By Phyllis Chesler
Sometimes, being recognized by one’s peers is more disconcerting than being condemned by one’s opponents.
Yesterday my dear colleague Richard Landes published a very powerful piece on the
Islamic invasion of the West, which he likened to the Greek siege of Troy. He quoted Virgil’s Aeneid on the terrible fate of the mythological Laocoon and his sons; Laocoon was punished by the gods, perhaps by Athena or Poseidon, for having tried to warn Troy about not allowing the Greek “Trojan” horse into the city. And then, Landes swiftly time-traveled to our own time and described the Trojan horse of Islam and how joyfully the suicidal West has been welcoming it into our cities and countries and hearts.
His Cassandra–c’est moi. He uses my Hebrew name Pnina or Peninah and links that name to my 2003 book The New Antisemitism. Please understand that this is indeed a very great and humbling honor; it is also a frightening one.
Then, if that wasn’t enough, last night, my good friend Ibn Warraq came to call–also bearing gifts: his new book: Churchill’s Secular Creed: Empire, Zionism, and Islam’s Complicity in the Holocaust. Warraq has dedicated the work to me. Another unbearable honor indeed. He inscribed a copy for me in a very neat handwriting. I marveled over that since mine has gone quite wobbly over the decades. The inscription reads in part: “For Phyllis and our common struggle to defend Judeo-Christian civilization from the barbarians.”
All too much…and yet, today Feminists Against Antisemitism, based in the UK, published their newsletter. They cite the great Melanie Phillips (whom they have recently interviewed); condemn the UN’s Reem Alsalem (and rightly so) for continuing to deny Hamas’s sexual violence on 10/7; congratulate Israel for having hosted 100,000 people in the Tel Aviv Pride Parade; and high-five the IDF for having admitted women as combat soldiers in mixed-gender units, a highly controversial decision for many reasons.
I’ve actually just begun watching a series about this on Izzy titled The Lionesses of the Jordan Valley. The young women are so very young–just like the men, they are all really children. Eighteen, maybe eighteen and a half years old. On her first night in the barracks, one newbie told her commander that she’d have to rise an hour before the others because she needed that amount of time to apply her makeup. Oy! Is she in for a rather grand comeuppance–kinda like the one Goldie Hawn received in her hilarious jewel of a film Private Benjamin.
Feminists Against Antisemitism also visited the Nova 10/7 exhibit in London and interviewed Israeli musician Zohara Niddam about the “chilling cancellation of her klezmer band” in the UK. At the end of their newsletter today, they describe my article about my email correspondence with another life-long feminist. They write that “every word of (this) piece tugged a familiar thread” concerning talking to someone who has “absorbed every fashionable anti‑Israel talking point but none of the history or facts. (Chesler) makes the case – with her usual sharpness – that she’s done debating people who want to ‘convert’ her, and is instead focused on Jewish survival, moral clarity, and refusing to join the mob scapegoating Israel after 10/7.”
Please understand: I admire–no, I love–these women who, in my view, constitute a nascent resistance movement, perhaps the first and only one of its kind in our era. I am at their service. Their respect for my work as an Elder is also unique. More often younger women fear older women as rivals whom they must disappear and defeat in order to take over the reins. Sometimes they also fear an Elder’s imagined disapproval or malevolence. Psychological matricide is what I’ve called this. And we are all Electra’s daughters. (Electra conspired with her brother to murder their mother, Clytemnestra, etc.)
Interestingly, in my conversation last night with Ibn Warraq, he described similar patterns of behavior among the younger, other ex-Muslims and secularists. I was actually relieved to learn that intellectuals, both men as well as women, engage in similar generational splits.
After having been cancelled and censored so often–as so many worthy others have also been–it is disconcerting to be praised by the only people that matter–one’s peers.
First published in Phyllis’ Newsletter
