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.

“Gender Cleansing” in the Sudan — July 26, 2004

NEWSFLASH! A colleague of mine has just informed me that she tried to send this piece to a Mideast pro-peace and pro-dialogue group. It was rejected out of hand as “not relevant to Islam.” This same piece was rejected by many left feminist list-serv groups when I first published it because I did not publish it in a politically correct place.

The images from the Sudan are horrific: Wounded, starving, diseased adults, skeletal, dying infants. Some people have referred to this as “ethnic cleansing.” Indeed, an estimated two million black African Christians, Muslims, and animists have been massacred by ethnic Arab Muslims over the last 21 years. Today, an estimated 1.2 million people have been internally displaced, and 170,000 have fled across the border into Chad. At least 30,000 human beings have been massacred by the state-sanctioned Janjaweed (”men on horses”) in the last six months.

The United Nations did nothing during this time except condemn Israel for crimes it did not commit. The French? They are too busy condemning Ariel Sharon to notice a real human rights atrocity. Thus, the French continue to oppose UN sanctions against the Sudan. To their credit, the American House and Senate have just passed a bi-partisan resolution that defines the massacres as “genocide.”

Still, although we are overwhelmed with images of suffering, one image is missing. We have no photos of what I shall describe as “gender cleansing.” The systematic use of repeated, public, gang rape as a weapon of war cannot be captured in a single photo.

According to Amnesty International, eyewitness-survivors have seen girls as young as eight repeatedly gang-raped; their captors break both their arms and their legs when they try to escape. Women and children have described being kidnapped and kept as domestic and sexual slaves, and of being gang-raped every night in captivity.

The damage to a woman’s self-esteem and sanity is impossible to calculate. Suicide, life-long anxiety, depression, and nightmares are among the many symptoms. To rub salt into the wound, Amnesty International reports that Janjaweed women sing (!!) to cheer their men on when they rape other women; they also utter racial insults to the women being raped.

Those feminists who immediately condemned Lyndie England and the American military as “depraved” in the matter of the torture of Iraqi male prisoners in Abu Graib are, so far, noticeably silent. Mind you: I am only calling for even-handedness; I am not defending torture or prisoner abuse.

As the author of Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, I am not surprised by the behavior of the Janjaweed women—although the cruelty is rather breathtaking. Like men, women also internalize sexist values and are capable of both cruelty and compassion. Women are mainly cruel towards other women. Like men, many women cling to the status quo, even to one that demeans them.

While rape has been used as a weapon, not merely as a spoil of war, before, most notably in Algeria, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan, there is something uniquely sadistic going on in Sudan. The women who are being gang-raped by Arab Islamists are also women who have been genitally mutilated (either clitoridectomized or infibulated). These crude, mutilating “surgeries,” often conducted by village women, result in tissue scaring and loss of elasticity. (Infibulation involves leaving only a small opening for urination and menstruation. Normally, these women have to be cut open wide enough for intercourse when they marry).

Repeated rape must be excruciatingly painful and must cause severe physical and psychological damage. The rape victims (who are Muslims as well as Christians and animists), have been raised to view their genitalia as “unclean” and shameful. Tribal honor is bound up with female chastity—this is why rape as a tactic is being used to destroy not only the individual woman but also her entire social fabric. Many Sudanese women have been taught that sexual activity—including rape—is always the woman’s fault. Some Sudanese tribes believe that a pregnancy cannot result from rape; thus, raped women who become pregnant will be suspected of having voluntary sex with the enemy.

Amnesty International believes that many raped women are not reporting their rapes. They fear their families will ostracize them; perhaps they also blame themselves for the shame they have brought on their families and tribes. If they are pregnant, their families will never accept a baby born of rape.

Honorably, the United States calls it genocide. The Sudan Campaign: A Coalition to Stop Genocide, Slavery, Starvation, and Religious Persecution has organized arrests and hunger strikes at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington D. C.

But, where are the leftists and feminists who are so quick to condemn both America and Israel for “ethnic cleansing” and racism?

