Polling residents of the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan, Australia, Indonesia, Kenya, Egypt, Ghana, and Nigeria, Globescan found that only 21 percent of respondents had a positive impression of Israel, and that the only one of the Western countries surveyed whose residents have an overall positive view of Israel is the U.S.

Looking at the study in its entirety, one discovers that while 50 percent of Americans took a positive view of Israel and 35 percent were negative, the breakdown in Canada was a very different 25-59.  Of Russia, France, Britain, Germany, and Spain, guess which had the most positive view of Israel?  Believe it or not, Russia – land of the shtetls and pogroms, of Sakharov and Sharansky.  While French attitudes toward Israel split 20-65, British 16-68, Germans 16-69, and Spaniards 12-74, the Russians broke almost even, 25-26.  Indeed, Nigerians (54-29) and Kenyans (45-31) were far friendlier to Israel than any of the Western European countries.  Unsurprisingly, the Muslim countries surveyed were not terribly pro-Israel: the figures for Egypt were 7-85, for Pakistan 9-50, for Indonesia 8-61.  But the country that was most hostile of all was Japan, where only 3 percent had an affirmative view of Israel.

The report, of course, only confirms what many of us already know: that with the exception of the U.S., the countries of the West – in which diaspora Jews have lived for centuries and which, in the wake of the Holocaust, fell all over themselves apologizing for, and trying to atone for, their roles in the destruction of the Jews – are today no friends of the Jewish state.  Mountains of anecdotal evidence, moreover, make it clear that it is impossible to separate this antagonism from pure and simple anti-Semitism.

American Jews who still believe that they are living in a world – or, at least, in a Western world – in which anti-Semitism is, by and large, a thing of the past need to open their eyes.  They should be aware of what is going on in the minds of many of the people they encounter when they travel to places like Paris or London.  They should recognize that the relative lack of Jew-hatred that they experience in the U.S. is an outright aberration – an aberration, moreover, that, as rhetoric emanating from the Occupy Wall Street movement has suggested, may not persist for much longer.

Similarly, Western European gentiles who think that they inhabit the most civilized, tolerant, and peaceable corner of the world need to think again.  For the ancient prejudice that led Europe down the road to the Holocaust has come crawling back out of its dark hole.

Clearly, the main reason for the widespread enmity toward Israel in Western Europe is that left-leaning individuals in positions of influence – from politicians and journalists to schoolteachers and professors – have been engaged for quite a long time in a relentless campaign of disinformation and demonization directed against Israel and, frankly, Jews generally.  In turn, a major (if not the only) reason for that effort is a misbegotten desire to please, and appease, European Muslims.

“I am so tired,” complained Søren Espersen of the Danish Folkeparti last Friday on his Jyllands-Posten blog, “of all the lies about Israel.” He elaborated:

I am often invited to high schools, where both teachers and students get such a very special masochistic thrill out of seeing and meeting someone like me – the very epitome of Danish political evil ….! It is, of course, [my] foreign policy they most want to be outraged by, but the second most important topic at Danish schools is actually the Middle East. The relationship between Israelis and Arabs, between Jews and Muslims.

And time after time it has struck me that even in a situation where the interest in the Middle East conflict is burning hot, for the most part neither the teachers nor the students are aware of the historical background.

For the objective here is not just to try Breivik for his actions, but to try him for his thoughts as well.  The climax of the trial will come in June, when several writers who have written about Islam – myself included – will be hauled into court as unwilling witnesses for the defense.  As I wrote here last month, “the goal of the defense – and of the defendant, who apparently made up the list of witnesses himself – is utterly identical with the goal of the country’s leftist cultural elite: namely, to implicate all of us writers in Breivik’s actions.  Of course, Breivik wants to do this in order to mitigate his own guilt in the eyes of the court and the country; the cultural elite wants to do it in order to discredit forever the criticism of Islam.”

Among the other writers on the list of defense witnesses is Hanne Nabintu Herland, a historian of religion who’s been an outspoken critic of Western feminism, the social-democratic welfare state, “reverse racism,” Norwegian anti-Semitism, and the Norwegian cult of mediocrity.  She’s also written – and this is why she’s been summoned to testify in the Breivik case – about the importance of integrating immigrants and of preserving traditional European cultural values.  But she’s not having it.  On Monday, she made a major announcement in an op-ed for Aftenposten: she’s informed the authorities that she won’t be obeying her summons.  She simply refuses to be a part of “this twisted murderer’s show….I refuse to be dragged around the circus ring like another clown in the perpetrator’s bizarre delusions.”  She asserts that “the obligation to testify is being abused.  I was not in Norway on July 22.  My testimony has no bearing on the question of guilt or sanity.”

Needless to say, when you’re called to testify in a trial and refuse to do so, you may face serious consequences.  “If this means that I will be put in prison,” Herland writes, “then make me a political martyr.”

Herland doesn’t mince words.  Since the day after Breivik’s murders, she charges, opponents of what she calls “the throne of power, the Labor Party,” have been treated as suspects.  “As things stand now, it’s almost the case that if you’re critical of the Labor Party, you’re automatically put in the same category as a mass murderer….This political witch hunt is now so intense that it’s fair to speak of undemocratic, totalitarian conditions in Norway.  We’re well on the way to becoming the new East Germany….the state is developing in the direction of a totalitarian democracy.”

As readers of my recent e-book about the aftermath of the Breivik killings know, Herland isn’t exaggerating.

