Phyllis Chesler: Voice of Moral Clarity

Phyllis Chesler placed me on her e-mail list sometime after I blogged about the honor killing of Aasiya Hassan. I'm glad she did. Dr. Chesler, a professor emerita of psychology and women's studies, and a contributor at Pajamas Media, is a voice of reason and moral clarity in a world where right and wrong seems to evaporated from the culture.

It turns out that Dr. Chesler has been attacked mercilessly in a series of e-mails from the followers of Norman Finkelstein. See the whole post, "My Norman Finkelstein Problem—And Ours."

I'll just share one of the attacks on Dr. Chesler here:

Dear Dr. Chesler, I’ve just finished reading your article entitled ‘Our Eternal Struggle’ written for the Jewish Press, and I felt compelled to write you. I have to ask you, in all seriousness: do you genuinely believe this hysterical, vacuous drivel you’ve discharged upon we the already steeped-in-bullshit reading public? Do you genuinely believe in this absurd and unjustifiable conflation of legitimate (and legally supported) criticism of Israel’s post-1967 occupation, warmongering, war crimes, rejectionism, torture, settlement expansion, house demolitions, imprisonment of civilians without trial, slaughter of innocent men, women and children (please show me the evidence from any respected, independent Human Rights organisation’s records to support the claim that Palestinian militants routinely use innocent civilians as human shields); with this old, recycled “New Anti-semitism”? Are you not even a little tempted to entertain the overwhelmingly more credible hypothesis that whatever little new anti-Jewish feeling that does exist can adequately be accounted for by Israel’s very real, very consistent and very gross violations of basic human rights in the eyes of the world? Do you feel at all guilty for damaging, albeit in a very tiny but still notably insidious way, the prospects of achieving a just and lasting peace for both sides to the conflict in the form of a two state settlement in accord with UN Resolution 242 and International Law? I mean, surely this MUST bother you in some small way. Do you suffer from nervous ticks at all? From the trademark Dershowitz facial spasm, perhaps? Guilt must manifest somewhere, surely? Assuming, of course, you’re not a hopeless sociopath.

Your genuinely concerned “new anti-semite” (I can safely assume my preceding remarks more than qualify me as a worthy target for this particular piece of ideological excrement?),

Hugo Newman.

p.s. Shame on you.

Hugo Newman, hugonewman@gmail.com

This is not out of the ordinary for those on the contemporary left.

There are a couple of more letters attacking Phyllis at the link.