I am on many feminist academic and activist listserv groups. During the last two months, the matter of the Sudan has not commanded much attention. What has? Defeating Bush, cosmetic surgery, discrimination against transgendered people, defeating Bush, gay marriage, abortion, defeating Bush.

Make no mistake. I am in favor of elective surgery and abortion, and against discrimination, but I am puzzled by the isolationism and self-involvement of activists who should be part of making a difference.

I understand that the situation in Sudan is politically and practically complicated. Technically, rebel groups did oppose the government which, in turn, set the Janjaweed militia loose on them. Can food and medicine be safely distributed without being siphoned off by corrupt warlords? Will sanctions only hurt the most vulnerable people? Will nothing short of a full-scale military invasion really stop the genocide and the “gender cleansing?” Dare America—which has been so defamed because of Afghanistan and Iraq—invade Sudan?

During the European Holocaust, people did not see the photos or receive reports of the genocide in process. In the matter of the Sudan, we cannot claim that “we did not know,” “no one told us.” We know. We have heard and seen everything. To do nothing renders us complicit in what is happening. Those who survive such torture in war are more haunted by what the presumably good people failed to do than they are by the criminals whose evil character is already well known to their victims.

May we never have to learn this from first-hand experience.

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 Psychoanalytic Roots Of Islamic Terrorism — May 3, 2004

In the ongoing battle for Fallujah, terrorists are using women and children as human shields against American soldiers. On April 27, 2004, in Jerusalem, Hamas used a Palestinian human bomb to kill two Palestinian alleged “collaborators.” On April 28, 2004, even as UN envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, was busy characterizing Israeli policy as the “great poison in the region,” Jordanian police arrested al-Qaida operatives who were quite literally trying to launch a chemical poison attack that might have killed 80,000 Jordanians and Americans. And, on May 1, 2004, in Gaza, Palestinian gunmen shot and killed a Jewish woman who was eight-months pregnant together with her four young daughters.

Despite enormous and continuing denial on the part of left and liberal ideologues and the media, we are facing an exceedingly pathological strain of Islamofascist terrorism. So a crucial question must be asked: from a psychological and anthropological point of view, what kind of culture produces human bombs, glorifies mass murderers, and supports humiliation-based revenge?

According to Minnesota based psychoanalyst and Arabist, Dr. Nancy Kobrin, it is a culture in which shame and honor play decisive roles and in which the debasement of women is paramount. In an utterly fascinating and as-yet unpublished book, which I will be introducing, the Sheik’s New Clothes: the Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Suicide Terrorism, Kobrin, and her Israeli co-author, counter-terrorism expert Yoram Schweitzer, describe barbarous family and clan dynamics in which children, both boys and girls, are routinely orally and anally raped by male relatives; infant males are sometimes sadistically over-stimulated by being masturbated; boys between the ages of 7-12 are publicly and traumatically circumcised; many girls are clitoridectomized; and women are seen as the source of all shame and dishonor and treated accordingly: very, very badly.

According to Dr. Kobrin, “The little girl lives her life under a communal death threat–the honor killing.” Both male and female infants and children are brought up by mothers (who are debased and traumatized women). As such, all children are forever psychologically “contaminated” by the humiliated yet all-powerful mother. Arab and Muslim boys must disassociate themselves from her in spectacularly savage ways. But, on a deep unconscious level, they may also wish to remain merged with the source of contamination–a conflict that suicide bombers both act out and resolve when they manfully kill but also merge their blood eternally with that of their presumably most hated enemies, the Israeli Jews. In Kobrin’s view, the Israeli Jews may actually function as substitutes or scapegoats for an even more primal, hated/loved enemy: Woman.

Widespread child sexual abuse leads to paranoid, highly traumatized, and revenge-seeking adults. Based on my own experience in Afghanistan (a non-Arab, Muslim culture), a polygamous, patriarchal culture also leads to an infernal, fraternal competition for paternal favor and inheritance. It is brother against brother, full brothers against half-brothers, full and half brothers against first cousins–and thus, can entire families and clans remain locked in revenge-fueled mortal combat for generations.