Has anyone in Norway been as forthright about the present situation – and as willing to publicly challenge the grim new orthodoxy – as Herland has been?  Well, there have been a few others.  In her op-ed, Herland cites a recent opinion piece by shipowner Dan Odfjell, who tells a story I haven’t yet read or heard.  According to him, when Breivik began shooting on the island of Utøya, Eskil Pedersen, the head of the Labor Party youth group which was Breivik’s target, hopped on a boat and was the first person from the island to make it to shore.  Odfjell doesn’t criticize Pedersen for saving his skin; he criticizes him for allowing the Labor Party, in the days and weeks after July 22, to try to cover up the truth and turn him into a hero – an effort, charges Odfjell, that has been only one part of a carefully orchestrated effort by the party “to deliberately blur the distinction between itself…and the nation of Norway.”

If you remember that program, you may also remember what happened afterwards.  The British police investigated the mosques, but decided they didn’t have enough evidence to charge them with anything.  At which point the cops did a 180 and reported Channel 4 to Ofcom, the UK’s answer to the FCC, for allegedly editing its footage in such a way as to misrepresent the preachers’ views.  The good news is that Ofcom eventually rejected the charges; the bad news is that, once again, the critics of Islam became the heavies, the Muslims the victims.  And despite Undercover Mosque‘s explosive revelations, nothing much changed as a result of them.

Now, to its credit, and to the astonishment of many, Swedish television has done its own version of Undercover Mosque.  The 60 Minutes-style series Uppdrag: Granskning (Assignment: Investigation) sent two women in burkas into ten Swedish mosques.  One of them carried a hidden camera; the other pretended to be a woman whose abusive husband had taken a second wife and who wanted to know the answers to these questions:

•  Is a man permitted to marry more than one woman?
•  Is a woman permitted to deny her husband sex?
•  Is a man permitted to hit his wife?
•  If so, is she permitted to call the police?

Again, for those who have been following these matters for years in North America and Europe, the results of this investigation will not come as much of a surprise.  But in Sweden, where the media try their best never to approach these matters in a remotely honest way, this episode of Uppdrag: Granskning provided a rare taste of media candor.

One of the ten mosques was the Stockholm Mosque, the most prominent Muslim house of worship in Sweden.  An official at the mosque, Mahmod Adam, told his burka-clad interlocutor that it’s perfectly acceptable under the Koran for a man to take four wives, so long as he can support them and treat them equally.  “Understand?” he asked.  “Yes,” she replied meekly.  In response to which he told her, sharply, “You’re supposed to listen!” – in other words, “Shut up!”

The faux wife went on to tell Adam that her husband hits her if she so much as opens her mouth – and that he cites the Koran in his defense.  Adam replied that her husband is allowed to smack her on the arm – and that under no circumstances, in any case, should she call the police on him.  His final advice: to show her husband more affection.

Elsewhere the advice was similar.  At the Örebro Mosque, Abdur Kadir Salad told the woman not to call the police because she’d end up getting a divorce and breaking up her family – and Muslims don’t want that, for Islam is about building families, not breaking them up.  At the Islamic Center in Malmö, same advice: no police, because “they can take your kids.”  At another Malmö mosque, the message was unambiguous: “Never, never consider calling the police.”  Even if he hits her twenty or thirty times?  Smacking himself on the arm, the imam said forcefully: “This is not hitting!”

The Chronicle‘s editor, Liz McMillen, found out the answer to that question other day when one of her regular bloggers, Naomi Schaefer Riley, as reported here recently by Arnold Ahlert, reacted online to a Chronicle piece entitled “Black Studies: ‘Swaggering Into the Future.” The piece, which celebrated an up-and-coming generation of Black Studies scholars who are “rewriting the history of race,” included descriptions of five supposedly exemplary dissertations produced by students in Northwestern University’s recently instituted Ph.D. Program in Black Studies.

What was the gist of these brilliant, pioneering scholarly works?  Well, one of them linked the subprime lending crisis to white racism.  Another argued, essentially, that black conservatives like Thomas Sowell are the tools of white racists.  A third celebrated Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm for confronting racism – and sexism, to boot.  A fourth assailed racial profiling – which, of course, is racism set in system.  Riley quite sensibly dismissed it all as “left-wing victimization claptrap.”  Her post unleashed a firestorm.  Hundreds of academics posted comments savaging her as a racist and accusing her of “hate speech.”  (Incidentally, Riley’s husband is black.)  Several thousand signed an online petition demanding her dismissal.  After holding tough for a few days, McMillen capitulated, firing Riley and posting a pathetic mea culpa in which she assured Riley’s critics that she understood she had made a mistake.

“We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles,” McMillen wrote.  “I realize we have made mistakes. We will thoroughly review our editorial practices…and strengthen our guidelines for bloggers.”  McMillen apologized, additionally, for an Editor’s Note in which, by inviting readers to debate Riley’s post, she had “seemed to elevate it to the level of informed opinion, which it was not.”  She even expressed regret for a tweet of hers which, she now realized, “did not accurately convey The Chronicle’s message.”  As if she had not already made perfectly clear her absolute, utter, and cringing contrition, McMillen concluded as follows:

I sincerely apologize for the distress these incidents have caused our readers and appreciate that so many of you have made your sentiments known to us.

One theme many of you have sounded is that you felt betrayed by what we published; that you welcome healthy informed debate, but that in this case, we did not live up to the expectations of the community of readers we serve.

You told us we can do better, and we agree.

As Riley noted in a follow-up piece in the Wall Street Journal, McMillen’s apology read “like a confession at a re-education camp.”  Which is only appropriate, given that the humanities and social sciences departments of American colleges today are indeed, to an alarming extent, precisely that: re-education camps.  The principal objective isn’t to teach young people facts or to train them to think; it’s to indoctrinate them with a rigid, well-nigh cartoonish set of left-wing certitudes about the evils of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, and about the intrinsic association of these evils with the West (especially with the United States) and with the villainous figure of the white male, whose historical oppression of certain groups – chief among them women and people of color – certifies members of those groups as official victims.  (As the case of Elizabeth Warren has reminded us, American Indians are near the top of the list of those academically certified groups.)

