American Thought Leaders - Phyllis Chesler: Gender Apartheid and the Silence of ‘Faux Feminists’

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

“So, we landed in Kabul. This is a long time ago, long before the Taliban. And the airport official just smoothly took my American passport away and said, ‘No problem, madam. We'll return it to your family.’ Never saw it again. And then I discovered that my father-in-law had three wives and 21 children.”Phyllis Chesler was born into a Jewish-American family. In 1961, at just 20 years of age, she traveled as a new bride with her husband to Afghanistan, where she entered into a traditional, Muslim household and was quickly stripped of her rights, seen as the property of her male family members. After finally escaping back to the United States, she became what she calls a “politically-incorrect feminist” who advocates for the rights of women and girls, and speaks out against “faux feminists” in the West, who have failed to support the Oct. 7 victims of Hamas’s rape and sexual assault, and remain silent on the gender apartheid afflicting the Arab–Muslim world.“She called me up one day, maybe a year later, and said, ‘Do you want to help rescue girls and women from Afghanistan?’ I said, ‘I’ve been waiting for this call my entire life.’ And we did. That’s what we did. It was a group of grassroots feminists who undertook that holy task, and we got 398 out with no help from the government,” says Dr. Chesler. “Israel is fighting the West’s battle by itself—it really is—for the kinds of freedoms from tyranny that the West has been standing for, was founded for, and is now not holding on to.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

We landed in Kabul, and the airport official just smoothly took my American passport away. And then I discovered that my father-in-law had three wives and 21 children. Phyllis Chesler was born into a Jewish-American family. In 1961, at just 20 years old, she found herself stripped of her rights as a new bride in Afghanistan. She escaped and became an outspoken critic of what she describes as faux feminists in the West who remain silent about gender discrimination in the Arab Muslim world and, more recently, the October 7 victims of Hamas rape and torture. She called me up one day and said, do you want to help rescue girls and women from Afghanistan. And we did, with no help from

the government. Israel is fighting the West's battle by itself for the kinds of freedoms from tyranny that the West has been standing for and is now not holding on to it too fast. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Phyllis Chesler, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It's my pleasure to be here. Phyllis, tell me about faux feminists. Well, I'm a real feminist. A faux feminist is someone who has given up fighting for sex and dying for it,

or the Afghan women trapped under the rule of the Taliban, or the Israeli women who were just massacred and raped and atrocities galore, they don't take a position other than an abstract anti-racist, anti-colonial, post-colonial, deconstructive position on reality. And therefore they help no one. And they're not alone. It's the entire Western academy and media and human rights groups, the United Nations. Whenever I type it, it comes out untied, not united, because they're really, it's a collection of tyrannies. And so the feminists are only a small part of it who once cared deeply about violence against women issues, all races, all classes, all ethnicities, and they care nothing for the occupation of women's bodies in Gaza and in Yehuda and Shomron, where they have been increasingly forcibly veiled and forced into polygamous child marriages, and honor-killed. Instead of focusing on that kind of sisterhood,

they're focusing on Jew hatred in the guise of a liberation struggle. So what do you make of this all? Well, so it's paradoxical. Certainly some of these Islamist governments are clearly tyrannies, right? But you kind of included the UN among your collection of theories. So explain why you do that. Well, do you think Russia is a democracy? Do you think Iran is a democracy or Turkey for that matter? Or let's go Saudi Arabia or Qatar. They're not democracies. They've taken the Western democracies hostage by their veto power. At a certain meeting, Iran was appointed

to chair the Human Rights Council, Iran, where, if you know anything about Evin Prison, you know that they routinely rape and torture and murder dissidents of any kind, women of all kinds. And then China. Is China a democracy? I don't think so. And their persecution of practically everyone is well known, but they're very powerful. And they're increasingly in an alliance with Russia, with Turkey, with Iran. And that's coming toward Israel. And Israel is fighting the West's battle by itself. It really is for the kinds of freedoms from tyranny that the West has been standing for, was founded for, and is now not holding on to it too fast. I'll just briefly comment on when it comes to women's rights in China, for example, a group called Women's Rights

Without Frontiers, headed by Reggie Littlejohn, focused on gender side. There's a lot more men than women in China. Yes, that's because all the girl babies, when it was a one-child policy, they got rid of the girls who were born. So now there are too many boys. And so now China's policy, as I understand it, has changed, and they now want women to go back to the kitchen and have more babies of all genders. India is also, although a democracy with a profoundly awful caste system and class system that they also killed all the girl babies. Infanticide. It's another form of femicide, as is honor killing. Of course, you've done a lot of work on honor killing. And this is just not really in the lexicon of most people.

