When moral truth becomes politically incorrect, even otherwise sensible people lose their bearings. Thus it is with former NY Mayor Ed Koch, usually of sound mind on Middle East issues, who has joined the wolf pack attacking CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld who is the last man standing at CUNY who thinks it is a disgrace that the university would even think of honoring an Israel-hating demagogue like Tony Kushner. Koch, a longtime friend of Wiesenfeld is quoted in the Jewish Daily Forward as saying that Wiesenfeld was “obsessed” and that “It isn’t evil to be supportive of the Palestinian cause.” Au contraire. The last time I looked, the Palestinian cause was the destruction of the Jewish state. The “liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea” — the goal of Palestinian striving endorsed by every Palestinian leader — means in so many words the obliteration of the state of Israel. This is genocidal. This is evil. And the fact that even Ed Koch is hopelessly self-deluded on this issue is indicative of the moral abyss into which our intellectual elites have sunk.

Andrew Sullivan has posted an attack on CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld for blocking a politically motivated honorary degree that was to be given to the over-rated, crypto-communist and Israel-demonizing playwright Tony Kushner. Andrew’s intelligence is on display in the opening paragraph of his piece where he reiterates his clear-headed views of Kushner’s inflated literary reputation. Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning agitprop, Angels in America, is a puerile embarrassment and in recognizing this Andrew shows that he is capable of breaking out of the bubble of liberal derangement when it suits him. All the more reason that Andrew’s attack on Wiesenfeld is an instructive illustration of the unhinged attitudes of current “critics” of Israel, who are apologists for Hamas and their Gaza supporters.

The Palestinian case against Israel, as we noted in our ad in the New York Times is built on genocidal lies — lies which Andrew seems to have swallowed whole. Andrew wonders how apologists for Jew-hating Arab aggressors in the Middle East can be regarded as anything but reasonable critics. After all, Israel refuses “to give up land conquered in war.” Come again? Israel conquered nothing. Israel is the target of would-be conquerors whom it has managed to thwart through five or six (depending on how you count them) aggressive wars waged against the tiny Jewish state since 1948.

In 1948 the Arabs declared an unprovoked war on the Jews who had been given an internationally recognized mini-state on land previously possessed by the Turks for 400 years. That 1948 war – a racist war to expel a non-Arab people from the Middle East (and specifically Jews) – has continued unabated for 60 years. Determined to “push the Jews into the sea,” the Arab aggressors have refused to sign peace agreements in 1949, in 1967, in 1973 and after the first Intifada in 2000. When Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops from Gaza in 2006 absent a peace signed by the Arabs, Gaza became a terrorist state and fired 7000 rocket attacks into Israeli schoolyards and towns for more than a year until Israel struck back. Shame on Andrew for implying that this was not self-defense and for referring to Gaza as “conquered land,” implying that Israel was ever the aggressor. This is not reasonable criticism of Israel Andrew; it is apologetics for war criminals.

Andrew then accuses Israel of insisting on “populating that land with its own people.” Excuse me. We are still talking about the ruins of the Turkish (not Arab) empire – since the Palestinian Arabs have never come to terms with the postwar status quo — and about aggressors who have by all the recognized laws of war forfeited their right to the land by dint of their aggression. Remember whom the Jews are dealing with here, Andrew. Israel extricated 7000 law-abiding, productive Jews from Gaza in 2006 for the sole reason that without Israeli troops there they would be slaughtered by the Palestinians because they were Jews. These are Nazis Andrew, and that is why Kushner’s support for them is regarded with such distaste by people like Jeffrey Wiesenfeld and myself.

You refer to the “brutal bombardment” of Gaza. Excuse me, again, but no. What country would allow itself to be bombarded by 7000 rockets randomly shot into populated civilian areas without such a retaliation? And where was your  outrage over these terrorist attacks, or over the fact that 100% of Palestinians support terrorist governments who have sworn the destruction of the only Jewish state on the planet?

