Phyllis Chesler: Gender Apartheid and the Silence of ‘Faux Feminists’

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “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.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Phyllis Chesler, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Phyllis Chesler:
It’s my pleasure to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Phyllis, what is a faux feminist?

Ms. Chesler:
I’m a real feminist. A faux feminist is someone who has given up fighting for sex-based rights and is totally invested in gender identities of all sorts, and who has lost the plot in terms of women globally. Instead of supporting the Iranian women fighting for freedom 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 with atrocities galore, they don’t take a position, other than an abstract anti-racist, anti-colonial, post-colonial deconstructive position. Therefore, they help no one.

They’re not alone. It’s the entire Western academy, the media, human rights groups, and the United Nations. Whenever I type that out, it comes out untied, not united, because it’s a collection of tyrannies. The feminists are only a small part of those who once cared deeply about violence against women of all races, all classes, and all ethnicities.

Yet, they care nothing for the occupation of women’s bodies in Gaza and in Yehuda and Shomron, where increasingly they have been forcibly veiled, 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. What can one make of all this?

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s paradoxical. Certainly some of these Islamist governments are clearly tyrannical, but you included the UN in this group of tyrannies. Please explain why you do that.

Ms. Chesler:
Do you think Russia is a democracy? Do you think Iran or Turkey is a democracy? Let’s look at 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. This is Iran, where at their Evin Prison, they routinely rape and torture and murder dissidents of any kind, and women of all kinds.

Then there is China. Is China a democracy? I don’t think so. Their persecution of practically everyone is well-known, but they’re very powerful. They’re in an alliance with Russia, Turkey, and Iran that is coming toward Israel. Israel is really fighting the West’s battle all by itself, for the freedom from tyranny that the West has been standing for, was founded on, and is now not holding on to very well.

Mr. Jekielek:
When it comes to women’s rights in China, a group called Women’s Rights Without Frontiers headed by Reggie Littlejohn focused on the gender side. There’s a lot more men than women in China.

Ms. Chesler:
Yes. That’s because when it was a one-child policy, they got rid of the girls who were born. Now, there are too many boys. I understand that China’s policy has changed, and they now want women to go back to the kitchen and have more babies of all genders. Although India is a democracy with a profoundly awful caste system and class system, they also killed all the girl babies. Infanticide is another form of femicide, as is honor killing.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’ve done a lot of work on honor killing, but this is not really in the lexicon of most people. Most people don’t even understand what it means.

Ms. Chesler:
This is true. Honor killing is endemic to the Muslim Arab world, Muslim Africa, and Central Asia, including Pakistan. If a girl brings any sort of shame on her family, if she’s getting friendly with a non-Muslim girl or boy, if she wants to advance in 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.

When I first began studying it, Western feminists didn’t believe it and didn’t pay attention, and thought I was being racist, even though the victims are also women of color. But the perpetrators are men of color, and that is a no-no in woke ideology. I was so heartened when women from India, Pakistan, and Turkey began citing my work. They didn’t view that work as racist. They viewed it as feminist. Sometimes, you can find unexpected feminist allies who are not faux feminists.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have an extremely unusual story. Please share it with us.

Ms. Chesler:
You’re asking me how a nice Jewish girl from Borough Park in Brooklyn ended up in Kabul, Afghanistan, and what did I learn there? I was very young and I was foolish. I met a man in college who seemed totally Westernized. We talked about Dostoevsky and Proust. We went to all the best European films. I said, “I’d love to meet your family.” He said, “We would have to get married.” I had such wanderlust and such desire to travel that I said, “Okay.” It was a ho-hum decision.
We landed in Kabul. This is a long time ago, long before the Taliban. The airport official smoothly took away my American passport and said, “No problem, madam. We’ll return it to your family.” I never saw it again. 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. This was news to me.

That’s one thing. This was a posh family and a family of wealth. I wanted to go out and see the splendor of the city. Every time I did, I’d have to run away from the family. Then there would be a car with the driver catching up with me to bring madam home.

But I made it out a few times alone. I saw women in burkas, these claustrophobic garments, stumbling around with no peripheral vision, looking like ghosts, and literally forced to sit at the back of the bus. When I went to my Afghan family and said, “I just saw something terrible,” they said, “Oh, Americans are so hysterical.”

That was a time and place where my life was in real danger, because I got very, very ill. I didn’t know how to get out or even if I would be able to, and I contemplated all kinds of escape schemes. I understood then what it was like to be trapped in that country with no passport in the 20th century, because mine had been taken away.

