The New Anti-Semitism : The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It

Rating:
Summary: The courage to tell the truth
Review: It takes courage to tell the truth, especially when it means risking the condemnation of a good number of one's own friends and being isolated from the social circle one has long been accustomed to being in. For daring to call the new ' radical left Anti- Semitism' by its name, for seeing that as Alan Dershowitz said ' Anti-Zionism is the latest form of Anti- Semitism' Phyllis Chesler takes on many of those who she was once good friends with. She too by daring to link the hypocritical extreme left with their support for anti- feminist fundamentalist Islam shows how the haters unite around one principal subject - anti- Semitism.
This book should be supplemented by a number of other new books on the subject , one by Gabiel Schoenfeld and another ed. by Ron Rosenbaum which strongly support the case that this old evil is rearing its head in new ways.

Rating:
Summary: The mouse that roared!
Review: That's my assessment after suffocating through four chapters of "The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It", by Phyllis Chesler. Normally, I don't read women authors. They're too sentimental and incoherent. Phyllis Chesler breaks new ground by being spiteful and irrational. You would be misled in assuming that the "we" in the title referred to all people of good will, who are deeply concerned about the prospects of yet another looming tribulation. Although no terms are explicitly defined, the "we" can only refer to a cadre of narrow-minded, agenda-driven pseudo-sophisticates and quasi-intellectuals. Chesler should have saved us the expense and handed this book out to her friends. Of course, her students would still have to pay full price for their copies.

A more frank "About the Author" on the cover jacket could have protected normal people. Unbeknownst to me when I procured this book, I had no idea that Chesler was some big-deal radical, liberal, feminist. The culture she idealizes doesn't reflect any reality, looming or otherwise. I also didn't know that she was a Jewess, but at the same time I didn't believe it a necessary criterion for detecting unconfined evil. (Like Churchill, Thatcher, and Reagan before him, George W. Bush appears to be doing just fine for a non-Jew, thank you very much.) The cover jacket led me to believe that Chesler and I agree that American Jews are asleep at the stick when it comes to a worldwide resurgence of anti-Semitism. If she is indeed awaking from slumber and not just talking in her sleep, then she's mistakenly applied full throttle to a nose-diving airplane. For a grown woman, psychologist, and professor no less, Chesler has many "issues" for which she needs to come to grips. Heaven forbid that she applies even a smidgen of analytical reasoning; that'd be too stereotypically male.

Chesler makes many blanket statements and lashes out at many groups, including men (obviously), Muslims, Catholics, Christians... etc. Each instance is followed by a half-hearted apology, almost as if she's convinced of her original conclusion, but is incapable of developing the supporting logic. Instead, she recoils at the display of her own emotional intolerance, especially given the book's purported theme. For instance, 'Catholicism frightens me ... enrages me.' Then later on, 'I don't mean to sound overly harsh...' It's as if her rabbi told her what to think when she was a girl, and now she regurgitates it at the dinner table. It's not pleasant. Even though I agree that Catholicism misses the mark, just saying that people you don't like are wrong does not make you right about anything. And, as someone who grew up Catholic, I can say that she's needlessly offended about 200 million fervent practitioners.

There is nothing wrong with making sweeping, thought-provoking generalizations about group-behavior based on collective beliefs, but when the audience extends past an immediate circle of friends, further explanation is required. In lieu of logic, Chesler offers the emotional shock-value of listing various terrorist and criminal acts, shaded data-dumps that are too often short on particulars and follow-through. The exclamation point to one six-page list is five pages of whining about feeling miffed that a Jewish feminist was rebuffed from attending a conference in Istanbul. Oh, how awful.

Chesler's distorted history is absent friends of the Jews. The Septuagint endeared Romans with a deep respect and tolerance for Judea. Jews had their own king alongside a Roman governor, were not required to serve in the legions, and were permitted their own religion. "Christ-killers" is a bad rap. However, the record indicates that in 30 CE the Jewish Messiah was arrested by Jews, who later cried out for His blood to be on theirs and their children's heads. Like clockwork, forty years later (one generation in Scripture), the Romans returned, re-conquered, and reduced the Temple to ruble. To everyone else, that should be the end of the matter. (Allah might need suckers to die for him, but Yahuweh-Elohim can take care of His own business.)

Unlike the diaspora of the Northern Kingdom, Jews can be recognized as Jews today because they were permitted separate communities and Shabbat. Seldom regarded as full citizens, Jews couldn't own land. It was a blessing in disguise; by emphasizing education, Jews formed a skilled class of artisans, traders, physicians, surgeons, attorneys, and bankers. When the Church rounded up dupes to die in the Crusades, European royalty extended direct and personal protection to their most lucrative tax base. The modern nation of Israel honors non-Jewish friends of the Jews with trees planted beside the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Yerushalayim. In America today there is an abiding commitment to the Jews of Israel, not as the Islamists believe by powerful American Jews, but from their favorite whipping boys - conservative Christians. Paying deeper attention to Scripture, Christians theologians and some populist preachers are coming to the nascent realization that their Hellenistic christ, is not in harmony with a Jewish Messiah or His teachings, and that the Scriptural record from Genesis to Revelations focuses on Yisra'el.

