti-Semitism, that decades of increasingly lethal propaganda against Israel has finally turned the Jewish state into the Jew of the World. I also said that anti-Zionism= Racism. In 2004, I wrote that Jews were once again “on the precipice,” that we were back in the 1930s, or even 1940s, that a potential Second Holocaust against us, (God forbid), had quite obviously begun in Israel.

Only a few years ago, such views were unique and were often mocked; today they have become more apparent to more people. But we are only a handful and our voices are mainly carried away by the winds of indifference and denial. However, we have also been attacked and marginalized for our pro-Israel views. This suggests that all those who stand for Israel, are, in a way, also under siege.

I am honored to be among you today–I am honored to stand with Emunah for Israel, for America, for the truth and for God.

What’s wrong with the world?

The world is ready to sacrifice the Jews once again.

The world is ready to embrace fascism and totalitarianism once again.

Most of the world’s leaders are blind, they are greedy, they are arrogant. They lack humility and gratitude. They act as if they are immortal, as if they are Gods.

Therefore, the world continues to brutally sacrifice its most vulnerable citizens: Its widows and orphans, its elderly, its women, its children–and, in an orgy of misguided self-righteousness, to then blame its own cruelty on the Jews. The world dares, once again, to believe that it will only be redeemed if tiny Israel, the only Jewish state is, perpetually defamed and tormented and then God forbid, destroyed.

What’s wrong with the world? We live at a time in which the truth goes begging for a hearing, a time in which Big Lies prevail. The world’s universities, media, and international bodies, including human rights groups, have all been Palestinianized. Indeed, reality itself has been Palestinianized. We live amidst a glut of doctored film footage, blood libels, internet videos that proclaim the essential evil of the Jews 24/7 in all the world’s languages.

One can find Islamists and Palestinian terrorists glorified and Israel demonized on the internet at all hours: On an academic listserv group, on YouTube, in popular rap music videos posted on the web. Israel is proclaimed as the “apartheid” oppressor and genocidal “ethnic cleanser” of the noble Palestinians. The mainstream media call terrorists “freedom fighters” or “militants.” And they describe Israelis trying to defend themselves as “Nazis.”

Such media bias has inevitably taken its toll. The “international community” has spent forty years turning Israel into a pariah nation. Surrounding nations, like Sudan, in which ethnic Arab Muslims are perpetuating a real genocide against black African Muslims and Christians is barely noticed, never demonized, neither condemned nor stopped.

Yes, some western intellectuals, including Israeli academics, including Jewish academics, not only believe this propaganda–often, they are the first to say so.

What’s wrong with the world? Fundamentalist Islam, which is the world’s largest practitioner of gender and religious apartheid, is nevertheless passionately embraced by the most “distinguished” Western progressives, academics, intellectuals, and feminists. Yes, by Israeli academics and by Jewish intellectuals too.

In the name of “political correctness,” “anti-colonialism,” “anti-racism,” and “multicultural relativism,” the West is ready to throw open the gates to the barbarians. The Western intelligentsia were the first to surrender to this death-cult.

What’s wrong with the world? We, even the Jews, still believe certain dangerous myths: That the Jews are to blame for anti-Semitism, that if we only appease our enemies that things will go well for us. Or, that the world will somehow be “saved” by moderate, peace-loving Muslims. To this I say: There were, no doubt, moderate and peace-loving Germans in the Nazi era but since they did not actively resist Hitler, they ended up collaborating with radical evil.

I am ready to work with moderate and religious Muslims. But, my friends and colleagues, who are Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents assure me that such moderates do not exist. There are practically no leading Muslim clerics who dare to publicly oppose the extremist mullahs. (Many secular and anti-religious Muslim dissidents do so). How many mullahs condemn the relentless and pitiless destruction of the Jewish reputation and of the Jewish state? How many decry the demonization of the West?

What’s wrong with the world? It grieves me to say what I am about to say but: Israel itself has not taken care of its most vulnerable citizens either. Israel has withheld justice from its needy, its endangered, from its women, its agunot, its widows, its elderly, its poor–its own internal exiles, re-located from Gaza. Read Isaiah. Israeli leaders dare not continue to do so lightly.

What’s wrong with the world? It remains indifferent to the plight of the Jews; no, it is worse than this. As I’ve already said, the world continues to scapegoat and sacrifice Israel either for opportunistic reasons or because they hate and envy Jews and the Jewish nation. The civilians of Sderot are relentlessly shelled, yeshiva students in Jerusalem are gunned down at point-blank range–and the UN refuses to condemn the Palestinians and the world media condemns Israel for finally trying to protect her own citizens.

I fear it is almost too late, the harm has been done, the brainwashing is pervasive, an atmosphere has been created in which no one will stop a slow motion or a nuclear/dramatic Second Holocaust.

We are up against a new kind of enemy and massive weapons of propaganda. In turn, Jews and Israelis have not yet developed any anti-propaganda weaponry of our own. We need a war room to combat the propaganda in the War of Ideas, not separate, poorly funded, and funding-competitive grassroots groups who are each trying to tackle this particular Monster.

The world’s heart is harder than Pharoah’s against the Jews and against the Jewish state.

Jewish women’s voices now matter more than ever. Of course, they always have. Where would we be as a people without our great Matriarchs, and without Miriam, Dvorah, Channa, Ruth, Esther?

Queen Esther saved the Diaspora community in which she lived. She was ready to risk her life in order to save the Jews of Shushan. We, as a people, are again faced with Esther’s task. In her merit, may we also rise to the occasion.

Acts of chesed and emunah are, as ever, urgently required. But, in addition, acts of heroism are needed too. Indeed, heroism is now our only Jewish alternative.

From left to right: Phyllis Chesler, Steve Emerson, and an Emunah official

Left to right: Phyllis Chesler, Ari Goldman, and Martin Peretz

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

This originally appeared as a blog on my own website. It was written before I started writing a blog for Pajamas Media. It also appeared in The Jewish Press.

The Educated Terrorist

What more is there to say?

Here’s something. Tarek Heggy is a prominent Egyptian intellectual and dissident. Nonie Darwish, my friend and also an amazing truth-teller, has just introduced us. Recently, according to Heggy, he had lunch with a former Crown Prince of Jordan and a dozen other Egyptians, “none of us without a Ph.D from a world class university.” Nevertheless, Heggy, a businessman, a leading liberal political thinker, and the author of fourteen books, was the only one who believed that 9/11 had indeed been perpetrated by Al Qaeda against America. All the others still believed that America either attacked herself or, like so much else (blizzards, earthquakes, poisoned well-water), that the Zionists did it.

I first wrote about this dispiriting, unyielding phenomenon in 2002 and I published it in 2003 in “The New Anti-Semitism.” Since then, nothing has changed. Actually, everything has changed–but for the worse.