Most people don't even understand what that means, I think. This is true. Well, honor killing is very endemic in certainly the Muslim and Arab world and in Muslim Africa. If a girl brings any sort of shame on her family, and in Central Asia as well, like Pakistan. If she's getting friendly with a non-Muslim person, girl or boy, if she wants to advance an education,

if it's suspected that she's having sex outside of marriage, even if it's not true. If she wants to leave a violent marriage to a first cousin which was arranged against her will, her family will kill her. Because if they don't, then the family loses its reputation, no one else will marry their other children, and they may lose their business. So when I first began studying it, mainly Western feminists didn't believe it, didn't pay attention,

thought I was being racist, even though the victims are also women of color, but the perpetrators are men of color. And that was a no-no. And I was so heartened when women from India and Pakistan, for example, and Turkey, another example, began citing my work. And they didn't view that work as racist. They viewed it as feminist. So sometimes you find unexpected feminist allies who are not faux feminists. You have an absolutely, I would say, extremely unusual story. Maybe tell me about that. Well, I think you're asking me how did the nice Jewish girl from Borough Park in Brooklyn end up in Kabul, Afghanistan, and what did I learn there? I was young. I was foolish. I was very

young. And I met a man at college who seemed totally westernized. He was. We talked about Dostoevsky and Proust. We went to all the best European films. And I said, I'd love to meet your family. And he said, well, we'd have to get married. And then I thought, well, I had such wanderlust, such desire to travel. I said, okay. You know, it was ho-hum. So we landed in Kabul. This is a long time ago, long before the Taliban. And the airport official just smoothly took my American passport away and said, no problem, madam.

We'll return it to your family. Never saw it again. And then I discovered that my father-in-law had three wives and 21 children, and I was supposed to live with my mother-in-law. Well, this was news to me. That's one thing. This was a posh family, a family of wealth. I wanted to go out and see the splendor of the city. And every time I did, I'd have to run away, and then there would be a car with a driver catching up with me to bring Madam home. But I'd made it out a few times alone, and I saw women in burkas, stumbling and with no peripheral vision, these claustrophobic garments looking like ghosts and literally forced to sit at the back of the bus.

And when I went to my Afghan family and said, I just saw something terrible, they said oh Americans are so hysterical so that was a time and a place where my life was in real danger where I got very very ill and I didn't know how to get out or if I would be able to and I contemplated all kinds of escape schemes so I understood then what it was like to be trapped in that country with no passport out to the 20th century because mine had been taken away. got me an Afghan passport, gave me $10, and said you could leave because he didn't want a dead American on his hands or on his conscience. I was very yellow with hepatitis. I flew over the frozen wastes of Siberia, and I was thrilled, on an Aeroflot flight out. And then I tried to tell other people at college that I'd seen servants very badly treated, that I'd seen women held very cheaply

and leading very dangerous lives. And nobody wanted to hear it. They said, how many servants did you have? Were you now a princess. So even professors who I – I didn't have the phrase yet for Islamic gender and religious apartheid, which I now use. And my then mother-in-law, I mean poor soul, the first wife, she – every day she tried to convert me to Islam. Every day it was a battle. So I really did understand without anyone telling me that it wasn't so good to live in a Muslim country if you were a girl.

If you were a girl with dreams, who reads books, and who has intellectual ambitions. I went to graduate school, and I wrote a story, Memoirs of Afghanistan, which was published in a magazine. And it was, you know, filled with also nostalgia and charm. Kabul is in a valley, and it's surrounded by the Pamir Mountains, and it's very gorgeous. And I didn't see the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which the Taliban have blown up. I didn't know at the time that the country had once been Buddhist until the Arab Muslims came and converted via the sword. I learned these things only over time. But when the women of Bangladesh were being raped in a war zone by Pakistani soldiers, I spoke to a group of feminists and I said,

well, we have to get them out. We need a feminist air force. And they thought I was being very poetic. And they said, well, why? What are you worried about? And I said, well, if their families learn they were raped and if they're impregnated, they'll kill themselves or their families will kill them. No one had heard of this.

