The Horror of it All – Even If We Are Joyful About the Redeemed Israeli Captives

The Horror of it All – Even If We Are Joyful About the Redeemed Israeli Captives

By: Phyllis Chesler

I do not think that the exchange of hardened Islamist terrorists with blood on their hands for innocent Israeli civilians makes any sense. Or is just.

I do not understand why Israel has not, long ago, instituted a death penalty for just such terrorists. They should not be housed, fed, clothed, educated, and given excellent, even life-saving medical care by the Israeli government so that, one day, they can become part of an atrocious exchange of killers for innocents; aggressive killers for those who fight them in a war of self-defense.

I was not in the room–nor were you–when these deals were made. I have no idea what promises were given, what next-steps were discussed. I’ve been trying to hold my tongue until every last living Israeli hostage is redeemed from bondage.

However, knowing very little inside information, I still do not think that only Israel should be burdened with terrorists on all her borders–not when the entire rest of the world refuses to grant asylum to the “Palestinians.” One must ask: Why not? Do Muslim countries simply lack compassion for other Muslims? Or, do they know that the Arabs who are referred to as “Palestinians” are primarily rogue terrorists, who will probably destroy their host countries as they did in Lebanon and tried to do in Jordan. Clearly, this must be the Jordanian King’s thinking. What do Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE think? Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Indonesia? Any takers there?

One more thing: The way in which masked and armed Hamas soldiers and thousands of Gazans who support them, viciously mobbed the young, female, Israeli captives on their slow, long walk to the Red Cross truck, demonstrates, yet again, to the world that Israel has been forced to make deals with barbarian monsters. The scene was surreal, the Gazans seemed as if they were actors in a horror or zombie movie. But the horror was all too real.

Can you bear to imagine how they behaved when the world’s eyes were not upon them?

Because I do not feel entirely free to speak my mind as yet, I want to look back a bit, at least for a moment. I want to provide a little history, some context, to what we are now seeing.

On the day of 9/11, I immediately wrote: “Now, we are all Israelis.” Bin Laden had called his assault on America “blessed attacks” against the “infidel…the new Christian-Jewish crusade. He explained that the Twin Towers had fallen because of American support for Israel.”

War–and a new kind of antisemitism had been declared.

While I had been tracking the propaganda war against Israel since the early 1970s, come the 21st century, I termed what was happening as a “slow motion Holocaust.” It began pin Israel from the moment that Arafat’s unleashed his carefully planned Al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000–an Islamist military and propaganda Holocaust that remained invisible to most of the world.

In 2001/2002, while Israeli civilians were being blown up in cafes, nightclubs, hotels, buses, and supermarkets, I stopped everything else and began writing around the clock, day after day, even as I was still researching the topic. I documented the Arab Muslim attacks against Jews in Israel from the beginning of the 20th century (when there was no alleged Israeli “occupation” of disputed lands), and the Islamist Muslim attacks against the West from 1979 on (when Khomeini came to power).

Given historical reality, I could not bear how the Western media and professoriate covered, or rather hid, the bloody Intifada against the Jews. In fact, the media peversely attributed all the crimes perpetrated by Muslims against Jews–as crimes committed by the Jews. The media and the professoriate distorted both facts and context in grotesque ways. Even Orwell would have been stunned by the linguistic reversal of reality and the scapegoating of Israel for the very crimes being committed by Arab Islamists.

I published the first edition of The New Anti-Semitism in 2003. In it, I’d insisted that anti-Zionism was a large part of the new antisemitism and that the propaganda was not primarily a white supremacist Nazi phenomenon but rather, was coming at us from the Islamic world.

My editor fought with me over this. He was not comfortable being associated with such statements–even if they were the God’s honest truth.

Something else happened. My book was “out there”–but it was as if I had not spoken.

Please understand: All my previous books had garnered front page reviews in the mainstream media and my face had graced mainstream magazine covers. For the first time in my career, the increasingly left-liberal media was not interested in reviewing my work or in interviewing me. There was only one exception–I received a highly critical review in the Washington Post. Based on this review, my single interview on CNN was an attack launched by Judy Woodruff—which I easily, but uncomfortably, fielded. (Clearly, she had only read that review, not my book). However, I will never forget that a CNN cameraman came out from behind his equipment “to shake my hand.”

Why was I surprised? After all, I was holding the Western intelligentsia, including the media, responsible for making common cause with Jew-haters, America-haters, and with the most barbaric and misogynist of totalitarian movements. How foolish of me to think that those whom I had exposed would give me a fair hearing.

For the last twenty years of the 20th century, and even more dramatically in the 21st century, Western academic feminists had become increasingly Stalinized and Palestinianized. My ideological sisters and daughters were more obsessed with the alleged “occupation” of a country that had never existed—Palestine—than they were with the real occupation of (brown) women’s bodies globally. They dared not focus on the occupation of Muslim and infidel women’s bodies in rapidly, radicalized Muslim countries lest they be shunned as racists and Islamophobes.

Although the victims were women of color–according to Western academics, their rights were not as important as those of the men of color who forcibly veiled, raped, battered, genitally mutilated, or honor murdered them.

Those in the West who benefited from free speech, women’s rights, human rights, gay rights, and freedom of religion were defending or at least refusing to criticize the utter absence of such rights in the Muslim world. Instead, and quite bizarrely, academics and journalists had decided that Israel was the worst possible nation on earth and that if Israel were boycotted, or abolished, that gender and racial justice would prevail and the world would be at peace.

