In April 1979, my professor, a bright, beautiful woman, came into the classroom with “exciting news!” It was official, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was in power, Iran was now an Islamist state. She was ecstatic. This feminist professor who was also African American, was buying and selling Islamism. My heart sank. The world was turning upside down. 

I was the lone student who objected. I said Islamism would be a catastrophe for women, girls, and Jews. I tried to explain my fear as an Iraqi-Egyptian Jew who grew up stateless, and how Islamism forced 800,000 Jews out from our ancient communities all over the Middle East and North Africa. 

It should matter, I said, that Jews and women and other minorities are seriously oppressed under Islamist laws.  This regime was going to be a disaster for the Iranian people. 

I dropped the class. I had to “challenge” the course by taking a two-hour multiple-choice test based on a set of tedious books and statistics instead of submitting a paper on ethnicity I would have loved to write.   

At the time, my words were not welcome. The others in the class were silent – maybe they didn’t know enough to have an opinion. But still? We have had years of information of executions, torture in medieval prisons, and rape, yet this very particular silence continues in progressive and feminist communities. 

The cluelessness of predecessors is replaced with an inverted morality that excuses terrorism, and accepts Islamism and this regime’s international export of terror, especially against Jews and Israel, by funding Hamas and Hezbollah as it terrifies and pauperizes its own country.

This regime has created horror at home and mayhem in the world. It has made no secret of its plans to go nuclear and destroy Israel, the “little Satan,” first, and then the USA, the “big Satan.” And our university students are silent? 

These students were very loud in........

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