Clearly, only evolution of democracy and the elevation of women can begin to change such dynamics. Western feminists, American leaders: Please note. Alas, historically and theologically, Arab and Muslim culture strongly opposes both democracy and equality for women. This is why the battles to liberate Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East are so important and so very difficult. The American and Israeli war against terrorism is like World War Two, not like Vietnam.

Yesterday, further confirmation of Dr. Kobrin’s thesis arrived at my door. The remarkable and charming Walid Shoebat, an ex-PLO terrorist, came to visit. He has been speaking about his renunciation of terrorism and conversion to evangelical Christianity. Shoebat has been touring the country speaking out for Israel and against the “occupation of Palestinian minds with Jew-hatred.” Unlike the human bombs, Shoebat “merged” with his American-born mother by finally rescuing her from years of captivity and domestic abuse in Bethlehem/Beit Sahur. He also rescued his father, the man who imprisoned and abused her.

Shoebat confirmed the widespread sexual abuse of both boys and girls in Palestinian society. “It is a strange society. Homosexuality is forbidden but if you’re the penetrator, not the penetrated, it’s okay.” He is describing prison sexuality. “If you’re a teenage boy with no hair on your legs other boys your age will pinch your butt and tease you. Once, I saw a class of clothed teenage boys sexualize their gymnastics exercises. And once, on a hiking trip, I saw a line of shepherd boys waiting for their turn to sodomize a five year old boy. It was unbelievable.”

Shoebat’s father also told him stories about starving Arab men who would barter sex for meat from Iraqi soldiers. According to Shoebat, teenage boys prey upon younger children; older male relatives prey upon pre-adolescent and adolescent boys and girls. They do not have intercourse with the girls since this would render them un-marriageable and bring shame upon their families. I heard many stories in both Afghanistan and Iran about the male preference for anal sex, even within marriage, either as a form of birth control or as a preferred homosexual practice.

Most Arabs and Muslims will deny that this is so. They will attack westerners who say so as “orientalists, colonialists, racists.” Western intellectuals will agree with them. They have been well indoctrinated by–no, western academics were the ones who first glorified the work of the late Edward W. Said who, in my opinion, published his master work, Orientalism, in 1978 as a way of denying feminist ideas and refocusing academic attention away from women and onto brown, Muslim, Arab men as the truest victims of oppression. Neat trick.

Shoebat’s grandfather was the Muktar of his village. Nevertheless, eleven-fifteen people lived cramped into two rooms with a huge balcony, a courtyard, and an outhouse. Once, when Shoebat’s American-born Christian mother, (she was forced to convert to Islam), upended a backgammon board in front of his father Achmed’s friends, Achmed took a hammer and cracked her skull. Shoebat, her youngest child, took her hand and walked with her to the nearest church where the nuns sewed up her head. There were no hospitals. Whenever his mother tried to escape, (always together with her three children) the Shoebat men would find her, re-kidnap her, subject her to further punishment.

The male sexual abuse of female children exists everywhere; it is one of the main means of traumatizing and shaming women into obedience and rendering them incapable of resistance or rebellion. However, the male sexual abuse of male children–denied, never admitted–may work differently and may turn boys into predatory, pedophilic men. Also, among Arabs and Muslims, revenge killings are uniquely prevalent.

Shoebat told me several extraordinary stories which illustrate Palestinian and Arab Middle Eastern mentality. One of his paternal uncles was supposedly having an affair with the mother of Yusuf who belongs to the family of the Montreal-based student who stopped Bibi Netanyahu from speaking at Concordia University. The woman’s husband was the chief of police whose revenge consisted of throwing live grenades at Shoebat’s family home. The home bore the unrepaired damage for years. The outraged husband wanted to not only kill his wife’s lover but his entire family. “My father and his immediate family all had to die because of what his brother did.”

