Phyllis Chesler's fighting words.

Chesler Chronicles: An American Dissident's Fighting Words. My Speech at Columbia on 10/24/07

It is time to take the campus back so that the rights of “free speech” and “academic freedom” also apply to those who tell the truth about Islam and who espouse minority and dissident intellectual points of view. Such rights also belong to those of us who are pro-American and pro-Israel and not only to those who demonize the West and valorize Islamist misogyny, death-cult terrorism, and Wahabi and Salafi fundamentalism.

Telling the truth about Islam is, apparently, “provocative.” One risks everything for doing so. In my opinion, one risks even more for failing to do so.

No western academic is supposed to criticize anything that a formerly colonized man of color does—including gang-rape or stone women of color to death. Nor can he or she focus on the savage persecution of homosexuals or on the epidemic of homosexual pederasty in the Islamic world; or on the persecution of heroic Muslim and ex-Muslim intellectuals and human rights activists.

Muslim-on-Muslim homicide and genocide are also “unmentionables.” Any western academic who dares discuss such tabooed subjects will be defamed as a “racist” and “colonialist.” Fear of this allegation is so great that false concerns about racism have inevitably trumped all feminist concerns about sexism. This is the new McCarthyism and it is coming to us from the left.

In the early 1960s, I was held captive in Kabul, Afghanistan, in fairly posh purdah. I was a young bride. I escaped, I survived, I learned a thing or two. I write about this in The Death of Feminism which describes Islamic gender apartheid both way back then and now, as it is penetrating the West.

For example, I learned that what characterizes Islam (not Islamism) is mainly indigenous to the culture, the region, and the religion and is not necessarily caused by Western imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism.

n the early 1970s, American imperialism and Israeli policies of self-defense did not force Bangladeshi Muslims to murder their own women for the crime of having been raped by enemy Muslim soldiers.

In the 1980s, when Iranian village mullahs ordered that women be lynched, the villagers did not stone their daughters, mothers, and sisters because America had, in the past, interfered with Iranian politics.

No American or European oil company ordered the men of Saudi Arabia to prohibit Saudi women from driving, or from going out without a male escort, nor did they order the be-heading of a Saudi Princess for daring to choose a love match.

No Israeli law forced Palestinians to honor-murder their women, beat their wives and daughters, or to force-veil women against their will. Only Hamas did that.

Western feminists and pro-woman academics must understand that like women everywhere, Arab and Muslim women have internalized their culture’s views of women. Therefore, like men, some women will justify wife-beating, purdah, polygamy, veiling, and female genital mutilation. Thus, just because Muslim women can be trotted out to support Islamic Gender Apartheid, does not necessarily mean that their words on such subjects are any more inviolate than those of their male counterparts.

Pro-Islamists are perfectly free to criticize, even to demonize the West in the West, because they live in a democracy where academic freedom and free speech are (still) taken seriously. Were they to dare criticize the barbarism, misogyny, and despotism of Third World countries, were they to do so in Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Bangladesh or Saudi Arabia (to name only a few such countries), they would be in serious danger of being shot to death in her own home, as happened recently to an Afghan woman journalist, or of being imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. This has happened to many Muslim dissidents and feminists.

Western feminist academics have now become allied with Islamists—against Muslim and ex-Muslim women and against their own feminist principles. Now is the time for western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists or committed to human and women’s rights to stand with Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents. To do so, requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism which justifies, even romanticizes, indigenous barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals, and intellectuals.

Our abject refusal to judge between civilization and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny even further.

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