By: Dr. Phyllis Chesler
Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Are we winning the war against terror – or more precisely, against the death-cult ideology of extreme hatred that employs terror as one of its weapons? America, Britain, and Israel have all committed significant sums of money in order to fight jihad militarily. We must, however, simultaneously battle another very hot war, one that will decide if Western civilization lives or dies. This is a war we are not winning; some argue that it is a war we have not yet begun to fight.

I refer to the cultural war that both Islamists and Western intellectuals have launched against America and Israel. We face a situation in which hate speech, Big Lies, and Orwellian propaganda have all triumphed on academic campuses across North America and in Europe. As parents and grandparents, we are sending our beloved heirs to be brainwashed, not educated.

Today, the truth is not holding its own against the base propaganda that has increasingly gained a foothold at our most distinguished universities and in our mainstream media.

The Palestinianization of the Western academy and media began in earnest in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Initially groundbreaking views about gender and racial inequalities became increasingly influenced by Marxist views against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and organized religion and gradually came to constitute what is now known as the “postcolonial” and postmodern academy. Race replaced both class and gender as a primary concern. By the late 1990’s, Palestinians – not Tibetans, Kurds, Bosnians, or Rwandans – had come to be viewed as the symbolic victims of the world by those academics who considered themselves anti-racist, anti-violence, and anti-misogynist.

In an Orwellian world of doublespeak and groupthink, Palestinians became the new black South Africans and Israel became the new white Afrikaner Apartheid regime. Politically correct Western academics and activists romanticized Palestinians, including terrorists, whose methods they viewed as a justified response to oppression.

Paradoxically, these same Western academics viewed only two nations as dangerous “terrorist” entities: Israel and America. The atrocities committed by China, Soviet Russia, Cuba, Korea, Iran, Sudan, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq never viscerally outraged them in quite the same way.

The fact that jihadists also opposed modernity, democracy, human rights, and women’s rights did not seem to matter to the self-proclaimed arbiters of human rights in the West.

The fact that Islamic culture is far more patriarchal than Judeo-Christian culture did not seem to register in significant ways. In fact, feminist academics tiptoed around it. For a Westerner to accuse a non-white, non-Westerner of barbarism (especially if it were true) was seen as unacceptably “racist.” That such Western academics were willing to sacrifice non-white, non-Western women and men to savage regimes did not strike anyone as either racist or sexist.

Ironically, in the war of civilizations that is upon us, dare to argue for military as well as humanitarian intervention and you will be slandered as a racist – even when you are arguing for the lives and dignity of brown-, black-, and olive-skinned people. Such cultural relativism is perhaps the greatest failing of the Western academic and media establishment.

It is important to note that such views currently exist in every discipline within the humanities and social sciences and are no longer merely confined to Middle Eastern or Jewish Studies departments. And those views did not diminish post-9/11, or post-3/11 (Madrid), or post-7/7 (London). Academics and activists continued to rage against President Bush and American foreign policy, while anti-Israel sentiment – particularly the calls for boycotts and divestment – has only increased in the last five years.

Esteemed citadels of academia – including Duke, Georgetown, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton – have supported academics who, post-9/11, continue to call for boycotts of Israel, challenge the Patriot Act, care more about the civil liberties of Muslim jihadists captured in battle than they do about civilians under jihadic siege. Such academics are the first who charge “racism” when their biased views are challenged.

As a psychologist, I can only conclude that the Western academy currently functions like a cult. Academics have been brainwashed and in turn view their teaching jobs as a way to indoctrinate rather than educate. Our universities do not function as institutions in which independent and diverse ideas are welcome.

Brainwashed people are usually not amenable to facts or to multiple and competing interpretations of those facts. Those academics who don’t want to hear about why anti-Americanism is wrong and self-destructive generally do not attend lectures that might set the record straight.

(If and when these academics do attend lectures, they usually come en masse to object and attack. The debate is uncivilized and often characterized by interruptions, accusations, curses, intimidation, threats, and group walkouts.)

Billions of people, including our own children and grandchildren, have been brainwashed against America, against Israel, against Jews and, paradoxically, against women – at least against those who live under Islamic domination. We have a serious fifth column in our midst, one that has been leading the culture war against the West.

Given that this is so, I believe there are certain things that we must do and keep doing in order to win the culture war.

First, those in possession of family fortunes they wish to donate to universities should think twice about doing so. At this point in history, it might be wiser to invest in conservative think tanks so that they might begin to offer courses for credit at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Second, we need to fund – seriously fund – a collective effort to combat the vulgar lies and vilification that have brainwashed so many. We need a War Room effort to counter the Big Lies. We need international radio and television channels to educate people both here and abroad. Thus, we must support the work that individuals such as Bat Ye’or, Andy Bostom, David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Nidra Poller, Robert Spencer, this writer and others are doing to challenge the propaganda.

Third, we absolutely must defeat jihad. We must preempt Iran’s nuclear capacity. We must combat the hate propaganda against America, Israel, and women that characterizes so much of the Arab and Muslim world today. This is a very long educational and cultural process. And we must peg every peace and trade treaty with a Muslim country to the status of women in that country.

Parents must now understand that their children will probably be brainwashed against both America and Israel in their college classrooms. And that if students challenge this one-sided view of both history and contemporary reality, they risk being ostracized by other students and penalized by their professors.

It is therefore very important for parents to teach their children, both boys and girls, how to stand up to bullies; how to live with being “unpopular;” how to survive and flourish as an honorable minority. It is also important to learn how to present and interpret facts in a reason-driven way and how not to succumb to unreason and extreme emotion.

We must rescue language. It must bear some relationship to truth and morality. Everything is not relative. We must take back the campuses and allow intellectual diversity and truth-telling to flourish.

We must not allow our media or academics to continue to insist that Islam is not the problem. We must teach the history of jihad against infidels, and the history of how infidels (Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians) were treated under Islam. We must insist that criticism of America and Israel be balanced, not pathological, obsessive, cult-like. We must insist on civility in public discourse. We must model it for the coming generations.

This country has birthed two significant waves of feminism. We must now take that feminist vision global. We need our foreign policy to contain serious provisions about women’s rights abroad. Otherwise, democracy cannot and will not evolve or flourish in Muslim countries.

The way I see it, everything is at stake. This is a time when we must all be heroes. We must all stand up to evil in our lifetime. We must acknowledge that Islamist terrorism is evil and has no justification. We must teach this to our children. We must support Muslim and Arab dissidents in their fight against Islamic tyranny.

We can do this. We must do this. Otherwise, we will die – and our history, our values, and our entire way of life will die with us.

Dr. Phyllis Chesler is the author of several bestsellers, including
The New Anti-Semitism(2003), and the recently published The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom(Palgrave-Macmillan). She is an Emerita Professor of psychology, and co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1969) and the National Women’s Health Network (1974). She is currently on the Board of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Her website is www.phyllischesler.com.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 and is filed under opinion.