Well, the demographics are against Europe because as women become more educated and men become progressive about women’s rights, the birthrate goes down. If you’re not under siege, this is fine – you have two children instead of eight. But if you [accept within your midst] a culture that believes in polygamy and believes that a woman should have eight children, your country will be flooded.
Now that doesn’t mean we want to force white Caucasian women to breed, breed, breed, but it does raise questions about immigration, deportation of radicals, restriction of access to radical mosques, etc. It also raises questions about using European laws to punish very seriously honor and shame crimes committed on European soil.
You write in Living History – in reference to standing up to radical Islam – that people would “rather live on their knees than risk dying on their feet.” Can you elaborate?
Jews are an anxious group – understandably, given the millennia of persecution – and want to have no trouble. They don’t want to bear the burden – or glory – of having to support a Jewish state that has been demonized into pariah status. They don’t want to spend their lives fighting. They don’t want their salaries risked. They don’t want to receive hate mail. They want to have opportunities and take vacations.
Anyone who takes up Israel’s cause is demonized as a “Zionist,” a “conservative,” and a “Republican.” I mean, these are all curse words. And once [you defend Israel] – even if you are a staunch civil libertarian, as I am, or a committed feminist, as I am, it doesn’t matter – you have crossed the line of what is permissible and nothing you say thereafter will be deemed credible. The litmus test for political correctness is where you stand on Israel.
Why, in your opinion, do many liberals focus on the occasional Muslim killed in self-defense by Israel when Muslims are killed in far greater numbers in so many other places, such as Syria where more than 200,000 people have died as a result of the ongoing civil war there?
It’s a good question, and I think part of the answer – the darker part of the answer – is nobody really cares about Muslims. The world doesn’t care about barbarians vs. barbarians, or Muslims vs. Muslims or persons of color vs. persons of color – just as in Ferguson and Baltimore nobody really cares about the black-on-black crime. They care only if a white policeman is killing a young black man.
In addition, it’s a psychological defense mechanism. Rather than focusing on real genocide committed by Islam in terms of religion and gender – which is a bigger and harder problem to solve – you focus on the tiny, not totally perfect, state of Israel. That way, people don’t have to feel helpless in the face of terrorism or barbarism but rather can feel: “If only Israel were abolished, everything would be okay.”
In your 2013 book, An American Bride in Kabul, you reminisce about your marriage to an Afghani Muslim 50 years ago. How did a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn wind up eloping with a Muslim to Afghanistan?
I was a born rebel. In 1948 in Boro Park, where I grew up, I joined a left-wing Zionist group, Hashomer Hatzair, which envisioned a mystical, political, and harmonious union between Yishmael and Yitzchak. Perhaps that concept reverberated with me over time so that so that my guard was not up as it should have been.
But I was not openly rebelling by the time I got involved with this man. I was a child and I knew no danger and it was a great adventure. I had no intention of staying in Afghanistan, nor did I wish to get married, but he said, “Well, I can’t introduce you to my family and we can’t travel the world unless we are married,” so I said, “Well, all right.” It was a civil ceremony that meant little to me.