When will “progressive” Westerners accept the fact that not all people and all cultures are the same?

by Phyllis Chesler

Hamas/Iran/Qatar’s barbarian butchery of Israelis on 10/7 and what is now happening in Gaza is far bigger than the Middle East.

A third World War is underway—and has been for a long time. Secular-socialist Westerners have absolutely refused to accept that it is a religious war, and one being waged against infidels and Western civilization.

It may start with the Jews but it never ends there.

However, many “progressive” Westerners, including those who spent six months demonstrating in Israeli streets, refuse to believe that Israel is facing a religious war being waged by a barbaric death cult. Stubbornly, they assert that it is all about Bibi—and about territory, colonialism, racism, apartheid, and imperialism. This refusal to see reality, to understand that not all cultures are the same, is not new.

Once, long ago, I was held captive in Kabul by my Afghan husband, a sophisticated, “westernized” man whom I had met at an American college. Once back in Afghanistan, he became another person.

Without warning, he expected me to live in purdah, in a polygamous family, which included my mother-in-law, the first of three wives, a woman who tried to force me to convert me to Islam and who then tried to kill me.

Airport officials had removed my American passport, (“a mere formality, Madam”), and I found myself back in the 10th century with no exit out.

I learned the hard way that the Islamic East and the Judeo-Christian West really are very different.

Long before the Taliban came to town, women in burqas were forced to sit at the back of the bus and were rudely pushed to the back of the shopping line when any man, usually a male servant, came to make his purchases.

I was horrified by this and by child marriage, polygamy, purdah, burqas, hijab, the mistreatment of servants, and rumored honor killings. When I said so, my Afghan family mocked me as an “hysterical” American overreaction to what was a normal and perfectly acceptable way of life.

It was for them, but not for me, and not for anyone who had grown up in America, the land of libraries and liberty.

I nearly died there. However, I got out and lived to tell the tale. It was a story that no one wanted to hear.

No one at college, including the professors in whom I had confided, wanted to grasp what I was trying to say.

Afghanistan is a wild and tribal place, a land of men who live to fight, kill, and die; a country of men who hate women and who love boys.

It is important to understand that Afghanistan was never colonized by the West. Therefore, the Afghan history of gender and religious apartheid, extreme but normalized cruelty, illiteracy, poverty, the power of the mullahs, was—and alas, still is—their indigenous culture.

Years later, my views were confirmed by M.H. Anwar’s Memories of Afghanistan and by Edward Hunter’s The Past Present, both of whom described savagery, extreme misogyny, and the tyranny of illiterate mullahs, mobs, and Kings, at least before they were exiled or assassinated.

Remember 9/11? Please realize that Bin Laden was thrown out of Saudi Arabia and Sudan, but welcomed by Mullah Omar in Afghanistan where he hatched his 9/11 plot.

Today, too many Westerners still refuse to understand that Islam has, once again, become Islamism; that jihad does not mean a spiritual “shaking off,” but means killing the infidels and doing so in the creatively demonic ways perfected by the PLO, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. Islamism = jihad terrorism. Jihad Islamism, as funded by Iran and Qatar, and by Soros and the Rockefeller Brothers.

We have just seen the most barbaric assault on Israeli civilians by Hamas. They live-streamed it. They called home to boast about their bloody deeds.

And how has the West responded?

Many have blamed Israel—for having “colonized” Gaza, a territory that Israel evacuated in 2005. Mobs all over Europe, Russia, and North America have blamed the victim, which is psychologically and politically easier to do that confront the evil of terrorism, or admit that one lusts for Jewish blood.

Western politicians and iconic journalists have cautioned Israel not to “retaliate,” and have successfully negotiated to resupply (an already well-supplied) Hamas, and in the name of “humanitarian aid.”

Activist and student mobs all over the world have called to “free, free Palestine, from the river to the sea” which is tantamount to calling for the extermination of the Jewish state. Israel, of course, begged Palestinian civilians to flee the north before Israel invaded. Hamas blocked roads and shot down those civilians who tried to do so.

While there are some exceptions, too many Muslims in the West and their left-wing allies seem excited by the sight of Jewish blood, Jewish body parts, Jewish headless torsos, Jewish blood, Jewish pain. Their insufferable chants of “liberation,” and “freedom from occupation,” are meant to disguise their insatiable blood-lust.

By now, we know that at least 10,000 American troops have landed in Saudi Arabia, that Iran’s Hezbollah has launched at least 17 rockets at American ships in the Mediterranean, and that Hamas/Hezbollah have murdered 33 Americans. Hamas has also taken hostages from 41 countries. There are also 600 American citizens who are trapped in Gaza.

When will “progressive” Westerners accept the fact that not all people and all cultures are the same? That as critical as they are about America’s imperfections and historical crimes, that Muslim countries also have a long history of colonialism, imperialism, conversion via the sword, black slavery, white slavery, and gender and religious apartheid, etc.

To expect such a culture to “redeem” America’s sins is lunacy.

We live in an era of derangement. We are doomed if reality does not triumph.