"Activists Hijacking Feminism to Attack Israel at Women's Studies Association Meeting"

Article here. Excerpt:

'The next National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting will take place in San Juan, Puerto Rico on November 13-16, 2014 and is aptly named “Feminist Transgressions.” Indeed, the conference itself is “transgressive” in that it minimizes the cause of women to focus, yet again, on the cause of Palestine, aka the destruction of Israel.

This is only the latest, among many other examples, of the way in which Women’s Studies—an idea which I pioneered so long ago--has been Stalinized and Palestinianized. I wonder whether the forces of evil will try to pass a resolution in favor of boycott, divestment, and sanctions—not against Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, or Russia—but against Israel only.

The Association’s line-up of professorial and celebrity talent is 100% politically correct; the speakers are mainly African-American, African-Hispanic, and African/Asian Caribbean. While I may not agree with some of their views, e.g. the pro-sex “work” agenda which is being presented at this conference, I recognize that these speakers--my old friend bell hooks, Ana-Maurine Lara, Ana Irma Lassen, and Kamala Kempadoo--are all genuinely feminist.

However, not so the Plenary session speakers. The Plenary is titled: “The Imperial Politics of Nation-States: U.S., Israel, and Palestine.” The speakers are Brandeis graduate Angela Davis, the well-known (former) communist, former associate of the Black Panther Party, and recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1970, Davis purchased the firearms that Jonathan Jackson, the brother of the imprisoned George Jackson, used in the kidnapping of a judge, prosecutor, jurors, and two or three African-American prisoners in open court. A police shoot-out ensued which led to the death of the judge and of three African-American men. Davis made the FBI Most Wanted List, was jailed, tried, and found innocent by an all-white jury. Support for her was tremendous. She visited Cuba and found it an anti-racist paradise, she visited Soviet Russia to receive the Lenin Peace Prize, and she ran for vice-president of the American Communist Party.
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In 2002, a lifetime ago, a feminist conference on women, war, and peace in Palestine-Israel featured a keynote speaker which fully equaled Dworkin’s metaphoric hyperbole. Ruchama Marton, an Israeli Jewish psychiatrist, likened Israelis to “batterers” in a marriage. Guess who is the “battered wife”? None other than the Palestinians.

Are the Israelis and Palestinians married? Is the feminist view of marriage that it is like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? When one says this, one is both misusing hard-won feminist knowledge and rendering the specifics of both Israeli and Arab Palestinian suffering invisible. Such an inflammatory and vulgar misuse of ideas is worthy of Joseph Goebbels, not of supposedly independent-minded feminists.

This is indeed the problem. Like so many other academics, feminists are no longer independent-minded. They have also become the spawn of Edward Said’s thinking about post-colonialism and Palestinian nationalism. Worse yet, they are also, along with all the rest of the herd, die-hard Lacanians and post modernists, and one cannot understand a word that they write—except when they are clearly, cravenly, attacking Israel and Zionism.'

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About the article's author: Phyllis Chesler