Finally, at the very last moment, my father-in-law, a very dapper fellow, got me an Afghan passport, gave me $10, and said, “You can 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 to be on an Aeroflot flight going out.

Then I tried to tell other people at college that I had seen servants very badly treated, that I had seen women held very cheaply and leading very dangerous lives. Nobody wanted to hear it. They said, “How many servants did you have? You’re now a princess.” I didn’t yet have the phrase, Islamic gender and religious apartheid, which I now use.

Then my mother-in-law, poor soul, the first wife, every day she tried to convert me to Islam, and every day it was a battle. 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, and 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. It was also filled with nostalgia and charm.

Kabul is in a valley surrounded by the Pamir Mountains and it’s very gorgeous. 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 in and converted everyone via the sword. I only learned these things over time.

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, “We have to get them out. We need a feminist air force.” They thought I was being very poetic. They said, “Why? What are you worried about?” I said, “If their families learn they were raped, and if they are impregnated, their families will kill them or they will kill themselves.”

No one had ever 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. Many years later, I was privileged to conduct the first four studies on honor killing. 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. I view that as such important feminist work.

Then something even more extraordinary happened. I had been working with a woman named Mandy Sanghera, a Sikh who lives in London. When I was disinvited from presenting honor killing findings at a law school in America because I was seen as a Zionist, and therefore threats were made, Mandy said, “We can’t have you dishonored this way.” She convened a panel at University College, London, where I presented these findings, which was so kind of her.

She called me up 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.” That’s what we did. It was a group of grassroots feminists who undertook that holy task with no help from the government, and with opposition at every step of the way.

There is one young woman who I have adopted with my whole heart, not legally, but financially. She is now in graduate school finishing her master’s and will continue for a PhD. I looked out for her because she’s grateful, she’s brilliant, she’s hardworking, but she actually could have done it on her own anyway.

Can you imagine having the opportunity to rescue girls and women from that place? I had considered running away with the Kochis, the nomads, anything to get out. But then I realized, “They’ll marry me off, they’ll rape me, they’ll sell me, and then where am I going?”

It is a heart stopping sight in Afghanistan, though, with the camels and the women wearing all of their jewelry. It’s biblical. They’re walking barefoot so proudly, with all their jewelry clanging and clinking and tinkling.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re describing these scenes, but things have gone the other way in Afghanistan, and they have actually gotten worse.

Ms. Chesler:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Since the 1960s, the time when you were there.

Ms. Chesler:
It wasn’t good when I was there. It got better briefly in the 1970s, in the large cities. But it’s a geographically isolated country that has never been colonized and is ruled by illiterate mullahs and the mosque rules of the country. It’s been cursed with bad luck and a history of torturing and murdering anyone who thinks outside the box. I’ve probably read every memoir written by Afghans who describe this, especially one by Mohammad Anwar, which is really a great book.

First, there was a war when Russia invaded. Maybe they wanted more territory. Perhaps they wanted to uplift the poor in Afghanistan, which is how they described it. That didn’t end well for Russia. Then the Taliban came in, which didn’t end well for the people. They are lunatics.

They are like Hamas, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda. Afghanistan is the country that gave Bin Laden a safe cave to play in after 911. He was thrown out of Saudi Arabia, and he was thrown out of Sudan. How bad do you have to be to be thrown out of those two countries? Afghanistan and Mullah Omar took him in, and that’s where he plotted.

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 problem. America, with boots on the ground, allowed two generations of Afghans to get education, taste freedom, open up businesses, acquire skills, and get women’s shelters and rape crisis centers. But they all shut down the minute the Taliban came back and the boots were gone.

Mr. Jekielek:
This was the context of you helping to get 400 women out.

Ms. Chesler:
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 burkas, just medieval. We knew if we couldn’t get them out, at best and 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. The way America left Afghanistan was horrendous, totally irresponsible, and non-strategic. The military equipment that we left behind I’m sure made its way to Hamas.

Mr. Jekielek:
Since I’ve been reading your work, I’ve been thinking about rape as a weapon of war. We don’t realize how common this has been historically, so please share about this with us.

Ms. Chesler:
Rape is a war against the rape victim, even not in a war zone. It’s a hate crime, but the FBI doesn’t view it as such. Mainly it’s women who were raped by men, although men also rape men. Historically, it has been not a weapon of war, but a spoil of war.

If the army comes in, they do what they wish. A pogrom includes rape to the max. But as of 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, and to cleanse a population.