From all over the world, activists, academics, politicians, businesspeople, and technology pioneers are coming [to Oslo] to negotiate, discuss, and learn.  About 90 journalists are traveling to Norway to cover the conference….This is an event that puts Oslo and Norway on the map.

It is therefore incomprehensible that Norwegian authorities are choosing to stay away.

What are the authorities staying away from?  It’s the Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF), an annual event which, during its four years of existence, has presented talks by Vladimir Bukovsky, Elena Bonner, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Elie Wiesel, and dozens of other human-rights heroes from around the world.  Year after year, the OFF shines a light on regimes that have abused and imprisoned citizens simply for speaking out and wanting to breathe free.  What’s not to like?

Well, it appears that a number of people in Norway’s Foreign Ministry and elsewhere in the upper echelons of the Norwegian government “are skeptical about the conference because they fear that it can have underlying political motives.”  They’re “especially skeptical about the man who is behind the whole thing” – Thor Halvorssen, the energetic young head of Human Rights Foundation in New York. Despite his name, Halvorssen is not Norwegian but a Venezuelan-American.  His grandfather was a Norwegian ambassador to Venezuela; his mother is a descendant of Simón Bolívar, the hero of South American independence.

Although, noted Rønneberg, “there is nothing about this year’s conference that indicates a political bias in one direction or the other,” Halvorssen has had a rough time of it in Norway because his politics grate against those of the Norwegian elite.  What politics?  Well, for example, he’s “an outspoken opponent of Hugo Chávez” and has been criticized for inviting opponents of Chávez and Castro to the OFF in 2010.

Yes, you read that right – in Norway, it just isn’t done to invite opponents of Chávez and Castro to a human-rights conference.

“It shouldn’t matter what Halvorssen thinks of  Castro or Chávez,” wrote Rønneberg (although, of course, Halvorssen’s opposition to these tyrants matters very much indeed).  “What matters,” said Rønneberg, “is who is taking part in the conference and what they can do to promote human rights in the world.”  The forum’s 121 speakers, he noted, come from 71 countries; 36 have been imprisoned for a total of 175 years; 20 are exiles; 23 have been tortured.

But that’s not enough, it seems, for Norwegian authorities, who view the OFF as unacceptably un-Norwegian. Rønneberg pointed out that one of the offenses committed by the attendees at the OFF, in the eyes of its Norwegian critics, is that they’re too formally dressed.  (Many Norwegian leftists simply can’t process the idea of a human-rights activist in a business suit – you’re supposed to look like a hippie, goddamn it.)  The leftist daily Dagsavisen sneered that the title of this year’s conference, “Out of Darkness, Into Light,” was too “far-reaching” – in other words, “American.”  (Norwegian like their conference titles dry and low-key.)  There were even complaints about the gift bags – containing an umbrella, a candy bar, and other modest items – that were distributed this year to forum participants.  This, too, is considered un-Norwegian.

The main complaint, however, is that the OFF devotes too much attention to “political and civil rights, not the broader human rights concept that Norwegian authorities and organizations often advocate” – the “broader” concept, that is, that makes it possible to make heroes of monsters like Castro and Chávez.  The sad fact is that Norwegian authorities, like many on the left, don’t feel terribly comfortable with the word freedom.  They’re proud to call their country the “peace nation,” and they’re happy to blather on about “social justice” and “economic justice” (which they think people like Castro and Chávez have promoted), but they consider freedom an illusory concept, if not an outright lie, and, in any case, a preoccupation of the right-wingers they abhor.

Perhaps what really makes the OFF stick in the craw of the Norwegian establishment, however, is that, unlike many feel-good, politically correct, peace-centered Norwegian initatives, it’s had tangible results.  As a consequence of the OFF’s attention to Singapore dissident Chee Soon Juan, the Norwegian ambassador to Singapore has felt compelled to ask for his case to be reviewed.  “It is easy to suspect that some of the displeasure directed at Halvorssen and the conference,” suggested Rønneberg, “stems from a kind of envy – that he, in a short time, has accomplished something that Norwegians have not dared to dream of.”

On May 6, 2002, a Dutch sociologist and writer turned politician named Pim Fortuyn was gunned down in a parking lot in Hilversum in the Netherlands.  He had just come from an interview (Hilversum, outside of Amsterdam, is the headquarters of the Dutch electronic media), one of many he had given in previous weeks in advance of the general election, which was scheduled for May 15.  Despite the relentless smear campaign directed against him by the Dutch political and media establishment, Fortuyn’s party, Lijst Pim Fortuyn, was doing extremely well in the polls, and it looked as though, barring a major upset, he would actually become the next prime minister of the Netherlands.

The prospect was remarkable, for more reasons than one.  For one thing, if Fortuyn won, he would be the first openly gay head of state or government of any country in the world, ever.  But under the circumstances, his sexual orientation was barely more than a footnote.  What really mattered, and what gave hope to so many voters in his country and to observers around the world, was that Fortuyn was a social scientist who had gone into politics for one reason and one reason only: because he saw that the precipitous rise of Islam in the West, and especially in his own nation, was a catastrophic development, and he was determined to do everything he could to preserve the liberty and equality that he cherished before it was too late.

An extremely intelligent, well-educated, and charismatic man, graced with humor and gifted with an extraordinary courage that enabled him to withstand the most brutal and unfair assaults from his ideological enemies, Fortuyn was poised, some of us felt, to become a Churchill – a hero of freedom who would inspire his fellow European heads of government to follow his lead.  There were those of us who saw him as the man who might well save Europe.  But those dreams were dashed in a moment, ten years ago last Sunday.