Education–especially advanced education–in both the West and in the Islamic East does not seem to challenge or triumph over vulgar prejudice and really Big Lies.

Nobel Laureates (Saramago for one) believe that Israel is essentially evil and the cause of world suffering–but so does the Ford Foundation which continues, post-Durban, to fund those who continue to engage in such rank racism including John Mearsheimer and Joan Wallach Scott, both of whom will share their anti-Israel views at Columbia. Of course, their panel is being touted in grand Orwellian style as a shining example of free speech and academic freedoms which are otherwise under siege but, with the help of Ford and Columbia, will be briefly freed.

They share Osama bin Laden’s views which he recently shared with the world on videotape, live from No-Man’s land between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most of what he said consisted of Big Lies–but they are distressingly indistinguishable from what is taught on most western campuses today.

Only the West has engaged in Holocausts he says. Agonizingly true but also not exactly true. Let me remind Osama that Mohammed himself ordered the genocidal extermination of the Jewish tribes of northern Arabia and thus set the pattern for such subsequent pogroms of both Jews and Christians and of other dhimmi populations.

Ethnic Arab Muslims are genocidally slaughtering black African Muslims in Darfur; they are also enslaving them. The only humanitarian aid to reach these poor people comes from Jews and Christians and from America. Arab and Muslim nations and leaders are not settling this matter and are not sending food or medical supplies to their “brothers.”

My point here: Osama is educated and wealthy. So were the maniacs who flew planes into American buildings on 9/11. So are my colleague, Tarek Heggy’s Egyptian intellectuals. So are all their American counterparts who firmly believe that the tragedy on 9/11 was either caused by America and/or Israel or that America deserved it because, like Israel, we are essentially, existentially, evil.

Leading European and American intellectuals believe that America is a terrorist nation-state and that Osama is a freedom fighter.

These are very dangerous delusions which have only begun to gather steam.

May a miracle avert all the coming disasters.

September 10, 2007

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

This originally appeared as a blog on my own website. It was written before I started writing a blog for Pajamas Media. It also appeared in The Jewish Press.

Reading the (Funny) Papers or My NY Times Problem

Once upon a time, I only read and wrote for the most radical, left, and feminist media on the face of the earth. Reluctantly, suspiciously, I read just one establishment, “grown up” paper: The New York Times. After all, it was my home town paper and being as provincial as most Manhattanites, I somehow still believed (you learn this from the drinking water) that the Times covered issues in an objective, sophisticated, and leading-edge way.

I still subscribe to and read the Times but never first and sometimes not at all. (I love how they cover weddings and usually check their obituaries). But duty calls and, as a culture warrior on the front lines, so to speak, I have to read the Times.

But now, I first read The New York Sun, Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, Commentary, Middle East Quarterly, the American Jewish media, the online Israeli and Middle Eastern papers and then check about twenty five other internet websites beginning with FrontPage and Pajamas Media in order to steel myself for the ordeal of reading The Paper of Record–yes, the same paper which buried news of the Holocaust on its back pages; the one which today, chooses, positions, and captions photos in such a way that over time, its readers have come to believe that Israel is really an “apartheid” nation state and that every single Palestinian, including the suicide killers, their handlers, and their billionaire funders are barefoot, unarmed, and innocent victims of Israeli and Jewish aggression.

Just the other day–on precisely August 11, 2007, what fresh outrage blinded me and caused me to reach for my blood pressure medication? There, right on the front page of the Saturday Times was a photo four columns wide and five inches high. It was not about the American miners who were, at the time, heartstoppingly, tragically trapped in Utah.

It showed us a lonely man (Camus’ existential stranger-hero, perhaps Kafka’s lonely civilian facing a nameless bureaucracy) on a long, long road surrounded by a high wall. The article was captioned: “A Segregated Road in an Already Divided Land.” One more time, the Israeli attempt to defend itself from terrorist attacks by building a security wall and, incredibly, in this instance, to also allow the West Bank Palestinians (those who do not comprise the 1.2 million who live in Israel proper as Israeli citizens) to travel from Ramallah to Bethlehem without checkpoints, without being stopped, without having to deal with Israeli soldiers.

One might think that congratulations were in order. Nope. In fact, the pull quote read: “A Lack of Exits Will Keep Palestinians Out of Jerusalem.” I do not recall any similar pull quotes about how Jews or Christians are not allowed to practice their religions in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or even at their own holiest sites in Muslim-held territory.

And, as Paul Berman has brilliantly pointed out, the Times has glamorized fascism in its overly gushing reviews of the work of Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of The Muslim Brotherhood, who now teaches at Oxford University and is published by their distinguished press.

When Islamic jihad intensified against Israel in 2000, I began to meticulously document such media biases. I wrote articles, delivered speeches, lost old friends and colleagues but made new ones for doing so. I counted myself one lucky woman when HonestReporting, Camera, and Memri emerged to do just this both systematically and splendidly.

Let me note that because the Times is still so large it can afford to throw bones, offer scraps, to cover their considerable moral nakedness. Thus, the paper has also published inspired, “corrective” reportage by Nicholas Kristof, Christopher Caldwell, and David Brooks–even occasionally by Thomas Friedman on the subjects of Islamic gender and religious apartheid and about the Middle East. And, let me admit: I still read their Sunday Book Review which, although it chose not to review my last two books, (a “first” for me, but a very educational experience), still remains essential reading. But, the book reviews in the New York Sun, Wall Street Journal, and Weekly Standard are now also essential reading.

Here’s the problem: Despite all the ongoing critiques, the Times remains a major cultural gate-keeper. If a film, opera, ballet, concert, or book is reviewed in its pages–the work exists. Otherwise, the work and its creator are rendered almost invisible. A good review in the Times (and I have had two front page Sunday book reviews, appeared on the cover of their magazine, been interviewed and published in their pages hundreds of times), inevitably leads to book sales, lecture and media requests, larger publishing advances, and invitations to much-talked about parties. It does more than that: It ensures that your ideas are made available to a large number of people.

If this is true about culture, imagine the influence the Times wields by its coverage of war, politics, foreign policy or the Presidency.

I don’t think the bias or the influence of the mainstream media will change any time soon. And, it may get a lot worse with the increasing Saudi purchase of shares in American media.

However, there is cause for hope. I am banking on the internet to effectively complete with such mainstream media. Most people under 30 turn to the internet for their news, not to hard copy newspapers–or so my son and various polls tell me. This, more than the cancellation of subscription by irate readers, is probably the primary reason that circulation has fallen at the paper of Record.

And now, having gotten this off my chest, I am ready to face the Paper of Record for today.

August 14, 2007

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

This originally appeared as a blog on my own website. It was written before I started writing a blog for Pajamas Media. It also appeared in The Jewish Press.

