Rocks have been lifted all over Europe, and the snakes of Jew-hatred are slithering free.

An important email going around.
In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and calling him "a dirty Jew."
Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a third, in Charleroi, was sprayed with automatic weapon fire.
In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack.
Oxford professor Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the West Bank and Gaza "should be shot dead."
A Jewish yeshiva student reading the Psalms was stabbed 27 times on a London bus.
"Anti-Semitism", wrote a columnist in The Spectator, "has become respectable ... at London dinner tables." She quoted one member of the House of Lords: "The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last."
In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads, "Surely they don't want to kill me again?"
In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulcher. The caption: "Non resurrexit."
In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a grenade was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a rally, marching near a synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath. Graffiti appeared on a synagogue in the western town of Herford: "Six million were not enough."
In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the windows of Kiev's main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack was anti-Jewish.
In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Loannina and vandals hurled paint at the Holocaust memorial in Salonica.
In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas, photos of Hitler, and chants of "Sieg Heil" and "Jews into the sea."
In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed.
But nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France:
In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words "Dirty Jew" were painted.
In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.
According to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per day since Easter. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming "Jews to the gas chambers" and "Death to the Jews."
The weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It said Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them to preserve "family honor."
The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sacked – and did not apologize - when it was learned that he had told guests at a London dinner that the world's troubles were the fault of "...that shitty little country, Israel."
"At the start of the 21st century," writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a well-known social scientist, in a new book, "we are discovering that Jews are once again select targets of violence ... Hatred of the Jews has returned to France." But of course, it never left. Not France; not Europe.
Anti-Semitism, the oldest bigotry known to man, has been a part of European society since time immemorial. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, open Jew-hatred became unfashionable; but fashions change, and Europe is reverting to type.
To be sure, some Europeans are shocked by the reemergence of Jew-hatred all over their continent. But the more common reaction has been complacency.
"Stop saying that there is anti-Semitism in France," President Jacques Chirac scolded a Jewish editor in January. "There is no anti-Semitism in France."
The European media have been vicious in condemning Israel's self-defense against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank; they have been far less agitated about anti-Jewish terror in their own backyard.
They are making a grievous mistake. For if today the violence and vitriol are aimed at the Jews, tomorrow they will be aimed at the Christians. A timeless lesson of history is that it rarely ends with the Jews.
Militant Islamist extremists were attacking and killing Jews long before they attacked and killed Americans on Sept. 11.
The Nazis first set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was ablaze Jews, it is often said, are the canary in the coalmine of civilization. When they become the objects of savagery and hate, it means the air has been poisoned and an explosion is soon to come. If Europeans don't rise up and turn against the Jew-haters, it is only a matter of time until the Jew-haters rise up and turn against them.
French Anti-Semitism Finally and long overdue, your people, oppressed and disgraced by hatred and maliciousness, have achieved justice: now you enjoy full citizen's rights, but you'll remain Jews nonetheless." Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Austrian author.
A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher's shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France; a Jewish couple in their 20s were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne, France. The woman was pregnant; a Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles, France. This was in the past week.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, from September 9, 2000, at the start of the intifada, through November 20, 2001, there were some 330 acts of anti-Semitism just in and around Paris. In addition to literally scores of firebombing of synagogues, just before Rosh Hashanah, 200 Arabs attacked Jews on the Champs Elysees. The pace has only picked up since then:
In December, a French cinema in Paris refused to allow a Hanukah showing of Harry Potter to 800 Jewish children because of French-Palestinian threats (the threats were confirmed by French police who then went on to do nothing, not even giving details). It was one incident in an eventful month when synagogues continued to be firebombed and a Jewish kindergarten was vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti and set ablaze.
We can understand anti-Semitism among the French people. There is nothing the French love like their traditions and, on the question of hating Jews they certainly have tradition galore. What, however, can explain the sometimes muted, sometimes defensively outraged reaction of French officials?
Simple. There are approximately 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 Muslims presently living in France and many more arrive daily. There are only about 600,000 Jews still living in France. Moreover, France is the number one European exporter to Iraq, totaling over two billion dollars per year in exports since 2000. To those who are at a loss to explain why French elected officials seem "helpless" to stem the tide of anti-Semitism, I say that something smells awfully Vichy around here.
You already know that Israel is at war against a fearsome enemy, which has brought the fight to its streets. Much of the civilized world (well, at least on this side of the Atlantic) finally understands this fact.
What is not being acknowledged, however, is that this is not a war against Israel, or as propagandists and demagogues worldwide would have it, occupiers.
This is a war against each and every individual, Israeli or not, religious or not, Zionist or not, right, left or center, who identifies himself or herself as Jewish. Israel is only the publicized front line and if you are not in Israel, and the fight has not arrived at your front yard, just wait. Or, perhaps, we shouldn't wait. Perhaps history has finally taught us, of all people, that waiting and hoping for succor and sympathy from the nations of the world will lead only to more burned synagogues, pogroms, and, down the road, grim-faced dignitaries mouthing "never again" while dedicating yet another memorial museum. We cannot wait inactively and hope to have security or peace for our children or ourselves. We dare not privately rail against irrational, virulent hatred while letting the world believe that we remain disinterested, accepting our lot with equanimity or, worse, resignation. We can and must do more than simply grieve.
So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from depravity, to do, at least, these three simple things:
First, care enough to stay informed. Don't ever let yourself become deluded into thinking that this is not your fight.
Second, boycott France. Only the Arab countries are more toxically anti-Semitic and, unlike them, France exports more than just oil and hatred. So boycott their wines and their perfumes. Boycott their clothes and their foodstuffs. Boycott their movies. Definitely boycott their shores. If we are resolved we can exert amazing pressure and, whatever else we may know about the French, we most certainly know that they are as a cobweb in a hurricane in the face of well-directed pressure.
Third, send this along to your family, your friends, and your coworkers. Think of all of the people of good conscience that you know and let them know that you and the people that you care about need their help.
The number one best selling book in France is "September 11: The Frightening Fraud," which argues that no plane ever hit the Pentagon.
Our only strength is the strength of our community and there can be no community without communication.
This is really scary stuff, Read it very carefully and thoroughly. We cannot allow this to continue. You MUST pass it on to as many people as you know, so we can curb this hideous anti-Semitic wave and squelch it ... before it grows and engulfs us all.

