Sleepwalkers in Dangerous Times

I am intimately surrounded by enemy propaganda and I’ve only myself to blame. For example, I have been reading Publishers Weekly (PW) for a very long time. I don’t have to but I won’t give it up. Yes, I have noted the leftward drift of their reviews but, like the New York Times, whose editors and book reviewers have drifted similarly left-ward, PW remains a “must” for all those who want to read reviews of upcoming book titles and who want to know what publishing deals are in the works.

In their March 10th issue (I am behind this month), there is an image on page 66 and a glowing review on page 74. The photograph is titled “Palestinians waiting to be processed at an Israeli checkpoint, West Bank.” Yes, another image, another work. The book is titled Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. The anonymous reviewer finds the book “urgent,” and focuses on how many Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli military operations-as if Israelis planned to kill the children.

This image, this idea, this reality has been burned into Western and Eastern brains. The Chinese Occupation of Tibet, the Sudanese genocide, the thousands of Muslim on Muslim atrocities and Islamist acts of terrorism all pale by comparison. The “Israeli checkpoints” was an accusation hurled at me when I spoke at Barnard in 2003. As I described the features of Islamic gender and religious apartheid, (honor killings, arranged marriage, polygamy, forced veiling, female genital mutilation, etc.) the assembled feminist crowd kept yelling at me to “admit” or to “focus on” the checkpoints. No matter what I said, they shouted back: “What about the humiliation at the checkpoints?” Continue Reading >>