We live in an era where mobs and bullies distort the truth and silence dissent -- whether at the UN or at the university -- and that makes the role of fearless truth-tellers all the more critical.

This week, Israel was singled out as the world’s top violator of health rights by the annual assembly of the U.N.’s World Health Organization, even as Israeli hospitals provide life-saving treatment to countless wounded Syrians fleeing barbaric attacks by their own government. The epic hypocrisy and absurdity of this UN outcome is thoroughly detailed by Hillel Neuer, one of the few brave and honest voices revealing the UN for the farce that it is.

Moving from the UN to the university, Andrew Pessin is the latest casualty of an academic lynch mob trying to silence pro-Israel views through bullying tactics, defamation, and the unjust application of "hate speech" rules. After Pessin dared to post his criticism of Hamas on Facebook last summer, when Hamas launched its war against Israeli civilians, his reputation has been trashed and his family has received death threats. Anyone who cares about Israel, academic freedom, and/or free speech should support his online petition now.

Chillingly, free speech, academic freedom, and the safety of Jews can no longer be taken for granted on college campuses. The deteriorating situation is described and analyzed meticulously in Volume IV of The Black Book of the American Left (subtitled Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews). In the book, author David Horowitz assumes the mantle of fearless truth-teller, as he explores how Islamists and leftists work together to limit freedom of thought and speech, defame the only democracy and reliable US ally in the Middle East, and aid the spread of Islamist ideas and policies.

The book aptly begins by noting how this assault is facilitated by democracy itself, whose tolerance Islamists readily exploit: "By deploying defamatory expressions like 'bigotry' and 'Islamophobia,' [Islamists] seek to stigmatize...anyone who [tries to highlight] the political nature of their movement, its imperialistic ambitions, its support for terrorism, its oppression of women, [and] its hostility to other religions..." 

In many ways, the most important strategic front left for Islamo-fascists to conquer is the United States. Islam already dominates the governments of nearly every country in North Africa and the Middle East, and much of Asia. With nearly sixty Muslim countries often voting as a bloc in the United Nations, they have succeeded in passing UN resolutions against "the vilification of religion" (derivative of the much harsher anti-blasphemy laws in many Muslim countries). Because of demographic trends in Europe, that continent is already in retreat as countries like France struggle to maintain a secular state, Jews across Europe are more threatened than at any time since World War II, and cherished Western values like freedom of expression have been murderously attacked in European cities -- from the 2004 murder in Amsterdam of Theo Van Gogh (for producing a film that criticized Islam's treatment of women) to the 2015 murders in Paris at the Charlie Hebdo offices (for publishing cartoons of the prophet Mohammed). After these "achievements," bringing Islamist policies to the United States arguably represents the ultimate strategic victory, given the U.S.'s superpower status and its Constitutional protections for freedom of expression and religion.

The effort by Islamists to spread their ideology to the U.S. is advanced, in many ways, by attacking Israel. The only true democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, Israel is also the only non-Muslim state and the most reliable ally of the U.S. in that region. With its legally codified respect for individual freedoms and minority rights, Israel represents the same Western values that the U.S. proudly upholds. Israel is also a bastion of secular moderation balancing out the forces of Islamic extremism vying to dominate the Middle East, and ultimately far beyond. A strong Israel impedes both the fast-growing (Sunni) Islamic State and the hegemonic ambitions of the (Shia) Islamic Republic of Iran. Hence, weakening Israel weakens the frontline defenses of the U.S. And because Israel is the size of New Jersey and surrounded by enemies whose total population is easily 40 times greater, the Jewish state is far more vulnerable than the U.S.

Thus, Horowitz's book appropriately focuses on how Islamist groups and their leftist allies are steadfastly working to erode U.S. support for Israel. Nowhere is their campaign more visible and effective than where they can most impact this country's future: college campuses. The extent of their success has produced a tragic irony: institutions whose raison d'etre is to foster critical and independent thinking have devolved into a climate of bullying and hateful misinformation designed to produce anti-Israel group-think. Horowitz, whose book chronicles his tireless attempts to balance out the viciously one-sided campus debates about Israel, laments that "the university has become a one-party state where people on the left talk to each other and nobody challenges them..."

He notes that the "campus alliance between Muslim supporters of the Islamic jihad and secular radicals has been winning these battles [for campus opinion]...because of the support they receive from faculty members who use their classrooms to reinforce the virulent anti-Israel and anti-American messages of the jihad. They are abetted by administrators who otherwise rigorously punish even the suspicion of hate speech; they are so cowed by the campus left that they refuse to apply similar standards to the Jew-haters on their faculties and among their campus organizations. [Disturbingly,] this campus war has been going on for so long now, and has been so one-sided, that it has created a culture" that automatically stigmatizes Israel and its supporters.

Horowitz's book highlights the deceptive nature of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), which many assume to be a cultural organization that represents all Muslims, even though it "was created by the Muslim Brotherhood and is a sister organization of the terrorist organization Hamas.... More than a dozen of its former presidents at American universities have gone on to high-level positions in Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups..." Anwar Awlaki, the Al-Qaeda leader killed in a 2011 drone strike, was president of the MSA at Colorado State University.

Indeed, the MSA has been allowed to sponsor hate weeks against Israel at many universities, even though such campaigns violate the diversity principles and ethical codes of the universities hosting them. Yet there is no outrage over the lies propagated by the MSA against Israel -- lies that Horowitz debunks during his talks and throughout his book. Sadly, his efforts to set the record straight have mostly fallen on deaf or poisoned ears because his audience is invariably composed of anti-Israel activists who have shown up more to disrupt than to listen or discuss.

