Editor’s note: The speech below was delivered by David Horowitz at Brooklyn College on March 10, 2011. The speech is part of a nationwide campaign being conducted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center to counter the genocidal propaganda campaign launched by the Hamas-related Muslim Students Association as “Israel Apartheid Week.” The Center has also created the video “Palestinian Wall of Lies” to counter the MSA’s genocidal propaganda campaign. For more information on the Freedom Center’s campaign, visit WallofLies.org.
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Myths and Facts
“To achieve justice, it is first necessary to call things by their right names.” – Confucius
It’s a pleasure, I guess, to be back on a college campus. It wasn’t like this in my day, however, with all these officers present, wanding everybody and searching your backpacks. How does it feel to go through a checkpoint? Here’s what I feel: safer.That’s what checkpoints are about. They’re about making people feel safer when they’re under attack from terrorists and, as it so happens, Middle Eastern Jew-haters.
In the 1930s, the Communists and the Nazis in Germany joined to break up meetings of their opponents with protests, and if that didn’t work with protests inside the meeting halls, and if that didn’t work, with physical violence. The main opponents of the Nazis and Communists were liberals – social democrats. This violence against the social democrats, this attempt to suppress discussion of political issues, spelled the end of the Weimar Republic and its democracy. It led directly to the reign of Hitler, who was elected chancellor and then it was all over.
The most important battle line in defending our democracy against its totalitarian enemies is the First Amendment, which guarantees us the ability to dissent – to disagree in a civil manner, and to have our point of view heard. That is the indispensable basis of a democracy.
And as you can see evidenced here tonight, there is a movement all across this country to suppress the free speech of conservatives, of people who embrace the fundamental principles of this democracy and are actively defending them against the threat posed by totalitarian radicals. You don’t need bodyguards and you don’t need armed police and you don’t need checkpoints if you’re a leftist coming to speak on a college campus. That’s because conservatives respect the democratic principles of our society, while many leftists don’t.
The group that attempted to organize a protest against my appearance here tonight is the International Socialist Organization, a Marxist organization whose goal, according to its own website, is a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in America. If you are looking for the true reactionaries of our time, they are political leftists.
Leftists operate on the basis of doctrines that were discredited over the entire course of the 20th century at the cost of 100 million innocent lives. The International Socialist Organization is one of the most active components of this communist left on college campuses. For ten years, they have protested my appearances on campuses across the country, no matter what subject I was speaking on.
The pressure from this left has been so successful that now legislators cannot even hold hearings without being attacked as “McCarthyites” or “racists” or “Islamophobes.” This effort to embargo critical thought is the primary weapon of the radical jihad within the democracies of the West at present.
You probably were in class today and didn’t see the congressional hearings about the radicalization of Muslims held by Representative Peter King, which have been attacked by the political left and the Democrats on the committee. The hearings featured a particularly sad case of an African American father from Texas whose son had converted to Islam and went to a mosque which happened to be a radical mosque and was recruited into the Islamic jihad. He was sent to a Muslim center in Yemen where he was trained to be a terrorist, returned to the United States and murdered two U.S. soldiers at an Arkansas military facility. His father testified about the dangers to American youth who might unsuspectingly attend mosques connected to the jihad.
Also testifying at these hearings was Zuhdi Jasser, who is an American Muslim. Jasser said that that the ones whom these radicalization programs hurt are Muslims and that the Muslim community needs to stand up and defend democracy in this country. That’s what we’re all waiting for.
The fascist left is making significant heady in silencing the opposition to the domestic jihad. It’s already impossible for me, and speakers like me, to come to a university campus and have a civilized exchange with faculty or with students. Leftist faculty avoid us; conservative faculty hardly exist. To speak to students, we have to come under police guard, and face malicious slanders that utterly misrepresent what we think and have said. This means that many students are unable to hear a non-left point of view on their campuses and weigh the issues for themselves.
This atmosphere of intimidation, because that’s what it is – is a threat to everyone’s democratic rights. You intimidate the opposition and then you win an election and then you shut everybody down. And why do you do that? Because people who go out of their way to intimidate others are people who believe so fiercely in their own righteousness that they basically want to eliminate their opponents, and they do. When they have enough power, they shut you up or they kill you.