Violence as a Form of Islamist Speech — August 10, 2007

When will the West awaken? Of course, I am not talking about your ordinary citizen or soldier but about our Talking Heads and other gate-keeping chatterers who simply refuse to “get it.” Cambridge University Press not only recalls but has promised to pulp the book that authoritatively documents one Saudi billionaire’s funding of terror; many anti-jihadic writers and all our leading mainstream media have privately apologized to this same billionaire. Only Rachel Ehrenfeld has refused to “apologize” for telling the truth and has counter-sued him in an American court of law based on her First Amendment right to tell the truth. (She was initially sued in London where she lost by default, she chose not to appear in court).

At a recent conference in Los Angeles, sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, Daniel Pipes announced his intention to start a legal defense bail fund. For those who are sued by Islamists and their Western apologists for telling the truth. Not a moment too soon–although, regrettably, perhaps too late for Ehrenfeld. And, The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has begun a process of legal intimidation against my esteemed colleague, Robert Spencer. Accordingly, David Horowitz has launched a legal defense fund for Spencer. I have pledged money to this and advise us all to do the same. Before this war is over, we will each need legal defense funds. And that’s if we’re lucky.

Those in the Islamic East need bodyguards and air-lifts to safety in the West. But there is a pattern emerging in the West which we ignore at our own peril. For example, a leading American publisher of law enforcement and counter-terrorism titles cancelled Dr. Nancy Kobrin’s book about Islamic suicide terrorism. I wrote the Introduction for it and together Dr. Kobrin and I “went public.” A number of other publishers emerged–but they quickly disappeared from whence they came. I have been trying to find a publisher for a book titled “The Islamification of America” and guess what? No takers so far. I am ready to self-publish the work.

This is a very special kind of Gulag. The internet provides us with the most sophisticated and universal of platforms for such 21st century “samizdats.” We who write in the America are so far lucky. We are legally intimidated. We are silenced on campuses due to the “politically correct” ideologies that rule there. True, the American Jewish Committee recently paid for a full page New York Times ad signed by American college presidents who oppose the eternally-intended British boycott of Israeli academics and who bravely suggest that they be boycotted too. Well and good. But guess who did not sign? Harvard, Yale, Vassar, California State University at Berkeley, Los Angeles, UCLA, San Francisco State, and of course, Norman Finkelstein’s old perch, De Paul in Chicago. (Maybe I’m wrong, maybe they did sign in a Harry Potter kind of way in invisible ink).

But this is nothing–nothing–compared to what Muslim intellectuals (and women and human beings) must endure in the Islamic world today. If they are lucky, they live in exile or in hiding and write under pseudonyms. A handful writes openly and travels with bodyguards. I am just told that Taslima Nasrin was, yet again, attacked by one hundred angry Muslim fanatics as she held a press conference in Hyderabad, India, to launch her new book. Nasrin, a physician and a feminist author who was born in Bangladesh, was once nearly lynched by a mighty mob there. She fled her country and lived in exile in Sweden and in hiding. Now, she lives in India where dozens of Muslim protesters, led by three lawmakers physically attacked her and her co-panelists. They demanded that India extradite her to Bangladesh (I guess for the kind of justice Bangladesh has meted out to that other hero, parliamentarian Chadhury, who was imprisoned and tortured because he wanted to visit Israel). Her works have been banned in Bangladesh. She is being accused of being “anti-Islam.” Islamists are moving against us in the West very carefully and in legal ways. In the overly revered “Third World” they speak in violence, their speech IS violence. I hope that Taslima Nasrin remains safe and in India. And that the sleeping giant awakens before we have all been sued and censored into silence.

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

Holocaust Remembrance — April 27, 2006

With Holocaust denial rampant among Islamists and Western intellectuals, the celebration of Holocaust Memorial Day becomes more than an affirmation of the truth of the tragedy. It is also an act of defiance and moral clarity.

In the Islamic media, Israel and Jews are labeled and portrayed as vermin and child-eating monsters. Islamists see no contradiction between caricaturing Jews in the vilest way and yet protesting, often violently, the fairly innocuous Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. Appeasers in the Western intelligentsia are quick to sympathize with Islam’s injured “honor” in this matter.

Western leftists use the Holocaust to suit their own political purposes. Some say that the Jews are exploiting the Holocaust in order to collect reparations money and that they have used the Holocaust to justify the creation of an “apartheid” state.

They have also put forward their own version of Holocaust denial. Jews, they claim, are worse than Nazis, and Israel is perpetrating a “Holocaust” upon the Palestinians – the same Palestinians who send human bombs to murder Israeli civilians. The attacks on Israel are constant, its list of alleged crimes routinely expanded to include “ethnic cleansing,” “forced transfers,” and supposed “human rights violations.”

One is forced to confront Big Lies at every level. Two professors at America’s most distinguished universities publish “scholarship” that reads like the 21st-century version of anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They claim that an all-powerful “Israel Lobby” controls the universities, the media, and American foreign policy. No sooner are such papers debunked as crude propaganda then imitations appear. Thus, the virulently anti-Israel lobbying group, the Council for the National Interest, runs a full-page ad in the April 17 edition of the New York Times claiming that the unmasking of the aforementioned article as a pseudo-scholarly smear proves that the Israel Lobby does in fact control everything.

In Europe, meanwhile, the same nations that conspired in the murder of their assimilated, educated, and peaceful Jews, are now inviting in Muslims, who are far less assimilated and who are often far from peaceful.

But Europeans have had a long romance with the Noble Arab Savage, whom they nevertheless brutally colonized. Now, in a frenzy of anti-racist guilt, newer generations of Europeans seem to believe that a policy of multiculturalism that tolerates the most illiberal elements of Muslim culture is necessary to expiate for their former sins. And even as they make a virtue of defending Islamic racism, these Europeans proudly declare, “We are now anti-racists who have welcomed 20-30 million fertile Muslims of color.”

Surveying these developments, some now say that we are re-living the 1930’s. Today, however, the danger to Jews is far graver and more complex than it has been in the past. Old-fashioned anti-Semitic stereotypes – e.g., the Jews control the media and the banks, seek world domination, and killed Jesus Christ – have been added to pre-existing Islamic views of Jews as subhuman infidels. The resulting mix is a hot brew of relentless hatred.

But there is still another danger. Anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli, and anti-American propaganda has gone global. It is visually masterful, technologically sophisticated, and available around the clock, especially in Arabic. Jews and Zionists can be “seen” holding a meeting of the (fake) Elders of Zion, (falsely) demanding that Jesus be tortured and crucified, committing (fake) massacres in Jenin, and stabbing non-Jewish children to death for their blood.

