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Why is there such international pressure? It comes from Islamic states, but also from the secular international left, which regards Israel as the oppressor and not only ignores the history of Arab aggression but also the real oppression in the Muslim world. The left is supposed to care about women and gays, but apparently not when they are second class citizens or hung from cranes in Islamic countries. There is no greater oppressor of women in the world today than Islam.
Women are practically chattel in many Islamic countries and are not even free to go out without a chaperon. Ninety percent of the women of Egypt have their clitorises sliced off in accordance with Muslim practice, and most of these clitoridectomies are done without anesthetic on pubescent girls with kitchen knives. Where is the outrage? What is the Women’s Studies Department on this campus saying about that?
In any case, in 2005 or so, Ariel Sharon decided that Israel would unilaterally withdraw from Gaza and take away an argument against the Jewish state. Remove a Jewish “settlement.” There were 7500 Jews in Gaza at the time. Why are Jewish settlements a problem in any case? There are more than a million Palestinian Arabs settled in Israel. What’s wrong with Jews living in the West Bank? It’s a problem because the Palestinians are racist. They hate Jews and they don’t want any Jews living in their society. How do I know this? Because Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the PLO, has said so, and in so many words: there are not going to be any Jews in a “liberated” Palestine. How much clearer does it have to get? (And yet, there is not a Jewish organization on this campus willing to support this talk.)
So, Ariel Sharon decided, “We’re going to unilaterally withdraw.” Of course, Jews don’t want to be occupiers in any case. Why should they? They’re too busy creating cell phones and flash drives. Israel is the most creative, productive society on the face of the earth. Which is another reason why the Arabs hate it. Hate Israel. Israel’s creativity and productivity because it shows how Islam as currently interpreted has blighted the Arab world. There are three hundred million Arab Muslims in the Middle East. There are five million Finns in Finland. If you take away the oil that God in one of his blacker moments put under the desert there; if you take away the oil, the gross national product of three hundred million Arabs is less than that of five million Finns. And why is that? Well, part of the reason, obviously, is that they keep their women ignorant, denying them education. One of the reasons the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the ayatollahs was because he allowed women to get an education. The ayatollahs didn’t like that. The illiteracy rates in the Muslim world are a disgrace. It’s no wonder their countries are so backward.
In any case, Ariel Sharon decided that Israel was going to remove the Gaza pretext for the Palestinians not to sign a peace treaty. But he misread the Palestinians’ intentions. Israel evacuated Gaza unilaterally. The Israeli government also evacuated the 7,500 Jews who had settled there and did not want to leave. Because they did not want to leave, the Israeli government forcibly removed them. Why did they do that? Because if they had not done that, the Jews living in Gaza would have been massacred when the Israeli troops left. Figuring out the Middle East conflict does not take rocket science. What did those Jewish settlers do? Well, first of all, they were law-abiding. They were 7,500 Jews living peacefully among more than a million Arabs. They were not only law-abiding citizens of Gaza, they were productive ones. The 7,500 Jews created a horticulture industry with greenhouses and irrigation systems. They produced 10% of the entire gross national product of Gaza, a country that could not afford to take such a contribution lightly.
If I may be self-critical about my own people, this is how sappy we Jews are. To make the Israeli peace gesture to the Palestinians complete, to put the ribbons on it, so to speak, the Jewish publisher of U.S. News & World Report collected 14 million dollars from Jewish philanthropists to buy the greenhouses and give them with the irrigation systems to the Palestinians of Gaza. On the day the Israeli troops left and Hamas took control of Gaza, Hamas destroyed the greenhouses and the irrigation systems – the whole industry that had accounted for ten percent of Gaza’s gross national product — and started firing rockets into schoolyards in Sderot.