The atmosphere of intimidation on this campus is so intense that with one exception the dozen or Jewish student organizations at Brooklyn College were afraid to sponsor me. Only one professor on this campus, Mitchell Langbert, was willing to get this room reserved for this event, and only one student was willing to stick his neck out and organize it, and that is Yosef Sobol.
Across the country, Jewish student groups have been intimidated from presenting their case if presenting it involves saying anything negative about people who launch terrorist attacks against Jews and want to destroy the only Jewish state in existence. Because doing so might “offend an ethnic or religious group.” Doing so would be Islamophobia. So everyone has to pretend, for example, that there’s actually a peace process in the Middle East. As a result, Jews have to pretend that it is their fault that they haven’t been able to make peace with people who want to kill them
If there are liberals in this room, you should be horrified. Anybody who is truly liberal, anybody who believes in democracy, should be horrified by this situation. If there were a liberal professor on this campus with guts, he would be in this room introducing me, and save Mitchell Langbert from having to stick his neck out for the thousandth time on this campus. But there are no such liberal professors; they are all hiding.
Now, to the Middle East. Let me say before I start, since leftists on the web have portrayed me as an arch-Zionist. I actually have never been to Israel. I have never been a political Zionist except in the very basic sense of believing that Jews have a right to exist and that they have a right to a state in the Middle East. That is the only sense that I am a Zonist, as every decent person should be.
These are the words said in 2007 by Mahmoud Al-Zahar, the founder of Hamas:
“There is no place for you Jews among us and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed to annihilation.”
This is Ahmad Bahar, the acting chairman of the Gaza Parliament. The parliament in Gaza, of course, is controlled by Hamas, which was elected in a democratic election. It’s important to point this out because when I submitted these quotes to the UCLA Daily Bruin for publication, They said, “Well, these are individuals and in your ad, you call them ‘Voices of Palestine.’” Well, yes.
These are the voices of Palestine, the Chairman of the Parliament, Ahmad Bahar, said:
“Make us victorious over the infidel people. Allah, take hold of the Jews and their allies; Allah, take hold of the Americans and their allies. Allah, count them and kill them to the last one and don’t leave even one.”
The next statement is from Ibrahim Mudayris, an official of the Palestinian Authority, Ministry of Religious Trust and Religious Affairs:
“The prophet said the resurrection will not take place until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them. Rejoice in Allah’s victory. Everything wants vengeance on the Jews, these pigs on the face of the earth, and the day of our victory, Allah willing, will come.”
Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, the party of God, an Islamic party in Lebanon, funded and created by the Iranians has said that he hopes that the Jews will gather in Israel, so he won’t have to hunt us down globally.
The creator of Hamas, is the Muslim Brotherhood, about which you’ve read something in the last few weeks during the protests in Egypt. Here’s what Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, has said. Qaradawi spoke in Cairo a week or two ago to a million cheering Muslims:
“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the Jews people would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler by means of all the things he did to them. Even though they exaggerated this issue, he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.”
In other words, Islam – or Qaradawi’s Islam, Hamas’ Islam, Hezbollah’s Islam, Ahmadinejad’s Islam – will finish the job that Hitler started.
So who are the opponents of the Jews in the Middle East? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know. They are Nazis, Islamic Nazis, and the level of intimidation is already so great in this country that you can’t even say Islamic fascists, let alone Islamic Nazis to describe these people, because that would be “Islamophobic.” But these are Nazis. That’s who they are. They want to kill the Jews. That is their agenda. They don’t want a state in the Middle East. They have rejected a state over and over again. Because their goal is not the self-determination of the Palestinian people. Their goal is to push the Jews into the sea.
So how do people deal with this? How do religious Muslims deal with this? How do people who want peace, or say they want peace, people who are basically decent, get associated with Hamas and Hezbollah and the Palestinian Authority? How do liberals turn a blind eye to these Nazi agendas. Well, they say to themselves – these people can’t really mean that. They’re just angry and oppressed. The Jews are oppressing them. They’re just reacting to that.
For a moment, let’s hold apart the question as to whether the Jews have actually oppressed the Palestinians. Instead, let’s just consider the claim that these expressions of Palestinian inhumanity are reactions to being oppressed. For thousands of years the world has been an unhappy place and people have been oppressed. Yet never in all those thousands of years has there been a people who have strapped bombs onto their own children and told them to go and blow up innocent people, people at weddings, seders, and in pizza parlors, and if they do that they will go to heaven and become saints, and if they’re lucky enough to be males will have seventy-two virgins as a reward.
