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“That’s true,” I said, “except for this difference: there are no Amalekites anymore (and haven’t been for more than a thousand years). But there are Jews, and there are Imams and dictators all over the world screaming for their destruction.”
At this point, Josh Orol spoke up to support Jacob: “In the Torah it says that rabbis should decapitate a Jew who does not observe the Sabbath.”
“That’s news to me,” I said. “But when was the last time you heard of a rabbi decapitating anyone, let alone a Jew for not observing the Sabbath?”
Anxious to break free of this surreal discussion – all too typical of the left — I returned to Jacob’s original question and said, “The reason I wrote the ad was to identify the Palestinian case against Israel as a genocidal lie, namely that Israel occupies Palestinian land. Israel was created out of the Turkish Empire. The Turks are not Arabs, let alone Palestinians.” The effect of this was to pour oil on the flames. Now the conversation became testy and passionate as the two of them claimed that this history didn’t matter. What mattered was “international law” under which Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, according to them, was “illegal” – which if true, would make Israel’s position indefensible.
This was the standard PLO/Hamas line. I deliberately didn’t make an issue of this but whatever I did say provoked an outburst from Josh Orol who proclaimed with something approaching ardor that he considered the head of the Muslim Students Association not only his friend “but my brother.” I said, “If you consider him your brother, you might ask him whether he believes the Jews have a right to a Jewish state in the land that is Israel and if he does would he state that publicly.”
“I could not do that,” Orol replied. “It would be insulting.”
Ari Gauss, who had said nothing until then, said it was time to conclude the conversation. I reached into my pocket and pulled out our pamphlet Muslim Hate Groups On Campus, thinking that Josh Orol should become acquainted with its contents. “Have you seen this?” I said. He hadn’t. I realized then that Ari hadn’t distributed the pamphlets to his Hillel students as he said he would.
“You’ve been remiss, ” I said to him. “Yes,” he replied, “I’ve been remiss.”
There were about 160 people assembled to hear my speech, about 60 of them students. It was with a little concern that I noticed the front rows were filled with students who were obviously Muslim, some with head scarves, at least one with a kaffiyeh. Security is always a concern for me at events like this, since I have been physically attacked on several campuses, while the words used by the left to defame me are easily translatable into incitements to violence. Nonetheless, this was a southern campus, and in my experience such campuses are generally better behaved than those in other geographical regions (Texas being an exception).
My speech focused on two points. First that the intentions of Israel’s adversaries in the Middle East are genocidal – their goal is the obliteration of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea.” Second, that this has been the goal of the Arab states and the Palestinians since Israel’s creation in 1948. I began the speech by reading statements from Palestinian leaders, including the statement of a suicide bomber featured on the official Hamas website: “My message to the Jews is that there is no god but Allah. We are a nation that drinks blood and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood and our children’s thirst with your blood.” The Hamas charter promises that “Israel will exist … until Islam obliterates it as it has obliterated others before it.”
The rest of my speech was devoted to a historical narrative in which I documented the disinterest of the Palestinians in self-determination (Jordan is 70% Palestinian but there is no movement to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy that “occupies” it) or in establishing a state (hence the rejection of statehood whenever it was offered to them).
The forty members of the MSA and Students for Justice in Palestine who had positioned themselves in the front rows didn’t bother to wait around for the historical review. As I had anticipated, about 15 minutes into my talk they stood up on cue, and marched out in unison, evidently uninterested in hearing the facts or disputing them. As I learned from the article, which appeared the next day in the Daily Tar Heel, the leader of the walkout was Mariem Massmoudi, a member of the Muslim Students Association and “co-founder” of the “Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue Committee” that Ari had praised. Massmoudi’s concept of dialogue was clearly restricted to opinions that served her agendas. I also learned from a report in The Blaze that Massmoudi was not merely interested in Muslim culture and religion, but was a political activist and self-styled “revolutionary” whose father was an important figure in the network of Muslim Brotherhood fronts, of which the Muslim Students Association was one.
The headline in the Tar Heel – “Student-Led Walkout of Horowitz Lecture Protests ‘Destructive’ Remarks” — gave Massmoudi the victory she wanted. The characterization of what I said as “destructive remarks” was the comment she had given to the reporter about the speech she hadn’t stayed to listen to. This kind of “reporting” is not unusual for campus papers which are normally run by leftists, and whose editors are often as concerned as are the political activists that the campus community not be exposed to a politically incorrect opinion.