And yes, despite your raised eyebrows over Wiesenfeld’s mild statement, the Palestinians have indeed earned themselves a special place in the annals of human depravity. In thousands of years of human suffering there has never been a people that has strapped bombs onto its own children, instructed them to blow up other children, and treated them as martyrs and national heroes when they did. This is a sick, evil culture – an unprecedented national death cult. The suffering of the Palestinians is self-inflicted and no one can release them from their suffering – as the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has  demonstrated – but themselves.

Osama bin Laden was a symbol of the Islamic jihad. After 9/11, surveys by al-Jazeera and other sources indicated that between 10% and 50% of Muslims regarded him as a hero. That is somewhere between 150 million and 750 million people. Symbols are important, and the death of the symbol of Islamic jihad is important. But the jihad will go on.

The fact that bin Laden was killed in a mansion near Islamabad (fitting name) is but one mark of the support he had in the Muslim world. But by the time our forces reached him, ten years after 9/11, the center of the jihad had long passed from the caves of Waziristan to the Middle East — to the Islamic Republic of Iran, to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and to the fount of the Islamic hatred and crusade against the West — the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. 

Obama will take credit for the death of al-Qaeda’s leader, and he deserves it — for the aggressive war he waged in Pakistan in particular. This was a forward strategy that provoked the wrath of the “liberal” establishment when Nixon tried it in Vietnam, and Reagan in Libya and Bush in Iraq. Unfortunately, this is only the right hand of Obama’s strategy towards the jihad. The left hand is simultaneously stoking the fires of Islamic aggression in its heartland, the Middle East, and our war with this evil is just beginning.

In his speech tonight the President talked as though the war is a war with al-Qaeda, although al-Qaeda has played a very small and diminishing role in the 17,000 plus Islamic terrorist attacks that have been perpetrated since 9/11. After that attack, Bush swore that the United States would not tolerate terrorist regimes that threatened the democracies of the West. You’re either for us or against us he said, to the dismay of the appeasement Left. But since then Islamic terrorist regimes have been created in Lebanon and Gaza and Somalia, the Taliban has been resurgent in Pakistan and the Muslim Brotherhood has risen in Egypt. The storm clouds that are gathering — not least because of the feckless ineptitude of the Obama Administration itself — will not be dispelled by one man’s death.

There are many days of grief and suffering on the horizon still. As President Bush so rightly said in the days after 9/11, this will be a long hard war that is likely to last our lifetimes.

The Muslim Students Association is a national organization with chapters on hundreds of U.S. campuses. It has a privileged position on these campuses such that no student paper would print the statement that follows in this blog. It would be regarded as “offensive to an ethnic and religious group.” What is truly offensive are the subterfuges under which the MSA operates, lying about its core mission — which is to advance the Islamic jihad against the Jews and Christians of the Middle East, and ultimately against the United States. Unfortunately the lies of the MSA (like its sister organizations CAIR and the Muslim American Society) are successful in snookering the willing accomplices of the political left and the unwitting accomplices of the inattentive middle to support and protect them.

Here is the deceptive Mission Statement of the Muslim Students Association at UC San Diego, where I confronted one of its members last year who endorsed the extermination of the Jews (and was defended by the MSA for doing so):

“The purpose of the Muslim Student Association 
of the University of California, San Diego
is to provide an environment for the development and networking
 of Muslims on campus while fostering a sense of community between Muslims and non-Muslims through education.”

This is an organization that sponsors Israel Apartheid weeks, sponsors Israel-hating speakers, advances the false and genocidal claim that that Israel exists on land stolen from a mythical “Palestine” that never existed and promotes the propaganda of the Muslim Brotherhood, creator of Hamas and spiritual guide of al Qaeda. Its “education” consists of informing the gullible that Islam means “peace” (actually it means “submission”) and that “terrorism is, in fact, a term that spans the entire world and manifests itself in various forms,” and is, in fact, a term applicable to “sanctions” (e.g., the sanctions against Iran to prevent its dictators from developing nuclear weapons. The MSA site directs the inquisitive who want to understand Islam (and Islam’s relation to terrorism) to a site called WhyIslam.org — a site that happens to be sponsored by the Islamic Circle of North America, which like the MSA itself, is a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Unfortunately this transparent double talk is enough to snooker gullible university administrators, faculty and students into regarding the jihad-supporting MSA chapters as religious and cultural organizations, while providing them with special privileges and protections. This allows them to conduct their war against the Jews and Crusaders in the heart of America’s educational institutions. The main Jewish organization on campus, Hillel, joined forces with this arm of the Muslim Brotherhood to attack the “Palestinian Wall of Lies” which our students put up at Brown, Florida State and the University of North Carolina, to refute the lies of the anti-Israel, anti-American left and the Nazis of Hamas — a sister organization of the MSA.

