Requiem for a Female Serial Killer by Phyllis Chesler

Requiem for a Female Serial Killer by Phyllis Chesler

This psychological crime thriller takes us inside the mind of a unique female serial killer, a prostitute who murdered seven adult men-a case with which the author was intimately involved. The issues raised by this high-profile criminal case remain unresolved to this day.

Women, even prostitutes, have the right to self-defense in theory, but in practice, the story is more complicated.

This book will challenge everything you ever thought about prostitutes, serial killers, and justice in America.

Aileen Wuornos is a damaged soul, a genuine American outlaw, a symbol of women's rage, a symbol of what can happen to severely abused children, and of how our justice system fails women.

Chesler's involvement with a serial killer has haunted her ever since. She speaks in Aileen Wuornos' voice, as well as in her own, and delivers an incisive, original, and dramatic portrait of a cognitively impaired, traumatized, and alcoholic woman who had endured so much pain in her short life. When she'd had enough, the results were deadly.

This is a poignant, sometimes humorous, never-before-told behind-the-scenes tale. Wuornos' story is handled with great sensitivity, but also with realistic detachment by Chesler as she probes the telling moment, the telling phrase. Was Wuornos suffering from post-traumatic stress after a life lived on a killing field? Was she also born evil? So many prostitutes have been torture-murdered by serial killers-how did Wuornos, once prey, become a predator?

Requiem for a Female Serial Killer will also haunt you. It won't let you put it down.

Take a walk on the wild side. The ghost of Aileen Wuornos beckons.

You can't accuse her of failing to warn us. Phyllis Chesler, a liberal feminist, authored The New Antisemitism in 2003. It was partially a reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, and partly a protest against the left's anti-Israel stance in the middle of the second intifada's horror. But it was also the climax of a lifetime of battle, as Chesler was forced to confront the specific racism that had been embraced by individuals she had considered allies in the fight for women's rights time and time again. As a third intifada approaches, Chesler, a Breitbart News contributor, is re-releasing The New Antisemitism a decade later, as the hate of Jews that motivates radical detractors of Israel no longer feels the need to hide under the anti-Zionist moniker.

Since 2003, Israel has constructed a security barrier and withdrew from Gaza, only to be targeted by Hamas rockets and tunnels; Iran has made significant progress in its goal to become a nuclear state; and the Palestinians have refused to come to an agreement. The refusal of Western elites to defend their own ideas against the Islamist danger in general, and notably in the Israeli-Palestinian case, has remained continuous throughout. They are willing to sacrifice Israel in order to appease the other, enabling a savage version of anti-Semitism that is encouraged by Palestinian officials and exemplified by Tuesday's terror attack on rabbis worshipping in a West Jerusalem synagogue. I questioned Chesler if she, like Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, blamed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for the incident.

She said that Abbas and the Palestinian state-run media in the West Bank and Gaza are solely responsible for the never-ending incitement intended to justify and lead to the genocidal massacre of Jews, noting that much of The New Antisemitism is devoted to debunking that misinformation. I hope and pray that the world will be more open to this study than it was nearly fifteen years ago when I started working on it. Is it true that President Barack Obama shares some of the guilt, as some have claimed? By declaring that there have been Palestinian deaths and Israeli deaths, that most Palestinians and most Israelis want peace..., he fails to speak the truth in his address condemning [Tuesday's] crime.

Palestinians who suffer under the yoke of brutal tyrants do not seek peace with infidels, especially not with infidel Jews, and particularly not with Jewish Israel... The heroic sacrifice of the two murderers, cousins who worked at a local grocery store in Har Nof, was celebrated by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Only those who have been indoctrinated and incited might enter a synagogue and begin hacking or shooting people to death. Chesler is a sharp observer of Middle Eastern propaganda and its power.

Because she was married to--and imprisoned by--a Muslim guy in pre-Soviet, pre-Taliban Afghanistan, she has seen far more deeply than most into the contemporary reality of life in the Islamic world. Her stories of antisemitism on the American and European left, as the oldest hatred had a fresh revival in a new shape, are probably her most profound revelations in The New Antisemitism. She claims that the kedoshim [saints] who were killed while praying were killed because they were religious Jews. [Palestinians] are able to do so because the rest of the world has been utterly misled by Big Lies, which have been supported for over sixty years.

The fight of ideas, or cognitive warfare, as Richard Landes and I call it, is the most hotly contested battleground we have. Chesler's book is a gripping and easy-to-read account of a journey through the left's duplicity as its illogical anti-Israel animosity has developed. Though she is disappointed and wounded by her colleagues' blind anti-Israel--and, in many cases, antisemitic--prejudice, she still considers herself a part of that wide political alignment, notably feminism. She cites an example of a feminist who compared Israelis to pimps and johns, characterizing Palestinians as the world's exploited prostitutes, as an example of how feminist ideals have been misapplied in the service of condemning Israel.

(I could not make this up, and sharing this information with you brings me no joy), Chelser adds. What irritates her the most is the absurdity of the left's anti-Israel preoccupation, because what happened to Israel and the Jews will soon happen to Christians, secularists, and the West as a whole at the hands of an Islamist fundamentalism that has no interest in discourse, let alone feminism, according to Chesler. She claims that the US and European left have formed an unholy alliance with Islamist terrorists. The same Left that has never admitted any responsibility for supporting communist dictators who massacred 100 million of their own people in the name of a Great Idea has now joined the global jihadist chorus in demanding an end to racist Zionism and the Jewish apartheid state.

She claims that what the left and jihadists have in common is self-criticism manifested as wrath, as well as a rebellion against some authority while worshiping others. Chesler embraces her tribal identity as a Jew and an American in order to criticize--and yet protect--a torn internationalism. Her book contains facts on foreign affairs, but it is also written in a personal tone, based on encounters with old friends (and new foes). Even 11 years later, Chesler's book remains a prescient, and essential, warning to us all, albeit a little outmoded by events.