I had heard rumors about honor killing in Afghanistan at the time. No one really talked about it, but I got the drift of it. So many, many years later, I was privileged to first conduct studies on honor killing. There were four. And this allowed me to submit affidavits to judges in America for women who were in flight from being honor-killed and who were looking for asylum. And I view that as such important feminist work. And then something even more extraordinary happened.

I'd been working with a woman named Mandy Sanghera, who's a Sikh who lives in London. And when I was disinvited to present honor-killing findings at a law school in America because I was seen as a Zionist and therefore threats were made, Mandy said, well, we can't have you dishonored this way. And so she convened a panel at University College London where I presented these findings. That was very, that was so kind of her. And then she called me up one day, maybe a year later,

and said, do you want to help rescue girls and women from Afghanistan? I said, I've been waiting for this call my entire life. And we did. That's what we did. It was a group of grassroots feminists who undertook that holy task with no help from the government, opposition every step of the way, heart-stopping anecdotes, and then one young woman who I've adopted, not legally, but financially, and with my whole heart, who is now in a graduate school. She's finishing a master's and will continue for a PhD. I lucked out because she's grateful, she's brilliant, she's hardworking.

Could have gone anyway. I mean, can you imagine having the opportunity to rescue girls, women from that place? I had considered running away with the coochies, the nomads, anything to get out. But then I realized, oh, they'll marry me off, they'll rape me, they'll sell me, and where am I going? And the women wear all their jewelry. The site is a heart-stopping site with camels. It's biblical. They're walking barefoot with all their jewelry clanging and clinking and tinkling so proudly. One thing that just strikes me as you're describing these whole scenes is that in Afghanistan,

things have gone the other way. It's actually gotten worse since the 60s, the time when you were there. It wasn't good when I was there. It got briefly better in the 70s in the cities, in the large cities. But it's a geographically isolated country that has never been colonized and is ruled by illiterate mullahs. The mosque rules the country. So it's been cursed with bad luck and a history of torturing and murdering anyone who thinks outside the box, so to speak. And I've probably read every memoir written by Afghans who describe this now, especially one by Mohammad Anwar, which is really a great book.

It has, well, first it had a war, Russia invaded, and I think maybe it wanted more territory. Maybe it wanted to uplift the poor in Afghanistan is how it's pronounced. That didn't end well for Russia. And then the Taliban came in, which didn't end well for the people. They're lunatics. They're like Hamas, ISIS, Al-Qaeda. And Afghanistan is the country that gave bin Laden a safe cave to play in 9-11.

He was thrown out of Saudi Arabia. He was thrown out of Sudan. How bad do you have to be to be thrown out of those two countries? Afghanistan, Mullah Omar took him, and that's what he plotted. And then there's my country, America, who didn't look for bin Laden in Pakistan, where he was tucked away in Abbottabad, their military west point, and kept looking in Afghanistan. But there's a big but. I think that America, the boots on the ground,

allowed two generations of Afghans to get educations and to taste freedoms, open up businesses, and acquire skills. Battered women's shelters, rape crisis centers shut down the minute the Taliban came back. And the boots were gone. And this was the context in which you participated in helping get 400-odd women out. We all knew what would be happening.

We had seen the Taliban in action before with their stonings and their hatred of women. No education, no music, no beauty parlors, full burqas, just medieval, premedieval. So we knew if we couldn't get them out they would at best, if they were very lucky, they would be sequestered for the rest of their lives indoors and become profoundly depressed. They would not be allowed to work. They aren't now. And America, the way we left, was horrendous, totally irresponsible, non-strategic. The military equipment that we

left behind alone, I'm sure, made its way to Hamas. I've been thinking about, since I've been reading some of your work, I've been thinking about rape as a weapon of war. I guess we don't realize how common this is, or at least has been historically, and why, and so forth. So I want you to dig into that a little bit for me. Okay. Well, rape is a war against the rape victim, just even not in a war zone. And it's a hate crime, but the FBI doesn't view it as such.

And mainly it's women who were raped by men, although men also rape men. Women, not so much. Historically, it's been not a weapon of war, but a spoil. So if the army comes in, they do what they wish. A pogrom includes rape to the max. Max. But as of maybe the 1990s, rape was conceived of as a weapon of war to drive the female population out of their minds, to humiliate and break the hearts and souls of the men who could not protect them, to cleanse a population. I mean, as in pogroms against Jews, it did just that.