No other people in the world has sunk so low morally as the Palestinians and yet everybody is afraid to say this. Even if you are oppressed, there are things that you don’t do that Palestinians are willing to do. There have been revolts in Iran against jihadist rulers, but there is no such revolt in Gaza or the West Bank. The terrorist governments in both places are elected without opposition from an anti-terrorist party. All through history, people have been oppressed, but no people has done what the Palestinians have done. No people has shown itself to be as morally sick as the Palestinians.
The next defense of Palestinian terrorism is that even if they commit such heinous acts and teach their children to hate Jews and want to kill them, that is because the Jews stole their land. This is the biggest lie of the Middle East conflict. It is a lie of Hitlerian dimensions because the agenda of Hamas is to kill the Jews, or to quote the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, “push the Jews into the sea.” This was also the slogan of the PLO, until its KGB sponsors advised Arafat not to say “push the Jews into the sea” because if you continue to do that you will not get people to support you. Instead, say that you want self-determination, say the Palestinians want a state, and that the Israelis are denying you a state and oppressing you. Then people will support you.
So the Palestinians have done that. For two decades the Jews have offered the Palestinians their own state and the Palestinians have rejected the offer. Today there is not a single Palestinian leader who is willing to recognize existence of the Jewish state. What is the chant on college campuses today? “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The Jordan river is the eastern boundary of Israel; the Mediterranean is its boundary to the west. If Palestine extends from the river to the sea, there is no Israel. In other words, kill the Jews and push them into the sea. That’s what the Middle East conflict is about. It’s not about right against right. It’s about right against wrong.
The biggest lie promulgated by the anti-Israel left and the Palestinian Jew-haters is that Israel is “occupied Palestine.” They have even created maps to prove it. At UC San Diego, the Israel Apartheid Wall features four successive maps to show the encroachment of Jews on the state of Palestine. The first map purports to show Palestine in 1946. The map is Muslim green and there are tiny little white spots to show Jewish settlements around Jerusalem.
The fact that the map is green is interesting. The war against Israel began as a war of Pan-Arab nationalists who didn’t want a Jewish state in the region because Jews are not Arabs. Now the war against Israel is a Muslim war to clean out the infidels. Not only are the Palestinians terrorists, they are sick Nazi terrorists, racists who can’t live peacefully alongside anybody who’s not Muslim – just ask the dwindling Christian populations of Bethlehem and other Arab cities in the region. The map is a lie. There was no Palestine in 1946 and anybody who used the word “Palestine” in those days was referring to the Jews.
There was no Palestine in 1946 for Israel to occupy. Israel was not built on Palestinian land. It was not built on Arab land. Israel and all the other countries in the region around the Jordan River, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, were created out of the ruins of the Turkish Empire which had ruled that region for around 400 years. During that entire time, there was never a Palestinian state, country, province or political entity. And in fact, the Arabs around the Jordan River, who began calling themselves Palestinians in 1964, regard themselves as Syrians.
There hasn’t been a “Palestine” since Roman times. “Palestine” is not even an Arab word. It’s Latin. It means Philistine. The Philistines were the enemies of the Jews. When the Romans slaughtered the Jews – six hundred years by the way before an Arab set foot on that soil – and dispersed them around the world, they gave the name Palestine to the Jewish homeland to humiliate the conquered. By the way the Jewish homeland is Judea and Sumeria, which is the West Bank, now occupied by so-called Palestinians.
There was no Palestine in 1946 or in 1948 when Israel was created, and no Arab land on which the state of Israel was created, unless of course you regard America as occupied Indian country. But if you want to argue historical precedence in this manner, the Jews were in Jerusalem and the West Bank for more than a thousand years before the Arabs. So who are the “occupiers”?
The “Palestine Mandate” refers to a region not a country. The area designated by the Mandate was much larger than the territory between the Jordan and the sea. In 1922, the British allotted 80% of the Palestine Mandate the new state of Transjordan, stipulating that no Jew could own land there – that’s how racist the Arabs were even then.