Jew-haters are creating a situation in which another Holocaust-like mass murder of Jews may be possible. Indeed, in my view, it has already begun, certainly not in America and not yet in Europe – but in Israel. Today, Jews who live in the Jewish state – a nation that was initially envisioned as the solution to the ceaseless persecution of the Jews – are far more endangered than those who live in the Diaspora.

Israel endured the equivalent of 9/11 every month for four years during the intifada that erupted in 2000. In 2005, seven Palestinian homicide bombers killed and wounded Israeli civilians; an additional 15 such terrorist attacks were thwarted. True, Israel is well-armed and has nuclear capacity. However, the military superiority of the Jewish state is now being used to diabolize Israel on university campuses throughout the Western world.

The fanatical leader of Iran has gone further. President Ahmadinejad has threatened to annihilate Israel using nuclear weaponry. He has said: “The Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. It will be eliminated by one storm. Believe that Palestine will be freed soon.” I take him seriously. My military sources tell me that there are at least 65 known nuclear facilities in Iran. All are strategically located in heavily populated civilian neighborhoods. Iran must be stopped. But who will do it? And when?

Ahmadinejad, notoriously, is a Holocaust denier. Another prominent exponent of Holocaust denial, historian David Irving, has been jailed in Austria for those beliefs. As dangerous as Holocaust denial is, however, memorialization of the Holocaust may also function as a form of denial. How can remembering the European Holocaust be a form of denial? Because in this instance it may also allow us the luxury, and the consolation, of assuming that the “worst” has already happened. Unfortunately, that may not be true.

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

The Islamification of America — March 19, 2006

As Americans, we have a long and legendary history of welcoming and assimilating immigrants. This includes granting political asylum to those in flight from political persecution. But, as Americans, we must also ensure that what has gone wrong in Europe—or what some are now calling “Eurabia”—does not happen here.

At this moment in history, we cannot allow a large influx of Arab and Muslim immigrants who have no intention of assimilating into a western, modern, and democratic American way of life. Please note that I am saying a “large” influx of immigrants who do not wish to “assimilate.” I am not talking about Arabs and Muslims who not only want to assimilate but are actively in flight from repressive Islamist regimes. How we might do this is the subject of another piece.

Here, I want to focus on those things that specifically endanger America in the absence of a massive influx of Arab and Muslim immigrants bent on jihad. I am talking about the ways in which a small but organized number of Muslim-Americans and Muslim immigrants, aided by their many Christian- and Jewish-American supporters, are currently seeking to begin the Islamification of America.

According to the scholar Bat Ye’or and the journalist Oriana Fallaci, Europe became “Eurabia” due to a massive influx of hostile Muslim immigrants with a high birth rate whose passage to Europe was aggressively funded both by Arab oil money and by European doctrines of “multi-cultural tolerance.”

A similarly dangerous, multi-cultural tolerance also exists in America. So far, however, it has won support mainly among our intellectual elite and our liberal and progressive media. Respect for barbarism thankfully does not yet exist among most American civilians. However, our concept of “religious tolerance,” academic freedom, and free speech are now being used to promote and protect hate speech against America and Israel and against the Judeo-Christian tradition. Let me give some recent examples.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is fighting to overturn the U.S. State Department’s decision not to admit Tariq Ramadan. Please note: Ramadan’s grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood and his father joined the family business. (The Jew-hating Brotherhood is a staunch advocate of jihad against the West). Ramadan is also a suave apologist for Islamic religious and gender apartheid and is, arguably, pro-jihad. He is, no doubt, a “moderate” compared to al-Qaeda’s Bin Laden and Iran’s Ahmadinejad. Yet Ramadan may outdistance such terrorist counterparts in terms of his far more sophisticated disinformation capability. Nevertheless, the ACLU sees his right to teach and preach as a First Amendment issue. Perhaps they have a point. My questions: Are we obligated to extend First Amendment rights to our enemies when we are at war? Even if doing so endangers us?

And further: Why did PEN—a distinguished Association of Writers of which I am a proud member—feel obliged to honor or to “invite” Ramadan to their festive annual conference which will take place at the end of April of 2006? Would they extend a similar honor to Hitler? Would they do so simply because the American administration had banned the sale of his book or refused to allow Hitler to preach here?

According to the Iranian dissident Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, PEN was going to honor both Ramadan and Magdi Allam, the Egyptian-born non-practicing Muslim deputy editor of Italy’s premier newspaper, Corriere della Sera, but Allam refused to appear together with Ramadan. When I called the PEN office they confirmed that Ramadan was still “invited” but was no longer being given an award. Why does an American organization dedicated to both free and artful speech feel that “even-handedness” obliges them to honor a Muslim anti-Islamist and a Muslim Islamist apologist at the same event? Whose favor do they curry, whose censure do they fear? That of western politically correct intellectuals or that of Islamists? Is there an operative difference when it comes to pro-Islamist free speech?

More recently, the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Norman Seigel, followed by the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, defended the right of the New York City’s top Muslim prison imam to rage against America, Jews, and Zionists. At a conference of Muslim students, Imam Umar Abdul-Jalil claimed that Muslims were being “tortured” in city jails; that “the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House;” and that we should not allow “the Zionists of the media to dictate what Islam is to us.”

The imam was suspended with pay for two weeks but not fired. Perhaps he does have the right to say anything he pleases as a citizen; perhaps his loss of this right might also endanger us all. My question is, what if he is indoctrinating a large population of NYC criminals? Conversion to Islam, especially among African-American men in jail, is growing, both here and among North-and Caribbean-African men in Europe. Can we consider them truly “rehabilitated” if they hold such extremist views when they are released?

Further, what does it mean that Duke University and Georgetown University have recently defended the right of the Palestine Solidarity Movement to hold their annual conference at their respective campuses? Both institutions claimed that even if the hate speech against Jews, Israel, and America was false and inflammatory, it was still protected by the First Amendment and by academic freedom.

Let’s assume they are right. My question: at what point can we understand that such hateful teaching and preaching have the power to inflame someone like the Iranian student, Mohammed Reza Taheriazar who just drove his rented SUV into a crowd of fellow students at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, injuring nine people? According to Daniel Pipes, this quiet and seemingly assimilated terrorist said that he wanted to “punish the American government for their actions around the world” and that he “wanted to avenge the death of Muslims around the world.”

Such ideas are rampant in the Islamic media. Just as the 2000 Intifada against Israel has gone global, so too has the hate speech against America, Israel, and the West become global and technologically magnified. The anti-American and anti-Zionist mosque sermons that have historically taken place locally every Friday have now also gone global and are available, via satellite, throughout the world, including in Europe.

Not to worry. The Qatar-based network, al-Jazeera—the very same network to which bin Laden and al-Zaraquawi send the videos of their beheadings—wants to open an office in Washington, D.C. to “spin” the news in English for us. Luckily, like the Dubai Port deal, it has encountered some American resistance. There is no guarantee that such resistance will ultimately prevail.