Shoebat asked me how I would resolve this feud-unto-death because of his uncle Najib, who was also the chief of police. I foundered. Bride-exchange sacrifice? Blood money? I could not come up with the ingenious plan that Najib rafted–a plan which may also shed light, in part, upon the nature of the Arab war against the Jews.Najib persuaded the village that they had to attack, pogrom-style, a nearby Jewish community. (Ramat Rachel). Once the Israelis opened fire in self-defense, most of the Arabs fled. However, the Arab attack upon the Jews provided cover for what Najib had to do: He himself snipered Yusuf in the back. When the Israelis, as they always did, allowed the Arabs to safely retrieve their dead, Najib roclaimed Yusuf a “shahid” and buried him in his bloody clothing. This is a mark of honor. A “shahid” enters heaven more quickly, clothed in his own blood.

This characterizes an Arab way of thinking. From here, it is easy to create the kinds of doctored footage and photo-opportunity journalism that has dominated this latest Intifada against the Jews. It is also a way of thinking that the liberal western media does not comprehend.

Yusuf’s martyrdom was not enough, the “honor” of the family had not yet been redeemed. Another man from the family attacked Shoebat’s male relative who, in self-defense, “ripped his stomach open like a sheep.” The man did not die. Shoebat’s relative immediately went into hiding. By this time, Shoebat was living in America. His paternal uncles called him and asked that he pay the blood money. Shoebat did so but not until each of his uncles (”nice uncles”) publicly “abandoned” their male relative. “He is not my brother, I denounce and abandon him.”

And only in this way was Shoebat finally able to rescue his mother. He paid the blood money and brought both his long-suffering mother and her abuser, his father, to America. Since Shoebat’s mother holds an American passport she was able to bring her husband into the country with her.

Recently, Shoebat’s brother–a man they had previously socialized with– called Shoebat’s wife. “Tell your husband that we know what he is doing against Islam. Tell him we know where he lives. Bye bye.”

“I told my wife, Welcome to the Middle East where your beloved one day can become your executioner the next day.”

Shoebat is, miraculously, engaged in redefining loyalty. He has taken his mother’s side, and in so doing, has broken with the shame, honor, and secrecy codes of his father’s culture. It is important to understand that Shoebat has not broken with his father. On the contrary, he rescued him too. Shoebat’s mother and father both live near him in the United States.

These amazing anecdotes confirm the veracity of Dr. Kobrin’s work. In my view, they also suggest that Americans and Europeans begin to think twice about what Arabs tell them about who started a fight, and why the Israelis, the Jews, and the Americans are to blame.

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.

I originally wrote this for Frontpage Magazine hard on the heels of what happened to me at Barnard in November of 2003. What I had to say about Islamic gender apartheid caused a near riot. I further refined and expanded the piece for Hadassah Magazine. This is the Hadassah version.

“The Brownshirts Of Our Time.” FrontPage Magazine, November, 2003; Expanded as “Letter From New York: Left Behind. Hadassah Magazine, April, 2004

On November 8, 2003, the anniversary of the eve of Kristallnacht, I addressed a woman’s “networking” conference of mainly black and Hispanic-American feminists. The conference, sponsored by WERISE (Women Empowered through Revolutionary Ideas Supporting Enterprise), held at Barnard College, was described as a grassroots, multicultural, multigenerational and multidisciplinary organization for women in the arts.

Indeed, the women seemed to range in age from 20 to 65 and were dressed in corporate business suits, various ethnic attire, youthful jeans.

Booths were arranged in a semicircle—it was as if the panels and performances were taking place in an African outdoor marketplace. Scented candles, beaded drums, photographs, Citi-banking for women consultants and colorful skirts vied for my attention.

The conference was closed to men—but one of the organizers made a split-second decision to allow my adult son in and seated him by himself at the very back of the room on a chair set apart. Growing up in a feminist household, he was used to this. We still sighed over it.

A few days before the conference I had the following conversation with one of the organizers. She asked me what my most recent book was and I told her it was The New Anti-Semitism. I explained that Jew-hatred was a form of racism—only it was not being treated as such by anti-racist “politically correct” people. The organizer only said: “We need you to explain the ways in which women sabotage each other so that we can overcome it and come together. We need you to talk about your book Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman [Plume]. Your speech will precede our big Unity panel.”

