Op-Ed: Israel--not Apartheid; Islam--Nothing but Apartheid
Exposing the Big Lie.
May 18, 2016
Israel has long been accused of being an apartheid nation state--and a state involved in "ethnic cleansing."
Pure propaganda! This is a brazen Big Lie.
The largest practitioner of both gender and religious apartheid in the world is Islam or Islamism.
Religious apartheid exists when the dominant state religion allows no other religion to exist and flourish. For example, Muslim countries do not allow churches to be built, Christian insignia to be displayed; Muslim mobs and governments destroy existing churches or convert them into mosques.
Today, living Christians are persecuted, tortured and murdered in the name of Islam all across the Muslim world. Oddly, on April 16th of this year, (for the second time) the Pope offered no solace and no asylum to persecuted Christian; he publicly offered to take in a symbolic number of Muslim refugees into the Vatican.
For many centuries, Muslims have also forcibly converted, persecuted, and massacred Hindus, the "wrong" kind of Muslim, (the Shia v Sunni war is quite intense), ex-Muslims, Muslim dissidents, Baha'i, Zoroastrians, and Buddhists. Afghanistan was once a mainly Buddhist country until Islamic Jihad ravaged the land and massacred the Buddhist monks who refused to convert to Islam.
Jews? We are pariahs, "monkeys," evil-doers --and this is the only reason that Israel, the Jewish state, has been under attack for more than one hundred years in the Jewish Holy Land. It is the reason that Muslim mobs and Muslim leaders have consistently exiled, taxed, tortured and murdered Arab, North African, and Central Asian Jews.
Israel allows Arab Muslims and Arab Christians to live in Israel--they are Israeli citizens, some serve in the Knesset, sit on the Israeli Supreme Court, work as physicians, nurses, and researchers in Jewish hospitals.
Palestinians envision Shomron and Judea aka the West Bank as a place that must become "yudenrein," free of Jews. Thisis ethnic cleansing. The entire Muslim Middle East is now "yudenrein," just as Gaza now is. This is ethnic cleansing.
In terms of gender apartheid: I once lived in Kabul and was, in effect, held captive there for five long months in a marriage that was not at all what I expected. I write about this in An American Bride in Kabul. I love my opening line..."I once lived in a harem in Afghanistan..."
It was a grand adventure but a very dangerous one. I could not believe my eyes when I first saw women wearing burqas--sensory deprivation isolation chambers which the West should ban. (I am not talking about headgear, just about face masks).
In 2003, after a very successful feminist lecture, an African-American feminist audience at a free-standing conference at Barnard, asked me--completely off-topic--where I stood on the issue of the women of “Palestine.”
I responded by saying: “I think you are asking me where I stand on the issue of apartheid and I oppose it. Islam is the largest practitioner of gender and religious apartheid in the world." And I began explaining what I meant.
A near-riot broke out and I had to be hustled out for my safety. These feminists did not care about women or about “Palestine;” they cared about demonizing Israel and, as women of color, they identified with Arabs because they thought they Arabs are all people of color; that there is no such thing as Jews of color; and because they have absolutely no idea of the anti-black prejudice that characterizes Arab and Muslim cultures.
I was both an eyewitness and a survivor of the kind of gender apartheid that is indigenous to many tribal cultures. Barbaric customs, which include the savage subordination of women, have not been caused by Western imperialism or colonialism.
This point is very hard for many Western thinkers to fathom.
Practices such as forced veiling, purdah, honor-based violence, child marriage, arranged marriage, polygamy, honor killing, and FGM, long preceded the rise of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram, and ISIS.
Furthermore, most Western thinkers do not comprehend that Islam has a long history of slavery, racism, religious and gender apartheid, colonialism, imperialism, conversion via the sword, etc.
This understanding should be easy to achieve given our daily, horrendous headlines. But no one wishes to be the first to say: "The Emperor is naked." Do they?
Today, Orwell's rules apply. Once the universities have indoctrinated the coming generations; once people are infected with a fake but lethal narrative, reason alone cannot prevail.
People are punished for thinking independently. They fear that by criticizing barbaric behavior when committed by formerly colonized men of color, especially Arabs, particular "Palestinians," (we have the malevolent influence of Edward Said to thank for this) that they themselves will be demonized as racist "Islamophobes."
Unfortunately, the virus of anti-Semitism (Jew hatred) has been rising among progressives/leftists--the so-called "good people."
Increasingly in the 21st century, people who were once classical liberals have now become totalitarian leftists; those who were once in favor of free speech and academic freedom now confuse hate speech with free speech and are willing to grant hate speech, Blood Libels, and junk social science, the privileges of academic freedom.
Unbelievably, the global professoriate and human rights activist industry today stand with “Palestine,” Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter, and not with Christians, Yazidis, and Kurds who are being massacred by Muslims—or with the women who are being kidnapped into sex slavery by ISIS and Boko Haram.
I have worked with Christians--the Hatune Foundation--who have been rescuing ISIS's sex slaves. Anti-Christians are not doing this work, although Western feminists have been involved in teaching the counselors who console them the basics of Western trauma and recovery practices.
Even if I could be persuasive, the coming generations are not getting to hear or read me. Non-invitations and dis-invitations can do that. To the best of my knowledge, four of my six 21st century books, The New Anti-Semitism, The Death of Feminism, An American Bride in Kabul and Living History: On The Front Lines for Israel and the Jews, 2003-2015 have never been adopted by a university for a course.
The tasks before us are clear:
Globally, we must militarily, economically, legally, politically, intellectually, ideologically, theologically, and socially defeat Islamist Jihad.
We must also hold our universities accountable for not teaching objective truth, for preferring junk social science and propaganda.
We must restore civility and intellectual and political diversity to our campuses and to our media.
Brown Shirt-like mobs should not be allowed to engage in "hostile takeovers" of lectures with which they disagree.
We must also somehow de-program those who have been indoctrinated with America-hating and Israel-hating propaganda.
Thus, America should leave the U.N., which has not stopped a single genocide or a single honor killing and has only been effective in one thing only: legalizing Jew hatred.
Cross-posted at The Jewish Voice.