By telling the truth, I had become “politically incorrect.” Amazingly, (but only to me), my ideas were embraced by Christian, Jewish, and Hindu conservatives, Zionists, Muslim dissidents and feminists, and by ex-Muslim anti-Islamists.

I delivered lectures about anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism when I was asked to do so, but I found myself disinvited by the Anti-Defamation League because they viewed me as the “enemy competition.” Really, who could make this up?

I invited Abe Foxman to my book party which Erica Jong and her husband Kenneth Burrows hosted for me. Foxman did not invite me to his even glitzier book party at the Four Seasons (or, if memory fails me), at an even ritzier joint. In fact, although we’d never met, (we still haven’t), he actually canceled one of my lectures in Detroit–by renting a much larger auditorium for the same date at the very same time–and by persuading the lecture agency to get me to talk on another subject–any other subject. I called his office to suggest that we speak together and give all the money (that he, clearly, hoped to raise for the ADL), to the IDF.

He never called me back. I never lectured in Detroit.

This was my welcome to the organized Jewish world.

And then, when I looked at his book about antisemitism I noted that he focused far more on the dangers of Nazi-era, white supremacism, and hardly at all on the lethal propaganda and the funding for terrorist attacks coming at us from the Muslim world. Mr. Antisemitism himself seemed to live in the past but was highly successful at milking money from the Jewish world.

There was more. I was not initially invited to speak at most liberal synagogues, Jewish Museums; one such institution actually said that my work was “too Jewish.” Large Jewish organizations, either invited or then dis-invited me. All the many places that had previously welcomed me, became silent. This included feminist organizations and groups that I myself had co-founded.

Like a handful of blessed others, I was seen as “too Jewish,” “too conservative,” an “Islamophobe,” and, ironically, as a traitor to the cause of women’s freedom.

A group of Jewish psycho-analysts asked me to speak to their Institute about antisemitism. The place went wild. I discovered that their religion was not psychoanalysis or Judaism but anti-Zionism. They could not even have a civilized conversation about what I’d said. I was met with yelling, screaming, outrage. Were they this frightened by the truth? Did they know something that I did not know?

Increasingly, when I spoke on campus about Israel and anti-Semitism and about Islamic gender and religious apartheid, I required bodyguards.

With some important exceptions, I lost most of my intellectual and feminist friends.

I made new friends and allies.

Whatever disappointments, discomforts, or insults that I may have endured, they paled in comparison to the imprisonment, torture, and murder of my anti-Jihadist counterparts in Europe, North and South America, and in the Muslim world. Unlike some high profile European anti-Islamists, I was not sued for what I said, nor were attempts made on my life.

The subject would not let me go. World events demanded that I continue and expand my work on anti-Semitism.

A Jewish Israel in the heart of the Arab Muslim Middle East makes Muslims crazy—after all, they ejected all 850,000 of their Jews who had lived among them as second- and third-class citizens for millennia. Except for Israel, the Middle East is “Judenrein.” Persecuted Arab and south Asian Christians are now in flight from an increasingly hostile Muslim world.

This is what real ethnic cleansing looks like. The fact that Jews are not allowed to safely live in the heartland of our country, in Yehuda and Shomron, is another example.

Many have said, “It begins with the Jews but it never ends with us.” However, if the world refuses to acknowledge and refuses to condemn and abolish the kind of hate propaganda, which inevitably leads to genocide, that world will soon inherit the whirlwind.

And so it has. Europe’s willingness to demonize and sacrifice Jewish Israel as a way of appeasing its own hostile “Muslim Street” has not rendered Europe safe. On the contrary. In terms of the first fifteen years of the 21st century, who can forget the kidnapping and beheading of Western aid workers and journalists in Muslim countries, the Madrid train bombing, the assassination of Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam, the London subway bombing, the torture-murder of Ilan Halimi, a Jew, in Paris, the murder of four Jews in the Jewish Museum of Belgium, or the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists and of four Jews shopping for the Sabbath in a kosher supermarket in Paris?

The Iranian funded attack by Hamas on civilian Israel on 10/7/24 and the Western support for such barbarism tops all that has preceded it. This atrocity still continues. Although I wrote up quite a storm about it–truly, words fail me. The exchange of innocent Israeli civilians for hardened terrorists with blood on their hands and hate in their hearts–what kind of an exchange is this?

By now, from 2003 through 2024, I must have written about 500,000 words in op-eds and essays and published at least six books on these subjects.

I am weary. I am angry. I am fearful. I am still armed for battle. I see everything that I and a cohort of other cognitive warriors had predicted, described, documented, analyzed–all the lies and attacks we covered daily–I see these lies and attacks all being repeated, again and again. Now, some blessed and younger newcomers are on the job. They do not always know whose shoulders they stand upon.

‘Tis the way of the world.

I am now determined to ensure that my work, my legacy, is preserved in some safe place. I want it to be in the hands of others right now and for all times. I want it to arm students on campus, professors who have an independent mind, future historians, and religious and government leaders.

I want everyone to remember these events and to never forget them.

I only need the right publisher. And the right distribution networks. To stand by work that will stand the test of time but which may not make much money.

To read more writings by Phyllis Chesler please go to Substack at:  https://phyllischesler.substack.com/