When I arrived, performers were rapping and singing and dancing and the energy was fabulous. I whispered to my son: “There’s still a whole world out there. Perhaps I have become too obsessed with the Jewish Cause, with Israel. Maybe I need to remember that I am deeply connected to more than one issue.”

While I was speaking, the women in the audience applauded, sighed, cheered, nodded in agreement, laughed, groaned, nudged each other—it was a half hour of good vibes.

And then my first questioner blew it all to hell. All it took was ‘The Question’ and it only required one Questioner. She demanded to know where I stood on the issue of the women of Palestine. Her tone was hostile, relentless—and prepared.

I took a deep breath and said that I did not respect people who hijacked airplanes or conferences or who, at this very moment, were trying to hijack this lecture. I pointed out that the subject of my talk was not Israel or Palestine. She grew even more hostile and demanding. “Tell this audience what you said on WBAI. I heard you.” Clearly, she wanted to unmask me before this audience as a Jew-lover and an Israel-defender.

I took the question head-on. “If you’re really asking about apartheid, let me talk about it. Contrary to propaganda, Israel is not an apartheid state. The largest practitioner of apartheid in the world is Islam, which practices both gender and religious apartheid. In terms of gender apartheid, Palestinian women—and most women who live under Islam—are oppressed by ‘honor’ killings, in which girls and women who are raped are then killed by family members for the sake of restoring the family ‘honor’; forced veiling, segregation, stonings to death for alleged adultery, female genital mutilation, polygamy, outright slavery, sexual slavery. Women have few civil, legal, or human rights under Islam.”

I continued: “Islam also specializes in religious apartheid. All non-Muslims—Christians, Jews, Assyrians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, animists—have historically been viewed and treated as subhumans who must either convert to Islam or be mercilessly taxed, beaten, jailed, murdered, or exiled.”

“Today,” I said, “the entire Arab Middle East is Judenrein, there are no Jews left in 22 Arab countries. And the Arab leadership has backed the P.L.O. strategy in which the twenty-third and smallest state remains under constant siege. Jews cannot become citizens of Jordan, Egypt or Saudi Arabia, for example, and yet no one accuses those nations of apartheid.” I said that Israel is not an apartheid state.

Clearly, they had not heard this before. The audience collectively gasped. Then people went a little crazy.

Someone muttered darkly, coarsely, in a near-growl: “What about the checkpoints? What about the fence?” As if checkpoints and fences are the same as being killed by your father for the crime of having been raped was really the same as having your clitoris sliced off, the same as being stoned to death for alleged adultery. The first questioner demanded that I denounce Ariel Sharon—but not Yasser Arafat—as a murderer. I absolutely refused to do so.

The lightning rod of “Palestine” was enough to turn a very friendly audience quite nasty and a bit unhinged. As I left the podium, a young African-American woman stopped me to say that I’d “hurt” her by how I had “disrespected” a “brown” woman. “What brown woman?” I asked. “Your first questioner was a brown woman,” she said, “and so are Palestinian women.”

I said: “Jewish women, especially in Israel, also come in many colors including brown and black.” She stopped me. “But you’re a white Jew.” As if this was proof of a crime.

I did not bother to tell her that without my glasses I could not see the face or color of a questioner so far away, that my answer to the question would have been the same no matter what color the questioner happened to be.

As I was trying to leave, one woman loped after me and continued to demand that I deal with the Palestine question. She kept trying to get at me physically. One of the organizers kept putting her own body between this woman and me. The conference organizers who had invited me thanked me for coming and looked rather embarrassed about what had happened.

What’s important is this: Not one of them tried to stop what was happening, not one stood up and said: “Something good has just turned ugly and we must not permit this to happen.” Thus, the “good” people did nothing to disperse the ugliness or to address the issues. Perhaps they were simply unprepared on the issues; perhaps they agreed with the view that Israel is an apartheid state and that anyone who would dare defend it was supposed to be treated as a traitor and enemy. Perhaps they simply lacked the courage to stand up to the “politically correct” fundamentalists in their midst.

Like so many Jewish Americans of my generation, I had thrown myself into the civil rights movement and, for 40 years, into so many other liberation struggles against racism, colonialism and sexism. I do not regret this.