Jordan – which is what this state is now called – is an interesting case. Seventy percent of its population are Arabs from the Palestine Mandate, who refer to themselves now as “Palestinians.” But Jordan is ruled by a Hashemite minority, and unlike Israel is a monarchy – not a democracy. Yet there’s no movement on American campuses or in the Middle East to liberate Palestine in Jordan. There is only the movement to push the Jews into the sea. That’s because the agenda of the so-called Palestinians is not to liberate Palestine, but to get rid of the Jewish state.
The ascendant Islamic movement in the region has no tolerance for other religions and will not live alongside another faith – an infidel faith. So the Christians are also being driven out of the West Bank by Palestinian Muslims.
In the postwar period, there were two democracies in the Middle East, and only two: Israel and Lebanon, which was a Christian democracy. The president was Christian by law and the speaker of the assembly was Muslim by law. The Palestine Liberation Organization and the Syrians destroyed this democracy, first because democracy is a threat to political Islam, and second because Christianity is an infidel faith. Political Islam regards everyone who does not toe its religious line as an infidel. And its bible tells Muslims that infidels must be converted, subordinated or die. As a result, Lebanon is no longer a democracy. It’s a terrorist state controlled by shi’ites of Hezbollah, the party of God.
The mentality of the secular left is so twisted that it has joined forces with the political Islamists to support the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Although Israeli forces left Gaza in 2005, Hamas is still at war with Israel. Why? Because the war against the Jews has nothing to do with land or self-determination. It has to do with the determinaton of Islamic fanatics to get rid of the Jews between the river and the sea.
Why was the Israeli military in Gaza in 2005? Because the Egyptian army had invaded Israel through Gaza and with the cooperation of the Arab inhabitants of Gaza three times – in 1948, in 1967 and in 1973 – and because Arab terrorists have been launching attacks into Israel since 1949. In 2005, Israel’s leaders decided to withdraw their military forces from Gaza to demonstrate that they did not want to occupy any Arab lands – even the lands of Arab aggressors against Israel, even lands which provided a base for terrorists to launch attacks against Israel.
It was a very bad idea. Why was it a bad idea? Well consider what happened. In 2005, there were 9000 Jews settled in Gaza among 1.4 million Arabs. These 9000 Jews were regarded as a problem and were also removed. But why? Our minds in the West have been so corrupted by the propaganda of Islamic bigots that the settlement of 9000 Jews in Gaza is somehow regarded as a problem. But why are Jewish settlements a problem? There are a 1.2 million Muslim Arabs settled in Israel. But they are not regarded as a problem. Thanks to the tolerance and readiness of the Jews to live in peace with Arabs the presence of Arabs in Israel is not a problem.
Muslims settled in Israel have more rights than Muslims in any Muslim country, let alone any Arab country. Muslim Arabs are freer as gays and women in Israel than they are throughout the entire Islamic world. Yet the disgusting, Jew-hating, Israel Apartheid Week on this campus and others defames the Jewish state as an apartheid state and defends the real apartheid governments of Gaza and the West Bank, where women are second-class citizens, gays are hunted and no Jews are allowed.
The Jewish settlements on the West Bank are a problem only because the Arabs who live there are racist Jew-haters, who cannot live side by side with another people or other religions. That is the reality throughout the Middle East. Everything else is ideological, hate-inspired claptrap.
When Israel decided to withdraw its military from Gaza, there were 9000 Jews living there. I’m embarrassed as a Jew that Jews could be so stupid over and over again to make unilateral gestures of peace to people who only want to kill them. But that’s what they did. They withdrew their military to show they really wanted peace. But Israel also forced the 9000 Jews who were living in Gaza to leave as well. Forced them against their will. Why? Because if the Israeli army left them there without protection, the Arab inhabitants of Gaza would have raped, robbed and killed them. If you disarm the Palestinians and their allies, there will be peace in the Middle East; if you disarm Israel and the Jews, they will be massacred. There is nobody who deep down doesn’t understand that.
Were these terrorist Jews? No, they were law-abiding Jews. Not only were they law-abiding, but they were creative, as Jews tend to be. They created a horticulture industry, and that horticulture industry amounted to 10% – ten percent – of the entire gross national product of Gaza. Gaza is not a wealthy society. A horticulture industry amounting to 10% of the gross national product was very significant to the mainly poor Arab inhabitants of Gaza.
