I did not liken anyone to Hitler, I did not call anyone a Nazi in a pejorative sense, I did not say that it was an anti-Semitic act to criticize Israel, I did not say that Palestinians are irrational, and I did not say that Israel was formed because of the Holocaust or that Jews are entitled to Israel because of the Holocaust. Not one of those statements appeared in my Wespeak, they do not represent my views, and I have never expressed support for those views—ever. With all due respect, learn to read.
What I did say was that the Grand Mufti, the father of Palestinian nationalism, was a Nazi. Not Nazi-esque or Nazi-like, but an actual member of the Nazi party. I said this because it is true, and because it is terrifically important. It is important because Palestinian Nationalism—not “criticizing Israel” or trying to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinians, but the project of the Palestinian political groups and their advocates—is an idea with an intellectual history, and at the center of that history and the core of that idea is the Mufti’s Nazism.
That Nazism colors the project, which was and is essentially anti-Semitic. This is not only because it is based on a mythical history (laid down in “oral histories” and even in contemporaneous documents created for propaganda purposes by the Mufti’s organization) in which Jews are held responsible for every ill that befalls the Palestinians, and not only because of the extraordinary bigotry that remains prevalent among Palestinians and in Arab countries in general, where the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is regularly republished. It is not even just because the Palestinians’ own political groups and elected leaders have openly genocidal platforms, although surely that is sufficient. It is also because the idea underlying the project is that Jews do not exist as a people, do not have any right to the sites and antiquities that are their cultural patrimony, and that their continuous residence in their homeland (as well as the homes and lives millions of people have built there over the past 50 years) should be disregarded so the land can become the exclusive province of another ethnic group. The distinction between the Mufti’s “send them to concentration camps” and today’s “let them move to New York” is without a moral difference.
It is, therefore, of substantial interest to me as an alumnus when someone comes to my alma mater to spread anti-Semitic propaganda straight from the 1920s. Especially when that person is invited to campus even though a simple Google check would have revealed that they are notorious for the same. Wesleyan students openly supporting (donating to?) organizations (e.g., Hezbollah, Hamas, Fatah) that are actively targeting my relatives for murder, and often following through with their plans is, I think, something I am entitled to be concerned about.
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