Here’s what’s so sad. Clearly, my speech touched hearts and minds; there was room for common ground and civilized discourse. But not once the word “Palestine” was uttered, not when “Palestine” is seen as a symbol for every downtrodden group of color who are “resisting” the racist-imperialist American and Zionist empires. Once the “Palestine” litmus test of political respectability was raised, everyone responded on cue, as if programmed and brainwashed. It immediately became a white-versus- brown thing, an oppressed-versus-oppressor thing.

These are the Brownshirts of our time. The fact that they are women of color, feminists, is all the more chilling and tragic. And unbelievable. And to me, practically unbearable.

Afterward, my son, ever-wise, said, “Well Mom, you have your answer. The Jew-haters will never allow you into their wider, wonderful world. You can’t go back.”

I should have seen this coming.

I first began to encounter Jew-hatred on the left in the late 1960’s, especially after Israel successfully defended itself in the 1967 war. I spoke out about this right away and have never stopped doing so. All throughout the 1970’s, I brought journalists and ideologues to Israel and courted countless celebrity signatures to oppose the resolutions equating Zionism with racism. I also worked for the United Nations, attended the Copenhagen conference, and was an eyewitness-participant in the Russian-P.L.O.-Arab-U.N. orchestrated orgy against Israel in which Israel was demonized as the whipping girl of the world.

Today, these same ideologues and their intellectual descendants are still not thundering against gender apartheid in the Islamic world; they are thundering against Israel as the apartheid state. Some of them are also wonderfully progressive Jews.

Thus, some Jewish feminists and leftists are more concerned with the so-called occupation of Palestine than with the occupation of women’s bodies, worldwide.

For example, a feminist rabbi recently had a representative of the P.L.O. address her congregation on Yom Kippur. Another Jewish feminist recently gave a speech about the future of Jewish feminism in which she said that “Jewish feminism would have no future if the Palestinians did not have a state and if Israel did not redress the wrongs done to the Palestinians.”

An Israeli Jewish feminist rebuked me when I called for “equal compassion for the Israeli Jewish civilian victims of Islamist terrorism.” She accused me of betraying the cause of both peace and women by calling for rachmones for other Jews. (Who could make this up?) An Israeli Jewish feminist psychiatrist described the Israelis as “batterers” and the Palestinians as “battered women.”

A leading feminist described Israelis as the “Johns and pimps” and the Palestinians as the “prostituted women of the world.”

Such condemnation by metaphor is what Jews, Israel and America have been suffering both in the media and in Western academia. Intellectuals have described Israelis as “worse than Nazis.” In my view, this is a new form of Holocaust denial. No feminist worth her salt would say that because a man is unemployed or oppressed he is justified in beating his wife or abusing his child.

Let me be clear. There was no physical rioting at Barnard. I was not in physical danger—although toward the end even the otherwise passive organizers started to surround me to protect me; they gently hustled me out.

What happened at the conference was important for this reason: I was there as an authority, a leader. The audience was grooving on every word I said. But once I was “unmasked” as a Jew-lover and an Israel-defender, I was instantly seen as a traitor. There was no reserve of trust or respect toward me—not after I’d crossed over this “politically correct” line.

I hope this was an isolated instance. I fear it was not. Thus, if Jewish and non-Jewish educators were to speak out for Israel and for Judaism on campus, at rallies, they may risk just this kind of mistreatment at the hands of their peers and students. In fact, many professors and students have written to me and said that this is indeed the case.

We must create pockets of civility in which people can stand up to the Big Lies (the Jews control Wall Street, the media, the United States government; they killed Jesus and are now perpetrating a Holocaust on the Palestinians). We must be able to speak the truth—especially on college campuses and at conferences—without being mocked, scorned, silenced and intimidated.

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 was my first piece for Frontpage Magazine and I gave it to them only after both the New York and LA Times turned it down. A group of Israeli feminists wanted to show a film. The Swedish filmmaker absolutely refused his film to be shown in Israel. Within 48 hours of posting my article, Lukas Moodysson, the filmmaker, changed his mind and allowed his brilliant anti-trafficking film, “Lilya-4-ever” to be shown on a one-time basis at an anti-trafficking conference in Israel. Moodysson knew my work in Swedish and he wrote to me, furious that I had challenged his reputation as “prejudiced.” But he changed his mind.