But here is what really worries me. The same First Amendment, free speech, and academic rights that seem to work so well for Islamists, do not seem to protect our right to criticize Islamic terrorism or Islamic religious and gender apartheid. Thus, by and large, the First Amendment absolutists of the American media chose not to reprint the Danish cartoons in solidarity with the Danish cartoonists. In fact, only one brave young editor, Harry Siegel of the New York Press, walked off the job when his boss refused to allow him to publish the controversial cartoons. Meanwhile, the bookshop so well known for stocking books by dissidents, San Francisco’s City Lights Bookshop, absolutely refuses to stock or sell Oriana Fallaci’s work.

Those of us who describe Islam/Islamism accurately are often slandered as “racists” and as “Islamophobic” and silenced by lawsuit and by fear of lawsuit. Members of Cincinnati’s Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) managed to shut down a production of a play by Glyn O’Malley about the first female suicide bomber. A group of Muslim students at De Paul University managed to get Professor Thomas Klocek fired or permanently “suspended” because, off-duty, (just like the NYC prison imam above), he tried to tell the truth about the Israel-Palestinian matter. Muslim students, perhaps shocked that anyone would dare disagree with their anti-Israel views, reported him as a “racist.” Klocek pro-American and pro-Israel free speech is, apparently, not as protected as is that of another De Paul University professor, Norman Finkelstein, a well-known Holocaust denier and demonizer of Israel. Finkelstein has certainly not been suspended for his false and inflammatory views. On the contrary, he is up for tenure.

In Europe, lawsuits have been launched against those who tell the truth about Islam. A series of such lawsuits has kept Oriana Fallaci in exile from her native land, Italy, and has made it dangerous for her to visit Switzerland. For similar reasons, the Israeli-American author Rachel Ehrenfeld cannot visit England, where a Saudi billionaire has won a default judgment against her. Ehrenfeld’s alleged crime? She told the truth about this particular Saudi’s funding of terror - and she has counter-sued him here, under her First Amendment right to do so. Interestingly, while many major newspapers and booksellers, including Amazon, have written briefs on her behalf, no one but Ehrenfeld is funding the actual lawsuit in defense of our collective right to tell the truth about the Islamic funding of terrorism against us.

Finally, the same western intellectuals who insist on our right to mock both Judaism and Christianity are often the first to charge “Islamophobia” and “racism” when Islam is presented accurately and criticized, not to mention presented in a series of rather innocuous cartoons. (The three offensive cartoons were slipped in by Muslims, and the riots against the cartoons were carefully orchestrated months later.)

What is to be done about this state of affairs? First, we have to re-evaluate the meaning of free speech, both in terms of hate speech and in terms of wartime realities. Along the same lines, we must find some legally and politically sound ways to slow down or to eliminate entirely the growth industry of jihadist hate speech in America. Islamists do not hesitate to falsify, exaggerate, and censor our culture, e.g. the Danish cartoon incident. We cannot allow our traditions of freedom and tolerance to be taken over by intolerant forces in the service of repression or terrorism. This is not easy to do but it must be done—and done quickly—by the best lawyers and legislators in our land.

Second, we must begin to insist that Muslims allow the same free speech and religious practices to religious minorities in their countries that they wish us to extend to them in the West. This means that if Muslims want religious freedoms in the West, they have to grant such freedoms to Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities in Muslim countries. It is well past time they did so. The Middle East is already entirely judenrein, free of Jews, except in Israel, and I doubt whether any of the 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab Muslim countries, or their descendants, will want to return. But Christians have long been—and still are—persecuted, often severely, under Muslim rule. Thus, America might begin to peg every trade or peace treaty with a Muslim country or business to an agreement about religious tolerance and freedom.

Third, we should not allow a falsely positive or superficial picture of Islam to be taught in public schools (and inserted into textbooks), nor should we teach a balanced view of Islam as long as Islamic schools, both here and abroad, refuse to teach anything true about Judeo-Christian culture.

Finally, we endanger countless Muslim women and girls and freedom-loving Muslim men as well, when we extend religious freedom to Muslims who believe it is their religious right to subjugate, torment, mutilate, and murder women and dissidents. In a dangerous cultural ju-jitsu, Islamists have been using our strengths against us. Previously, we in the West insisted how proud we were to tolerate the intolerant. We can no longer afford to do so. Instead, we must stand up to intolerance and hate speech, just as we must stand up to jihad—with all our hearts, and with all our might.

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

The Price of Appeasement—March 2, 2006

Today, reality outpaces fiction. The truth is often linguistically reversed before our very eyes: Even as we see Muslim jihadic terrorists blow up civilians we are simultaneously told that the victims are not those who have just been murdered, that the perpetrators of violence are the true victims. Our daily lives have become Orwellian.

The Palestinian intifada of 2000 against Israel started with and maintains genocidal intent. President Ahmadinezhad of Iran has threatened to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons, and the international community (the United Nations, the European Union, the Quartet) has made no significant effort to stop him. In my view, like Hitler, he means what he says, should be taken very seriously and stopped before it is too late.

We all remember what happened when Neville Chamberlain returned from Berlin in 1938 with that infamous piece of paper in his hand. Despite five years of Nazi malevolence, the free world thought it could appease the German dictator. We all know what happened next.

In the world’s treatment of Iran, we see appeasement in full swing. For two and a half years, France, Britain and Germany have been negotiating with the rogue state in an attempt to ensure that it does not use its nuclear capability to produce weapons. The result of these negotiations? Delay, deception and threats from the Iranian regime that it will attack if a more direct method—military action—is taken to halt its program.

In much the same way, we already see the appeasement of the terrorist group Hamas. Despite a founding charter that calls for the destruction of Israel and a war on the West, France, Russia and the U.N. have already begun to coddle the group. Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary general, told reporters in February that he thinks there is “an opportunity here for Hamas to transform itself into a political party and work with the international community and the Israeli government.” This in the face of Hamas leaders’ repeated assertions since their electoral victory that they have no intention of amending their charter or their belligerent stance toward Israel and the West.

In other words, when one appeases murderers and Islamic totalitarian regimes, one soon inherits the whirlwind.

Hamas’ victory is the latest outrage in a 50-year campaign to isolate and demonize Israel. Soviet Russia and the Arab League used the United Nations to disseminate the propaganda that Zionism is Racism” and that the Palestinian refugees (whom no Arab country would accept as citizens) were the most noble and most persecuted refugees in the world. Their poisoned fruit has fully blossomed. Today, one can’t open a newspaper without reading about a new resolution to boycott or divest from Israel. What’s more, the view that Israel is the cause of all the problems in the Middle East is widespread.