Today’s NY Times carries an obit for terrorist collaborator Vittorio Arrigoni, and celebrates him as a peace activist. Check out Steven Plaut’s account of the poetic justice meted out to this wretched individual who was killed by the evil cause to which he dedicated his life. The identification (and glorification) of Arrigoni by the Times – the front page slot and multicolumn spread — and his presentation as a “peace activist” and lover of Palestine underscore two truths about the increasingly menacing world we live in. First, that “peace activist” is a label which reflects a commitment to terrorism and the enemies of democracy. During the lead up to the Iraq War, for example, there were massive “peace” demonstrations against America’s efforts to rein in a monster who had murdered 300,000 of his own people. But there was not a single demonstration in front of the Iraq embassy demanding that Saddam Hussein obey 17 UN Security Council resolutions and honor the truce he signed in the first Gulf War. The peace demonstrations were an outpouring of the anti-American, pro-jihadist Left. No doubt there were among them many political naifs who couldn’t put two and two together to understand just what they were demonstrating for or against. But the fact remains that the peace movement had only one end in sight — the survival of the bloodthirsty regime in Iraq.

Calling Arrigoni pro-Palestinian, as the Times does, is like calling supporters of Hitler “pro-German,” without taking into account the ruin Hitler brought on Germany. Every misery suffered by the Palestinians has been inflicted on them by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and the Arab states who have seen to it that the Palestinians remain in squalid refugee camps and under terrorist rule. We can add the NY Times to this shameful list as well.

On Monday, March 28, the Daily Pennsylvania printed our ad “Wall of Lies.” We removed the word “Palestinian” from the original “Palestinian Wall of Lies” as a concession to the reigning political orthodoxy on campus which forbids putting the words “Palestinian” or “Muslim” with the words “lies” or “terrorism” in the same factual sentence but has no problem with putting “Israel” and “Apartheid” in dyad thus spreading an actual lie about a militarily threatened democratic state. In response to our ad the sinister coalition of campus  Hillels with groups that seek to destroy the Jewish state took another step forward. Below is the “response” to our ad in the Daily Pennsylvanian, followed by the letter I have submitted to the editor. This, in turn, is followed by my letter to one of the signers of the attack on our ad, a former Hillel education chairman.

On Monday, the David Horowitz Freedom Center took out a full-page advertisement in The Daily Pennsylvanian and college newspapers around the country. It was an ad full of dehumanizing hate speech about the Palestinian people particularly and the Muslim, Arab and pro-Palestinian communities generally. We, as leaders of the Jewish and Muslim communities and as leaders of the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups on campus, are joining together to collectively condemn such hateful and inflammatory rhetoric and those who espouse it.

We believe that the publication of this horrifying and divisive document is an opportunity to come together as one community and address the status quo that has gone unchallenged for too long. We are exasperated by the oversimplification of an issue that deeply affects millions of human lives. We reject the idea that there is no alternative to this fruitless, polarizing antagonism. We are deeply disappointed by the fact that both sides have convinced themselves that they have nothing to learn from the other and nothing to say that the other will respect. We reject the extension of this attitude to our campus.

We are no longer satisfied with a world in which Muslims, Jews and Christians, as well as those who identify as pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, are compelled to suffer silently every time extremists perpetrate hate in the name of the convictions we hold most dear. We recognize that these attacks and libels de-humanize not only those they target but also those in whose name they claim to speak — the individuals whose peaceful voices and opinions are drowned out in a sea of discrimination and hatred. We refuse to be complicit in destructive ignorance.