There was no population left, and survivors had lots of psychiatric issues. With the Islamist groups in North Africa in the 1990s with the raping of women systematically in Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, and in Sudan, where the Janjaweed perpetrated continuous public gang rapes on little girls and women, you have a whole new era of violence, of war zone violence. Don't think for a minute that Russians are not raping women in Ukraine. We just don't have videos of it, as Hamas has of their October 7th massacre. Many rape victims are resilient. Many are not. So if you're raped and repeatedly raped,

you'll have insomnia. You'll have flashbacks. You'll have the symptoms of post-traumatic stress that we associate with soldiers who've been in war, in battle and you'll also have shame you'll blame yourself and you'll think

and this is true not in a war zone and in a war zone you'll think you did something wrong in the wrong place at the wrong time, looking the wrong way. And what they did that is unusual is they photographed themselves. They were proud of what they did. And they laughed and they took pleasure in it. You're talking about October 7 now. Hamas, October 7, Hamas.

And when I saw that, I thought, we have to capture them and try them in Jerusalem after Israel is victorious militarily. Not in The Hague, certainly not, but in Jerusalem the way Eichmann was tried and the way the Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, because the world will not be even slightly safer for Jews and for Israelis of any religion if if there's not a public acknowledgement and acceptance of what happened, a pogrom on steroids, as I've written. And I hope we can have that. I don't think the UN is the place.

I don't think the International Criminal Court is the place, because these are all rabidly Jew-hating venues. And the thing you asked me earlier about faux feminists, usually the feminist movement in America says, at Me Too, believe all women, you have to trust what the woman says. When it came to Israeli women, and there were photos and videos and evidence and eyewitness accounts well we don't really know what happens at this point despite the extensive video and photo evidence and so forth there's still you know powerful narratives out there that this was somehow overblown. Someone who I trust very highly,

to quote him, he said, you know, serial killers don't do the things that he saw being done on this footage. Yet at the same time, these narratives exist that this didn't even happen or perhaps is overblown. People are struggling at this point to try to understand how there could be such a disconnect. Well, from the day after Israel won the 1967 war of self-defense, Russians and the Arab League countries started funding the curriculum in the West, strategizing brainwashing that has now paid off. The New York Times, which I once trusted and appeared in their pages and was reviewed in their pages. No more. I'm canceled now.

They lie. That means all of the trusted media organs, Washington Post, New York Times, not that different now from Al Jazeera, funded by Qatar, which is the paymaster for Iran. Lethal Jew hatred. It's almost as if Obama is still pulling the strings of Biden, both presidents, and wants Iran to destroy Israel, not understanding that this means Iran comes for the West next. Ten billion that our American government just unleashed, gave to Iran, it was through Qatar. And why Qatar would ever be chosen to negotiate for hostages.

Just to clarify, when you say Qatar is the paymaster of Iran, what do you mean by that? SUSAN GLASSER. It has its bank accounts. It funnels money to Hamas and to Iran and from Iran. Iran funds so many terrorist groups worldwide. Hezbollah is one and Hamas is another. Why is America delaying taking on Iran? There are so many Iranians who have given up their lives fighting for their freedom, fighting cruel, diabolical regime of Mullahs, I see the alliance of China, Russia, Iran, Turkey

against the West. That's the only reason why a country like Saudi Arabia would be open to the Abraham Accords, because they're terrified of Shiite Muslim power. The Muslims in Iran are Shia. And throughout the Arab Middle East, it's Sunni. They were seeing the Abraham Accords as a possible way of containing Iran and of having good economic diplomatic relationships. Now, this Hamas move may have delayed it, but maybe there'll be life in it yet. And so all of the university professors whose performances we've just seen in Congress. And they had professors before them.

And all of the students who learned from them really believe that Israel is an apartheid Nazi nation state. They believe it with their whole hearts. They really believe that terrorist and fascist organizations are freedom fighters. They truly believe this. They have binary thinking. There is only an oppressor and someone who's oppressed. It's good versus evil, but they have it upside down. Orwell would not believe his ears. So you have crowds marching across America and across Europe

calling for death to Jews in the name of liberation, in the name of freedom. Now, Palestinian Gazan civilians, yeah, they should be liberated, but from Hamas, as should the Arabs who live in Yehuda and Shomron, otherwise known as the British West Bank. They should be liberated from Abbas and from the Palestinian Authority, from all of the Islamist Taliban-like, ISIS-like, al-Qaeda-like groups whose position on women dissidents, independents, thinkers, homosexuals, is like antithetical to all those in the West who are marching in their favor. This has been planned for a very long time, funded also not just by Arab or Muslim money, but funded by China, funded by Russia, and funded by left-wing philanthropists in America.

