Noam Chomsky
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Bawer
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Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
Phyllis
Chesler, Ph.D, is an Emerita Professor of Psychology
and Women’s Studies at City University of New
York. She is a best-selling author, a legendary feminist
leader. This article first appeared in her newsletter:
https://phyllis-chesler.com
Listen to an audio version of this essay:
Lately
I've been portraying some of the Western Academy’s
leading and most influential figures, such as Edward
Said, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Judith Butler. Their ideas
have not only shaped the media and most international
organizations, but they have also been fueled by both
left-wing and Muslim anti-Western funders. Today, I
have a few words to say about Angela Davis. In my forthcoming
book, The Complete Palestinianization of American
Feminism, I expand the discussion to include many
more such idols with considerable claws of clay who
have dominated our universities for at least four decades.
When I was much younger and somewhat in the grip of
a left-wing cult, I was among those who marched for
Angela Davis when she was jailed in Manhattan. Most
feminists and feminist magazines featured her as a Black-American
feminist hero starting in 1972; this has continued on
down through the decades. Feminists did not—and
do not—view her as a pro-Soviet apologist. Feminist
newspapers idolized her as a Black woman fighting back.
They and others glamorized Davis as a feminist, an artist,
and a heroic dissident, but she is nothing of the sort.
Davis
is an unrepentant Communist who supported the Soviet
Union in every way and refused to criticize it for its
persecution of real dissidents and ethnic minorities.
The millions of peasants whom Stalin murdered in a state-sponsored
famine—not a word from Davis. Stalin’s torture
cells? His gulag? The rise of a plutocracy? Putin? Ukraine?
Again, not a word of reproach. Instead, Davis savagely
criticized only America for its history of slavery and
for its continued discrimination against Black Americans.
She was among those who took the globalized fight against
apartheid in South Africa to alleged “apartheid”
in Israel.
Although
she is a lesbian, thank God, Davis does not identify
as “queer.” She has falsely compared what
happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, with
what happens to brown-, black-, and olive-skinned Palestinian
Jihadists and terrorists at the hands of Israelis fighting
back. Davis has misused the concept of “intersectionality”
so as to better create cartoon-level memes, the purpose
of which is to scapegoat Israel for the crimes committed
by others and to draw false parallels where none exist.
For
example, in a 2015 collection of her lectures and interviews,
she strongly embraced anti-Zionism and, according to
Dr. Corinne E. Blackmer, continued to repeat “the
major strand of Soviet-era ideological propaganda but
has transcended Cold War aporias to remerge in the twenty-first
century as pro-BDS advocacy.”
In
a 2017 article titled “The Intersectionality of
Fools” in The New Criterion, Dominic
Green critiques Davis’s 2016 book, Freedom
is a Constant Struggle, in which she likens “the
recurring shootings or killings of unarmed Black men
in the United States, on the one hand, with the deaths
of armed Palestinian protestors in Israel/Palestine.”
I want to thank Corinne E. Blackmer for having led me
to this article. “Armed protestors”? Is
that how Davis characterizes Arab Jihadist/terrorists
who are obsessed with ethnically “cleansing”
the Middle East of its remaining Jews in Israel?
As
I’ve noted elsewhere, when I spoke at the University
of Santa Cruz, where Davis taught, I personally invited
her to attend my lecture on antisemitism or at least
to meet with me. Of course, I received no response.
Does
anyone even remember why Angela Davis was jailed, tried,
and exonerated? Does anyone even care?
In
1970, Davis purchased the firearms that Jonathan Jackson,
the brother of the imprisoned George Jackson, used in
the kidnapping of a judge, prosecutor, jurors, and two
or three African American prisoners in an open court.
A police shoot-out ensued, which led to the death of
the judge and three African American men. Davis made
the FBI Most Wanted List, was jailed, tried, and found
innocent by an all-white jury. Support for her was tremendous.
She visited Cuba and found it an anti-racist paradise.
She visited Soviet Russia to receive the Lenin Peace
Prize and ran for vice president of the American Communist
Party.
Even
before she was found “not guilty,” Davis
had already become the Che Guevara or the Lila Khaled
of the feminist movement.