Eight-thousand rockets have been fired into Israel since Israel foolishly withdrew from Gaza. And what kind of rockets are they? They’re not rockets that one targets a military instillation with. They can’t target accurately. They aren’t good for any military purposes. They are only good for terrorizing civilians. These are Nazis. That’s who they are. And yet, on college campuses we have people wringing their hands over the poor Gazans because after three years of Israel accepting the unacceptable Israel struck back. Just how long do you think a country like America would allow, say, Canada, to launch rockets into schoolyards and towns in this country with no reprisal? But the Jews did it for three years. And then when they struck back, on college campuses across the country to protest the deaths of civilians who were killed in the Israeli effort to stop the attacks. Why were so many Gazans killed in the counter-attack? Because Hamas put them in harm’s way. Hamas put its headquarters under a hospital. Hamas installed its rockets in neighborhoods where people lived. You wouldn’t think there would be so many idiots in the West who would fall for these tactics, but there are.
Geopolitically speaking, Israel is in pretty dire straits. Iran is a thousand miles away; Israel does not have strategic bombers, it has fighter bombers. Whether they can actually carry out the job of taking out Iran’s nuclear capabilities is problematic. Of course, if you believe that Iran is building these nuclear sites to produce medical isotopes I’m not goin’ to get through to you. Israel is in a very hard place. A significant portion of its plight, is its own doing – not reading the intentions of its enemies. Leaving Gaza to Hamas was one mistake. The Oslo peace process was another. When Oslo began, the terrorist Yassir Arafat was in exile in Tunisia. For the sake of peace with people who wanted to push them into the sea, the Jews brought Arafat back to Ramallah, and armed his terrorist “police force” with 40-thousand weapons, and in effect began the phase of the war in which Hamas Nazis are dictating the tactics – suicide bombing in particular.
Why do people fall for these illusions? Its the “hopey-changey” thing in all of us. The wish is father to the thought. We want things to be better; we don’t want to face the fact that there is evil in this world. People don’t want to hear that there is evil.
On our college campuses today you can’t even inform people of what’s out there. My Freedom Center has produced a pamphlet written by Dan Greenfield about Muslim hate groups on campuses, which refers to the anti-Israel activities of the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine. I tried to place an ad for that pamphlet in about 30 college papers. Only one, Ohio State, agreed to print it – this is a paid advertisement mind you. Of course, there was a big eruption when it appeared. The Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine are Muslim Brotherhood groups, which make apologies for Palestinians’ evil intentions and deeds, and demonize Israel by spreading Hamas and PLO lies about the Jewish state.
Oh, of course on a college campus you can’t talk about Palestinians having evil intentions. That’s a generalization. You can’t say all Palestinians, that’s racist. All right, where is the Palestinian “Peace Now”? Tell me that. Where is the Palestinian standing up in the West Bank or Gaza, or in the United States, for the rights of Jews? There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Jews who are standing up for the rights of Palestinians. But none known to me refuting the lie that Israel is an apartheid state. It’s all about intentions. It’s all about the culture. And Palestine is a culture of hate.
Tell me that the reason the Palestinians in their majorities, through their governments support suicide bombers is because they are desperate. The Israelis have tanks, we have suicide bombers. The fact is that people have been oppressed in this world for thousands of years, horribly oppressed. But never in the entire history of mankind has an oppressed people strapped bombs on its own children and sent them to blow themselves up and kill other children, and then tells them that if they’re lucky enough to be male, they’re going to go to heaven and get 72 virgins for their good deed. That is sick. Gaza is a death cult, and the death cult is created by Hamas. A similar death cult exists in the West Bank run by Hamas’s ally, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which lionizes the murderers of children, terrorists who actually set out to target children. Who does this except psychopaths? They have institutionalized psychopathic behavior. You can see it on the web, the preachers preaching death to Jews, the little kids dressed up as suicide bombers, the children’s television cartoon figures encouraging them to murder Jews.
There was a really good documentary on HBO called “A Death in Gaza,” made by liberals, which was about this death cult. The filmmakers followed two twelve-year-old boys who who were hanging around Hamas, and aspiring to be suicide bombers. They recited poems in their school classes about becoming suicide bombers. It was a very sad picture. During the film one of the kids was shot – I forget the details of the incident – and suddenly he was transformed back into a little kid no longer boasting about becoming a suicide bomber but screaming and crying in pain.
In another sequence one of the boys was playing scissors, rock, paper with a Hamas terrorist. When the kid went back home the filmmaker said to the terrorist, “I see that you use this kid as a runner and lookout. Isn’t that a little dangerous for a 12-year-old? He could get killed.” The terrorist’s answer: “Oh, we have thousands of kids like that we can replace him with.”