'Honor' Killings in Turkey - the story of Cemse Allak

For seven months after her stoning, Ms. Allak lay semi-conscious, her skull crushed, unable to move or speak. Still, according to the people who watched over her, Ms. Allak was capable of expressing a wide range of emotions with her eyes.
Relatives visited once, in the beginning, to tell the hospital staff that they could not pay for her care. The fetus inside Ms. Allak died six weeks after the attack.

'Honor' Killings in Turkey
New York Times
15/07/2003 Dexter FILKINS
(Yaylim) - Last month a woman named Cemse Allak was buried in a corner of a municipal cemetery here. Ms. Allak, unmarried and pregnant, had died from a stoning.
Villagers and local lawyers said Ms. Allak - as well as the man who had made her pregnant - had been killed to restore the honor of their families.
For seven months after her stoning, Ms. Allak lay semi-conscious, her skull crushed, unable to move or speak. Still, according to the people who watched over her, Ms. Allak was capable of expressing a wide range of emotions with her eyes.
Relatives visited once, in the beginning, to tell the hospital staff that they could not pay for her care. The fetus inside Ms. Allak died six weeks after the attack.
When Ms. Allak died on June 7, no one from her family claimed her body, and none of her relatives attended the funeral.
Just two days before Ms. Allak's funeral, the elected Parliament of this predominantly Muslim nation approved a sweeping human rights law that, among other things, abolished a provision that often reduced the prison terms for murders committed in the name of "family honor."
The legislation is part of a broader effort to secure Turkey's long-hoped-for admission to the European Union and, more profoundly, to answer the centuries-old question of Turkey's place in the world: whether in Europe or the Middle East. The death of Ms. Allak, 35, underscores the distance between legislative pronouncements emanating from Ankara, Turkey's modern capital, and the sometimes grim, medieval realities of everyday life in other parts of the country.
"Honor is not a trivial thing," shouted Celilie Allak, Ms. Allak's sister-in-law, explaining the deaths. "What else were we supposed to do?"
Much of Cemse Allak's story has been lost in a whirl of conflicting versions of her death. By most accounts, Ms. Allak fell victim to the age-old honor code that survives in the villages of southeastern Turkey, a system so unforgiving that some villagers here said they were relieved to learn of Ms. Allak's death. If she had survived, the villagers said, the family of the man who had been killed with her would have been obliged to take revenge on Ms. Allak's family, since it was Ms. Allak's brother who was suspected of his murder.
"When the girl Cemse died, the matter was closed," said Shelalettin Cakar, a local farmer. "In such cases, if one dies and the other lives, it is not equal. So it was better for both of them to die."
Ms. Allak's brother, Mehmet, as well as four other relatives, have been charged in the murder of the man, Hila Acil, who was stoned to death at the same time in a field outside town. Despite last month's legislative changes, Mr. Allak's lawyer, Salih Demirkesen, said he was confident the local judges would understand.
Nearly everyone in this hardscrabble village agrees that Ms. Allak's problems began with Mr. Acil, age 55 and the father of 11, who was known as a man who could never take his eyes off the local women.
"He is my friend, but he was like this since the day he was born," said a pistachio farmer, who would not give his name. "He had very wide eyes."
According to accounts from Ms. Allak's family and other people in Yaylim, the incident began when Mr. Acil dropped Ms. Allak's father off at work, and then returned to the Allak house where he apparently found Ms. Allak alone. What happened next is unclear, but Ms. Allak, whom neighbors described as a quiet and unassuming woman, became pregnant.
Some members of Ms. Allak's family said she had been raped; others in the town suggested that the two had engaged in consensual sex. Conversations with villagers and family members made clear that many saw little difference between the two. Villagers who conceded that Ms. Allak might have been raped said that she had still brought shame upon her family.
"Rape is wrong in every case," said Baki Allak, a cousin,as he stood at the top of the gorge where the two people were stoned. Nonetheless, he added, "the family was dishonored."
