RUTHFULLY YOURS

While the western world expressed its solidarity with France following the November 13, 2015 Paris terror attack by Islamic State local affiliates, few expressed similar sympathy and support for what Israelis have had to endure from Palestinian-Islamist terror in recent weeks, and for almost a century. It began with the anti-Jewish Palestinian-Arab terrorist riots of the 1920’s, and continued with the Arab Revolt (1936-1939), which was typified by terror attacks of Palestinian-Arabs against Palestinian-Jews (the Yeshuv, the Jews of Palestine were commonly called Palestinians). Following Israel’s war of independence in 1948, and Israel’s absorption of over a million refugees from Europe’s Holocaust and the Arab world, terror resumed in the 1950’s by Palestinian-Fedayeen from Gaza trained by Nasser’s Egypt.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, began its terror attacks against the Jewish state from Jordan first, then from Lebanon and Tunisia, with a platform that sought to destroy the Jewish state and replace it with a “secular, democratic Palestinian state.” The Oslo Accords of 1993 committed the Palestinians to forgo terrorism and incitement. Lasting less than a year, Palestinian terror resumed using the latest terrorist weapon introduced by the Palestinians to the world: suicide-bombers. In September, 2000, Yasser Arafat launched the Second Intifada, which was far more violent than the first. Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Authority president and PLO chairman, like Arafat, never stopped the incitement and the resulting terror against Israeli-Jews. In October, 2015, yet a new weapon in the Palestinian terror arsenal was introduced…knifing and car ramming.

Infantile college kids all over the country are protesting human-right violations like Halloween costumes and free speech, the honoring of Woodrow Wilson and the placidity of students studying in libraries. A few years ago, an early member of the new wave of student disobedience gave me a look inside the protesters’ scattered brains.

In February 2009, President Obama had just taken his oath of office, and I was a freshman at NYU. On the evening of February 18, a group of about 60 NYU students, and a few students from other schools, assembled in the NYU student-center cafeteria. They said that they were a group called Take Back NYU, and that they were occupying our cafeteria until a grab-bag of eleven non-sequitur demands were met.

Their first, courageous demand was that none of them be punished. Their second was that “all employees whose jobs were disrupted during the course of the occupation” receive “full compensation.”

Third, they demanded that NYU’s budget and endowment be made public. Fourth, that “student workers” and teaching assistants be allowed to bargain collectively. Fifth, “a fair labor contract for all NYU employees at home and abroad.” Sixth, they demanded “a Socially Responsible Finance Committee that will immediately investigate war profiteers and lifting of the Coke ban.” (NYU had recently overturned a silly “All University Senate” decision to ban Coke from our vending machines and cafeterias; rumors about abusive labor practices by the Coca-Cola Company turned out to be lies. But I’m not sure which war profiteers they had in mind.)

A month before the Yale Halloween meltdown, I had a bizarre and illuminating experience at an elite private high school on the West Coast. I’ll call it Centerville High. I gave a version of a talk that you can see here, on Coddle U. vs. Strengthen U. (In an amazing coincidence, I first gave that talk at Yale a few weeks earlier). The entire student body — around 450 students, from grades 9-12 — were in the auditorium. There was plenty of laughter at all the right spots, and a lot of applause at the end, so I thought the talk was well received.

But then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?” Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.

After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk. But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.

Islamist terrorism is not a consequence of the West’s failure to accommodate ‘cultural differences’. As Christian and Yazidi women raped by captors who simultaneously recite the Koran can attest, the problem is Islam itself
The continual attempts of the Islamic State (IS) to systematically annihilate the non-Islamic world have striking similarities. Texts such as the Koran and Hadith boast close to two hundred verses advocating jihad, and lay out specific guidelines for waging this “holy war”. Beheadings and suicide bombings are commonplace, and Westerners are primed by the media to see these atrocities as the defining features of Islamic radicalism. However, a recent development in the IS terror trend that remains distinct is the newly reinstated practice of sex slavery.

Regardless of the constant professing of IS that they act in the name of Allah and the Islamic faith, there is a strong tendency of Western left-wing ideologues to deny the religiosity of the agenda. Such vehement refusal to criticise the religion itself continues to be as baffling as it is frustrating—augmented by the paranoia of the Left that any criticism of Islam amounts to bigotry. More to the point, the lofty attitude of these self-deprecating Westerners does nothing to support the cause of the “unbelievers” enslaved and violated by IS.