When the Jews were removed, American Jews, who should have their heads examined, raised money to buy the horticulture industry and give it to the Arabs, who had sworn to kill them (that is what is said in so many words in the Hamas charter). This was feel-good time for liberal Jews. We’re going to show how superior we are to every sane and normal person. We going to buy the greenhouses and the irrigation systems for $14 million and donate them to the Palestinians who want to kill us – as a gesture of peace.
On the day Israel withdrew its military and forcibly removed the Jewish inhabitants of Gaza, Hamas destroyed the greenhouses and the plumbing, destroyed the industry, destroyed 10% of the gross national product of their country, and started firing rockets into schoolyards in Sderot and other Israeli towns. They fired 7,000 rockets at unarmed civilians, before the Israeli government responded. Just imagine America sitting by while Mexico lobbed 7,000 rockets into El Paso and Tucson, or Canada into Buffalo and Detroit.
All this determination to be long-suffering has made life worse for the Jews. A normal people, a normal state having defeated five Arab aggressors would have expelled the 1.2 million Arabs still living in Israel, knowing that one day they were going to provide a huge fifth column for other Arab invasions. But they didn’t. Instead, they included them as citizens of Israel, gave them more rights than the Arabs of any Middle Eastern state. Israeli Arabs vote, they sit in the Knesset and they sit on the Supreme Court. They’re part of Israel which is a tolerant, multi-cultural community – unlike any Muslim state or Arab state.
In 1967, the Jews were again attacked by five Arab nations with populations adding up to more than 100 million people, more than ten times greater than Israel. When an aggression is committed against you, international law says that you can punish the aggressor. Germany invaded Poland twice in the 20th Century. At the end of the Second World War, the allies lopped off East Prussia, which was the industrial heartland of Germany and gave it to the Poles. They removed 12 million Germans from East Prussia where they had lived for hundreds and hundreds of years, and relocated them in a truncated Germany..
But when the Jews beat back the armies of Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iraq, they didn’t expel all the Arabs from the West Bank. They didn’t expel them even though the West Bank is Judea and Samaria, the historic homeland of the Jews. No, the Jews said, “All we want is peace.” They offered to withdraw all their forces from the West Bank in exchange for a treaty of peace. The Arabs refused. The Jews had tried this in 1948 and nobody had wanted to sign a peace agreement. They tried in the summer of 1967. They decided they’re going to do the same thing. Instead of expelling the Arabs who had attacked them, they let them stay, hoping that one day, rationality would take hold. But it never did.
When you have a religion, which preaches war and violence and hate, rationality is never going to take hold. Well, actually, let me make this distinction: At one time there were Palestinian Arabs. The mayor of Nablus was one. He wanted to make peace with the Jews. I’m getting old, so names escape me, but Gamayel in Lebanon was another Arab who wanted to make peace with the Jews, and Abdullah of Jordan was a third. They all wanted to make peace with the Jews. They were all assassinated by the PLO terrorists who are now the government of the West Bank. There is not a single Palestinian leader now who will even recognize the right of Israel to exist. The children of Palestinian are now being taught in government schools – in government kindergartens – to hate Jews and to want to blow themselves up to kill Jews so they can become saints. There is no religion in the world besides Islam that teaches its children to want to kill others or makes saints out of murderers. None.
Hitler hid the final solution from the Germans because he thought they were too civilized to accept it. Ahmadinejad shouts it from the rooftops and Muslims all over the world cheer. There isn’t a Muslim country in the world, not a Muslim leader, who had denounced Ahmadinejad for that aspiration.
In America, we are barraged with charges of “Islamaphobia” and constantly hear how bad it’s been for Muslims since 2001. Every year since 2001, the official hate crimes statistics in this country show that there have been eight to 10 times as many hate crimes against Jews as against Muslims. That’s the reality – the rest is propaganda.
Can you imagine any other country which suffered the attacks of 9⁄11 or had a crazed army Major shouting Allahu Akhbar shoot 39 unarmed soldiers on a military base treating the community which produced these killers so deferentially? People in other countries would be more likely to string up members of a community they thought responsible. This is not to justify such reactions, just to point out they are a fact of life. This is what goes on in other countries. In Muslim countries, when an author publishes a book that they find insulting to Allah, they go around killing people and blowing things up. When the fatwa was pronounced on Salmon Rushdie’s book, Muslims in the Middle East killed a nun who was helping Muslims in retaliation.
