In the wake of the controversy over Hamzeh Daoud, the Stanford University student who vowed that he was “gonna physically fight zionists on campus,” Emily Wilder, who is “an undergraduate sophomore studying history with a regional concentration on the Middle East,” has taken to the august pages of the Stanford Daily to write an appallingly fact-free anti-Israel screed in defense of her “best friend, Hamzeh Daoud.” It’s called “A defense of Palestinian pain on campus” — one wonders if Emily’s “regional concentration on the Middle East” has led her to the discovery that the “Palestinian” people do not exist and have never existed. Somehow I doubt it.
Anyway, the thrust of Emily Wilder’s op-ed is that Israel is so evil (established with generous helpings of demonstrably false “Palestinian” jihad propaganda) that it’s understandable that Hamzeh Daoud, the poor victim, would want to assault Jews and other supporters of Israel physically. That’s bad enough, but Wilder goes even farther with her victimhood posturing, claiming fantastically that “Gazans’ kites and demands for basic human rights are met with bombs and exploding bullets,” as if innocent kite-flyers were mown down by the merciless Israelis; she doesn’t mention that the kites were fitted out with molotov cocktails and burned hundreds of acres of Israeli farmland. She also claims that “Palestinian student activists are subjected to immediate and unforgiving institutional punishment” — at Stanford? Come on — “while organizations like SCR [Stanford College Republicans], for example, are permitted to repeatedly slander them with baseless claims of terrorist affiliation or invite guest speakers who subject them to death threats and harassment.”
The link there on “invite guest speakers who subject them to death threats and harassment” goes to one of the defamatory tirades Stanford published about me last November, when I was about speak there. So the clear point Wilder is making is that the Stanford College Republicans brought me in, and I subjected students to death threats and harassment. Although “guest speakers” is plural, I am the only one specifically referenced, so this claim can only be about me.
This is, of course, plain libel. Nor is it the first time that the Stanford Daily has libeled me. Stanford student Terrence Zhao libeled me in the Stanford Daily last February; the paper had to alter his remarks and issue a correction. It seems that these Left-fascist students are so self-righteous, so full of the certainty that only a shoddy education and a steady diet of propaganda can give them, that they feel free to lie with impunity about those whom they hate. They are right and righteous, you see, and so anything they do in the service of their goal of destroying those whom they consider evil is justified.
Once again, I am asking the Stanford Daily for a retraction. I ask the Daily and Emily Wilder to produce evidence that I ever issued a death threat to any Stanford student, or harassed any Stanford student (Stanford students and faculty seem to think that my engaging their attacks on me intellectually was “harassment,” but I’m talking about a planet-Earth definition of “harassment”). Failing that, I am requesting a public retraction and apology.