The article itself ignored the substance of my speech, quoting only one remark I made, which as it happened proved to be a useful one. Accompanying the reporter’s article were three column-length attacks on the editorial page accusing me of being an anti-Muslim bigot. The attacks came from the president of the Muslim Students Association, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine, and the president of the campus Hillel, Josh Orol. It was obviously a coordinated assault.
The piece by Josh Orol was the most damaging as it came from a fellow Jew who claimed to be pro-Israel. His attack was headlined: “UNC Hillel Won’t Stand for Vilification of Muslim Students,” and began: “As co-president of UNC Hillel, I was surprised to receive an invitation from the Committee for a Better Carolina to publicize David Horowitz’s upcoming speech. I would have hoped that our opinions were already publicly known: UNC Hillel does not support Horowitz’s repeated vilification of Muslims.” The only attempt Orol made to justify the specific claim that I vilified Muslims – rather than Muslim jihadists — was this: “To make the broad claim that Arabs want to kill Jews — and that Islam is a militant religion bent on the destruction of Israel and the United States — is to destroy the principle of pluralism that the freedom of speech is meant to uphold.” Naturally, Orol didn’t quote anything I had said – or had ever written, and I have written thousands and thousands of words on Islam and on the Middle East war. The reason he provided no quotes is because there is none. I made no such claims. In my speech I said that the Arab states that attacked Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973 did so with the intention of destroying the Jewish state and pushing the Jews into the sea. I also said that Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of the Jews.
Conflating Hamas terrorists with all Muslims is the propaganda goal of Hamas and its parent organization the Muslim Brotherhood, and also of the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine, and also the campus left. This is how the terrorists and Jew-haters protect themselves, and how students like Josh Orol who claim to speak in the name of the Jews become their enablers.
In an attempt to alert the campus community to the slanders it was being fed, I wrote a letter to the Daily Tar Heel setting the record straight. The Tar Heel’s editor, Steven Norton, refused to publish my letter, despite his paper’s officially stated commitment to journalistic fairness and “involving … seldom heard opinions in our community.” The letter summed up my feelings on this whole disturbing episode:
Apparently, it is easier for the presidents of campus Hillel and the Muslim Students Association to condemn a defender of Israel than to condemn those who call for the destruction of Israel and America, and the murder of their inhabitants. Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hizbollah has called for “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” as has Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran. The spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusef al-Qaradawi has said that the Holocaust was a just punishment for the Jews and wished that the followers of Allah would finish the job that Hitler started.
In their Tar Heel columns, the presidents of MSA, Hillel and Students for Justice in Palestine accuse me of being an anti-Muslim bigot. This is a lie exposed by the Tar Heel’s own reporter whose one direct quote from my speech had me accurately saying, “There are good Muslims and there are bad Muslims.” I also said that “the majority of Muslims [are]… decent, law abiding citizens…who want peace.” I then pointed out that there were also good Germans but that in the end they didn’t make “a damn’s worth of difference.” This is a true statement, and no one would accuse me of being anti-German for making it.
Unfortunately, conflating Muslim terrorists with all Muslims is a typical tactic of campus apologists for jihadists who are at war with Israel and the United States. Opponents of the Islamic jihad against the West, like myself, are routinely accused of being “anti-Muslim,” which is a term designed to shut down debate and make opponents of genocidal movements seem the indecent ones — instead of those who make excuses for them.
Mahmoud Al-Zahar, the co-founder of Hamas and one of its current leaders has said, “There is no place for you Jews among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed for annihilation.” If the Muslim Students Association on this campus does not support Hamas or this statement, its leaders should say so.
This goes for all the Muslim Students Associations on American campuses. If they do not support the destruction of the Jewish state and if they condemn the Hitlerian sermons of Muslim Brotherhood leaders like Yusef al-Qaradawi, they should say so. And if they do not, Hillel should have no partnerships or “dialogues” with them, and Hillel students should not think of them as “brothers.”
[Editor’s note: To get the whole story on the radical anti-Israel hate groups infesting our universities, order “Muslim Hate Groups on Campus” by Shillman Journalism Fellow Daniel Greenfield and “Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews” by Dr. Richard Cravatts.]
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