And I'm thinking of Soros, certainly is one. The Rockefeller Brother Foundation for another. The Tides Foundation. So this is a well-financed campaign. And you're basically talking about all these funders of what we could broadly call progressive ideology, right? Yes, yes. And I thought I was a progressive. I thought I was a radical. I really, I mean, I was. I still am. But now all the goalposts have changed. So fighting for women's rights, no, no, it has to be for trans rights. It has to be for LGBTQI rights, not women's rights. If you say as a feminist that you really don't want to have women in sports competing with men in sports, because the women will always lose, that means that you're a traitor. Because the belief is that gender trumps sex, that there's no such thing as reality.

There's no such thing as objectivity. It's delusionary. It's apocalyptic. It's suicidal thinking. And I'm now wondering, how long will it take for deprogramming to become effective? Or is there an appetite for deprogramming? So here's a question I have, right? I think there seems to be a number of what you would call,

what I might call watershed moments, okay, in the last few months. Of course, October 7th, shocking to people. But then the reaction to October 7th, perhaps even more shocking, right, in Western nations. It perhaps wasn't obvious to, or not perhaps, it wasn't obvious to many Jews even that somehow anti-Semitism is baked into this ideology. It was denied. It was minimized. It was fought. Jews are an interesting group because we want to help the other person, which assumes, therefore,

that oneself needs no help, that one is just okay. And now Jews are realizing or facing in America, well, we're not exactly okay. And what does that do to our ethics, our morality about helping the underdog, helping those who are more in need? So Jews have mainly answered Rabbi Hillel's second question.

If you are only for yourself, really, who are you? Why were you born? If you're not for yourself, what are who are you? Why were you born? If you're not for yourself, what are you? You're not going to survive. So now Jews are faced with a question of survival. This is new for the first time since the Holocaust. Or perhaps it's the third question that's the operative one. And it's not now, when.

Exactly. These are very interesting times, as the Chinese said. Very interesting. As in troubling, historic, perhaps a curse. I've been on this beat since the early 1970s when I ran into very classic Jew hatred on the feminist left, and it sent me to Israel for the first time. I then got signatures for petitions against the UN resolution, Zionism equals racism, which it does not. Anti-Zionism equals racism, rather, as Judea Pearl has said, Daniel Pearl's father. And then I worked at the UN, put together a conference, which took place in Oslo, and then I went to that historic women's meeting in Copenhagen, 1980, which was a psychological pogrom.

It was a precursor to Durban. It was unbelievable because there were the women from Iran in full dark forbidding chadors and they in the Arab League and the left Europeans were death to the Jews, down with Israel. I didn't know what was going on. And I then flew to Israel and gave a series of interviews about anti-Semitism is back, bloody beast is back. This was 1980. It was on the front pages of the Israeli newspapers. The Israelis in general said, don't worry. And then I

tried to interest American Jewish organizations, 1980, 81, in allowing me to develop a curriculum to teach their staff how to use the language of liberation and oppression, because I said they will come after us with this language. Nobody was interested. I was not asking for money. Then we have the Intifada of 2000s and I knew I wouldn't abandon my feminist work but I did have to focus on anti-Semitism. And I did and I published a book called The New Anti-Semitism in 2003. It was the only book of mine that the New York Times would not review, did not review. I had had front-page reviews for other works of mine. And Jewish organizations didn't take it seriously. In one case, the head of

the ADL at the time had his own book coming out, which did get reviewed. And guess what that book missed entirely? The Islamist part of the picture. It was all about Christian, Nazi era Jew haters. That's changed rapidly in a surreal way now. And Jewish students are frightened on campuses. Professors began writing to me in 2003, 2004, to tell me that they are being harassed, they're being treated badly because they're suspected of being pro-Israel. And I turned all this information over to somebody who wanted to cover it for the New York Times, who then told me that they had been stopped at the highest level. This is 2003, 2004. And when I spoke on campuses, and I was a

professor for 30 years at a university, I needed police protection. That was new. I was asked to speak in 2003 at a conference at Barnard. It was a grassroots conference, mainly African-American women who wanted me to talk about women's inhumanity to women, which was the subject of my 10th book. We had a wonderful time together. They loved every word I said. And then a provocateur,

an Asian provocateur, stood up and said, I heard you on WBAI. I demand to know, where do you stand on the issue of the women of Palestine? And I said, I think if you're asking me where I stand on the issue of apartheid are Muslim countries, where gender and religious apartheid prevails. The place went crazy. Everyone began yelling. You know, I went through the litany of the woes and sorrows of Arab women in that region. They didn't care.