From 2000-2006, despite the pitiless slaughter of Israeli innocents by Palestinian terrorists, the world stood by. The same world that had remained indifferent to the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, obsessively demonized, boycotted and isolated Israel as a pariah state. Few Westerners dared cry out, as I and some others have done, that Islam, not Israel, was the most egregious practitioner of religious and gender apartheid, as well as slavery, in the world.

The world appeased terrorists when their main target was Israel. This tactic did not pan out as planned: the Palestinian intifada has now gone global. The West has experienced 9/11, the Madrid train explosion, the bombing of the London subway and the Danish cartoon protests. Muslim killers are sending human bombs to kill Muslims as well as Western civilians of all faiths in Europe, North America and Asia. This is how appeasement progresses: what was once Israel’s problem is now the world’s problem.

The tendency to appease can also be seen in our language, which can be used to either describe or obscure reality. Those who use the word “Islamist” want desperately to believe that Islam itself is, or can be, essentially peaceful and that moderate Muslims can wrest back control of their religion from the totalitarian fanatics who have hijacked it. One therefore also uses the words “jihadist” and “terrorist” to further distinguish the potentially “good” and “reasonable” Muslims from the killers and fanatics. Many Westerners turn themselves inside out in order not to describe even the 9/11 terrorists as “Muslims” or “Arabs” lest they be attacked as politically incorrect “racists.” The fear of this particular slander has led many good Western thinkers and writers to obscure reality.

These politically correct observers have done more than appease jihadic and terrorist forces. They have loudly and visibly justified violence against Jews, Israelis and civilians on every continent as “blowback” for imperial policies that are “racist.”

Still others believe that Islam has been hijacked by barbaric fundamentalists and that so-called moderate Muslims will never oppose them; it’s too dangerous. And some Westerners, especially our intelligentsia and journalists, believe that jihadists, including Muslim suicide killers, are only behaving “unreasonably” because Western modernity has dishonored them and caused the poverty and misery from which many Third World Muslims suffer. (In my view, this is mainly due to the cruelty and corruption of Muslim leaders and the brutal dynamics of Islamic family life.) To my mind, the moderate Muslims are all too silent. Meanwhile, the militant Islamists and their Western multicultural apologists refuse to admit that Islam, not Israel, practices religious and gender apartheid and that Islamic practices—such as female genital mutilation, daughter- and wife-battering, honor killings, polygamy, forced arranged marriage of children, stoning, amputations and public hangings—are barbaric and evil. Such barbarism has not been caused by the West.

What’s different today is that such barbarians use cell phones, al-Jazeera and al-Manar to convey their ransom demands and to broadcast their gruesome beheadings. They use airplanes as suicide bombs. They use our laws to compel us to tolerate their intolerance. They are not uneducated. They are barbarians with nuclear weapons. As a psychologist, I have both studied and worked with the victims of violence. Abused children will invariably blame themselves; like battered wives and kidnapping victims, they psychologically “survive” by imagining that their destiny is in their own hands, and if they, the victims, try harder to please—or at least not to “offend” their captors—that their abusive parents/spousal batterers/kidnappers will turn into good parents/non-violent husbands/reasonable and kind kidnappers.

The reality that one is being held captive by an evil human being is apparently far too threatening to contemplate. Many captives are more comfortable blaming themselves for their predicament. This allows them to work on changing their own behaviors. The fact that someone may want to kill you—and has the power to do so—is too terrifying for most people to admit.

So, let me say it for us all: Islamic fundamentalist fascists really want to destroy us (Jews and Westerners) and have been working toward that goal for quite some time. Indeed, they have declared war upon our civilization.

What must be done? First, we must shed our illusions; they will not save us. Second, we must form broad alliances. Liberals and progressives must unite with right-wing Christians and Muslim dissidents and feminists, many of whom live among us in exile. We must protest and expose the obsessive demonization of both Israel and America. We must fight back, which means we must fashion a strong military and educational response to the hate propaganda that has brainwashed so many in both the East and the West. Fighting the propaganda war is possibly even more important than fighting the military war. Lethal lies have a slow fuse, but as they explode, they destroy every mind in their wake.

My friends, the clock is ticking. By my reckoning, it is now 1940-1941 all over again. We have no time to waste. A strong resistance to the totalitarian Islamists will prove essential in the war of civilizations that is upon us.

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

France’s Intifada — Nov. 7, 2005

In 1973, the French novelist Jean Raspail artfully predicted in the form of fiction the very real Palestinian-style intifada that now rages on the west bank of Europe: France. Ten years after the book’s publication, Raspail described the “vision” he had, portrayed in the book, which lasted for ten feverish months:

“They were there! A million poor wretches, armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil, the vanguard of the multititudes pressing hard against every part of the tired and overfed West. I literally saw them, saw the major problem they presented, a problem absolutely insoluble by our present moral standards. To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.”

Raspail first published this haunting and apocalyptic novel, Le Camp Des Saints (The Camp of the Saints) in France. In 1975, it was published in America, where it was compared to Camus’s The Plague and to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The book imagines a flotilla of millions of immigrants traveling from the Ganges to France. The similarities between the fictional France of the novel and the France of today are easy to spot.

Consider the plot. An all-powerful, multi-culturalist intelligentsia, having taught France that it must atone for its racist crimes, swiftly joins compassionate French Christians in ecstatically welcoming the mass invasion that brutally destroys France. The solicitude of white Frenchmen—the priests, intellectuals, student activists, and prostitutes who wish to embrace and assist the implacably angry new arrivals—is repaid by death. And terror: The immigrants loot everything in sight. They murder for new apartments. France is run into the ground. Raw and relentless, the novel is as brilliant as Orwell’s 1984.

Raspail dares to ask the hard questions: Are we our brothers’ keepers? Must the West share all its resources with a barbarous East—even if it means our own demise? Can Europe and the West redeem themselves by becoming as impoverished as those they once colonized? What will be the consequences for France should it welcome profoundly hostile immigrants who do not wish to assimilate and whose own cultural and religious practices sanction violence, illiteracy, and gender and religious apartheid?

At the time Raspail published this book, he stood alone. Sympathy was very much on the “victim’s” side. Europe could no longer save the Jews—they were all murdered or gone. Instead, beginning with France, Europe could save itself by saving “victims” from elsewhere, especially those whom France had previously colonized and who were also French citizens. Indeed, the less sympathy one had for France, the more entitled one was to “victim” status. The inverse held true: Many Algerians who had fought for France in the Algerian war of independence and moved “home” to Paris, found themselves unwanted.

Sympathy for victim-uprisings was gathering great force in the world. Students rioted in Paris in May of ‘68, and inspired other such riots all over Europe and North America. Revolution was in the air, and many whites viewed it as their own redemption and as the death of Western rot.