In an interview, Mr. Demirkesen, Mehmet Allak's lawyer, said his client had killed Mr. Acil and Ms. Allak. He said Mr. Allak had not followed the couple into the gorge with murder on his mind, but he said the two men got into a physical confrontation when Mr. Acil insulted his sister. Ms. Allak, according to Mr. Demirkesen, stepped in front of one of the stones that Mr. Allak threw at Mr. Acil. "It was an accident," he said.

Dr. Adnan Ceviz, a neurosurgeon who treated Ms. Allak, dismissed the notion that her skull had been crushed unintentionally. The side of her head, he said, had been struck over and over in the same place.
"She was thrown to the ground," Dr. Ceviz said in an interview. "This was not an accident."
The stoning of Mr. Acil and Ms. Allak appeared to follow in the tradition of recm, which is, according to villagers here, the religiously sanctioned trial and stoning of a dishonored woman or man by an entire village.
For years, men - and only occasionally women - accused of killing their spouses or family members could invoke Article 462 of the Turkish criminal code. That gave judges the discretion to reduce a murder defendant's potential sentence by more than 80 percent.
Emin Sirin, a member of Parliament who supported repealing the law, said he hoped the legislation would quickly bring the medieval practice to an end.
"To kill a girl because she falls in love with another man is no longer acceptable," Mr. Sirin said. "Murder is murder."
But abolishing the more pernicious traditions of village and town will take a much longer time, and require far more effort, than merely passing laws.
Mr. Demirkesen, the lawyer for Mr. Allak, wondered why Ms.Allak's case had generated such publicity.
"There are a lot more interesting honor killings than this one," he said, and then proceeded to tell of four other such killings that he knew of in recent years in the area.
In the months that Ms. Allak lay in the hospital, her neighbors in the village said they grew concerned that her survival would set off a vendetta between the Allaks and the Acils. If Mr. Allak had indeed killed Mr. Acil, and if Ms. Allak survived, then the Acil family would be obliged under local tradition to take vengeance.
In February, the Allak and Acil families met for a "peace dinner" to try to obviate the need for a revenge killing. A picture of the families eating together appeared in the Independent Agenda, a local newspaper. The headline read, "Peace Established in Honor Killing."
"We were trying to make sure that the incident caused no further harm," said Mehmet Itok, a cousin.
Hence the relief expressed by villagers when Ms. Allak finally died.
"If both of them did not die, the vendetta would have gone on for years," the pistachio farmer said.
Though Ms. Allak's family did not visit her in the hospital, many women did. Over the months several women from Kamer, a women's association in Diyarbakir, where Ms.Allak was hospitalized, brought her medicine, helped wash her and pushed her wheelchair around the hospital grounds.
One of the women, Hayriye Ascioglu, said that Ms. Allak's face would brighten as soon as she entered the room, and that Ms. Allak's eyes would follow her as she walked around. When nurses trimmed Ms. Allak's fingernails, she would pull back her hands in pain.
"I would say to her, `If you hear me, blink,' " said Ms. Ascioglu. "And she would blink."
Under Turkish law, a deceased person must remain unburied for up to two weeks to give a family time to claim the body. Ms. Allak's death appeared in the papers; still, no one from the family came to get her body.
Kamer, the women's association, saw to it that Ms. Allak had a coffin. The group's members flouted Islamic tradition by carrying the coffin into the municipal cemetery themselves.
In another snub to the old way, the women - and not the men, as custom dictated - stepped up to throw the first handfuls of soil over Ms. Allak's coffin. About 100 women came in all, and the scenes from Ms. Allak's funeral made the front page of the Diyarbakir Event, a newspaper.
In the days since the funeral, some of the women who cared for Ms. Allak have been reflecting on her trial. For Meral Bestas, a local lawyer who attended the funeral, Ms.Allak's story seemed to offer equal measures of hope and despair.
"These traditions do not die easily," Ms. Bestas said in an interview in her office. "But they will die, I'm certain of that. Turkey is changing very fast."