Time is relentless.  It all seems so long ago now.  Fortuyn’s murder followed 9/11 by only a few months.  Throughout his election campaign, the events of that day were fresh in all of our minds.  Some of us, to be sure, had been clued into the seriousness of what we were up against even before the Twin Towers were taken down – but even for us, 9/11 brought the crisis of the West into sharper relief, and made the importance of Fortuyn’s political quest even more obvious.  He was the one major politician out there – not only in his country, but in any country – who was speaking, without hesitation, euphemism, or equivocation, the uncomfortable truths that needed to be spoken.  And then – suddenly – he was gone.

The assassinations of certain people raise questions of historic dimensions.  What would have happened with Reconstruction if Lincoln had lived to oversee it?  What direction would race relations in America have taken if Martin Luther King, Jr., had not been cut down?  The same kinds of questions attend upon the murder of Wilhelmus Simon Petrus Fortuyn.  What would have happened to the Netherlands, to the Europe, to the West, during the first decade of the twenty-first century had he survived to become the prime minister of the Netherlands?  The power of his rhetoric, of his mind, and of his personality, was beyond dispute.  The power of his example as a prime minister, many of us believed, could be equally formidable.  Fortuyn, we felt, might well prove to be the man who would chart a courageous, humane, and workable way forward out of the mess that Europe had gotten itself into.

The author explained that in order to “render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world,” you’ve got to “do the following.”  In the list that followed, there was no mention of, say, stimulus packages, government-mandated health care, subprime mortgages, campus-wide bans on free speech, or the appeasement of Islam.  No, according to this article, the way to achieve unexceptionalism was (in part) to cut taxes, torture terrorists, “react to a terrorist attack by invading a nonterrorist country,” “[s]ee to it that a majority of prisoners are African-American,” “treat immigrants as criminals,” “[p]ortray trade unions as un-American,” “[p]ortray global warming as a conspiracy of scientists,” etc.  And the topping on the cake: “Having subverted the Constitution and enervated the nation with these measures, portray the federal government as unwieldy, bumbling and shot through with elitist liberals.  Create mental states of maladaptive populism among the citizenry to support this view.”

After reading the first few lines of this ludicrous litany, I naturally wondered what lefty from Central Casting was responsible for it.  I looked back up at the byline: E.L. Doctorow.  Well, that explained it, and then some. This kind of tired, apocalyptic, left-wing cant about America is straight out of Doctorow’s playbook.  At the same time, I was surprised.  Was he still at it?  Really?  Believe it or not, the guy’s been banging on like this for over half a century now. If for Ronald Reagan it was always morning in America, for E.L. Doctorow it’s always been dusk.  Doesn’t he ever get tired, I mused, of pronouncing America dead?

Many people first became aware of Doctorow when his 1975 novel Ragtime became a blockbuster bestseller.  What was considered special about the novel (which later was turned into a movie and a Broadway musical) was Doctorow’s incorporation into the list of characters of a number of real historical figures, among them Houdini, Henry Ford, Freud, Jung, Dreiser, J.P. Morgan, Emma Goldman, and Booker T. Washington.  Ever since then, Doctorow has been considered one of America’s leading novelists, and Ragtime one of the pinnacles of modern fiction: the Modern Library included it on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and Time named it one of the 100 best between 1923 and 2005.

But for a man who is so widely considered a literary master, Doctorow has striking literary deficiencies.  Unlike the truly great authors, he’s not terribly interested in (or gifted at) creating three-dimensional characters – characters who rise off the page, whom we care about and feel we know – and telling stories about them that capture the rich, ambiguous texture of human life.  No, he’s mainly interested in making crude, didactic left-wing points about the evil of America, the cruelty of capitalism, and the futility of the American dream – which, as the anarchist Emma Goldman helpfully explains in Ragtime, is a mischievous invention whereby the masses “permit themselves to be exploited by the few” because they have been misleadingly “persuaded to identify with them.”

That atmosphere-heavy American subtitle captures something important that should be mentioned at the outset.  It is this: that we are living in a time when writers like Karen Armstrong, while pretending to tell us everything we need to know about Islam, have in fact perfected the art of prettifying it beyond recognition.  They routinely either soft-pedal or thoroughly avoid the more chilling facts about the religion, or write about them in a dispassionate, distanced prose that is deliberately designed not to capture the horror lurking behind the words.  They glide past acts of violence committed by Muslims while paying close, clinical attention to acts of violence directed against Muslims.  They demonize Islam’s critics while employing charming, humanizing details to make even the most brutal Islamic figures sympathetic.  And they pour out reams of pseudo-poetic language about exotic sights, tastes, and smells, as if trying to cover the stench of a murder victim’s corpse with a couple of gallons of perfume.

Case in point: a three-part 2006 series of New York Times articles about an imam in Brooklyn for which reporter Andrea Elliott won a Pulitzer Prize.  It opened this way: “The imam begins his trek before dawn, his long robe billowing like a ghost through empty streets.  In this dark, quiet hour, his thoughts sometimes drift back to the Egyptian farming village where he was born.”  Readers who smelled a rat were obliged to read column after column of numbingly adorable personal details about the imam before getting to the brief tidbits about his actual beliefs, which, although couched in the most euphemistic language imaginable, gave away the fact that he was not the genial, open-minded bridge-builder Elliott wanted us to think he was, but an uncompromising adherent of hard-line sharia law.

Kadri has clearly been an attentive student of the Karen Armstrong/Andrea Elliott school of prose.  “I reached the shrine long after dusk,” he tells us on his first page, “and its neem tree glades were pulsating to the drums and accordions of an ululating troupe of musicians.”

