Have you ever escaped a raging fire? I have—twice, and one never, ever forgets the heat, the smell, the bright red-and-orange flames, the horror, the near-brush with death, the loss of one’s possessions or of one’s home—and the overwhelming gratitude that one’s life has been spared.
Israel has been on fire—literally, and for days, in yet another series of fiendish, co-ordinated arson attacks, otherwise known as #ArsonJihad, #Pyro-terrorism, or #BushfireJihad. Daniel Pipes has kept a running record of just such arson Jihad attacks.
In addition to Arab suicide bombings, continual rocket bombardments, kidnappings and murders via tunnel, rock throwing, stabbing, and car ramming Intifadas, fire has long been a weapon of choice for Islamists in Europe, Australia, and Israel.
In Israel, Arab Israeli Jihadists take advantage of smaller, naturally occurring forest fires to purposely set multiple additional fires. Who can forget the fires in northern Israel in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015? Or the fact that, in addition, Arab Israelis attempted arson “at a staggering rate of two per day” in 2010?
“Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus,” an important new film, brought to us by Americans for Peace and Tolerance on Campus (Charles Jacobs and executive Producer and Director, Avi Goldwasser), is about another kind of Jihad arson: the way in which the American campuses have been set ablaze by a well-choreographed and well-funded propaganda campaign against Jews and the Jewish state.
Once such propaganda takes hold, actual, physical, murderous Jihad is not far behind. The cognitive war, as my colleagues Richard Landes and Charles Jacobs know, is very hot; it, too, is on fire.
The accumulated footage of increasingly aggressive and menacing keffiyeh-and hijab-draped mobs utterly disrupting peaceful pro-Israel or truth-telling lectures; the omnipresent swastikas, anti-Jewish graffiti (“Kill all the Jews,” ""I hate Jews,” Kike”, “Dirty Jew,” ), the frightening hate speech (“Jews, your days are numbered,” “Long live the Intifada,” “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free,” “You are child murderers,” ), the prominent mock Apartheid Walls, the mock eviction notices, the dorm storming, the bullying, etc.—document what I first called the Brownshirt phenomenon on campus way back in 2003.
By now, the Brownshirts have come into their own. They rule the American campuses from coast to coast, on the subjects of Israel, Islam, Palestine, Jews, and “Amerika.” Their filthy lies, their false and lethal narratives have taken over the American academic and activist imagination. How? This film clearly and persuasively documents the role that Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Association (MSA), both Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist-related front groups, have played through their 600 campus chapters in North America.
As early as 2007, the New York Police Department on terrorism “identified the MSA as an incubator for Islamic radicalism.” Indeed, as the film shows us, at least a dozen MSA leaders and members on U.S campuses, as professors and students, have participated in terrorist activities. These include Anwar al-Awlaki (Colorado State University), the man who inspired Nidal Hassan, the Ft. Hood shooter; Ramzi Yousef (Rutgers University), in prison for masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; Aafia Siddiqui (from MIT, Brandeis), in possession of information on how to make a dirty bomb, captured in Afghanistan when she tried to shoot two American soldiers; Dzhokhar Tsarnayav (U of Massachusetts at Dartmouth), the Boston Bomber.
This most excellent film captures Berkeley’s own Hatem Bazian on camera calling for an “Intifada in this country.” He says “We’ve been watching Intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq, and the question is what are we doing? How come we don’t have an intifada in this country?”
My question: Why is Bazian still allowed to teach at the University of California? Why is the man who founded American Muslims for Palestine, whose various officials have been found “civilly liable in a federal court for financing Hamas,” and who founded the Students for Justice in Palestine, still allowed to teach, still a beloved professor? This group has not only launched annual conferences, it has also interrupted Jewish events on campus all over the country and been behind the BDS campaign on American campuses. Why is Bazian, whose research on alleged “Islamophobia,” co-published with CAIR, is bogus, pseudo-academic research, a professor at Berkeley?
Here’s why.
The Big Lies are protected as “academic freedom” and “free speech,” presumably in the service of anti-racism. The verbal and physical attacks against Jews are not seen as “racist” because anti-Semitism is simply not acknowledged as racism. “Micro-aggressions” of all kinds are increasingly respected; overt hatred of Jews confuses administrators who still believe that anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism and that if a Jewish person is also confused—that settles the thorny matter.
Gloria Greenfield, in her films (“The Case for Israel,” “Body and Soul,” and “Unmasked: Judeophobia”); Neil Kressel in his academic research; Charles Small in his bruising encounter at Yale; Richard Cravatts in his new book, “Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel and Jews,” have all found that Islamic Jew-hatred is endemic but missing-in-action from American curricula, textbooks, studies about prejudice, classroom lectures, and conferences on the subject. Any attempts to shed light on Islamic religious apartheid is deemed “Islamophobic.” Likewise, any attempt to tell the truth about Islamic gender apartheid is also deemed “racist,” “white nationalist,” and “colonialist.”
Here’s also why Big Lies and the Censorship of Truth have been allowed to fester on American campuses: As this film demonstrates, so many American universities have been massively—and I mean massively—funded by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. In the last six years, these three countries have donated one billion dollars to Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, John Hopkins, New York, and of course, to the University of California, and to other American universities.
We all now understand that Islamic Jew-hatred has made a treacherous alliance with Western academics and activists—something that I’ve previously described as a “Perfect Storm.” The danger to students in terms of genuine learning, and to Jews and Zionists, is not coming from the “hard right,” as much as from the “hard Left.”
This film shows us, without a doubt, the terrible sight of American students being bullied, beaten, frightened, silenced, and punished if they dare challenge the Big Lies.
Charles Jacobs is a most extraordinary hero, the founder of The David Project (2002), the American Anti-Slavery Group (1994), co-chair of the Sudan Campaign (2000), and once a Deputy Director of the Boston chapter of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (1989). He has also taken on the ADL in articles and in a film titled “Defamation"—and that was Abe Foxman’s ADL.
“Hate Spaces” has assembled a stellar case of experts, including Alan Dershowitz, Caroline Glick, William Jacobson, Richard Landes, Kenneth L. Marcus, Melanie Phillips, Bret Stephens, Jonathan Schanzer, Susan Tuchman, and Chloe Simone Valdary. Each one says something smart, important, devastating, and true.
Melanie Phillips: “Israel is singled out in another way which is unique...not just a double standard, but an impossible standard, a standard of perfection which cannot possibly be reached...we are living in an era in which the idea of truth—objective truth—has been replaced by ideology.”
Bret Stephens: “It’s very difficult to deal with a blizzard of lies, you can always invent some kind of fiction that requires enormous efforts to prove the negative: that, in fact, it did not happen...many people who are now joining SJP (are doing so) out of a totally misguided idealism. (They are) the useful idiots of the 21st century, taken in by something that is wrong and antithetical to their own true values.”
Caroline Glick: “The more that people attach themselves to ideologies that reject reason, that reject objective reality, that reject facts, that reject history, the more likely you’re going to see very aggressive anti-Semitism.”
Richard Landes: “A lot of intellectuals are playing out a sort of colonial guilt thing, and using Israel as their sacrificial lamb...by sacrificing Israel to what is, in fact, the most ferocious imperialist, colonialist force.”
Alan Dershowitz: “We have been set back on university campuses. Ultimately, we have to rely on truth, emet, veritas, is our best friend because the facts are on our side, morality is on our side.”
Is it too late to turn back this tsunami of lies? What would an Iron Dome against Lies and Blood Libels be like? It is not only Israel that will suffer due to propaganda. The standards for truth-telling in the West, in America, among intellectuals is also on the line.
This film leaves no doubt about that.