In pogroms against the Jews, it did just that. There was no population left, and the survivors had lots of psychiatric issues. With the Islamist groups in North Africa in the 1990s, with the systematic raping of women 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 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 had of their October 7th massacre.

Many rape victims are resilient. Many are not. If you are repeatedly raped, you’ll have insomnia and flashbacks. You’ll have the symptoms of post-traumatic stress that we associate with soldiers who’ve been in war and in battle. You’ll also have shame and you will blame yourself.

This is true in a war zone or in regular society. You’ll think you did something wrong in the wrong place at the wrong time, looking the wrong way. It is unusual that they photographed themselves, that they were proud of what they did, and they laughed and took pleasure in it.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re talking about October 7th now.

Ms. Chesler:
Yes, October 7th, Hamas. When I saw that, I thought that we need to capture them and try them in Jerusalem after Israel is victorious, militarily. Certainly not in The Hague, but in Jerusalem, the way Adolph 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 there’s not a public acknowledgement and acceptance of what happened. It’s a pogrom on steroids, as I’ve written. I hope we can have that acknowledgement.

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. You asked me earlier about faux feminists. Usually the Me Too movement in America says, “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, they said, “Well, we don’t really know what happened.”

Mr. Jekielek:
Despite the extensive video and photo evidence, there are still powerful narratives out there saying this was overblown. Someone who I trust very highly said that serial killers don’t do the things he saw being done in this footage. Yet at the same time, these narratives exist that this didn’t even happen, or perhaps it is overblown. People are struggling at this point to try to understand how there could be such a-

Ms. Chesler:
Disconnect.

Mr. Jekielek:
Disconnect, yes.

Ms. Chesler:
From the day after Israel won the 1967 war of self-defense, the Russians and the Arab League countries started funding the curriculum in the West, and strategizing, and brainwashing. That has now paid off. With the New York Times, which I once trusted and appeared in their pages and was reviewed in their pages, I am now canceled. They lie. That means all of the trusted media organizations, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, are not that different now from Al Jazeera, funded by Qatar, who is the paymaster for Iran.

This is lethal Jew hatred. It’s almost as if Obama is still pulling the strings of Biden, and wants Iran to destroy Israel, not understanding that this means Iran comes for the West. There is $10 billion that our American government just unleashed and gave to Iran, and it was through Qatar. Why would Qatar ever be chosen to negotiate for hostages?

Mr. Jekielek:
When you say Qatar is the paymaster of Iran, what do you mean by that?

Ms. Chesler:
It has its bank accounts. It funnels money to Hamas, and also 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, and fighting to be free of this cruel diabolical regime of mullahs.

I see the alliance of China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey against the West. The only reason why a country like Saudi Arabia would be open to the Abraham Accords is because they’re terrified of Shiite Muslim power. The Muslims in Iran are Shia. Throughout the Arab Middle East, they are Sunni Muslims. They were seeing the Abraham Accord 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. 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 this with their whole hearts. They really believe that these terrorist and fascist organizations are freedom fighters. They truly believe this. They have the binary thinking that there’s only an oppressor and someone who’s oppressed. It’s good vs. evil, but they have it upside down. Orwell would not believe his ears hearing this.

You have crowds marching across America and across Europe calling for death to Jews in the name of liberation and in the name of freedom. Now, Palestinian, Gazan civilians should be liberated, but it should be from Hamas. The Arabs who live in Yehuda and Shomron, otherwise known as the British West Bank, they should also 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, independent 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 and funded not just by Arab or Muslim money, but funded by China, funded by Russia, and funded by Left-wing philanthropists in America. I’m thinking of Soros as one, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as another, and the Tides Foundation. This is a well-financed campaign.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re talking about all these funders of progressive ideology.

Ms. Chesler:
Yes. I thought I was a progressive, and I thought I was a radical. I was, and I still am. But now, all the goalposts have changed. If you are fighting for women’s rights, no, it has to be for trans rights. It has to be for LGBTQIZ 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, and there’s no such thing as reality. There’s no such thing as objectivity. This is delusionary, it’s apocalyptic, and it’s suicidal thinking. I’m now wondering how long will it take for deprogramming to become effective?

Mr. Jekielek:
But is there really an appetite for deprogramming? There have been a number of watershed moments in the last few months. October 7th was shocking to people, but then the reaction to October 7th in Western nations was even more shocking. It wasn’t obvious to many Jews that antisemitism is baked into this ideology.