Who is Kadri?  I have never heard of him before.  (But he’s heard of me: I was surprised to discover a half-page or so of mendacious invective directed at me toward the end of his book.)  The dust jacket tells us that he is a half-Finnish, half-Pakistani Londoner who studied at Cambridge and Harvard Law and is “qualified as a barrister and New York attorney.”  He is also a believing Muslim who presents the tale of Allah’s revelations to Muhammed as if it were historical fact.  In his prologue, he provides the assurance (directed, presumably, at any violence-prone coreligionists of his who might happen to be on the lookout for heterodoxy) that he “does not intend at any point to challenge the sacred stature of the Prophet Muhammad, the self-evident appeal of Islam, or the almightiness of God.”

Well, he certainly keeps that promise.  Apropos of Allah’s revelations, Kadri writes that “the channel of communication that had opened between Muhammed and God would transform the world.  Thousands of lines of divine wisdom would reach him from the heavens over the next two decades, transmitted by a disembodied voice or heralded by a bell, and as he fell entranced and moved his lips to memorize God’s words, he would see far beyond the visible world, far into heaven and deep into hell.”  As Kadri sums it up: Muhammed “had more access to eternal wisdom than any other human being who had lived.”  Anyone who wrote like this about, say, Moses or Jesus and took his manuscript to the London branch of Random House or to Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York would be instructed condescendingly to try an evangelical publisher.  But Islam is, needless to say, different.

Kadri makes it clear that Muhammed was not just a recipient of divine revelation; he was also, in one way after another, the ideal man: “No one has ever denied that Muhammed was tall, dark-eyed, handsome, fragrant, lustrous, well-mannered, softly spoken, modest, firm of handshake and purposeful of stride,” writes Kadri.  For him, it’s a given that Muhammed was a paragon of human virtue, the ultimate ethical and spiritual teacher, God’s final prophet.  “[N]o one would ever doubt Muhammed’s eloquence,” Kadri asserts.  He speaks unblushingly of Muhammed’s “solid moral arguments.”  He even dares to credit Muhammed with teaching sexual equality – never mind that the Koran teaches comprehensive sexual inequality.  (With lawyerly deftness, Kadri doesn’t speak of “sexual equality” but instead uses the term “morally equal,” which makes less sense the longer you look at it.)

One question about Muhammed that Kadri does address – kind of – is the one about his marriage to nine-year-old Aisha.  While accepting every detail of Muhammed’s divine revelations as historical fact, Kadri refuses to accept that Aisha was nine when the prophet married her, and suggests, without a hint of supporting evidence or argument, that historians “might have been exaggerating her youth to exclude any doubt about her virginity.”

Unsurprisingly, Kadri evinces as much reverence for the Koran as he does for the Prophet.  “Not for nothing,” he gushes, “is its recital said to have stopped jinns in their tracks and melted the hardest of pagan hearts.”  The Koran is without blemish, he informs us, although “its perfection was not universally appreciated when it first appeared.”  But is he interested in close reading?  Hardly.  Want a frank discussion of all those passages that deliciously imagine an eternity of hellfire for infidels?  Don’t look for them here (although Kadri does go out of his way to tell us that two Koran verses “promise a reward in the afterlife to good Jews and Christians”).

Well, if the latest screed by Norwegian “peace professor” Johan Galtung is any evidence, Grass’s poem has inspired other leading members of the pack to aim for their own new lows.  For Galtung has now served up his own grotesque entry in the Jew-hatred sweepstakes.

Granted, it’s no surprise to see Galtung, the “father of peace studies” and founder (more than half a century ago) of the International Peace Research Institute, diving into these foul waters.  Poisonous anti-semitism fits right in with Galtung’s charming history as a booster of Communist dictatorship and a savage critic of Western democratic capitalism – and, especially, a propagandist against America, which for him is the epitome, and the headquarters, of everything despicable and dangerous about the contemporary world.  This is a guy who thinks that war is caused not by tyrannical bullies but by free countries that refuse to be bullied – a  guy for whom responding to aggression is at least as evil as aggression itself.  (In fact, even more evil – for if you don’t resist aggression, there’s no war, right?)

What’s most lamentable is that this unspeakable crackpot has fans.  Years ago, at the University of Oslo, I experienced the revolting spectacle of Galtung receiving a prolonged ovation for a “lecture” that was little more than a pastiche of anti-American invective and absurd conspiracy theories.  Last September 30, he gave another lecture entitled “Ten Theses about July 22” – that being the date on which Anders Behring Breivik massacred 77 people in and near Oslo.  The lecture, according to NRK, the Norwegian national broadcasting company, “was greeted with a standing ovation by some, while others chose to leave the auditorium.”  Good for them.  In Dagbladet on October 7, John Færseth neatly summed up the lecture’s message as follows: “Galtung comes dangerously close to the idea that the world is really controlled by Jews and Freemasons.”  After Galtung replied to Færseth, the latter followed up by reprinting his Dagbladet article in the Humanist along with a reply to Galtung’s reply.  Galtung’s reply to the reply to his reply – are you still with me? – appeared in a later issue of the Humanist, and both items from the Humanist were made available online on April 23.

Galtung’s last contribution to this exchange, entitled “On Clear Lines and Ambivalence,” is an instant classic of its genre – namely, lowdown anti-Semitism originating from the very summit of European intellectual celebrity (or, at least, much too close to that summit for comfort).  To be sure, Galtung makes an exceedingly feeble effort to shield himself from charges of anti-Semitism – (1) by suggesting, absurdly, that he is himself a stalwart soldier in the fight against that most stubborn of European prejudices (“anti-Semitism has mostly disappeared from American debate.  And that’s a good thing.  I made my contribution when I worked for the Anti-Defamation Le[a]gue”), and (2) by making the magnificently disingenuous argument that not to allow criticism of Jews and of Israel is to keep the lid on a potentially explosive brew.

