As a country with more than enough real enemies, the last thing Israel needs is for its supporters to start attacking its friends. But that’s what seems to have happened to the University of Texas – which has been attacked as an anti-Israel boycotter for taking a courageous stand against the boycott.

It began when Israel National News published a perfectly fair article with an unfortunate headline: “New Boycott: U. of Texas Cancels Book Including Israelis.” The headline seems to accuse the university itself of boycotting Israelis, and that’s how many people evidently read it: Comments such as “U of Texas Press bows to boycotters,” or the more generic “scandalous!” and “shameful,” soon appeared on Twitter and Facebook.

What actually happened, as the news story makes clear, is that the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies wanted to publish a collection of women’s writing about life in the Middle East that would include both Arab and Israeli authors. The problem began when a Palestinian woman who had been invited to contribute threatened to withdraw her own article if the two Israelis contributors weren’t excluded.

The university, quite properly, told her to go ahead and withdraw; the book could live without her contribution. But she countered by persuading other contributors to withdraw their manuscripts as well. Ultimately, according to Inside Higher Ed, 13 of the 29 authors did so, and a few others were wavering. That left the university with four choices:

First, it could violate every known standard of professional behavior, and open itself to lawsuits, by publishing the withdrawn manuscripts without their authors’ consent. Second, it could make itself a professional laughingstock by publishing a collection of articles on life in the Middle East that didn’t include a single Arab author. Its critics seem to think it should have chosen one of these two. Yet it should be obvious that no self-respecting university would seriously consider either of them.

The third option was to capitulate to the boycotters and publish 27 of the 29 articles, excluding only the two Israeli contributions. Many universities would likely have done exactly that: Just consider the craven behavior of Yale University Press, which capitulated to Muslim pressure to exclude pictures of controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammed from a book about the controversy over the Danish cartoons. But Texas, to its credit, did no such thing.

Instead, it chose the final option: It stood up to the boycotters and announced that if the Israelis aren’t published, the boycotters won’t be, either – even at the cost of canceling a book in which the university had already invested a good deal of time, effort and money. As Kamran Scot Aghaie, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, quite properly said, he refuses to “censor” people “based on religion or national origin. To do so is simply discrimination, and it’s wrong.”

That’s exactly how a self-respecting university should respond to anti-Israel boycotters. And for having done so, the University of Texas deserves kudos, not blame.

Yes: They hate us. It must be said. 

Some may ask why I’m bringing this up now, at a time when the region has risen up, fueled not by the usual hatred of America and Israel but by a common demand for freedom. After all, shouldn’t everyone get basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? And what does gender, or for that matter, sex, have to do with the Arab Spring? But I’m not talking about sex hidden away in dark corners and closed bedrooms. An entire political and economic system — one that treats half of humanity like animals — must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun.

So: Yes, women all over the world have problems; yes, the United States has yet to elect a female president; and yes, women continue to be objectified in many “Western” countries (I live in one of them). That’s where the conversation usually ends when you try to discuss why Arab societies hate women.

Apartheid in the Middle East

The Jews, too, misread Hitler’s intentions. There would be a lot more Jews in the world, if the Jews then had understood the intentions of the Nazis.  There were 500,000 Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. But they didn’t think the Germans were going to kill them. They organized themselves to make it easier for the Germans to ship them out to what they thought were work camps. They actually made it easier for the Germans to kill them because they thought the Germans were too civilized to plan to exterminate them. They misread the intentions of the Germans.

So I want to begin this little talk tonight by reading some statements made by Palestinian leaders, which express their intentions towards the Jews. Mahmoud al-Zahar is a founder of Hamas and one of its current leaders, and this is what he has said: “There is no place for you Jews among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world.  You are headed for annihilation.”

Ahmad Bahar, who is acting chairman of the Gaza Parliament and a member of Hamas said, “Be certain that America is on its way to disappear.  Allah take hold of the Jews and their allies. Allah take hold of the Americans and their allies. Allah count them and kill them to the last one, don’t leave even one.”

On the official Hamas website there is a video of a Hamas suicide bomber, and he can be seen saying this: “My message to the Jews is that there is no god but Allah.  We are a nation that drinks blood and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews.  We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood and our children’s thirst with your blood.”

Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, has said that he hopes we Jews will gather in Israel so he won’t have to hunt us down worldwide.

Youssef al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, spoke not long ago to a million people in Tahrir Square and said this:  “Throughout history Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler by means of all the things he did to them — even though they exaggerated this issue — he managed to put them in their place.  This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.”  In other words, Islam will finish the job that Hitler started.

The prophet Muhammad has said, “The day of judgment will only come when Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.  When the Jews hide behind the rocks and the trees and the rocks and the trees cry out ‘Oh, Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

This genocidal saying of the prophet is quoted in the Hamas Charter, which also says, “Islam will obliterate Israel as it has others before it.”