Another 'honor' victim: Daughter, raped by brothers, killed by mother

ABU QASH, West Bank - Rofayda Qaoud - raped by her brothers and impregnated - refused to commit suicide, her mother recalls, even after she bought the unwed teenager a razor with which to slit her wrists. So Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud says she did what she believes any good Palestinian parent would. Killing her sixth-born child took 20 minutes, Qaoud tells a visitor through a stream of tears and cigarettes that she smokes in rapid succession. "She killed me before I killed her," says the 43-year-old mother of nine. "I had to protect my children. This is the only way I could protect my family's honor."
According to court records, Rofayda was raped by her brothers, Fahdi, 22, and Ali, 20, in a bedroom they shared in the family's three-room house. On Nov. 26, 2002, doctors at a nearby hospital who were treating Rofayda for an injured leg discovered she was eight months pregnant.
No trace of Rofayda or her brothers remains in the family home. Qaoud says she ripped up all of their photographs and burned their clothes. The bedroom in which she killed her daughter is now a storeroom.
Erasing the memories is harder, she admits. She eases her pain by doting on her three children still living at home, especially the youngest, Fatima, 9, whom she lavishes with kisses. The children say they've forgiven Qaoud and return her affection.
"My mother did this because she does not want us to be punished by people," Fatima explains with a shy smile. Leaning into Qaoud's arms, the little girl adds: "I love my mother much more now than before."

The Brownshirts of Our Time

By Phyllis Chesler
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 19, 2003
On Saturday evening, November 8, 2003, the eve of Kristallnacht, I addressed a woman's "networking" conference of mainly African-American and Hispanic-American womanists and feminists at Barnard College. The conference was described as a grassroots, multi-cultural, multi-generational and multi-disciplinary organization for women in the arts. Indeed, the women seemed to range in age from 20-65 and were dressed in corporate business suits, ever-colorful African/ethnic attire, youthful jeans.

Booths were arranged in a semi-circle--it was as if the panels and performances were taking place in an African marketplace. Scented candles, beaded drums, sleek handbags, photographs, Citi-banking for women consultants, African skirts, all vied for my attention. In addition to my son, who had driven me there, and myself, there were a handful of white people, including a photographer from whom I bought two prints and a psychologist who identified herself to me as an admirer and as someone who had suffered a brain injury in an car accident.

The conference was closed to men--but one of the organizers made a split second decision to allow my adult son in and seated him by himself at the very back of the room on a chair set apart. Growing up in a feminist household, he was used to this. Privately, we both sighed and wondered when feminist men would finally be welcome at a feminist conference.