Get that?  Avoid questions about Jews and Israel, Galtung warns, “and anti-Semitism will come like a tidal wave.”  He claims that “Jewish friends” of his in the U.S., “a country frustrated down to its bone marrow,” fear precisely this kind of tidal wave.  (I would be fascinated, by the way, to know which Jews in the U.S. are this man’s friends.  If you’re one of them, please drop me a line and explain.)  To sum up: we’ve got to criticize Jews and Israel as vigorously as possible – not to contribute to anti-Semitism, but to prevent it.

(While you’re scratching your chin over that one, let me just interject that, when it comes to Galtung’s work for the Anti-Defamation League, all I’ve been able to discover is that the ADL published – in 1961 – a book in which he surveyed high-school students’ knowledge of and attitudes toward Jews and Nazism. Again, if you  can tell me anything more about Galtung’s involvement in the ADL’s fight against anti-Semitism, do let me know.)

On page 243 of his compelling new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party, Michael Patrick Leahy recalls the memorable exchange, at a July 24, 2010, town  meeting in California, between Democratic congressman Pete Stark and a constituent who asked about the constitutionality of ObamaCare.  “I think,” said Stark, “that there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life.”  When the constituent followed up – asking, “if they can do this, what can’t they?  Is your answer that they can do anything?” – Stark’s reply was clear and unhesitant: “The federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country.”

Stark’s candid acknowledgment of the well-nigh unlimited scale of federal authority in the twenty-first century comes toward the end of an extremely absorbing account of how, exactly, we got to this point.  Leahy begins his story in 17th-century England, where heroes of individual liberty battled the tyranny of Stuart kings and Puritan theocrats alike.  Never heard of John Lilburne?  John Wise?  The Levellers (“the first significant grassroots political movement in Anglo-American history”)?  Leahy makes it clear that every American schoolchild should know these names.  He illuminatingly identifies the different philosophical traditions that went into America’s founding documents, noting that the critical second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”) is “the perfect blend of Locke, Protestant covenant theology, and the Ancient Constitution.”  However much history you may think you know, you may actually find Leahy deepening your understanding of the Founding Fathers’ ideas and of their historical roots.

At the center of this book is the U.S. Constitution – and, especially, Article I, Section 8, which includes three clauses that have been broadly interpreted in such a way as to expand government powers: the “general welfare” clause (“The Congress shall have power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common defence and general Welfare of the United States”); the “necessary and proper” clause (“[The Congress shall have power] To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof”); and the commerce clause (“[The Congress shall have power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”).

It is remarkable to reflect upon the fact that immense government agencies and onerous, life-destroying regulations have been constructed on the fragile foundation of these few words.

In Leahy’s story, the hero is Thomas Jefferson, whom Leahy views as a supporter of “the plain meaning of the words of the Constitution.”  (He chooses to overlook the fact that Jefferson, as president, was not quite the constitutional purist, buying the Louisiana Territory even though he believed himself that he had no constitutional authority to do so.)  The villain is Alexander Hamilton, who, in establishing the National Bank, established “the precedent of federal powers far beyond those articulated in the Constitution,” thereby becoming the forefather of “modern expansionists of government power” who “support a meaning of the Constitution that can be expanded to justify virtually any action the federal government seeks to undertake.”  (There are many good things to be said about Hamilton, but Leahy’s book is not the place to look for them.)

Until Woodrow Wilson and World War I, America swung back and forth between constitutional purism and overreach.  Among the good guys: Andrew Jackson, who put the kibosh on the Second National Bank, and Grover Cleveland, “the last constitutional Democrat,” who “demonstrated greater fidelity to the constitutional principles of limited government” than any other president.  Among the bad guys: John Adams, whose Alien and Sedition Acts represented an outrageous violation of the First Amendment; Abraham Lincoln, who dispersed federal funds to the companies that built the transcontinental railroad; Benjamin Harrison, who signed “the first massive entitlement program in American history”; and, of course, Wilson, who during the First World War implemented “massive intrusive and ubiquitous government regulations,” whetting federal bureaucrats’ appetite for power and accustoming American citizens to Washington’s exercise of unconstitutional power over their lives.

The list reads, in large part, like an honor roll of courageous truth-tellers.  In the U.S., people like David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Ibn Warraq, Mark Steyn, Robert Spencer, and Andrew McCarthy.  In Canada, Ezra Levant.  In the U.K., Roger Scruton.  In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders.  In Denmark, Lars Hedegaard.  And so on.

But no, this isn’t meant as an honor roll.  It’s a list of individuals – and organizations, too, among them the David Horowitz Freedom Center – that, according to a new “Counter-Jihad Report” by a British group called Hope Not Hate, make up a nefarious network of Islamophobic extremists who inspired the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring-Breivik.

It’s no coincidence that this “report” was issued to coincide with the beginning of Breivik’s trial, which started on Monday.  For the people at Hope Not Hate seek to draw an explicit cause-and-effect connection between writings by various critics of Islam and the atrocities of July 22.

One thing’s clear: Breivik has been a terrific gift to those who, for whatever reason, have long been eager to shift focus away from the danger of Islam and to argue that it’s the criticism of Islam that’s the real danger.

It hasn’t been easy for these folks.  Over the last decade, as a result of one brutal jihadist atrocity after another – 9/11, Madrid, London, Beslan, Bali, Mumbai, etc., etc. – Islam has been associated in the Western mind with bloodthirsty slaughter.  Then, on July 22 of last year, a single man, acting alone, killed dozens of people, purportedly in the name of anti-jihadism.  His actions provided everyone who’d like to whitewash Islam with an opportunity to associate not Islam, but its critics, with savage violence.