Ms. Chesler:
It was denied, it was minimized, and it was challenged. Jews are an interesting group because we want to help other people, which assumes therefore that oneself needs no help and that one is just okay. Now, Jews in America are realizing, “Well, we’re not exactly okay.” What does that do to our ethics and our morality about helping the underdog, and helping those who are more in need?

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 you? You’re not going to survive.” Jews are now faced with a question of survival. This is new for the first time since the Holocaust.

Mr. Jekielek:
Perhaps it’s the third question that is the operative one. If not now, when?

Ms. Chesler:
These are very interesting times, as in troubling, historic, and 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 which said that Zionism equals racism, which it does not. Rather, as Judea Pearl, the journalist Daniel Pearl’s father said, “Anti-Zionism equals racism. “

Then I worked at the UN and put together a conference which took place in Oslo. I went to that historic women’s meeting in Copenhagen, 1980, which was a psychological program and a precursor to Durban. It was unbelievable because there were women from Iran in full dark, forbidding chadors.

Those from the Arab League and the Left Europeans were saying, “Death to the Jews, down with Israel.” I didn’t know what was going on. I flew to Israel and gave a series of interviews saying that antisemitism is back, and the bloody beast is back. This was in 1980.

It was on the front pages of the Israeli newspapers. The Israelis in general said, “Don’t worry.” In 1981 I tried to interest American-Jewish organizations in allowing me to develop a curriculum to teach their staff how to use the language of liberation and oppression. 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 the 2000s. I knew I wouldn’t abandon my feminist work, but I did have to focus on antisemitism, and I did. 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. I had front page reviews for my other works. Jewish organizations didn’t take it seriously. In one case, the head of the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] at the time had his own book coming out, which did get reviewed.

Guess what? His book entirely missed the Islamist part of the picture. It was all about Christian, Nazi-era, Jew haters. That has changed rapidly in a surreal way now, and Jewish students are frightened on campuses. Professors began writing to me in 2003 and 2004 to tell me that they were being harassed and they were being treated badly because they were suspected of being pro-Israel.

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 was in 2003 and 2004. I was a professor for 30 years at a university, and when I spoke on campuses, I needed police protection. That was new.

I was asked to speak in 2003 at a conference at Barnard College. It was a grassroots conference of 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. Then an agent 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?”

I said, “If you’re asking me where I stand on the issue of apartheid, I oppose it. The largest practitioners of apartheid are Muslim countries, where gender and religious apartheid prevails.” The place went crazy and everyone began yelling. I went through the litany of the woes and sorrows of Arab women in that region. They didn’t care.

My son came to pick me up, and he started moving towards the front where I was. Then the organizers hustled me out for my safety. Thereafter, many times I needed police protection when I was speaking, which is crazy.

Then, of course, there are the disinvitations. Cambridge University had invited me to speak at the 10th anniversary of their women’s studies program. Then they disinvited me when I asked about the other speakers who were rabid anti-Zionists masquerading as feminists. I just said, “What kind of security do you have planned?” On the basis of that question they said, “Maybe you should come another time.” But they never invited me another time.

Mr. Jekielek:
This happened much earlier than your average conservative speaker today trying to go to most campuses. They are in a similar situation that you were in back in 2003.

Ms. Chesler:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
At the time, I had no idea about any of this.

Ms. Chesler:
This trouble was brewing. It was there, only it wasn’t seen. You bring up October 7th, which was beyond surreal and shocking, but managed the sight of Jewish blood and thrilled the Jew haters globally. It’s almost as if the global intifada was primed to act out, zombie-like, all at the same time, in response to this death cult massacre, celebrating it as just desserts for the Israeli Nazi.

Mr. Jekielek:
How do you explain the people that weren’t even particularly indoctrinated into this ideology suddenly coming out on the wrong side of all this?

Ms. Chesler:
It’s herd instinct, conformity, fear, and cowardice. That explains a bit of it. Ignorance, disinformation, and misinformation explains it a bit more. People don’t want to lose their jobs, their friends, their family members, or their funding. They want to remain popular and safe.

Then they really do believe this, because the media, as well as their courses at college, have hammered into them that Israel’s a bad guy, not the good guy, that Israel deserves to be destroyed, and that Israel deserves to be exterminated because then the world will be safe, and then the world will be free.

It took the New York Times nine weeks to finally have a one-off article by Jill Filipovic that admitted that what happened on October 7th was terrible and kidnapping civilians and keeping them hostage where they’re probably being tortured and raped every single day is not so good.