We propose that we, as Israeli and Palestinian advocates, bring the same level of open-mindedness and intellectual rigor to our advocacy as we do to our studies. When discussing this issue, we resolve not to check our inquisitiveness or our tolerance at the door. We should be able to view each other’s efforts not as incitements that require either response or dismissal but as invitations to expand our understanding of the issues and each other.

Today and going forward, we stand united in our suffering and against our suffering. We are united in the conviction that this moment of hate will serve as the catalyst for us to come together and learn from each other. These conversations will not be easy, but they are essential in the process of reconciliation between our communities and the development of a shared vision for the future.

We all dream of peace, but we also recognize that in our dreaming we must not fall into complacent slumber. We must remain alert to the hatred and intolerance that surround us and guard ourselves — and each other — against them. Our generation has not inherited an easy task, but we resolve that those who see enmity as inevitable, or hatred as natural, will never go unchallenged. By our unity, commitment, action and friendship we vow to build and defend a new framework of respect, humility and constructive creativity.

This guest column was written by:
Besan Abu-Joudah, College and Wharton junior, former Penn Arab Student Society vice president
Logan Bayroff, College sophomore, Forum for New Israel Dialogue president
Ariel Fisher, College senior, former Hillel Education chairman
Elisheva Goldberg, College senior, Kedma editor-in-chief
Sarah Shihadah, College freshman, Penn for Palestine, Penn Arab Student Society

The following people are signatories:
Maryam Alireza, Penn Arab Student Society president
Humna Bhojani, Penn for Palestine president
Sarah Ijaz, Muslim Students Association president
Tamar Karpuj, Hillel Israel Sector chairwoman

Elisheva Goldberg can be contacted at nelis@sas.upenn.edu.

To the editor:

On Wednesday, the Daily Pennsylvanian printed a response to our Wall of Lies ad signed by a coalition of Jewish and Muslim campus leaders. In several rhetoric heavy paragraphs they called our ad “dehumanizing hate speech” and “hateful and inflammatory.” It would have been nice to see one citation from the ad that was alleged to be hate speech or one argument that the claims made in our ad were not true. There was no such citation and no such argument, only hate speech against us for writing the ad. It seems reasonable to conclude that this resort to emotion is because there is no argument to be made for the slanders that Israel is an “apartheid state” or that Israel “occupies” Arab land. Or perhaps these students were not up to the task. Shame on those who signed the article, and shame on their teachers for not providing them with the ability and good manners to actually answer arguments they disagree with instead of demonizing those who make them.

Sincerely,

David Horowitz

Dear Elisheva Goldberg (former Hillel Chairman and signer of the Daily Pennsylvanian article)

I don’t pretend to understand what would motivate you to attack a statement of facts defending Israel with such hate-filled vitriol as you do in the article you have jointly signed with Palestinian groups. I would like to see any statement you personally, or Hillel generally, has made condemning the Israel Apartheid Weeks and Walls organized by the Muslim Students Association, undoubtedly with support from the Palestinian groups you have embraced. If you do not respond to this email I will conclude that you made no such statements, and prefer to attack Jews defending themselves against slanders whose intent is clearly genocidal.

The purpose of this email is to formally offer to debate you or anyone you may propose as to the veracity of the claims our ad makes in defense of Israel or, alternatively, any of the claims made by the Palestinian groups you have aligned yourself with against Israel.

Sincerely,

David Horowitz

Here is Bill Kristol’s comment on the  speech the President gave last night justifying his aggression in the name of humanitarian values against Libya (yah I know Moammar is a bad guy) but not say Iran or Syria, or for that matter the terrorist enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank which are not even sovereign states:

“The president was unapologetic, freedom-agenda-embracing and didn’t shrink from defending the use of force [which is undoubtedly why he deferred to the kleptocracies of the UN, surrendered command over American troops to a Canadian general and basically washed his hands of responsibility for any mess that may ensue -- DH].”