And my son had come to pick me up, and he started moving towards the front where I was. And then the organizers, like, hustled me out for my safety. And thereafter, many times, the disinvitations. Cambridge had invited me to speak at a 10th anniversary of their women's studies program and then disinvited me when I asked. I saw who the other speakers were, rabid anti-Zionist speakers masquerading as feminists. So I just said, well, what kind of security do you have planned? And on the basis of that question, they said, maybe you should come another time. And they never invited me another time.

Well, you're describing this happened earlier than, let's say, take your average conservative speaker that might try to go to most campuses. They're in a similar situation that you were suddenly back in 2003. Yes. At the time, I had no idea about any of this. So this trouble was brewing. It was there, only it wasn't seen. Now, you're right, you bring up October 7th, which was beyond surreal and shocking but managed, the sight of Jewish

blood thrilled the Jew haters globally. It's almost as if the global intifada was zombie-like, primed to all act out and act up at the same time in response to this death cult massacre, celebrating it as just desserts for the Israeli Nazi. How do you explain all sorts of people that ostensibly weren't even particularly, let's say, indoctrinated into ideology, suddenly coming out on the obvious wrong side of all this en masse? Well, you know, herd instinct, conformity, fear, lack of courage, cowardice, explains a bit of it. Ignorance, disinformation, misinformation explains a bit of it. People don't want to lose their jobs or their friends or their family members or their funding.

They want to remain popular and safe. And then they really do believe, because the media has hammered this into them and their courses as well at college, that Israel is the bad guy, not the good guy, that Israel deserves to be destroyed, that Israel deserves to be exterminated because then the world will be safe, then the world will be free. It took the New York Times nine weeks to finally have an article that I just read by Jill Filipovic that admitted, that acknowledged in their pages, it's a one-off, that this was terrible what happened on 10-7 and kidnapping civilians and keeping them hostage where they're probably being tortured and raped every single day, etc. Not so good.

But on the other hand, you know, the nuance is the Palestinians have been suffering. They've been suffering because of Hamas, a terrorist organization which takes all the money meant for their populations for themselves to enrich their bank accounts, which are huge, and to build their terror tunnels and to get all their military equipment. And the population in Gaza has been so heavily brainwashed that they were in favor of 10-7, according to polls. But on the other hand, they'd be shot down dead if they didn't say they were in favor. All of the media, the journalists who went into Gaza or onto the West Bank, they knew that they were seeing doctored footage, Potemkin villages, but they reported it as if it was true. West reported Hamas health death figures that happened like overnight. They knew right away it was 578 people killed. No objectivity, anything hysterical. Statements that Israel now is quickly, more quickly than ever before, managing to denounce. But psychologically, the first narrative out is the one that sticks. So Israel proves that, no, it didn't bomb the

Al-Ali Hospital. In fact, it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short, as they usually do, that bombed an adjoining parking lot. And Israel had nothing to do with it. And there were not 500 people murdered, but it didn't matter because now all over the Arab media and the left-wing Western media, they're saying Israel did it and therefore deserves to die, deserves to be massacred. So I think the conservative media is important. I think any media that can tell the truth will make a huge difference. Are you conservative? Well, they say I am, and on some issues I am.

But I don't like to be identified by one thing only. I don't want to salute a single flag. But on so many issues, I agree with a conservative point of view. For example, if a man says, really, I feel that I'm a woman, and if you address me as a man, I'll sue you. That's where we are in the world today. So maybe I used to be or would now be considered a classical liberal, which is now conservative. There are so many Israeli leftists who spent six months on the streets demonstrating against Bibi Netanyahu for judicial reform or against judicial

