Mick Hartley

Phyllis Chesler – Against Faux-Feminists Who Deny the Rights of Muslim Women and Jews:

[A] new and what I describe as a “faux feminism” has arisen in the last 30 years, a postmodern and postcolonial feminism that passionately condemns Christianity and Judaism as the greatest danger to women’s rights but dares not critique religiously supremacist Islam for this same reason; an intersectional “faux feminism” that condemns only Western imperialism and refuses to acknowledge the long history of Islamic imperialism, colonialism, slavery, anti-black racism, and religious and gender apartheid; a “faux feminism” that is far more concerned with the alleged occupation of Palestine than it is with the occupation of women’s bodies, faces, minds, and genitalia world-wide–including those women who are being forcibly face-veiled, death-threatened, and honor killed in the disputed territories.

Women’s studies associations, national feminist organizations—many feminist Jews—are not merely “politically correct”; they have become “Islamically correct.” They are currently more concerned with the religious sanctity of head and face veiling than they are with FGM, forced face-veiling, honor-based violence, polygamy, child marriage, and honor killing in the West. Not only have faux feminists betrayed the Jews—in the name of anti-racism, they have also abandoned tribal and immigrant women of color—Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus—to barbaric misogyny. Above all, they have abandoned the most heroic ex-Muslim, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu feminist dissidents, both in the developing world and in the West.

And that’s the tragedy—that so many Western feminists have become such conformists. They are no longer independent thinkers. Faux feminists have also been persuaded that Islam is a “race,” not an ideology or a religion; that America’s historic enslavement of black Africans, and South Africa’s apartheid regime, is exactly the same as alleged Israeli discrimination against Arab Palestinians, including Jew-hating bomb makers and terrorists with blood on their hands.

Fundamentalists are trying to destroy what feminists have accomplished.

Feminists in America exposed, condemned, and analyzed rape. We began rape-crisis counseling and changed the laws about rape. Today, Western professional feminists—our women’s studies professors, politicians, journalists, human-rights activists—are not rescuing rape victims in Islamic communities, either in the Middle East or in the West. Feminists are too nervous about being called “Islamophobes,” “racists,” or “colonialists.”…

Anti-Semitism has, incorrectly, been viewed as solely a right-wing phenomenon. It is not. In fact, genocidal anti-Semitism has been perpetrated against Jews by ancient pagans, by Christians—both Catholic and Protestant, by Muslims—both Sunni and Shia, by Nazi-pagans, and by criminal psychopaths. We have recently been horrified by genuine, bona fide, American Nazi freaks in Charlottesville, chanting “Blood and Soil,” “Jews will not replace us,” and holding aloft flaming torches. This evokes terrible collective memories. Yet these hundreds of white Nazis on American soil are not nearly as numerous as Muslims who have been religiously, politically, and socially indoctrinated to hate and kill Jews and other infidels.

In 2003, I published the first edition of The New Anti-Semitism. I wrote that anti-Zionism is the new-Anti-Semitism—and I held the Western intelligentsia responsible for their alliance with Islamic-style Jew-hatred. My Berkeley-based editor fought with me about this. Back in 2003, what I was saying was considered heresy. It still is….

The fact that I am also a passionate Zionist has been used to marginalize my feminist work. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I have been disinvited as a keynote speaker at conferences. I have “made” some death lists. I have seen American classrooms being invaded by American totalitarians, fascists who, in the name of “free speech” and “academic freedom,” are verbally and physically violent. They mean to censor all objective truth, but especially the truth about Israel and Islam, and to redact history.

Adapted from a speech, “The New Feminism and Anti-Semitism,” delivered at the UJA Federation in Manhattan on Sept. 12, 2017, in acceptance of the “Defender of Women’s Rights Award.”