Last Thursday evening, I went to a cult meeting. I did so not out of ideological curiosity (as I had already thoroughly studied this particular cult’s teachings, and discussed their finer points with some of its most fervent devotees), but rather in order to take a few notes so that I could relay my impressions here, in this article. My interest in reporting on the cult is personal, as many of its members would like to see one of my favorite countries — a country where I have both dear friends and close family — wiped off the map.

The country, of course, is Israel (what other nation’s destruction is considered an acceptable political objective on a university campus?). The cult itself bears no title, but its acolytes populate the ranks of student groups on our campus such as the Muslim Student Awareness Network (MSAN), the ironically named Coalition for Justice in the Middle East (CJME) and Students Confronting Apartheid in Israel (SCAI). On Thursday, two of these groups hosted a lecture by Norman Finkelstein here at Stanford...

...Throughout his whole talk, this same, totalitarian message persisted: all of us are already with the program, except for you. Despite furious note scribbling, I literally lost count of the number of times he used turns of phrase that asserted the total impossibility of thinking differently than he does about Jews holding sovereignty in the land of their ancestors. To list only a few: “there’s no dissent, no debate, no dispute,” “they all agree,” “complete and total unanimity,” “no controversy whatsoever,” “no legitimate disagreement” etc. Many members of the audience helped to reinforce this message by providing the example of how one should behave if one is, indeed, already on board. One should laugh knowingly when Norman points out the “extraordinary coincidence that each new Arab leader who threatens Israel is compared to Hitler,” never wondering whether people might have made those comparisons because of something an Arab leader said about wanting to pave Arab roads with Jewish skulls, or something he did to help organize Muslim SS divisions in Bosnia during World War II. One should tsk disgustedly when some bigoted fool is quoted making the outlandish claim that European Muslims are anti-Semites, never asking why it is that French and Belgian Jews fear to wear their skullcaps on the streets of Paris and Antwerp. One should boo derisively at the mere utterance of the name of Alan Dershowitz, never doubting the unredeemable evil of the youngest professor to ever be tenured at Harvard Law School. And, most important of all, one should applaud vehemently at the suggestion from one audience member that all of Israel is an illegal Zionist occupation that should be dismantled, never once questioning the morality of such an appealingly final solution to the problem of Zionism...