Where to begin? It looks pretty clear at this point that Obama has pushed aside an American ally in Egypt (yah I know he’s a bad guy) and paved the way for the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fountainhead of all terrorism in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. In Libya Obama is supplying weapons to graduates of Guantanamo and veterans of the holy war against America in Afghanistan. His “freedom-agenda-embracing” stance doesn’t appear to preclude pressing the only democracy in the Middle East’s back to the wall. The Obama Doctrine, “responsibility to protect,” which means a license to invade another country not in self-defense but to enforce some vague “humanitarian” standard is a blank check for imperial intervention anywhere and everywhere. This is the doctrine that muddle-headed progressives who abhor the very existence of nation states may embrace. It is certainly the delusion that led Woodrow Wilson to destabilize Central Europe and set up World War II. But it is not a doctrine that conservatives who understand that rights do not exist without nation states to enforce them (and that there are precious few that are willing to do so, and none in the Middle East besides Israel) should be applauding.

This article appeared in the Arab American News about our Wall of Lies ad. I note that neither the Vice Chancellor, nor the author of the article, nor anyone quoted in the article offers a single statement from the ad or by me to justify their slanders of me or to explain their reaction to the statements in the ad.

“It looks as if David Horowitz has left the neocons and become an anti-Islam nationalist; …. he looks at the eruption in the Middle East and wants the dictators back.”

Nice spin Andrew.

First, I am not against people whose religion is Islam. I’m just a pragmatic realist who notes that in fifteen hundred years Islamic cultures have a very poor track record in creating democracies and that the emerging Islamic movements in the Arab Middle East are without exception totalitarian, jihadist and also Jew-hating, women-hating and gay-hating. These realities are apparently not enough to deter Andrew from supporting the exceptionally deceptive aggression, which is being led (sort of) by the dithering amateur in the White House in an audaciously deceptive campaign to put the Libyan rebels in power. As it happens at least one rebel commander already has been identified as a Guantanamo alumni (thank you liberals) and a jihadist veteran of the war in Afghanistan against us. How many more such rebel commanders might there be? Andrew doesn’t know (and neither does his leader) but that does not deter his hair trigger slander of a critic of this misguided war.

Obama’s war has been “authorized” as an effort to establish a “no-fly” zone in Libya to prevent Libyan airstrikes against civilians. But everyone knows this is a lie. The Libyan air force has already been destroyed but the strikes go on because the real agenda is to help the (al-Qaeda?) rebels to win. Despite Obama’s assurance that there would be no American ground troops, there are reports that ground troops are already being sent in. To “protect civilians” does Obama propose to occupy the country and ensure that the rebels do not establish a regime more bloodthirsty than the present one? Is he interested in insuring that a new regime would not be a terrorist state as in Gaza and Lebanon, or would not ally with al-Qaeda, whom Gaddafi at least opposed? Andrew will of course twist this into a claim that I am pro-Gaddafi. For the record I wish that some brave Libyan or secret agent would kill him. What I do not want to see is the American military invading Libya with no idea of what they are doing or why, which is the position into which the present commander-in-chief – “a classic pragmatic realist conservative” in Andrew’s wonderland – has put them.

The doctrine under which Hillary Clinton persuaded Obama to invade a sovereign country and thereby to disregard his Secretary of Defense (an actual pragmatist on Obama’s ship of state) is called “Responsibility to Protect.” It is the invention of NSC adviser Samantha Power and her patron George Soros. Soros describes the doctrine like this:

“If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified. By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states’ borders to protect the rights of citizens.”

The right to “penetrate nation-states’ borders.”  Now where have we heard this excuse for a big power stomp on a little nation before? Czechoslovakia 1938 perhaps? Wasn’t Hitler, by his own lights, protecting the rights of German-speaking citizens at the time? If Obama really means to protect the rights of Libyans he would have to occupy the country for a decade, rewrite its constitution, re-educate its population and institute a democratic educational system. Is that what Sullivan really wants – or has he just not thought this through?