Politics may have driven us apart, but even I retain a warm affection for her. I would talk to her if she called me now – such is the nature of her personal power. Gloria is a nice woman. She really is. But her enforcers are not.
Robin Morgan, whom I personally introduced to Gloria and suggested that Gloria hire as an editor in the mid-70’s, has functioned as one of those enforcers. Morgan’s position on Israel and Judaism is beneath contempt.
In 1989, Morgan published a book, The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism, which was reprinted in 2001. The book glorifies the Palestinian Authority and romanticizes the most corrupt, scandalous, and terrorist-connected of UN agencies: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which has employed and funded terrorists and appropriated money meant for impoverished Palestinians whose misery is meant to arouse the world against Israel. The world has an estimated 135 million refugees; UNRWA has managed to focus the world’s attention on the plight of only one small group.
Here’s Morgan on UNRWA: “The entire organization won my respect for extraordinary work performed against all odds.” She profusely thanks UNRWA for having arranged her trip to the Palestinian “camps.” Having UNRWA do this is like having the Soviet-era and KGB-controlled Intourist organize your trip to Moscow.
Morgan refers to Israel as “The Israeli Occupying Authority.” She appears to be not nearly as repulsed by the savage mistreatment of Palestinian women by Palestinian men as she is by a Jewish Jerusalem.
In the post-9/11 material for her book, she is more concerned with the possibility that America might turn “bigoted” and “right-wing” than she is with the devastation at Ground Zero; more concerned with the vulnerability of Muslim men in America than with America’s vulnerability to Muslim extremists.
Interested readers can see what I’ve written about Ms. Magazine’s history in terms of Israel, Judaism, Islam, and Palestine in my latest book, The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom. Read especially, pages 112-113, 115-117, 119-120, and 128. I would also suggest selected portions of my books The New Anti-Semitism and Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman. (You guessed it: Ms magazine did not excerpt or even review these books. Just call me lucky.)
I have no idea how influential Gloria is these days vis-à-vis the magazine. It matters not. She still appears on the masthead as a contributing editor, and for decades the media depicted her – and, by extension, Ms. – as the voice (and face) of mainstream feminism, as opposed to the more radical strains of the movement found on university campuses and in even more obscure journals.
That allegedly mainstream façade, however, is now demolished as the magazine has revealed itself to be no less reflexively hostile to Israel than those who inhabit the sisterhood’s more extreme fringes.