On the other hand, the nuance is that the Palestinians have been suffering. They have been suffering because of Hamas, a terrorist organization which takes all the money meant for the population to enrich their bank accounts, which are huge, and to build their terror tunnels, and to get all their military equipment.

The population in Gaza has been so heavily brainwashed that they were in favor of October 7th, according to polls. But they would be shot dead if they didn’t say they were in favor. All of the journalists who went into Gaza or onto the West Bank knew that they were seeing doctored footage and Potemkin villages, but they reported on it as if it was true.

All of the top media in the West reported Hamas death figures that happened overnight. They knew right away that it was 578 people killed, with no objectivity. These were hysterical statements that Israel is now managing to denounce more quickly than ever before. But psychologically, the first narrative out there is the one that sticks.

Israel proved that it didn’t bomb the Al-Ahli 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. 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 and deserves to be massacred. The conservative media is so important, and any media that can tell the truth will make a huge difference.

Mr. Jekielek:
Are you conservative?

Ms. Chesler:
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 the conservative point of view. For example, today a man can say, “I really feel that I’m a woman. If you address me as a man, I’ll sue you.” That’s where we are in the world today.

Maybe I used to be or would now be considered a classical liberal, which now actually means a 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.

Now, they’re all united and they’re in battle, so Israel has its own demons in addition to this massacre and the hostages. Hezbollah, funded by Iran, has been shelling rockets into the north of Israel. Israel is fighting deep into Gaza, and as of yesterday, has lost 116 very young soldiers with an average age of 22-years-old.

When Arafat launched his pre-planned and 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 50 to 60,000 Americans killed and hundreds of thousands wounded.

Israel has been living with this for all of the 21st century. The Oslo Accords were fake, diluted, and impossible. Why? Israel actually 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 differ, it’s the hijacking of Islam that has taught them hatred of the infidel, and a desire for a global caliphate. Those who want that are serious about trying to get it. We’re making a huge mistake not to take them seriously.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you think there’s been a fundamental shift where things are starting to move in a different direction?

Ms. Chesler:
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. 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 an interfaith mission to Israel to stand with their Jewish sisters.

There’s another coalition that I’m part of called the Clarity Coalition, which is an interfaith coalition of very independent, courageous Muslims, Christians, and Jews, along with ex-Muslims, one of whom is running for the Senate in Arizona, Zuhdi Jasser, who’s a retired Navy person.

I can’t be against all Muslims because that’s not possible. But there are those who are fanatic, those who want this global caliphate, and those who hate Jews and hate infidels, which means everyone else, like the Hindus and Baha’is. Israel gave asylum to the Baha’is when they fled from Iran. Anyone who is not Muslim is on their hit list, all of them.

The people who do not have the ability to resist them, to overthrow them, which is not an easy thing to do, I work with them. I would love to see coalitions of resistance. It is inevitable, because look at the darkness otherwise, and look at the death and destruction otherwise. I’m not saying we will win. I’m saying that we have the capacity to fight to win, and I hope we do that.

Mr. Jekielek:
What about these young people that have bought into this progressive woke ideology?

Ms. Chesler:
Islam has been engaged in slavery and still is, and certainly colonialism and imperialism as well. There’s such a great ignorance on the part of the wokesters in terms of human imperfection and the sins and crimes of all humanity, whatever color they may be. It’s not just the West and America. I’m not sure about how you reeducate someone who has been deeply indoctrinated. I’m not sure.

That’s going to be a task for the coming generations. 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 just can’t be certain about all this.

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. They have endless numbers of stories to tell, and they have not been indoctrinated in this way. This is a Western disease. This is a Western suicide pact with the devil.

The wokesters 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. It’s very rabid and it’s dangerous and it needs to be called out.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m seeing some signs that it’s actually being called out. Do you see a shift happening? Do you expect it to continue?

Ms. Chesler:
I hope it does, but I don’t want to give false hope. We’re in a very bad spot. I’ve been marking it and 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 or the climate which is another battle, but we have a chance of saving education and knowledge and culture.

I read that activists for climate interrupted an opera in New York at the Metropolitan Opera for 22 minutes. Half the audience booed and a third walked out. The opera was Tannhauser. I’m not a great Wagner fan, but in my own living room I have an opera channel, so 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.

That’s what we’re looking at. We’re looking at a bloody overthrow of all tradition and deeming it all evil with nothing worth saving. Barbarians are not at the gate. The barbarians are already within, so we need to fight it from within.

Mr. Jekielek:
Phyllis Chesler, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Chesler:
My pleasure to be with you. I appreciate your questions.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Phyllis Chesler and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.