Horowitz repeatedly exposes MSA members for their hateful agenda with a simple question: "Hezbollah...hopes that [Jews] will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt [them] down globally. [Are you] for it or against it?" MSA students routinely confirm that they support the genocidal Jew hatred of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Noting how MSA students and their leftist allies promote a climate of fear and intimidation intended to silence defenders of Israel, Horowitz recalls "how Nazis and Communists in the 1930s had conducted a joint campaign to break up the public meetings of their opponents, and how that had spelled the end of democracy in Germany and the rise of the totalitarian state." He asserts that the "threats of campus violence and obstructions of speakers...would disappear overnight if university administrators...and...trustees" ensured a safe environment for guest speakers on unpopular topics.

Ultimately, the tyranny of political correctness threatens far more than just freedom of speech: those who can't honestly discuss issues can't possibly formulate effective policies. As Horowitz notes: "The attacks on freedom of speech had already gone so far in this country that one couldn’t mention terror and Islam in the same breath without being labeled a bigot or an Islamophobe, and accused of calling all Muslims terrorists. Even President Bush, who had defended us against the attacks of Islamic terrorists, could not identify our enemies by name for fear of offending other terrorists or their sympathizers, or Muslims in general. He could not identify them as Islamic jihadists, which is in fact what they call themselves." 

The double-standards underlying the campus hate campaign against Israel are outrageous and numerous:

1) There are no similarly frequent, well-attended, and/or intense campaigns against Syria for massacring far more innocent life in just a few years than all of the deaths from a century of Arab-Israeli conflict.

2) Israel is excoriated for building settlements in the West Bank, but Arabs get a pass for outlawing Jews on lands that Arabs control.

3) Liberals are deafeningly silent when it comes to supporting Nonie Darwish, Irshad Manji, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other reformist Muslims who bravely critique Islam's traditional stance on women, gays, free speech, and religious minorities. 

4) When it comes to condemning the genocidal calls to destroy Israel (by Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah) "progressives" don't have 1% of the passion they display when berating Israeli settlements.

5) As Horowitz notes, "if Americans taught their children to murder Muslims as a quick pass to heaven, the left would regard this as a crime against humanity; [but] if Palestinians [kill Jews with suicide bombings, then] terror is the only [and justifiable] means of a 'desperate' people."

6) As Horowitz observes, "if the anti-Israel campaign had been directed against African-Americans or any other campus ethnic group -- including and especially Muslims -- no university community would tolerate it. But because it is directed against Jews, Israeli Apartheid Week is protected and funded by student governments and protected by university administrators.... What is really taking place on American campuses is a hate campaign against Israel and the Jews -- along with a parallel campaign to censor any response to these hateful attacks by Muslim and Palestinian campus groups."

In the process of detailing (and correcting) the many anti-Israel lies that dominate the campus debates, Horowitz's book also notes some important historical points that Israel's defenders ought to highlight more often: 

1) "The Muslim Brotherhood is a global organization and the leading force behind totalitarian Islam. It is also the fountainhead of terrorist Islam, [including] Al-Qaeda and Hamas. The Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, an open admirer and supporter of Adolf Hitler who arranged to have Mein Kampf translated into Arabic in the 1930s. His disciple, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the patriarch of Palestinian nationalism, spent the Second World War in Berlin recruiting Arabs for Hitler’s legions...He devised his own plan to create an Auschwitz in the Middle East, and was thwarted...only because Rommel was defeated at El-Alamein."

2) "Israel [was] attacked in three aggressive wars within a single generation...By every precept of international law, [Israel] had...the right to annex those territories from which [it was] attacked, and even to expel the populations that joined the aggressions. That is precisely what happened to the Germans after World War II. East Prussia was the industrial heartland of Germany. Ethnic Germans had inhabited it for a thousand years. But after Germany invaded Poland twice in a generation, the [victorious] allied powers...expelled twelve million Germans from East Prussia and gave the land they had inhabited to Poland.... The Israelis had every right to take the same measures to secure peace in the Middle East in 1948 and 1967.... But [they] preferred to live in peace with their Arab neighbors...even as their peace offers were rejected."

3) "The struggle in the Middle East...has never been...about land. Israel occupies a minuscule fraction of 1 percent of the Arab Middle East and...just...10 percent...of the defeated Turkish empire governed by the British victors after the World War I, who then allotted 90 percent of it to the Arabs...."

4) "The Palestinian national identity was invented in 1964 with the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1964, the West Bank and Gaza were occupied [by Jordan and Egypt after] the 1948 Arab war against Israel [but] the PLO’s founding charter" never refers to any Jordanian or Egyptian occupation of Palestinian lands. Thus, the PLO charter is about eliminating Zionists rather than liberating Palestinians.

5) Over 60 years after the Jews were displaced from Arab lands, there are no longer any Jewish refugees, because Israel absorbed them. But Arabs displaced during Israel's 1948 War of Independence are still refugees because the Arab states have refused to grant them citizenship, except for Jordan. Palestinian Arabs comprise 70 percent of Jordan's population and are ruled by a Hashemite minority, yet there is no international pressure for the self-determination of Palestinians in Jordan. 

In Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews, David Horowitz is a fearless truth-teller of how hostile and one-sided college campuses have become on the issue of Israel. But he also provides the historical facts and logical arguments to refute the many untruths used to smear Israel. His book is a must-read for all who wish to understand -- and intellectually counter -- the threat to U.S. support for Israel and, more generally, to free speech and academic freedom.

Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.