“Apartheid” – the official policy of racial “apartness” – strangled South African blacks for decades with laws based on race hate. Racism is today’s scarlet letter: once branded a racist, you’re an outcast. Today, anti-Israel “activists” campaign to mark Israel “an apartheid state.”

On Nov. 19, the Northeastern University School of Law and the National Lawyers Guild are hosting a five-hour event called “Beyond Apartheid in Israel/Palestine: the Reality on the Ground and Lessons from South Africa.” Every speaker on the program is an anti-Zionist activist/intellectual.

As we have seen often at such events, speakers will decry Israel’s building of “the apartheid wall” (mostly a chain link fence) as racism. They will dismiss Israel’s need to protect Jews from Arabs who murder them in the name of Allah. Arab murderers will likely be called “freedom fighters.” They’ll make the case in humanitarian terms: walls are bad – people can’t get to work or hospitals. Walls divide and discriminate between populations. Yet at this conference, don’t expect a protest of the wall Saudi Arabia is building on its borders with Yemen and Iraq, or the wall between India and Pakistan, or the electronically-charged fence between Botswana and Zimbabwe, or the DMZ between North and South Korea. It’s not really about walls, actually. It’s about Jews. The National Lawyers Guild doesn’t like Jewish walls.

Apartheid? Israel is the sole democracy in the Middle East, the only place in the region where Arab citizens possess equal rights. Citizens vote, worship freely, are part of the government – and criticize it constantly without fear.

Actually, just as with “walls,” these folks don’t really care about apartheid. They won’t protest gender apartheid throughout the Middle East, where brothers and fathers kill sisters and daughters who act “immodestly.” They won’t protest ethnic apartheid in Sudan, where Arab Muslims ethnically cleanse African Muslims and Christians, driving them off their lands, capturing and enslaving, or just slaughtering them. They won’t criticize religious apartheid in Saudi Arabia, where you can’t be a citizen unless you’re a Muslim.

By withholding the evidence of equal rights enjoyed by Arab-Israelis, minimizing the injustices committed by the Arab despots that surround the Jewish state and misrepresenting the reasons for the security wall, the speakers and sponsors of “Beyond Apartheid in Israel/Palestine” are guilty of defamation against Israel, as well as cheapening the actual experience of apartheid suffered by blacks in South Africa.

Though the National Lawyers Guild has the right to assemble and the invited guests have the right to voice their political views – as they would be allowed in any democratic country including Israel – responsible people in the audience also have the right to call them on their lies and their utter hypocrisy. Someday, Northeastern University Law School may have the courage to convene a conference on actual Middle Eastern apartheid. Women, escaped black slaves, oppressed Christians, terrified apostates, atheists and gays ... a terrific panel. We’re ready, Northeastern. Are you?

This column was co-written by Charles Jacobs and Erik Miller from The David Project Center for Jewish Leadership.