At the end of the film, the director is killed. Nobody knows who killed him. He is out in the field and is shot. The film ends with a sequence with the kids. After they come through the terrible experience of one of them being wounded and in pain, the filmmakers ask them what they’d like to be now, and they say, “filmmakers.” That’s how sick that situation is. This is a whole society geared to bringing up its children to kill Jews.
Now why are these campus leftists — I’ve talked to them and they’re not stupid kids — sucked into this, into being apologists for evil? I have some insight into this because I grew up in the Left. My parents were Communists and I was one of the founders of the New Left. I have a fairly educated insight into what might go on in the mind of a leftist and how one of them might be taken with the Palestinian cause. To begin with, there is no right in this cause. The Palestinian cause would be right if it were directed against Hamas and Hezbollah and the PLO and the Arab states. Then it would be supportable. But, it is led by Hamas and Hezbollah and the PLO and is directed against the Jews who are the victims of a 60-year war by the Arab states and the Palestinian authorities to push them into the sea, and obliterate the Jewish state.
“Push the Jews Into the Sea” was the official slogan of the Palestinian Liberation Organization until the KGB persuaded Yassir Arafat that the Palestinians would never gain influence with the international community unless they changed the face of their movement and presented it as a quest for self-determination. (We know this from the testimony of Arafat’s KGB handler, Ian Pacepa.) Of course, for anyone familiar with the facts this is an obvious lie since the population of Jordan is 60% to 70% Palestinian Arab but is ruled by Hashemites. There is no outcry over the oppression of the Palestinians of Jordan by the Hashemites and no movement for Palestinian self-determination in Jordan.
It is also evident in the repeated rejections of statehood by the Palestinians every time it is offered to them. In 2000 Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians 95% of the territory they had been demanding to create a state and their response was the Second Intifada led by suicide bombers targeting pizza parlors and public buses.
Why would the left embrace such a malignant cause? Because the left is seduced by promises to “liberate” and to change the world. The world is full of misery, everywhere one looks. If the world could be changed, who wouldn’t want to do it? But, consider the legacy of the movements that actually set out to change the world in the 20th century.
Nazism was one. If we just rid the world of the Jews and the mongrel races, we can create heaven on earth. Communism was another. If we just get rid of the capitalists – the 1% — we can create paradise on earth. What Communist progressives created in fact was the most oppressive state in the history of the world. In the name of “social justice” they murdered 120 million people — in peace-time – and created unimaginable poverty, man-made famines that killed millions of people. That’s what progressives produce when they get sufficient power.
The lesson of this is that you can only change the world a little piece at a time. There’s a reason that we are where we are and not somewhere else. The obstacle to the realization of all progressive utopias is human nature. You can read all of the Marxist and leftist texts ever written and never encounter a consideration of what people are actually made of and what they are capable of, and why it is so difficult to produce a society of human beings that is fundamentally different from the way human beings have lived since the beginning of recorded time. But the fantasy persists: we’re going to change the world. It’s the same fantasy of Osama bin Laden and the jihadists: We’ll make everybody Muslim and force them to live under Sharia law, and then the world will be a holy place. And if you don’t agree to be holy, we’ll kill you. Exactly the mentality of the Nazis and the Communists.
There’s a natural affinity between all movements for an earthly redemption. That’s why the Islamists have made common cause with the progressive left and have learned to talk in the language of the of the left, the totalitarian language of social justice. It’s a noble idea, but it is an impossible dream.
I have come to these conclusions having spent the first half of my life trying to achieve social justice and then reflecting on the achievements of the movements I supported. I was part of the so-called anti-war left of the ‘60s. (The left is never “anti-war” – it is anti-American, anti-capitalist war.) The left I was part of forced America to get out of Vietnam – to withdraw unilaterally from the field of battle. The Nixon supporters of the war whom we hated said, “If America leaves Indo-China, there will be a bloodbath. The Communists will kill thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe more.” Our answer was, “No, they won’t.” But they did. They killed two-and-a-half million people in one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. And there wasn’t one leftist protest against those killings – because they were done by Communists, by progressives.
Thank you all for coming.
[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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