I doubt that the organizers of this conference knew anything of my background but they were more than welcoming. They had real class and great soul. For example, when I'd explained that I was just in the midst of both a major move into Manhattan and a book tour, one organizer said: "We understand what it's like when a woman is jammed up doing too much. We'll love you anyway. You can let us know at the last minute." She was so damn upbeat and understanding that I decided I'd come no matter what.

In retrospect, I realized that I should have known what was coming; perhaps I chose not to know.

A few days before the conference I had the following conversation with one of the organizers. She asked me what my most recent book was and I told her it was The New Anti-Semitism. I explained that Jew-hatred was a form of racism--only it was not being treated as such by anti-racist "politically correct" people. The organizer did not say: "I don't agree with you" nor did she say: "This won't play well to our constituency." She only said: "We need you to explain the ways in which women sabotage each other and remain divided so that we can understand and overcome it in order to come together. We need you to talk about your book Woman's Inhumanity to Woman. Your speech will precede our big Unity panel."
When I arrived, performers were rapping and singing and dancing and the energy was fabulous. They were running late and I waited patiently and happily. I whispered to my son: "There's still a whole world out there. And in ways, it's quite wonderful. Perhaps I have become too obsessed with The Jewish Cause, with Israel. Maybe I need to remember that I am also connected to more than one issue."

I had been asked to talk about what women can do, psychologically and ethically, in order to enact sisterhood and to work in productive, even radical ways. As I spoke, the women in the audience sighed, cheered, applauded, nodded in agreement, laughed, groaned, nudged each other--it was a half hour of good vibes.

And then my first questioner blew it all to Hell. All it took was The Question and it only required one Questioner. I could not see who was speaking. A disembodied voice demanded to know where I stood on the question of the women of Palestine. Her tone was forceful, hostile, relentless, and prepared. I could have said: "The organizers have specifically asked me not to address such questions." I did not say that. I could also have said: "I am concerned with the women of Palestine but I am also concerned with the women of Rwanda, Bosnia, Guatemala, who have all been gang-raped by soldiers who used rape as a weapon of war; I am concerned with the poverty and homelessness of women right here in America; I am concerned with the women of Israel who are being blown up in buses, at cafes, in their own bedrooms." I did not say this.

Instead, I took a deep breath and said that I did not respect people who hijacked airplanes or hijacked conferences or who, at this very moment, were trying to hijack this lecture. I pointed out that the subject of my talk was not Israel or Palestine. I did not want us to lose our focus. She grew even more hostile and demanding. "Tell this audience what you said on WBAI. I heard you on that program." Clearly, she wanted to "unmask" me before this audience as a Jew-lover and an Israel-defender.

I took the question head-on. "If you're really asking about apartheid, let me talk about it. Contrary to myth and propaganda, Israel is not an apartheid state. The largest practioner of apartheid in the world is Islam which practices both gender and religious apartheid. In terms of gender apartheid, Palestinian women--and all women who live under Islam--are oppressed by "honor" killings, in which girls and women who are raped are then killed by family members for the sake of restoring the family "honor;" forced veiling, segregation, stonings to death for alleged adultery, seclusion/sequestration, female genital mutilation, polygamy, outright slavery, sexual slavery. Women have few civil, legal, or human rights under Islam."

I continued; "Islam also specializes in religious apartheid as well. All non-Muslims (Christians, including Maronites and Melkites, Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants, Jews, Assyrians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, animists) have historically been viewed and treated as subhumans who must either convert to Islam or be mercilessly taxed, beaten, jailed, murdered, or exiled. The latest al-Queda attack in Saudi Arabia was primarily directed against Lebanese Christians and Americans."

I continued. "Today, the entire Middle East is judenrein, there are no Jews left in 22 Arab countries. And, the Arab leadership has backed the PLO strategy in which the 23rd state remains under constant and perilous siege. Historically in general, but specifically since 1948-1956, Arab Jews were forced to flee Arab Islamic lands. Most are living in Israel, the only Middle Eastern state in which Jews are allowed to live. Jews cannot become citizens of Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, for example and yet no one accuses those nations of apartheid.
I said that Israel was not an apartheid state. I talked about real gender and religious Apartheid, as practiced by Muslims. I told the truth. Clearly, they had not heard it before. The audience collectively gasped. Then, people went a little crazy.
Someone muttered darkly, coarsely, in a near-growl: "What about the checkpoints? What about the fence?" As if checkpoints and fences are the same as being killed by your brother or father or, most recently, in Ramallah, in the Rofayda Qaoud case, by your mother (!) for the crime of having been raped--in the Qaoud case, both raped and impregnated by your mother's two sons. I asked the audience if they thought that being detained at a checkpoint was really the same as having your clitoris sliced off, the same as being stoned to death for alleged adultery. The only response I got was from the first questioner who demanded that I denounce Ariel Sharon--but not Yasir Arafat--as a murderer.

