[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/03/unc-sds-price.gif)Last week I travelled to Chapel Hill North Carolina at the invitation of Christians United for Israel and the Committee for a Better Carolina, a conservative student group whose leaders are not Jewish. I mention this otherwise irrelevant fact because they asked me specifically to speak about the war against Israel in the Middle East and when I asked their leader Brandon Hartness why, he said to me, “because there is no one making a strong argument for Israel on this campus.”

As on most campuses, there is a large and active campus Jewish group at Chapel Hill, namely Hillel. But UNC Hillel was not about to invite me or to sponsor this speech. In fact UNC Hillel had attacked me last spring when these same students, again led by Brandon Hartness, put up my “Wall of Lies” – a banner created by my Freedom Center to refute the genocidal lies that make up the Palestinian case against Israel. The most fundamental of these lies is that Israel “occupies” Arab land and that this occupation is the source of the conflict.

This lie effectively delegitimizes the Jewish state and underpins the claim that Palestine extends “from the river to the sea” – obliterating Israel all together. Members of the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine chant on campuses across the country: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The Jordan River is Israel’s eastern border, the Mediterranean Sea is its border to the west. In other words, Palestine is Israel, and therefore Israel must be obliterated.

The truth is that Israel – like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan – was created on land that belonged to the Turks for 400 years prior to the establishment of the mandates from which Israel and those Arab states were carved. The Arabs have less of a claim on the West Bank, let alone on Israel proper, than American Indians have on the United States.

When the “Wall of Lies” banner was erected on the UNC campus last spring, two directors of Hillel – Ari Gauss and Sheila Katz – wrote a letter to the Daily Tar Heel dissociating themselves from the Wall and defending the Muslim Students Association which was identified on it as a group that was making the false claim that Israel occupies Palestine on campuses across the country. This was not the first or only attack on the Wall by liberal Jews active in the university community, and was in fact mild compared to others, which denounced me as an “Islamophobe” and “racist” for stating the essential truths about the war against the Jewish state.

Hillel students at the University of Pennsylvania, who voiced these specific slanders did so in a joint letter signed by members of the Hamas-supporting group “Penn for Palestine” (formerly Students for Justice in Palestine) and the Muslim Students Association, which, as has been documented in publications of my Freedom Center, is a Muslim Brotherhood front. Elisheva Goldberg who was one of the leaders of the Penn attack is now working for Peter Beinart, the proponent of the view that the Palestinian Authority-Hamas coalition wants peace with Israel and that the obstacle to peace is Israel itself.

In an attempt to understand these reactions, I contacted Hillel officials and attempted to explore ways to work with them. At a bare minimum I hoped to avoid being attacked by Jews for my efforts to defend the Jewish state. I went to Philadelphia and met with the regional director of Hillel, Rabbi Howard Alpert, and more than a dozen Jewish student leaders. Our discussions revealed that alongside the Elisheva Goldbergs, Hillel had genuine defenders of Israel and was doing important work in supporting the Jewish state. Hillel’s national office had issued policy guidelines forbidding its local chapters from entering working partnerships with organizations that did not defend the existence of the Jewish state, specifically Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association. Unfortunately, this was a policy not always observed by the local chapters, which were independently funded and run. But my contacts with Hillel directors who shared my views of the conflict made me want to work with them to change that.

From my discussions in Philadelphia, I made two observations. The first was that I had made a mistake in not discussing the ads we placed in college papers with members of Hillel in advance. The appearance of the ads inevitably created a local firestorm, thanks to the aggressive organizations of the Muslim Brotherhood and the political left, which attacked them as “Islamophobic” and “racist” at every turn. This is a standard operating procedure of the left generally, whose goal is never to engage an opinion that challenges its core beliefs but to demonize and suppress it. In pursuit of this goal, leftists have no qualms about implicating others in its smears, making any group on campus that is Jewish or “pro-Israel” a party to the crime.

The second observation was that my approach to the defense of Israel was different from that of most Hillel chapters. I believed that the way to combat genocidal claims and intentions (i.e., that Israel’s existence is illegitimate and the Jewish state should be obliterated) was by identifying them for what they were. By contrast, members of Hillel – even those who understood these malevolent agendas – felt that the defense of Israel should be positive, stressing the tolerance, creativity and generosity of the Jewish state, as well as its legitimacy, while refraining from identifying its enemies and their supporters with the genocidal intentions they held.