I was impressed by the results and sent it to all my feminist listserv groups. The left-feminist groups refused to read the article or to hear about its results because, many said, I had dared to publish it in a “right wing rag.” Their blind intolerance motivated me to publish in Frontpage on a regular basis.

The Anti-Semitic Intelligentsia–August 21, 2003

The hit Swedish film, “Lilya 4-ever,” is a relentless and lyrical work about female sexual slavery. Professor Donna Hughes, who recently testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee about global trafficking, compared the film to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Lukas Moodysson’s film depicts the abandonment and betrayal of Lilya, a teenage Russian girl, by her mother and maternal aunt, leaving her vulnerable to a sweet-talking pimp who traffics her into Hell and death in Sweden. The film has been shown in many countries where trafficking, brothels, and other human rights abuses flourish: Sweden, Russia, England, Turkey, Finland, France, and the United States. Moodysson is not a woman, nor has he been prostituted. Nevertheless, as an artist, he is both able to empathize with great suffering and to distinguish the victim from the victimizer.

Moodysson’s genius fails him utterly when it comes to the Jews and the Jewish state. He refused to allow the film to be shown in Israel. According to Leah Grumpeter and Nissan Ben Ami of The Israeli Awareness Center, Moodysson “personally bought back the distribution rights for Israel” and would not allow its showing at their upcoming conference about such trafficking in Israel. For a decade, Grumpeter and Ben Ami have been trying to rescue the Lilyas in Israel (there are 3,000 a year, mainly from Eastern Europe) who sexually service Palestinian and Israeli Jews, Muslims, Christians and tourists. Grumpeter and Ben Ami are now expanding their fight on behalf of the victims of trafficking by opposing legislation that would legalize and normalize such sexual exploitation.

Moodysson’s personal boycott is outrageous but hardly unique. European and North American intellectuals and artists have been systematically excluding and condemning their individual Israeli counterparts for the so-called crimes of Israel–the Jew among nation-states.

In the last two years, European and North American academics have called for boycotts and de-funding of Israeli academics. They have disinvited Israeli scholars, fired Israeli academics, rejected university applications from Israeli students, refused to stage exhibits by Israeli artists or sell textbooks to Israeli universities, written inflammatory and defamatory editorials in prestigious journals condemning Israel for massacres that never occurred, refused to sell Israeli scientists materials that would aid in Israeli research to help Palestinian children, and refused to sell gas kits to Israel which would enable doctors to quickly identify gas and counteract a gas attack against civilians.

Should individual Americans and Israelis boycott individual Europeans for Europe’s murder of eleven million people, including six million Jews, in the Nazi era? Or for its past colonial aggression or its contemporary policies? In a sense, this singling out of individual intellectuals for punishment is morally similar to what genocidal suicide bombers do when they single out Israeli or American civilians for death.

Such obsessive anti-Zionist stands by intellectuals are examples of Jew-hating. Why? Because Western intellectuals have not even-handedly condemned academics from China (the Occupier of Tibet), North Korea (which possesses weapons of mass destruction), Rwanda (with its grievous record of genocide), or Holland (whose peacekeeping soldiers in Bosnia allowed 7,000 Muslims to be massacred in Srebrenica), or Jordan (who in one month, September of 1970, killed more Palestinians than Israel has killed in 55 years in a series of self-defensive wars).

More important, Western intellectuals have not condemned their counterparts from Arab and Islamic countries who have, for millennia, persecuted Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians; repressed, jailed, tortured, and murdered Muslim intellectuals; and utterly subordinated women within a system of gender apartheid. If that were not enough, for the last 50 years, Arab and Muslim nations have also systematically funded and carried out massacres and suicide-bombings of Israeli, American, and Western civilians.

