I wrote another piece for FrontPage after I was heckled, menaced, and had to be hustled out of a conference for my safety. This took place at Barnard, at a free-standing conference. The time was still 2003. The melee happened after someone unexpectedly asked me a completely irrelevant question: “We demand to know how you stand on the question of the women of Palestine.” The women who went wild after loving my every word were all mainly African-American feminists who, to their credit, had asked me to speak about the topic of my tenth book, Woman’s Inhumanity To Woman.
And, a few months later, when I wrote about what I called “gender cleansing in the Sudan,” a phrase I used to describe the repeated, public gang-rapes of girls and women, I did so for FP as well. Guess what? When I sent that piece around to feminist listserv groups I was castigated for publishing it … with David Horowitz. I was told then, and on numerous occasions thereafter, that I was being “used” by clever conservatives to … what? Advance a serious feminist agenda and foreign policy? To insist that we include Third World women in our vision of universal human rights? At the time, one leading feminist intellectual told me that she absolutely refused to read anything—even about the use of rape as a weapon, not a spoil of war, that I wrote in a “right wing rag.”
This all took place six to seven years ago. Just today, I had lunch with three old feminist colleagues. They are real feminists, not icons, not opportunists, women of a certain age who are not wealthy, who did not use their time in history to line their own pockets. One woman railed about the media—all media—for being biased and sexist but then warned me that I was undermining my own purpose by insisting on publishing in conservative venues. “Fox is fomenting the gravest damage, etc.” (It is one of the places where I also publish).
And then, out of nowhere, she launched an attack against Israel. She knew full well that I know a thing or two about this subject. She said, “How can you defend a country that sends its military to purposely blind young activists? Yes, to blind them.”
I counted to 29 … then asked several times, was she referring to one incident, several incidents, many incidents and if so, when and where did they happen? “You know,” she said, “it happens when young activists come to free Gaza.”
“Gaza?” said I. “By the way, do you have any idea how many Palestinian political prisoners are being tortured by Palestinians in Palestinian jails right now? Why are you this disrespectful toward someone, (myself), whom you know has a knowledge base in this area…I could easily take you down if we really got into it.”
“Take me down, did you hear what she said, take me down…”
And then I stopped. I understood that the poisoned propaganda had done its job all too well, that the damage was, perhaps, irreversible. No amount of discussion, nothing factual, nothing objective, would make the slightest bit of difference.
Afterward, I wrote to her and laid it out for her in feminist terms.
To me, what you said about Israel was equivalent to our sitting with a confirmed anti-feminist who honestly believes that feminists burned our bras, enjoy killing babies, hate men, are all ugly, lesbians, who control the university system, book publishing, and the media; and that it is wives who batter husbands, women who falsely accuse men of rape and incest, unjustly wrest custody away from good fathers, actually enjoy being prostitutes, and who are all evil and crazy anyway—yes, the conspiracy against the Jews and against Israel is just as big and you did not even pause to be slightly respectful towards someone (me) who has made sure to look into the matter at hand and whose feminism you have good reason to trust.
The very media which you so quickly denounced as “anti-feminist,” as “corrupt,” “hypocritical” and “pro-capitalist”—from FOX to MSNBC–you suddenly found totally believable when the subject was Israel.
And that is just one of the reasons I proudly publish on conservative websites. Anyway, the media that was once known as liberal, objective, and feminist has now become Stalinist, fascist, and Palestinianized; they now believe that “Islamophobia” is more important than “anti-Semitism” and that the United States and Israel are greater human rights offenders than Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Libya, Cuba, and Afghanistan.
No truth-teller can publish the truth in such diabolically Orwellian venues.
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