The people at Hope Not Hate didn’t let this opportunity pass them by.  So – voilà, the “Counter-Jihad Report,” the implicit premise of which is that to be opposed to jihad is, by definition, not only a bad but a downright dangerous thing.

Not that the “report” actually addresses the subject of jihad – no, jihad itself is left almost entirely out of the equation.  Indeed, to read this thing, you’d almost think that jihad were some fantasy cooked up by “counter-jihadists” in order to smear Islam.

I won’t mince words: the “report” is a thoroughly repulsive piece of work.  One repulsive thing about it is that it brings together the names of serious, respectable, and well-informed critics of Islam – individuals and organizations that are profoundly concerned about the rise of Islam in the West because they recognize it as a threat to freedom and human rights – with the names of neo-Nazis.  Also repulsive is the masthead on this page, on which pictures of David Horowitz and Geert Wilders are juxtaposed with a photo of Breivik, in full faux-military regalia, aiming his gun.

In a sane world, such a juxtaposition of images would be more than enough to make it clear that Hope Not Hate is a despicable organization and that its “report” is not to be taken seriously.  Yet this isn’t, alas, a sane world.  Issued only a few days ago, the “report” has already been embraced by the international media, and the formerly obscure Hope Not Hate is suddenly being treated as if it were a definitive source of objective information.

In 2009, the Danish writer and historian Lars Hedegaard, who is the founder and president of the Danish Free Press Society, made remarks in his home about the treatment of women in Muslim communities.  His observations, while expressed in broad generalizations, were based in fact, although when they were made public and resulted in widespread criticism he apologized for the way he had expressed himself.  This was not good enough for the Danish courts.  He was charged with violating Denmark’s racism law, and went to trial in January 2011.  He was acquitted, but was tried again on the same charges three months later.  This time he was found guilty.  Last Friday Hedegaard initiated an appeal of his conviction before the Danish Supreme Court.

Not so many years ago, such a story would have been regarded as nothing less than sensational: a writer is put on trial in a Western country for making critical remarks about a certain religion’s ideology and practices.  The unsettling truth is that the more often the sensational happens, the less and less sensational it becomes.  In recent years, the Western world has grown used to seeing writers hauled before official tribunals – Mark Steyn in Canada, Oriana Fallaci in Italy, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria – invariably for criticizing Islam.  It doesn’t help that the mainstream media almost always report on these actions as if they were anything but sensational: they’re treated as ordinary, reasonable, and legitimate judicial proceedings.

In Norway, where I live, no writer has yet been put on trial for treading on Islam’s toes.  But we’ve come close.  When the editor of a small Christian newspaper reprinted the Danish Muhammed cartoons as part of a feature about the controversy, the Norwegian media establishment and top-level government leaders came down on him like a ton of bricks, demanding that he apologize for offending Muslims.  The editor, Vebjørn Selbekk, withstood the pressure for a while, then buckled.  By that point, several leading figures in Norway – from the prime minister on down – had gone on the record with demands that freedom of speech be tempered by, or balanced against, things like “common sense,” “respect,” and “sensitivity.” Many thoughtful Norwegians expressed deep concern: the Magazinet case, they worried, did not bode well for the future of free speech in Norway.

That was back in 2006.  Then, last summer, as the whole world knows, Norway was hit by an act of mass murder – not by a Muslim terrorist group, but by a single individual who is a self-described opponent of the Islamization of Europe.  The perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, set off a massive explosion at the main government office building in Oslo and then massacred dozens of teenagers at a Labor Party youth camp on a nearby island.  In the months since his arrest, the case has taken several turns.  First, he was studied by two psychiatrists who issued an official report concluding that he was not sane, and thus not accountable for his actions.  This created an uproar in Norway.

Perhaps the most lucid and succinct summary I’ve seen of the ensuing developments appeared this weekend in the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen.  Klaus Wivel began by noting two ways in which Norway singles itself out: first, in no nation in the world are more defendants declared insane; second, in Norway, as opposed to many other countries, if a defendant is declared insane, that’s it: he’s put into the care of mental-health authorities, and the legal and penal systems no longer have any say in his future.

In the case of Breivik, this well-established state of affairs outraged many Norwegians, who, understandably, wanted to see him put behind bars forever.  It also disappointed many on the Left, for whom the idea of Breivik as a madman was of no use at all; they wanted him put on trial, so that they could also try, as it were, their own enemies on the Right whose criticism of Islam, they insisted, had led to Breivik’s actions.  Breivik, for his part, also hated the diagnosis. “He claims to have rational arguments for his murder,” wrote Wivel.  “He wants to be declared guilty, not insane.”

Most important, as it turned out, the judges, too, were unhappy with the first psychiatric report.  So in December, in a remarkable deviation from standard practice, they asked for a whole new report by two different doctors.  Wivel quotes Norwegian journalist Jon Hustad, who wrote bluntly that “the judges gave in to political pressure.”  That second report, whose conclusions were made public last week, gave the Left, Breivik, and the judges exactly what they wanted: a declaration of sanity.  On, then, to the trial, which begins today.

But – and this brings us back to where we started, with the subject of writers about Islam being put on trial – the release of the new psychiatric report wasn’t the only big news in the Breivik case last week.  Among other developments, Breivik’s lawyers made public a list of the people whom they plan to call as “expert witnesses” for the defense.  The list is an interesting mix.  There are politicians from both the Labor and Progress parties.  There are psychiatrists.  And there are a couple of people, such as University of Oslo sociologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who have publicly taken on critics of Islam such as yours truly and sought to spread to them the blame for Breivik’s actions.