I absolutely refused to do so.

The lightning rod of "Palestine" was enough to turn a very friendly audience quite hostile and a bit unhinged. Two or three women proceeded to ask aggressive questions in which they tried to get me to say that I had somehow "disrespected" poor women in my remarks; I had said nothing of the sort.

As I left the podium, a young African-American woman stopped me to say that I'd "hurt" her by how I had "disrespected" a "brown" woman. "What brown woman?" I asked. "Your first questioner was a brown woman" she said "and so are Palestinian women." I said: "Jewish women, especially in Israel also come in many colors including brown and black." She stopped me. "But you're a white Jew." As if this was proof of a crime.
I did not bother to tell her that without my glasses I could not see the face or color of a questioner so far away, that my answer to the question would have been the same no matter what color the questioner happened to be.

As I was trying to leave, one woman, who said her name was "Lupe," (she was dressed in a button-festooned serape, and had a cross tattooed between her eyebrows) loped after me and continued to demand that I deal with the Palestine question. She kept trying to get at me physically. One of the organizers kept putting her own body between Lupe and me. Lupe behaved like a trained operative, her rage was legitimized, empowered, by her politics.

The three young African-American women who had invited me were VERY supportive of me, they hugged me and thanked me for coming and looked rather embarrassed about what had happened.
What's important is this: Not one of them tried to stop what was happening, not one stood up and said: "Something good has just turned ugly and we must not permit this to happen." Thus, the "good" people did nothing to disperse the hostility or to address the issues. Perhaps they were simply unprepared on the issues; perhaps they agreed with the view that Israel is an apartheid state and that anyone who would dare defend it was supposed to be treated as a traitor and enemy. Perhaps they simply lacked the courage to stand up to the fundamentalists in their midst.

Afterwards, my son told me that he was on his feet the minute The Questioner spoke and although I could not see him either, I was glad to know that he was in the room. Things could easily have turned much uglier. (By the way: Talk about gender apartheid! The conference confined him to his men-only single chair section).
It seemed that The Questioner had at least one, and possibly two henchwoman with her. Clearly, she wanted to "get" the pro-Israel white Jew.

I couldn't help reflecting on my life's work against racism. For example, in 1963, I joined The Northern Student Movement and tutored Harlem students. This was the Northern branch of the civil rights movement. In the late 1960s, I was involved with both the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. I marched outside the Women's House of Detention when they jailed Angela Davis. I was involved in the Inez Garcia case and have written extensively about the cases of both Joanne
Little and Yvonne Wanrow, two women of color who, like Garcia, had killed (white) men in self-defense. In the mid-70s, I interviewed Jews from India, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Africa, and Jews who had fled Arab lands about "cultural" or "ethnic" racism in Israel. By the early 1970s, I also began organizing against Jew-hatred on the left and among feminists in America. Over the years, I have lectured on the complexities of both racism and sexism in the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, and in Japan.

For nearly 30 years, I taught working-class and students of color at a public university. I admired and loved them and was sometimes able to help them in ways that changed their views and their lives.
Here's what's sad. Clearly, my speech touched hearts and minds; there was room for common ground and for civilized discourse. But not once the word "Palestine" was uttered, not when "Palestine" is seen as a symbol for every downtrodden group of color who are "resisting" the racist-imperialist American and Zionist Empires. Once the "Palestine" litmus test of political respectability was raised, everyone responded on cue, as if programmed and brainwashed. It immediately became a "white" versus "brown" thing, an "oppressed" versus an "oppressor" thing.

These are the Brownshirts of our time. The fact that they are women of color, womanists/feminists is all the more chilling and tragic. And unbelievable. And to me: Practically unbearable.
Afterwards, my son, ever-wise, said: "Well mom, you have your answer. The Jew-haters will never allow you into their wider, wonderful world. You can't go back."