Israel has endured genocidally murderous attacks almost every month, sometimes every week, for the last three years and is engaged in a battle for its very survival. Nevertheless, both Islamic propagandists and Western intellectuals present Israeli self-defensive strategies as “worse than the Nazis,” as “genocidal” and “racist.” Orwell himself might weep were he to hear the non-stop Big Lies, the utter distortions and reversals of reality by linguistic and photographic means. As Camus wrote: “To misname things is to add to the misery of the world.” Western intellectuals are indeed adding to the world’s misery.

Grumpeter and Ben Nissan told me that Moodysson’s “refusal to allow his movie to be screened in Israel only prevents raising awareness among the Israeli population (Jews and Arabs) and denies hope to the trafficked women that his movie was supposed to help.” Clearly, Moodysson is willing to sacrifice the trafficked women in Israel in order to cut a politically correct figure among the anti-Semitic intelligentsia.

Our Israeli heroes, Grumpeter and Ben Ami, persisted. They found me and they also found a Swedish journalist, Louise Eek, who just exposed Moodysson in the pages of a leading Swedish newspaper (Aftonbladet.) Moodysson quickly backed down–not necessarily because he understands the difference between innocent Israeli civilians and the genocidal suicide bombers who have been murdering them–but because, in Grumpeter and Ben Ami’s words “he is very careful of his reputation.” It is their understanding that Moodysson still wants it to be announced at the Israeli showing that he opposes Israeli policies. And, the film can only be shown once, and then only through the Swedish Embassy. Israelis are being forced to jump through a hundred hoops.

The moral: It is important to expose Jew-hatred and to call it by its right name. Some people might not change their minds but they might change their actions if they know they are being watched, especially if Jew-hatred becomes less than fashionable once again.

Grudgingly, Moodysson is now allowing Grumpeter and Ben Ami to work towards justice on earth. His film is great; it speaks for all, to all. I hope it continues to do its great work for children in every nation on earth — including exploited Israelis. –August 21, 2003

Dear Alice:

Hello old friend. As you know, I have loved your writings, (I still do), both your novels and your poems and above all, your golden success. You also once blessed me personally back when you alone chose to believe my allegations of rape at the hands of a black “brother” and you reached out to me privately when our white feminist sisters did not do so. You were there for me. You told me to tell the truth, that nothing else mattered as much.

Therefore, I will honor and “hear” you even if–especially if–we disagree on particular subjects. You believe that Barack Obama can somehow save our country. You are moved by his oratory and character. I am bowed beneath the weight of tribal sorrows and fear for our country and our world no matter who becomes the next American President.

But Alice: In your piece,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/01/barackobama.uselections2008 why oh why do you single out Israel as a wrong-doer and not Saudi Arabia? Israel but not the ethnic Arab Muslims of Sudan who are perpetrating genocide against black African Muslims and black Christians and who are mass raping black African girls and women? Israel and not Rwanda; Israel and not Iran, Libya, Algeria, Afghanistan, China, or North Korea, for their grieivous crimes against humanity? Why, Alice, why? You have got to know that anti-Semitism is also racism. Indeed, today, anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism and this pains me as much as the white racism and sexism of our feminist sisters once pained us both.

Reverend Martin Luther King’s oratory and nobility also thrilled me. I was part of the Northern Student Movement. I volunteered in Harlem. I quickly ran into a rank, thuggish, increasingly criminal style of sexism against women, both white and black, and it drove me out of the civil rights movement at that time. It was becoming a movement that increasingly despised white volunteers, Jewish volunteers, and one in which black men viewed white women mainly as sexual prey.

Alice: We each have scars that ache when it rains.

I pray that you consider re-considering the ease with which you reflexively scapegoat Israel for the crimes of so many rogue nations.
And if you do, perhaps you might set an example for Obama who perhaps became accustomed to a Jew-blaming culture in his Chicago Church.

Yours in struggle,
Phyllis

P.S. Do you really think our imperfect America is as bad as most other imperfect countries? And Cuba? It is a totalitarian prison camp which has persecuted its own, including artists, politicals, homosexuals. Are you so charmed by Castro’s dancing that you have forgotten all this?

—–Original Message—–