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For thousands of years nations, ethnic groups, races and religions have suffered. They have been enslaved, they have been occupied, they have been oppressed. But never in the history of mankind until now has their been a people like the Palestinians who strap bombs on their own children and tell them to blow themselves up and kill other children, and that if they do so they will go to heaven and become saints. No other religion besides Islam makes murderers into saints. In the entire history of mankind no people has sunk to such moral depths as the Palestinians in their war against the Jews.
Let’s also look at the claims that Jews oppress Palestinians rather than the other way around. Let’s begin with biggest lie of the entire Middle East conflict — that Israel “occupies” Arab land, let alone “Palestinian” land. To begin with, there hasn’t been a political entity or state called Palestine since Roman times, when Rome affixed the name Philistina (or “Palestine) to the homeland of the Jews which is Judea and Samaria, which is today the Palestinian occupied West Bank. The Romans did this because the Philistines, who were not Arabs, were the Jews’ enemies and they wanted to humiliate the people they had conquered and dispersed to the four corners of the globe.
In the second place the entire region around the Jordan out of which Israel was created was not Arab and had not been for four hundred years. The Arabs’ claim to Israel is about as credible as the Dutch claim to New York. For four hundred years prior to the creation of the state of Israel – not to mention Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq – the land belonged to the Turks who are neither Palestinians nor Arabs.
The state of Jordan was also created out of what was called the Palestine Mandate, when it was administered by the victorious powers in World War I. The majority of Jordan’s population are Arabs who today would be referred to as “Palestinians” – a “nationality” created in 1964 to combat the Jewish state. The “Palestinians” of Jordan are ruled and oppressed by a Hashemite minority. But no one is calling for their liberation. That is because the true goal of the Palestinian liberation movement is not a Palestinian state (which has been rejected by the Arabs as recently as 2000) but to push the Jews into the sea.
I went on to discuss the other indefensible lies that make up the total case against Israel – for example that Jewish settlements are a problem. There are a million Muslim Arabs settled in the state of Israel, who enjoy more rights as Israeli citizens than the Muslims or Arabs in any Muslim or Arab state. If Muslim communities in Israel are not a problem, why are Jewish communities in the Arab world or on the West Bank or in Gaza? Because the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East are racists and refuse to live side by side with any non-Arab or non-Muslim people. That is the straightforward, factually accurate, but politically incorrect answer. There were two democracies in the Middle East after the Second World War: Israel and Lebanon. Lebanon was actually a Christian democracy. Democratic Lebanon has been destroyed by the Islamic jihad and the Christians of the entire Middle East are under the gun or in flight.
I had encouraged the Brooklyn students to erect a “Palestinian Wall of Lies” (www.walloflies.org) that we had created to combat the malignant “Israel Apartheid Wall” that the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish left on campus was going to erect during “Israel Apartheid Week.” When the Brooklyn College administration learned of these plans they banned both walls. This is what a victory looks like in collegiate America today.
“Israel Apartheid Week” is a hate week against Jews, nothing more nothing less. Israel is, in fact, the only state in the Middle East that is not an apartheid state. Jews have created the only multicultural society in the Middle East, the only society that respects the rights of all ethnic and religious groups – and all genders as well. Jews have built the only society that respects women and gays. The very name “Israel Apartheid Week” is thus an obscenity whose only purpose is to demonize the Jewish state and make it vulnerable to the terrorist armies who whose rockets are poised to destroy it and whose goal is to push its Jews into the sea.
If this campaign had been directed against African Americans or any other campus ethnic group – including and especially Muslims – no university community would tolerate it. But because it is directed against Jews, Israel hate week is protected and funded by student governments and protected by university administrators. Moreover, and most disturbingly, the Jewish organizations on campus have been unwilling to stand up for themselves and to claim the same rights and respect as the groups who are attacking them. The Hillel organization on the Brooklyn College campus is 1,000 Jews strong but it would not sponsor our event. The Palestinian Club is 100 Muslims strong, but they came to attack it. Only one of the many Jewish organizations on campus — the Students United for Israel, a CAMERA funded organization – - was willing to co-sponsor the event.