It was – and is – my view that the refusal to identify Israel’s enemies with their malignant goals weakens the case for Israel’s defense. The left understands that demonizing one’s adversary as a “colonial occupier” is the most effective argument, even though this requires inventing the facts. But supporters of Israel give their most important asset away at the outset. This forces them to play defense, which is always the weaker position. The left understands that intimidation through name-calling works – no one wants to be called a “racist” – which is why so many Jewish students are reluctant to “offend” them by speaking the blunt truths that are contained in my ads.

In accord with the policy I had adopted after my discussions in Philadelphia, I submitted an ad I wanted to run in the UNC student paper – the Daily Tar Heel – to the UNC Hillel director, Ari Gauss. The ad I wanted to run was headlined “Where Are They Now?” and featured nine former presidents of the Muslim Students Association who had gone on to leadership positions in al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The most famous among them was Anwar Awlaki, mentor of the Christmas bomber and the Ft. Hood assassin, who had previously been president of the Muslim Students Association at Colorado State University.

Also featured in the ad was a pamphlet we had produced, which was written by Daniel Greenfield, and titled “Muslim Hate Groups On Campus.” The pamphlet documented the anti-Jewish hate weeks and other outrages committed by the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine. Greenfield also traced the groups’ lineage back to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Gauss responded to my email with the proposed ad in this reply:

While it’s unspeakably upsetting and problematic that our campuses are supporting individuals that become leaders in terrorist organizations, my chief concern about the ad is that it’s not clear to me 1) how connected one campus MSA may be to another and 2) specifically, how connected UNC’s MSA chapter is to the national entity or other campus MSA chapters. To run this ad in UNC’s paper suggests that UNC’s MSA is connected to the others in some meaningful way and part of the problem. I’m not convinced that this is the case.

I have heard this argument from more than one Hillel director, but it always puzzles me. First, why would an organization take on the same name as an already existing national organization like MSA, which has chapters on virtually every campus, if it was not related to it? Wouldn’t the national MSA sue any organization appropriating its name and recruiting members using that name as infringing its copyright? Of course it would. But secondly, a quick search of the national MSA website shows that the UNC chapter is indeed one of the national MSA affiliates. Yet Ari didn’t bother to look.

Because I wanted to work with Ari, I let this go and agreed not to run the ad. In a phone conversation Ari explained to me that in his view the Muslim Students Association at UNC was “not political.” Hillel in fact worked closely with the UNC MSA chapter and had established a joint “Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue Committee” with its members. He was very proud of the dialogue. I asked him if this Committee was based on a public commitment by the MSA that the Jewish state had a right to exist on the land now called Israel. I got no satisfactory response but again chose to continue our dialogue. Since I had withdrawn the ad, I asked Ari if he would distribute our pamphlet, Muslim Hate Groups on Campus to his Hillel students, because they (and he) needed to be informed as to what was actually taking place on campuses across the country. He said he would do this, so I sent him 50 copies.

When the speaking date was set, my office called Ari to arrange a meeting with him and also with some Hillel students. Jeffrey Wienir who runs our campus programs informed me that he was having trouble setting up such a meeting because the Hillel students were “to the left” (and didn’t want to be in the same room with me). It would require Ari’s intervention to get any of them to agree. When I arrived at Ari’s office a few hours before my speech, we had a brief chat in which he reiterated that he had good working relationships with the Muslim Students Association. Then he introduced me to the two students who were willing to meet with me, whose names were Jacob and Josh.

Josh Orol was the co-president of the campus Hillel. But it was his partner, Jacob, who was visibly agitated. “Why did you run that ad last year?” he asked, referring to an ad containing the Wall of Lies I had placed in the Tar Heel. I asked him what he objected to, and he said its references to the Koran were wrong and it was an attack on a religion. Neither of us could remember what the ad actually said (in fact the only reference to the Koran was that Jerusalem, which the Palestinians now claim is a Muslim holy city, was never mentioned in the holy book), but I jumped right in.

“The ad doesn’t attack Muslims,” I said, but then asked whether he didn’t agree that Islam was problematic in a way that Christianity and Judaism were not. I pointed out that Christians worshipped a carpenter who preached non-violence and never committed a violent act in his life. By contrast Muslims worshipped a prophet who was a warrior who spread his religion by force, killed those he considered infidels and in fact committed a genocide against an entire community of Jews – the Qurayza tribe – because they were Jews. To which Jacob responded, “Well, in the Torah, Joshua conducted a war of extermination against the Amalekites.”

“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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