“The human race,” quoth an anonymous wit, “is divided into adults and women.”

If we accept the division for the sake of argument, we would observe that many females belong in the adult column, but almost all feminists, along with all leftists, belong in the other. (Homosexuals are well distributed into both, the division having nothing to do with sexual preferences or who’s macho or who’s effeminate.)

Generally, but most significantly in the realm of public affairs, adults think, women feel.

One of the few exceptions among feminists is brave, intelligent, principled Phyllis Chesler.

Recently, on August 25, she gave an address at a Yale University conference on global anti-semitism.

Her speech, titled The History and Psychological Roots of Anti-Semitism Among Feminists, Their Gradual Palestinianization and Stalinization, is well worth reading in full. Here are a few passages from it:

I could not have predicted the rapid and extreme Stalinization and Palestinianization that would take place among academics and activists in general. I could never have imagined that the western intelligentsia, the “good” people, including feminists, would make so tragic an alliance with Islamic barbarism and misogyny.

I became a feminist leader in 1968-1969. I remain one. Most of the other feminists of my generation are no longer engaged in the historical moment. …

For the last decade, Jewish and non-Jewish feminists have marched in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel rallies, signed newspaper ads and petitions to divest from and boycott Israel—yes, even gay and lesbian feminists who would be tortured to death in Muslim countries, did so. These professed “humanitarians”—who carry on about the recent Turkish assassination flotilla—do not take as strong a stand against stoning or forced face-veiling. Some feminists think [face-veiling is] “liberating” or even the ultimate feminist choice. Most feminists do not take a stand against forced marriage, child marriage, first cousin marriage, polygamy, and honor-related violence, included honor killing. They fear that doing so might be seen as “racist” or as culturally insensitive. …

In October of 2004, a small group of San Francisco-based feminist activists … traveled to Duke University … to support the Palestine Solidarity Movement Conference that was taking place there. …

They did not have a balanced or particularly feminist agenda. Although many activists were lesbians or pro-gay, they had not come to protest the Palestinian persecution and torture of suspected homosexuals in Gaza or on the West Bank nor did they seem to know that Israel has granted political asylum to Palestinian homosexuals, including those who have literally been tortured and nearly killed by other Palestinians. Instead, these American feminists wore keffiyas, political buttons and tee-shirts that read “We are all Palestinians.”

The American and European Left and feminist and gay movements have made a marriage in Hell with Islamist terrorists. The same Left that has still never expressed any guilt over their devotion to communist dictators who murdered one hundred million of their own people in the service of a Great Idea, have now fatefully joined the world Jihadic chorus in calling for the end to “racist” Zionism and to the Jewish Apartheid and “Nazi” state. …

She notices the immaturity of these leftists and feminists:

These westerners share an extraordinary psychological rage which requires a scapegoat and cleaning messianic promises, a refusal to look within, an overwhelming need for group approval, an inability or refusal to think as independent individuals, an adolescent in-your-face rebelliousness towards certain authorities—coupled with an adolescent, slavish adoration of other authorities, a desire for cathartic violence, for the ecstasy of mob action …

And their often stunning stupidity:

In 2007, a Jewish Israeli feminist researcher at Hebrew University, doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, blamed Israeli soldiers because they refused to rape Arab and Palestinian women; she claimed this constituted “racism” against Palestinians.

Earlier this year, 2010, a team of researchers led by a female Harvard social scientist blamed Israel in the pages of The Lancet, a British medical journal, for an increase in Palestinian wife-battering in Gaza and on the West Bank. The researchers did not even consider the role that radical Islamification might play in the oppression of women or the fact that Gaza is ruled by terrorist gangsters and this might cause an escalation of violence towards women. Honor killings (and a relevant, recent study actually existed) were not included in their measures of violence against Palestinian women. Why? Because that cannot be blamed on Israel or on the West. …

In the summer of 2010, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and former spokesman for the PLO, …

– who, it is said, arranged for Obama’s fees at Harvard to be paid presumably by some rich Arab or Arabs –

… a man who also happens to be a friend and former dinner companion of President Obama, signed an appeal for money to send yet another aid ship to Gaza named “The Audacity of Hope,” the title of Obama’s second autobiographical book. He publicly challenged the President, saying that “if the name [of the boat] is a problem for the administration, it can simply insist that Israel lift the siege: end of problem, end of embarrassment.” …

We’re perfectly sure he won’t be embarrassed. Though he might pretend to be.

Such feminists, leftists, and gay liberationists have not thought through what their lives might be like under Islamic rule. In fact, they still deny that there’s a “problem” with Islam and insist that the main problem is with American and Israeli colonialism, imperialism, and militarism. …

They should try converting to Islam to test their theory.

We like her whole speech, except the end of it where she says:

I have not come here today to bash feminists [as such]. I am one. As I’ve said, I don’t understand what happened to the best minds of my Second Wave generation. However, our feminist work is certainly not worthless and was not done in vain.

We say it was almost entirely done in vain. Worse, it was done to the detriment of generations of children. We regret that Phyllis Chesler still wants to describe herself as a feminist. To us she is a thinking adult. She is an asset to the cause of individual freedom, the cause that feminism is hysterically against.