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This is a Nazi movement. The statements I read at the outset of this talk are Nazi statements. The difference is this: Hitler hid his plans for the Final Solution from the German people because he thought they were too civilized to accept them. The Palestinians of Hamas and the Iranians shout it from the rooftops. Where is the great dissent from this in the Muslim world? It’s too bad that all our Muslim friends have left and did not stay to hear this, but there are good Muslims and there are bad Muslims, and the majority of Muslims are probably good Muslims – decent, law abiding and desiring peace. But there were good Germans too, and in the end, they didn’t make a damn’s worth of difference. I will know a moderate Muslim when they stand up and condemn these kinds of statements and the actions that they inspire. It’s not really hard to know who your friends are. But a lot of people have difficulty in knowing who their enemies are and that is the problem we are facing today.

Arab aprthaid in the Middle East

Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, half the Christian community has fled. Christmas decorations and public displays of crucifixes are forbidden. In a December 2010 broadcast, Hamas officials exhorted Muslims to slaughter their Christian neighbors. Rami Ayad, owner of Gaza’s only Christian bookstore, was murdered, his store reduced to ash. This is the same Hamas with which the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank recently signed a unity pact.

Little wonder, then, that the West Bank is also hemorrhaging Christians. Once 15% of the population, they now make up less than 2%. Some have attributed the flight to Israeli policies that allegedly deny Christians economic opportunities, stunt demographic growth, and impede access to the holy sites of Jerusalem. In fact, most West Bank Christians live in cities such as Nablus, Jericho and Ramallah, which are under Palestinian Authority control. All those cities have experienced marked economic growth and sharp population increase—among Muslims.

The most dramatic oppression of the region’s civil societies and the Arab Spring is not by means of weapons, or in the Middle East. It is not led by Gaddafi, Mubarak, Bin Ali, Saleh, or Assad. It is led by the powerful Islamist lobbies in Washington DC. People may find my words curious if not provocative. But my arguments are sharp and well understood by many Arab and middle eastern liberals and freedom fighters. Indeed, we in the region, who are struggling for real democracy, not for the one time election type of democracy have been asking ourselves since January 2011 as the winds of Arab spring started blowing, why isn’t the West in general and the United States Administration in particular clearly and forcefully supporting our civil societies and particularly the secular democrats of the region? Why were the bureaucracies in Washington and in Brussels partnering with Islamists in the region and not with their natural allies the democracy promoting political forces?

Months into the Arab Spring, we realized that the Western powers, and the Obama Administration have put their support behind the new authoritarians, those who are claiming they will be brought to power via the votes of the people. Well, it is not quite so.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Nahda of Tunisia, the Justice Party of Morocco and the Islamist militias in Libya’s Transitional National Council have been systematically supported by Washington at the expense of real liberal and secular forces. We saw day by day how the White House guided carefully the statements and the actions of the US and the State Department followed through to give all the chances to the Islamists and almost no chances to the secular and revolutionary youth. We will come back to detail these diplomatic and financial maneuvers which are giving victory to the fundamentalists while the seculars and progressives are going to be smashed by the forthcoming regimes.

Obama continues to speak grandly about his vision for the Middle East and his dedication to America’s regional allies. And his supporters in the media continue to applaud his great success in foreign policy. But outside of their echo chamber, he and the country he leads are looked upon with increasing contempt and disgust throughout the Arab world.

Obama’s behavior since last January 25 has made clear to US friend and foe alike that under Obama, the US is more likely to attack you if you display weakness towards it than if you adopt a confrontational posture against it. As Assad survives to kill another day; as Iran expands its spheres of influence and gallops towards the nuclear bomb; as al- Qaida and its allies rise from the Gulf of Aden to the Suez Canal; and as Mubarak continues to be wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher, the US’s rapid fall from regional power is everywhere in evidence.

Apartheid in the Middle East

In the pursuit of peace, alliances and interests, Western policy-makers have tended to sacrifice the perplexing realities of the Middle East on the altar of oversimplification and wishful-thinking. Yet their attempts to implement unsubstantiated policies often have served to inflame rather than extinguish regional fires.

Lebanese-born professor Fouad Ajami, the distinguished historian and former director of Middle East Studies at John Hopkins University, asserted that realities in the region constitute “a chronicle of illusions and despair and of politics repeatedly degenerating into bloodletting (The Arab Predicament, Cambridge University Press, 1990).”

Western policy-makers and shapers of public-opinion would benefit from studying writings by some key historians and scientists, whose research reaffirms that fundamentals in the Middle East have remained largely intact for the last 14 centuries.

For example, the late Iraqi-born professor and leading historian of the Middle East Eli Kedourie, from the London School of Economics, wrote in Islam in the Modern World (Mansell publishing, 1980): “The fact that political terrorism originating in the Muslim and Arab world is constantly in the headlines must not obscure the more significant fact that this terrorism has a somewhat old history…which would not be easy to eradicate from the world of Islam.”