Against this backdrop, imagine how Raspail’s work was received in certain quarters. He was accused of being a racist and a fascist. In 1982, in an epilogue to one edition of the book, Raspail recalled the wrath he had incurred: “What I was saying was terrible. I waited patiently to be burnt at the stake.”

As time went on, however, French leaders and thinkers began to read his work—secretly to be sure. According to Raspail, “When it finally became apparent that in the future the denial of essential and basic human differences would work solely to the detriment of our own integrity….I, the accursed writer, was transformed into a prophetic writer.”

Two realities remain especially curious. First, even Raspail did not dare portray the dreaded immigrant invaders as Muslims. But this omission ignores the fact that, in stark contrast to many Muslims in the East and West, many non-white immigrants, such as Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Chinese, Vietnamese, African and Caribbean Christians, are neither inclined to violence nor averse to assimilation. Not all Muslims are rioters; but most rioters are Muslims.

Second, no one in my various intellectual and political circles seems to have read Raspail’s book. In fact, no one who is now leading the fight against the Islamization of Europe seems to know about it either. One reason may be that the politically correct have censored this crucial conversation. While Raspail was initially published by Scribners, a major American publisher, the subsequent American editions of his novel devolved to a series of four different and smaller presses: first, Grosset and Dunlop, then the Institute for Western Values, followed by the American Immigration Control Foundation. The 1995 edition was published by the relatively obscure Social Contract Press of Petoskey, Michigan.

Like so many prophets—Jeremiah and Cassandra come to mind—Raspail saw what was coming, but he was powerless to prevent it. He was mocked and scorned, then grudgingly acknowledged. But his challenge has not been heeded. Some admirers of the book have embraced it as science fiction. I suggest that its true genre is that of prophecy and that Raspail’s “vision” has come true in our lifetime.

France is on fire. The riots have spread from the environs of Paris to Toulouse, Nice, Rennes, Rouen, Lilles, Bordeaux, and Strasbourg. Rioters have prevented the evacuation of their own wounded and have attacked police and ambulances. One group of rioters set a woman with crutches on fire. According to the Associated Press, the French Internet is ablaze with the fury of France’s radicalized Muslim community. “Civil war is declared. There will no doubt be deaths,” writes one Rania. “We are going to destroy everything,” writes someone called “Saint Denis.” My colleague, the French-American novelist and critic Nidra Poller, tells me that one African Muslim woman in Paris announced that “we will burn white people’s houses” (Has she just stepped off the pages of Raspail’s novel?). Poller also tells me that one “Fatima,” another African Muslim woman, set one of the first hellish fires. “Fatima had an assignation with a man but she was not pleased with how the evening went. Enraged, she set fire to his apartment and walked out,” she explains.

The official response to the violence has been inept. Poller notes that, despite ten days of rioting, French authorities have yet to impose martial law. The mainstream media in America has done no better. Media outlets have explained the intifada as the function of “racial and economic injustice.” The role played by radical Islamism has been willfully minimized.

There is now a temptation to schadenfreude. After all, France applauded and supported the ongoing Palestinian Intifada against the Jews in Israel, possibly in the hope that such appeasement would pacify their own restless Muslim population. But their comeuppance gives me no joy. As it is said: First the Jews, then everyone else. If the war against the Jews is not stopped, then it will simply spread elsewhere, in a perfected form. In a worrying sign, the rioting French Muslims have begun to call their own neighborhoods “territories.” Some are demanding that they be governed by Shari’a, not French law.

Difficult questions must now be asked. Did France really believe that everyone naturally wants to become “French” and can do so on their own? Has France’s tragic mistake been to allow too many impoverished, non-French speaking Muslim immigrants in and to economically subsidize three generations of immigrants who are hostile to France and to the West? Could the ceaseless violence in France’s Muslim community have been prevented—for instance, if French authorities had not refused to jail Muslim juveniles and adults when they committed crimes, or allowed radical Islamist mullahs to preach their hearts out via satellite and in mosques all over France? Should France exile its Muslim immigrants and their French-born children—the innocent along with the guilty—by sending them back to countries where they will have no housing, no health care, no education, and no employment, and where the lives of women will be even more endangered?

Raspail posed all these questions in his novel. France, and the West generally, have yet to grapple with them.

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

Murder, Lies, and Videotape — Nov. 1, 2005

“Paradise Now” is a brilliant and powerful piece of propaganda which has already won the Blue Angel Award for best European film at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and which has also been sold to 45 countries, including Israel. The film was financed by Dutch, French, and German backers. The director, Hany Abu-Assad, who has lived in Holland for the last twenty years, describes himself as a Palestinian with an Israeli passport. Reviewers have described the film as an attempt to “humanize” suicide killers, to “dramatize” what goes through their minds, and as an “ingeniously calculated thriller.”

Some reviewers have suggested that Abu-Assad has actually endangered himself by portraying the terrorist-recruiters as cold and manipulative (which he surely does), and by allowing two of his characters to question—and rather passionately–whether suicide bombing missions are effective responses to oppression and occupation. (Note: With one exception, they do not question whether they are “moral” or not). Finally, reviewers on at least three continents have also congratulated Abu-Assad on his careful research and solid documentation into the matter.

Nothing could be further from the truth—although I will grant him this: He is an artist, and a very good one. He excels in nuance, subtlety, irony, humor, character, and drama. Said (one of the suicide bombers played by Kais Nashef) is as heartbreakingly soulful and innocent as Giancarlo Giannini was in “The Seven Beauties and in “Swept Away.” Nashef resembles him as well. The tale is gripping and tragic—as long as you accept his exceedingly close-cropped informational frame. Israel and Israelis do not exist in this film. Israelis are depersonalized and utterly demonized. For most of the film we see Israelis only as soldiers: ominous, hard-eyed, helmeted, armed or in tanks. The film betrays no understanding that there is more than one side to this tragic story. Yes, feature films are not obliged to present opposing points of view—that’s something only expected of Israeli or pro-Israel artists, film makers, and writers. But the film is supremely ahistorical, anti-historical, and it is also based on a series of lies and omissions, and on one outright fantasy.

First, what the film does right:

The film takes place in a 48 hour period in which two friends, Said (not Edward, but the choice of name is significant), and Khaled (Ali Suliman), who work at dead-end jobs in an auto repair shop, are told that their suicide mission will take place in Tel Aviv the next day. We see them at work, at home, relating to a woman, Suha, with their recruiter, (who is the local schoolteacher), and with the terrorists who video their prepared speeches, feed, shave, dress and embrace them– and then strap on their explosive belts which the killers themselves can never remove.