By now you are probably wondering about the reaction of these members of the Palestinian Club who came to protest my speech. You are wondering how they responded to the detailed arguments I made refuting their claims and self-justifications or to my statement that while Palestinians were indeed suffering, the cause of their suffering was their own leaders and the Arab states who for sixty years have rejected peace because they want to push the Jews into the sea. The answer is that they didn’t. It was as though members of the Palestinian Club had not heard a word I said.
I have had the same experience on a score of campuses where I have confronted audiences, which included sizeable contingents from the Muslim Students Association, a front for the Muslim Brotherhood and a sister organization to Hamas, along with their leftwing enablers. The reactions at the end of my talks are always the same. The only way I can truly convey what happens is to recount a speech I arranged for the Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, who is under indictment for “insulting Islam” in the Netherlands. Wilders made very clear that he was not opposed to Muslims but to an intolerant and totalitarian ideology that demanded total submission to its doctrines and oppressed minorities whom it regarded as “infidels.”
During his speech Wilders turned to address directly the two dozen leftists and Muslims in the audience. He appealed to them saying “Look, I am doing your work. You say you are for the rights of women and gays. Under Sharia law and in many Islamic countries gays are hung from cranes and women are treated as chattel, denied education, and beaten with impunity by their husbands. I oppose the version of Islam that oppresses women and homosexuals. You need to do so as well.”
As soon as Wilders had finished his speech, the Muslims and leftists in the audience stood up en masse and started chanting “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Geert Wilders go away!” and marched from the room.
So it was with the Muslims who came to protest my talk. When they went to the microphones to ask questions after the speech they all had one talking point and it was the strategic talking point of the jihadists: “Mr. Joe McCarthy” (this is how the leader of the protest actually addressed me, “you said that all Muslims are terrorists….” Others before him had made the identical charge bolted from the room. None had even made a pass a questioning the history I had reviewed or the facts I had presented.
What struck me afterwards was this. Every Muslim in the room was a member of the Palestinian Club; most I was told afterwards were from Ramallah. But not one of them spoke as a Palestinian. I had said that Palestinians had elected two terrorist governments to rule over them, that Palestinians were willing to kill their own children in order to kill other children, that their schools taught their children to hate and kill Jews, that as a people they had sunk to the lowest moral level in history. I had said that they were indistinguishable from Nazis. And not one Palestinian in that room stood up to defend themselves as Palestinians. To a man and woman they said, “You are accusing all Muslims of being terrorists.
I said to them, you are acting as foot soldiers for the terrorists – which provoked an outraged cry. I confronted the professor ringleader and said: “Will you condemn Hamas?” He hemmed and hawed and stuttered, and then began his evasion of the question, but everyone in the room who was not a member of the Palestinian Club knew they already had their answer. Yes these Muslim students from the “Palestinian Club” were all supporters of the terrorist war against the Jews.
There was one questioner who actually did offer an intellectual challenge to an argument I had made, and did make an attempt to defend Palestinians as an ethnic group – as opposed to a religious sect of Islam. This person was a Jew from Hillel who suggested that Japanese kamikaze pilots were akin to suicide bombers and therefore Palestinians were not the only people in history who had sunk so low. But, of course, kamikaze pilots were soldiers not civilians, and they targeted battleships and aircraft carriers not women and children in pizza parlors.
When it was over, I was glad I had come. I was proud of the small vanguard of Jewish students who had invited me and arranged my appearance, and come to my speech. I was proud of Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, the Jewish trustee who had gone out of his way to protect me, and the students who came to hear me. And I was gratified that they understood my message and would take it to the rest of the Jewish community at Brooklyn College: If we are not for ourselves who will be?
It is the same message I take to other campuses where my audiences are mainly non-Jewish. Israel is the canary in the mine. The chant of the Islamo-Nazis in the Middle East – shouted by millions – is, “Death to Israel! Death to America!” If we in America do not stand up for ourselves now, there will be no America tomorrow.
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