by David Horowitz
Our attempt to place an advertisement in student papers featuring our “Palestinian Wall of Lies” [www.walloflies.org] has met with resistance from editors, whom it would be polite to call ignorant. Where student papers have actually published the ad, it has been met with outraged letters, particularly from Jews, which it would be appropriate to call suicidal. The Palestinian Wall of Lies was devised to counter the genocidal propaganda campaign launched by the Hamas-related Muslim Students Association. This propaganda campaign portrays Israel as an apartheid Nazi state and the Palestinians as innocent victims of Israeli theft and oppression. The “Palestinian Wall of Lies” is our response to these blood libels and is strictly factual, which may account for the absence of reasoned challenges to any of its statements or the offer of any evidence that would contradict its claims.
The following voice message was left on the Freedom Center’s voice mail and appears to be in response to the Wall of Lies ad that appeared in the Yale Daily News:
“This is a Desert Storm veteran. I’ve served time in the Middle East, unlike most Jewish people in this country that have never been to Israel or the Middle East. You know, is this really necessary, the Wall of Lies? It’s more of a, you know, I have Palestinian friends that are gonna take very big offense to this, uh, article you have in the Yale Daily News. Is that your goal just to bring up a bunch of bullsh*t? I wouldn’t say bullsh*t I would say, maybe some of it’s fact, maybe some of it’s not. But, you’re causing more problems by printing stuff like this. You’re in America now, so act like it.”
I don’t believe for a second that the caller served in the armed forces. But notice how his first move is to attack the Jews, and then to proclaim his opposition to ads that offend the sensibilities of an ethnic group. All of the rejections of the ad by campus editors have been on the grounds that it was offensive to ethnic or religious groups – clearly Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims. To my knowledge there has never been a single editorial in any campus paper, let alone in the 15 that have rejected our ad so far, decrying the Israel Apartheid Weeks that have been staged on their campuses to promote monstrous slanders against Israel and its Jews. What is really taking place on American campuses is a hate campaign against Israel and the Jews along with a parallel campaign to censor any criticism of its main sponsors, which are Muslim and Palestinian campus groups.
And the response of campus Jewish groups? In the case of Hillel – the largest Jewish student organization – it is to join the anti-Semites and attack their critics. At Florida State University, the campus Hillel joined in a coalition with the Muslim Students Association – the Hamas supporting campus group that is sponsoring the hate weeks against Israel across the country – to protest our campaign to correct the lies they were propagating. The name of the coalition? “The Coalition Against Hate.” Now how Orwellian is that.
Meanwhile at Brown, the student Hillel, which has written no such letters protesting Israel Apartheid Week, had this embarrassing mouthful to say:To the Editor:
The student leadership at Brown-RISD Hillel would like to express its disapproval of an advertisement that ran on page 8 of yesterday’s Herald. The advertisement propagated several Islamophobic, racist and hurtful untruths by linking all modern Arab leadership to Nazi ideology and equating Islam with violence.
Though neither Hillel nor any affiliated students had anything to do with the advertisement, we feel compelled to declare that there should be no place for these spiteful, bigoted words in the Brown — or any — community, even under the guise of political free speech. We stand staunchly beside any members of our community who feel alienated and attacked by the advertisement.
We trust that the Brown University community will be wise enough to view the “Wall of Lies” advertisement as an unfortunate example of hatred and as unrepresentative of Hillel or the Jewish community.
The Brown-RISD Hillel Student Executive Board
The student leadership at Brown-RISD Hillel is upset not with the Muslim Students Association, sponsor of Israel Apartheid Weeks across the country, but with those of us who have had the temerity to attempt to correct the hateful lies spread by enemies of the only Jewish state. According to Brown Hillel, there are “Islamo-phobic, racist and hurtful untruths” in our ad which consist in “linking all modern Arab leadership to Nazi ideology and equating Islam with violence.” Of course there are no such statements in our ad. What the ad says is that “Today Arab leaders call for the destruction of the Jewish state and routinely deny that the Holocaust with which their forebears collaborated actually took place.”
Is this actually the case? Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestine Authority has actually written an entire book of Holocaust denial. Hamas, which is the government of Gaza, promises in its charter that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” Perhaps the Hillel Student Executive Board would like to name a Palestinian leader who does not call for the destruction of the Jewish state. And then they should explain how the truth can be described as “bigoted.” And then they should explain how they expect normal people to regard their embrace of the cause of Palestinians whose leaders without exception call for the destruction of the Jewish state.
David Horowitz
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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