For them, there is No Exist. Quietly, but clearly, Abu-Assad shows us the enormously erotic element involved in Palestinian male bonding. He also shows us the casual cruelty with which older Palestinian men treat younger Palestinian men and boys. Most important, the film does suggest one very powerful motivation for becoming a suicide killer. Said fulfills his mission, Khaled turns back. Why this difference? Arab and Muslim society is a shame and honor-based culture. Psychologically, Said feels that he must cleanse his considerable shame: His father was executed as a collaborator by Palestinians when Said was ten. He blames the Occupation both for his father’s “weakness” and for his own decision to become a murderer. Said takes no personal responsibility for what he does. Khaled does not have such personal shame to expiate, nor does Suha, who is the daughter of a Palestinian hero. Both Khaled and Suha say all the right things about non-violent resistance, but our hearts are with Said who is the film’s tragic hero.

As to the lies:

Said decides not to board a bus which is filled with settlers because he suddenly experiences sympathy or pity for the toddler on board. In reality, Palestinian suicide killers have deliberately targeted Israeli civilians, not soldiers. Israeli soldiers represent about one-third of all those killed by Palestinian terrorists in this latest Intifada. In the last five years, nearly 800 Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian terrorists and thousands have been maimed for life. And yes, it is true, Israeli soldiers have also killed Palestinian civilians but inadvertently in their attempt to kill Palestinian terrorists who use their own people as human shields. Palestinian civilians are never, ever the planned targets of Israeli operations; on the contrary.

Said, in his video-ed “shahid” speech, claims that Israelis have rejected a two-state solution. This has been well documented as a falsehood.

One of Said’s handlers claims that this operation is the first they have tried in two years. Since Arafat unilaterally decided to break off negotiations and to launch the Intifada of 2000, the Palestinians have not stopped trying to kill Israeli civilians. The security fence has increasingly stopped them. Vigilant counter-terrorist and police work have stopped them. And still, they keep coming. Hamas says they will never stop. The Palestinian media and mullahs vow to fight on until the Jews and Christian infidels have all been driven from Muslim holy lands.

Said also accuses Israel of having carried out “ethnic cleansing.” This, too, is untrue. “Ethnic cleansing” is what the ethnic Arab Muslims are currently doing in Darfur in the Sudan to African Muslims, animists, and Christians; what the Hutus did to the Tutsi in Rwanda; what every single Arab Muslim country did to Jews particularly post 1948; and what the Nazis also did to Jews in the European Holocaust. However, had Israelis not settled these non-sovereign territories, it is a given that the same vicious and irrational jihad, the airplane highjackings and continuous Intifadas, would have been carried out against Jews in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa.

And yes, I know, Abu-Assad is not Said; Said is only a fictional character; he is entitled to his limited or distorted view of reality. In fact, this is exactly what a good film is supposed to do isn’t it? Get us inside the heads of its characters without judging them, yes?

Well, yes — but here’s the problem. The world has already been super-indoctrinated against what is referred to as “the Israeli narrative” and in favor of “the Palestinian narrative.” Doctored film footage of fake Israeli massacres and fake Jewish and Israeli killings of Palestinian innocents have already inflamed most of the Arab and Muslim world; the European and to some extent the American media has been inundated with precisely this point of view. “Paradise Now” is the first feature film on the subject by a Palestinian. Because this is a good film, it will have enormous ongoing influence over how an already heavily indoctrinated world audience views the phenomenon of Palestinian suicide bombings.

Indeed, perhaps the biggest lie in this film is something the film omits almost entirely: we do not get a clear sense of how filthy and continuous the hatred of Jews and Israel really is among Palestinians, how brainwashed the impoverished Palestinian population really is. And this hatred continues in the film: a taxi driver, for instance, accuses the Israelis of polluting the drinking water with anti-spermicides—not so different from what Mrs. Arafat said when she accused the Israelis of causing cancer and fertility problems among Palestinian women.

Palestinian Media Watch has been translating what the Palestinians say in Arabic in textbooks, on television, in mosques, on videos, etc. A few examples will suffice: Jews and Israelis have been plotting to take over the world for a long time; indeed, they have done so; the Jews control the world media and the world’s money; they behead Muslim children in order to obtain their blood for Jewish rituals; the Mossad was behind 9/11—and yet they also control the U.S. government, etc. Day in, day out, Palestinians–who have been denied citizenship in every Arab Muslim country and whose own corrupt leaders have lined their own pockets with money meant to ease the considerable suffering of their people—are indoctrinated to hate Jews and Israelis and then trained to kill them.

One cannot deny that Palestinian daily life has been tragically interrupted by long lines at checkpoints, nor can one deny that individual Israeli soldiers sometimes capriciously and sadistically refuse to allow those waiting in lines, often for hours, to use the bathrooms. (They are forced to relieve themselves in the fields, or by the side of the road). However, some of those in line, including women, are packing explosives. The number of suicide killer missions that Israel daily and vigilantly intercepts is very high. Some days, 10-20 attempts have been made. But Palestinian killers also get through. While Israeli soldiers can therefore be irritable and very, very jumpy, (who wouldn’t be?), it is preposterous to suggest, as many critics have, that they behave as German Nazis did. But the film tells us, with no evidence, that in the earlier Intifada an Israeli soldier allowed a Palestinian to choose which leg he wanted to lose and then promptly shot that leg. The man now walks with a limp. This is eerily reminiscent of the many “Sophie’s Choices” that Nazis forced upon Jewish mothers: to choose which of their children will live or die. If a mother refused to choose, then all her children would die on the spot.

Also omitted are the bloody Israeli body-parts, the screams, the terror, the pain, the life-long disabilities, the collective Israeli agony. In fact, we do not get to see Said blow up his bus of Israeli soldiers. We see him in a series of close-ups—and then the screen goes white. Slowly, we understand that he has detonated his bomb. Slowly, the screen credits come up in Arabic.

Finally, the fantasy in the film is calibrated to appeal to a Western audience. Suha, the pacifist hero, dresses like a fashionable European. She is a young and attractive woman who lives alone, drives her own car, and who allows Said to visit her in the middle of the night. She makes him tea. Really: Women are killed for far less on the West Bank in honor killings—yes, even in Nablus. The presence of Suha (who shares the same first name with Mrs. Arafat), suggests that the West Bank is not all that different from Paris or London, that Islamic gender Apartheid does not exist. Were Abu-Assad to show it to us—it might look as bloody as a suicide killing does.

The fact that this film, which is based on lies, is a success, both artistically and commercially, is extremely troubling. But, since Abu-Assad is a good film maker—possibly a great one—will he ever challenge himself, or feel an obligation, to consider doing a film based on the autobiography of “Souad” who also grew up on the West Bank and whose family tried to burn her alive? Will he ever challenge himself to “humanize” some Israelis, dare to render them sympathetic to both an Arab and Western audience? Now that would require real and considerable courage and artistry.