reform. And now they're all united and they're in battle. So Israel has its own demons in addition to this massacre and the hostages. And Hezbollah, funded by Iran, has been shelling rockets into the north of Israel, while Israel is fighting deep in Gaza and losing, as of yesterday, a hundred and sixteen very young soldiers strategized Intifada of 2000, Israelis were being blown up on buses and in cafes in such a large number that if we looked at it in American demographic terms, it would have been like 50 or 60,000 Americans killed, murdered, and hundreds of thousands wounded. And Israel has been living with this for all of the 21st century. And the Oslo Accords? Fake, deluded, impossible. Why? Israel wants peace, really wants peace, but the Arabs don't want to live in peace with the Jews because Islam has taught them, or as my good Muslim allies

beg to say, to differ, that it's Islamism, it's the hijacking of Islam that has taught them hatred, hatred of the infidel and a desire for a global caliphate. I think those who want that are serious about trying to get it. And we're making a huge mistake not to take them seriously. Do you think there's been a fundamental shift where things are starting to move in a different direction? I see some signs of that. I think some people are waking up. Now, there are a lot of Christians in America who are for Israel,

and that's a new chapter in Jewish-Christian relationships. And there are a lot of Muslims who I work with who are for Israel. I did a program the other day with two Muslim feminists who went on a mission to Israel is an interfaith coalition of very independent, brave-thinking Muslims, Christians, and Jews, or ex-Muslims too, one of whom is going to be running for the Senate from Arizona, Judy Jasser, who's a retired Navy person. So I can't be against all Muslims, because that's not possible. It's not true. But those who are fanatic, those who want this global caliphate, those who hate Jews and hate infidels, that means everyone else, Hindus, Baha'i.

Israel gave asylum to the Baha'i when they fled from Iran. Anyone who's not Muslims on their hit list. All of them and the people who do not have the ability to resist them, to overthrow them. Not an easy thing to do. I work with them. And I would love to see coalitions of resistance. I think it's inevitable, because look at the darkness otherwise. Look at the death and destruction otherwise. So I'm not saying we'll win. I'm saying that we have the capacity to fight to win. And I hope we do that. And what about these young people that have, however, bought into this progressive, woke ideology? You know, Islam has been engaged in slavery, still is, and certainly colonialism and imperialism.

So there's such a lack of, such a great ignorance on the part of the wokesters in terms of human imperfection, the sins and crimes of all humanity, whatever colors they may be, not just the West, not only America. And I'm not sure about how you re-educate someone who's been indoctrinated, deeply indoctrinated. I'm not sure. I think that's going to be a task for the coming generations. I think it was a mistake for conservatives to leave the universities and to set up independent think tanks. I understand all the reasons why it happened,

but had they been able to remain even in battle, things might be at a better place right now. I can't be certain. I'm thinking of all of the women around the world who need our best efforts and who themselves are trying as hard as possible, endless numbers of stories to tell, perhaps another time, who are not indoctrinated in this way. This is a Western disease. This is a Western suicide pact with the devil.

And the woksters also, they believe in Marxism and in the ability for human beings to perfect humanity and society, no matter how many hundreds of millions they have to kill in order to do so. And it's very rapid, and it's dangerous, and needs to be called out. As we finish up, I've been kind of dancing around the same question in a way. But do you see that shift happening? I'm seeing some signs that it's actually being called out in ways I haven't seen. Do you expect that to continue? I hope it does. See, I don't want to give false hope. I think we're in a very bad spot. And I think that I've been marking it, tracking it for quite a long time. So I don't want to lie.

I don't want to say, oh, we're going to turn it all around. What I can say is that at least for the Jews we're an eternal people. We're still here no matter what, and we'll continue to be here if the world continues on. If we fight, if we tell the truth, if we stand up with courage, even if it means we lose our friends or family members. If we say what needs to be said, then we have a chance of saving not the planet, not the climate, that's another battle, but we have a chance of saving education and knowledge and culture. I read that activists interrupted an opera in New York at the Metropolitan Opera for climate for 22 minutes. Half the audience booed, third walked out. The opera was Tannhäuser. I'm not a great Wagner fan, but just because in my own living room I have an opera channel, I sat and I watched that

opera as a small private act of resistance to the lack of manners, the lack of respect for authority, for culture, for art, which is upon us in every way. And that's what we're looking at. We're looking at a bloody overthrow of all tradition, deeming it all evil, nothing worth saving. Barbarians are not at the gate. The barbarians are within. So we need to fight it from within. Well, Phyllis Chesler, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. My pleasure to be with you. Yes, good questions. Thank you all for joining Phyllis Chesler and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek. Music Music

Music