So people are known to do this kind of thing. But in this country, Muslims are a protected species. You can’t use the word “terror” and “Muslim” in the same paragraph or book without being called an Islamophobe. This makes it very difficult for us to defend ourselves. I wait for the day when the good Muslims step forward to help us defend ourselves. Zuhdi Jasser is one but Zuhdi is pretty isolated, pretty alone.
I think ordinary Muslims are like anybody else who want to live in peace with others, who are concerned about putting bread on the table for their children, and so forth. But the principal institutions of Islam in this country, the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Society of North America, to name a few – are all fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood.
That’s why when I go on college campuses, and there are the Muslim Students Association members in the audience, I always ask them, “Will you condemn Hamas?” Because Hamas is a Jew-hating, America-hating fanatical religious-military party that was also created by the Muslim Brotherhood. And they never do. They never will condemn Hamas. That tells me all I need to know about their real agendas. Some of you may have seen a video of my exchange with a member of the Muslim Students Association at the University of California at San Diego.
The first thing I said to her was “Will you condemn Hamas?” Her answer was “You want to crucify me.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, if I don’t condemn Hamas then people will say that I support Hamas and Homeland Security will arrest me.”
In other words this college student is so delusional she thinks she’s living in a country where if someone says they support Hamas – and let’s face it there are open Hamas supporters all over the place – the government will arrest them. In reality, the government probably won’t even track them.
I said to her, “Let me put it to you this way. I am a Jew and the head of Hezbollah has said he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For or against it?” And she leaned into her microphone and said “For it.”
We have Nazis in this country who are perfectly decent-appearing people who will probably get along fine with others when they’re in circumstances where it would be dangerous reveal what they actually believe.
Interruption by a member of the “Palestinian Club”: “Do you want to go lynch all the Muslims in America?”
Audience member: “Sit down.”
Member of the Palestinian Club : “Lynch me! Lynch me!”
Audience Member: “Shut up!”
Member of the Palestinian Club: “Yeah, you’re racist. Is that what you want to do? You want America to go around killing all the Muslims in America?
Member of the Palestinian Club: “Do you want to go lynch all Muslims in America? You’re racist, racist. Yeah, you’re racist.” Exits the room.
The defense of terrorists begins with accusation that all critics of Muslim terror are anti-Muslim. That is what the Muslim Brotherhood and the jihadists and their political fronts maintain. Their strategy is to identify all Muslims with terrorists and they do it exactly the way this member of the Palestinian Club has done. Of course, she didn’t wait for the answer, but it doesn’t really matter because she didn’t hear anything I said the whole evening. So why would she be able hear the answer?
This is the strategy of the attacks on Peter King and the congressional committee. If you talk about Islamic terrorists, you are attacking a religion. Which is blasphemy. When you hear somebody say, “Oh, you want to lock up all Muslims and you think all Muslims are terrorists,” that person, whether they understand it or not, is speaking on behalf of the terrorists, and is insulting peaceful Muslims. This woman was a Muslim, but she insulted Muslims with her remarks, particularly since two minutes before her outburst I had said there are good Muslims who want to live in peace, and that the problem is that the main organizations who claim to speak for Muslims in this country are fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Why is this so? Why are all the major Muslim organizations in America connected to the Muslim Brotherhood and why are so many mosques filled with hate against Jews and against Americans? The answer is money and intimidation. If you are a Muslim, you don’t want to be accused of being an apostate. You don’t want to be a pariah in your own community for criticizing Islamic hate when that would get labeled an Islamophobe. And then there’s the money. Eighty-percent of the mosques in America are funded by the Saudis who are the chief spreaders of the Islamic doctrines – Wahhabism – that spread jihad and hate. The Saudis have funded the principal university centers of Middle Eastern Studies as well.
Yale University Press published a book, a scholarly book, on the Mohammed Cartoons and the violent reactions, which involved a million Muslims all over the world, the burning of embassies and the killing of innocent people. Yale University published a book about these events, but they didn’t print the cartoons. The book about the Mohammed Cartoons does not have any of the cartoons. There are only two explanations for this – money and fear. A translator of Rushdie’s book was murdered for the author’s blasphemy. That was a caution. And then Yale has received millions from the Saudis.
Thanks to the courage of a few people on this campus I was able to say my piece. I appreciate that. Thank you for listening.
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