Chesler's caricature of the political spectrum is a red herring. Anti-Semitism occurs irrespective of right or left. "Feminazi" is a word; "Islamofacsist" is not! Because her terms are unclear from the outset, Chesler plays situational semantics to veil inconsistencies in her conflicted opinions. She associates the word "liberal" with progressive, presumably something that she finds good. A century ago "liberal" used to mean a considerate, charitable and generous attitude towards education, fellow man, and society at large. Today, "liberal" describes the mountain of discarded traditions, values, and morals, not replaced by anything of worth. As America's moral fabric disintegrates above liberalism's torch, the world's moral fabric deteriorates also. What follows permissiveness and decadence is weakness and vulnerability. To the extent that she's contributed to that effort, Chesler should be silent and reflective, until she can apologize.


Rating:
Summary: Reactionary and Racist
Review: This book is deeply flawed. Chesler seems to have some vision of how we should be responding to this "post 9-11 new anti semitism" world, which involves things like being "patient" and "moral" and "soft spoken" but she does not in any way elaborate upon this, thereby creating some kind of blurry fantasy of what could perhaps be called a very subjective notion of goodness, pressing upon an attempt to define the ethical, while always and only defining the unethical as the racialized other, the Arab Muslim.

She takes a strange pleasure in refuting the work of other feminists, particularly third world or black feminism which demands that race and class be bound up in the analysis. Its reads like a child having a tantrum---lacking any kind of rationale, full of feelings which are not connected to clear political thought.

Chesler waters down the American left to a simple finger pointed at racist capitalism, totally ignoring the vast amounts of complex thinking that have come out from the left.

She uses her historic relationship to the Left as some kind of static, fixed identity which can be used to legitamize her blatantly racist rant. When this can not be her claim to authenticity Chesler reminds us that she was married to an Arab man, a fact which apparently gives her expert status on all things/ideas/people Arab or Muslim.

Rating:
Summary: More harm than good...
Review: This book speaks to weak people who are unsure of their faith and who can only bring themselves up by tearing others down. Once the killing machine starts everybody gets caught up in it. Were Jews that died in the burning of the Jerusalem synagogue by the crusaders the only ones to perish that day? You would think so if all you read were the rantings in this book. How about the Spanish Inquisition, only Jews? And in the Holocaust, only Jews? The answer is not that we need this or that ally or friend. A thousand years ago we were friendly with Arabs over Franks, today we want now to be friends with the Franks over the Arabs? My G-d! The answer is to enjoy what blessings we have and know that we don't deserve them. What curses come let them come while we have a just heart. I don't see that this book prepares us for either. It is just a collection of one-sided complaints!

Rating:
Summary: Moslems manipulate the world
Review: To Islam, above everything, it is a sacred action to exterminate and destroy every single spark of Jewishness around the world. Doing that, they get virgins in the paradise- a promise by the barbaric terrorist "prophet" Muhammad.
It is sacred as default to use the international media and the world as their puppets and mental slavers to perpetrate this mission.
The book shows the Islamic manipulation and indoctrination, which is obviously underlined by their control of the oil and through fear, for what people know that if they do not agree with an Islamic creature, they will be mutilated and lynched.

Politicians, for support, corruption and fear openly support terrorist and Palestinians terrorist and predators in their carnage and Israeli holocaust in Israel and Jewish genocide wherever they can, as an example of the 1994 bombing of the Jewish teen institute in Argentina, with 100 deaths and more than 200 crippled to life forever.

Islam has been struggling for 1400 to do so and since as well cited, Israel is "the Jew" in the world, it is attacked with lies, bombs, mutilation, etc...

All those who seek peace for the following generation must understand the aim of the Media and what is Islam, as a malign cancer in full metastasis against any hope of peace.

The Islamic barbaric manipulation also targets those massacred by them in their lands such as Christians and Kurds, the atrocities in Sudan and thousands of massacres that today occurs but are totally ignored by the Islamic Puppets Media, which by the way have no morality, decency and whose reports are covered bias against all non Moslems and as a result, by pure bestiality: obviously, in consonance to Islam and 90 % of the Islamic population all over the world.

This book more than showing the injustice that the world commits in regards to Israel, open your eyes about the summary that Islam, the pedophile terrorist prophet Mohammed and their pagan god allah represents to the entire civilization.

It is a wake up call.

The irony is that the Media is an infidel and once, God forbid, Moslems exterminate all Jews, they will start exterminating all infidels and even those Moslems that do not agree with their Muftis and Kings, as they already do in Islamic countries.
Women, be prepared to have your lower parts mutilated!

Islam hates Jews and all infidels b/c Jews and Christians and other faiths based upon the bible represents God, the light, in contraposition to allah, the big Satan and absolute darkness.

The more every single Moslem scream about the Zionist domination, the more they aim to cover their own bestialities and bastardies. They are the source of manipulation, indoctrinations, slavery, hatred and of course, the ones who control the finances of the world through oil. They are the richest ones. To cover that, they say that Jews are the guilty ones. OPEN YOUR EYES.

Thanks for your kind attention.

Have a good reading.