Potentially, Israel Faces a Second Holocaust

Phyllis Chesler wrote this for the rally-demonstration "For the truth, for Israel" held in Rome October 7. It is already available on several web sites and blogs, but we wanted to post it to the PRIMER-Connecticut blog as well because Professor Chesler will be speaking in New Haven, at Yale, on November 18.

Chesler will be speaking at the Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective Seminar Series organized by The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA). The title of her talk will be "How Scapegoating Israel Diminishes the Rights of Women in the Middle East." It is scheduled for 4:15-5:45 p.m. at ISPS (Institution for Social and Policy Studies), 77 Prospect Street, New Haven.

YIISA holds seminars most Thursday afternoons during the academic year. The seminars are open to the public and well worth attending for those who are nearby. The schedule may be found on the YIISA Seminar Series web page.

Many of the articles by Chesler may be found on her web site www.phyllis-chesler.com.

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Potentially, Israel faces a Second Holocaust.

Indeed, many Europeans continue Hitler’s war against the Jews by supporting fifty seven Islamic apartheid nation states against the single Jewish democratic state.

The worldwide media has become totally “Palestinianized” and Stalinized. Palestinians—even the haters, terrorists, and torturers, are naught but noble, innocent victims. Israel has literally become Orwell’s 1984 “Goldstein,” whom propagandized mobs are taught to scapegoat for their every conceivable sorrow.

The ideological assault against Israel has escalated. Daily, hourly, in every language, the media repeats Big Lies. Israel is the “Nazi, apartheid” state, the “colonial” aggressor. What a neat trick. Bloody Muslim imperialism and Islamic religious and gender apartheid are thus denied and projected onto Israel.

Israel is essentially, existentially, “evil.”

In 2005, Ahmadinejad said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” In 2006, he said that the Middle East would be better off “without the existence of the Zionist regime” and that Israel would “soon be wiped out.”

President Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, but really, he feels Hitler did not go far enough. Thus, he is taking up where Hitler left off—Ahmadinejad’s intention is a clearly stated genocidal one.

No one is stopping him.

We—the world’s civilians—are now all Israelis. The same world which refused to stop the airplane hijackings and human bombs which blew up countless Israeli civilians has now inherited this whirlwind. As they say: It starts with the Jews but it never ends there.

Recently, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that: “To delegitimize Israel is an affront not only to Israelis but to those everywhere, in every part of humanity, who share the values of a free and independent spirit.” However, while his speech, delivered in Israel, was a very warm one, Blair also seemed to suggest that Israel’s best approach to combat the “delegitimization efforts” was to “always be a staunch and unremitting advocate and actor for peace.”

In other words, Israel, alone among nations, must earn the right to exist by being “good.” If we applied this standard to Iran, Sudan, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, they would have ceased to exist long ago.

Dear Mr. Blair: Israel has always been in favor of “peace.” The intransigence and solution lie elsewhere with the Palestinians, the Arab world, the Muslim world, and with the so-called “international community” which have collectively hardened their hearts against Israel. In 1975, the United Nations resolved that “Zionism is a form of racism” and has since passed 322 resolutions condemning Israel and not one condemning any Arab country.

Europeans and Americans have launched countless petitions to boycott Israel-only. Fifty Israeli and 150 American artists have just launched a performance boycott against the Israeli city Ariel. Meanwhile, they or their colleagues continue to perform in Cairo, Ramallah, Riyadh and the United Arab Emirates. Free spirited theatre people have allied themselves with the most regressive and repressive of ideologies and condemned Israel, the only country that does not honor murder women, or jail and torture dissidents, artists, or homosexuals.

Obama’s United States, along with the western intelligentsia, wrongly blame Israel for the peace failure; they believe that it would be “racist” or “Islamophobic” to expect the Palestinians to first accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state as a precondition for any real peace negotiation. Instead, the American media blames Israel for “not caring about peace.” Human rights organizations and medical journals blame Israel only—although in 2009, the founder of Human Rights Watch finally criticized his own organization for doing so.

Our theatre boycotters wish to be seen as "anti-racists;" yet, and tragically, by holding Arab and Muslim countries to much lower standards, and by condemning their inhabitants to continued Islamist barbarism, they fail every ethical test of non-racism. And, their anti-Zionism is an unacknowledged form of anti-Semitism/racism which remains a politically correct pleasure.

Big Lies and monstrous hatred have gone global. Stand against this. Stand for the values of the Enlightenment, stand for truth over lies. Otherwise, we will all be bombed back into the Arabian 7th century, the women who survive will wear burqas, we will all be ruled by theocratic barbarians.

More than the lights will go out, and not just over Europe; this time, the lights will dim over the entire world.

Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D. is emerita professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at City University of New York. Well known author of fifteen books, including Women and Madness (Doubleday, 1972), The Death of Feminism: What's Next in the Struggle for Women's Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and most recently, The New Anti-Semitism, she is the co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology and the National Women's Health Network. Prof. Chesler is often on international media and is a frequent contributor to INN as well as FOX News, Pajamas Media, and Middle East Quarterly.