Even Norway’s most famous Muslim, the terrorist Mullah Krekar, is on the witness list.

All the President’s Men converted a generation of innocent, impressionable, pre-Internet Americans – myself included – into unthinking fans of the mainstream news media.  Some people in the government might be out to screw us over, and certainly every last man and woman in corporate America was up to no good, but the knights in shining armor at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the network news divisions were there to come to our rescue – to save our freedoms and preserve our Constitution, wielding the truth like a shining sword.

As I watched Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, in the last shot of the film, taking down Richard M. Nixon one typewriter keystroke at a time, my thoughts naturally turned to Mike Wallace, who since his death the other day at the age of 285 – sorry, 93 – has been celebrated by many commentators as the quintessential embodiment of the crusading, principled, virtuous mainstream news media in its now-bygone, widely lamented heyday.  His death, indeed, has provided his colleagues in the traditional media with a magnificent opportunity – which many of them, of course, have seized upon – to try to resurrect the heroic myth perpetrated by All the President’s Men and many other films.  (Remember, for example, another Redford film from 1976, Three Days of the Condor, in which he’s betrayed and hunted down by the CIA and ends up, incriminating evidence finally in hand, at the entrance to the New York Times building, the logo of that newspaper symbolizing his, and justice’s, salvation?)  A typical posthumous tribute to Wallace in the Washington Post began as follows: “Mike Wallace had a glorious career at CBS, racking up 21 Emmy awards and an endless reel of great interviewing moments. And to think that this fantastic career….”  Check, please!

Admittedly, Wallace was a gifted showman.  Every cheesy TV show that has ever made use of ambush interviews owes him a huge debt of gratitude.  But too often his antics left a vaguely – or not so vaguely – bad taste in one’s mouth.  Yes, the used-car salesman in Cowpie, Oklahoma, who turned back odometers deserved to get nabbed for it – but did he deserve to be nabbed in front a nationwide audience?  Did this pathetic petty swindler deserve to be cast as this week’s dastardly villain opposite the golden champion of American fair play and hero of the common man – portrayed, as always, by Wallace, this moneyed member of the Manhattan media elite?

What was especially unpalatable about Wallace’s work on 60 Minutes is that one week he’d self-righteously bring down some small-time crook in some shabby little office in flyover America – killing a fly with a cannon – and the next week he’d turn out an unctuous, nauseating puff piece on some insufferable celebrity or other.  I’ll never forget the image of him laughing it up with real-estate magnates Harry and Leona Helmsley on the roof of one of their New York hotels.  One had the impression (and perhaps he even said something to this effect; I don’t remember) that he and the Helmsleys were chums, or at least went to some of the same parties or had mutual friends among the bicoastal glitterati.  The Helmsleys were ripe for exposé treatment (she ended up behind bars; he escaped prosecution only because of physical and mental incompetence), but their profile by Mike Wallace, investigative journalist extraordinaire, was framed as a portrait of a husband and wife of a certain age who, though high-powered and successful businesspeople, were, far more importantly, still just as deeply in love with each other as ever.

The only surprising thing about the anti-Semitic “poem” that Günter Grass published last week, and that has created an international firestorm, is that he waited so long to write such a thing.  Anti-Semitism, after all, is all the rage these days among left-wing European literary intellectuals (excuse the multiple redundancy), and Grass has always prided himself on being in the forefront of these trends, not being a Johann-come-lately.

Who is Günter Grass, you ask?  For decades after the 1959 publication of his first and most famous (and highly overrated) novel, The Tin Drum, he was described by admirers as the conscience of postwar Germany.  His detractors had other words for him: smug, arrogant, obnoxious.  Even Richard Gilman, a writer for the left-wing The Nation whom one might have expected to celebrate the guy, complained in 1982 about his “lofty, hectoring tone,” stating: “Today there is no writer more swollen with self-importance…than Gunter Grass, who has begun to think of himself as identical with the fates of German literature, German politics, and German mores.”  John Updike, for his part, saw Grass as a “cautionary case” for politically engaged writers: “he can’t be bothered to write a novel; he just sends dispatches…from the front lines of his engagement.”

During the Cold War, Grass’s specialité de la maison was – naturally – equating capitalism and Communism.  A highlight of the 1986 PEN writers’ congress was a debate that Salman Rushdie later described as “a heavyweight prize fight between Saul Bellow and Günter Grass.”  Bellow made positive observations about America’s founding values, the freedom of the American writer, and the proper separation between the U.S. government and “the higher life of the country”; Grass replied by sneering predictably about conditions in the South Bronx.  Writers from behind the Iron Curtain – Adam Zagajewski (a Pole who had emigrated to France in 1982) and Vassily Aksyonov (a Russian who had lived in the U.S. since 1980) gave Bellow a thumbs-up, Aksyonov saying that “I would love German writers to think twice before making parallels between the USSR and USA.”

But making such parallels was Grass’s stock-in-trade.  By stuffing his books with predictable, lockstep left-wing politics, Grass established a position for himself in German literature – and in European culture generally – that he wouldn’t have been able to earn simply by means of his frankly feeble gifts for plot, characterization, and the like.  One thing’s for sure: if his novels hadn’t been jam-packed with just the right kind of politics, he’d never have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

With the Nobel, he reached the summit.  Then, seven years later, a bombshell: in a memoir entitled Peeling the Onion, Grass revealed that, as a teenager, he’d belonged to the Waffen-SS.  His fans were stunned: after all, as the critic Ted Gioia has put it, Grass made his name by “holding up to derision those who refused to take full ownership for Germany’s Nazi past.”  Indeed, the Swedish Academy, when it gave him the Nobel, specifically praised Grass for “recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget.”  As Gioia observed, the exceedingly belated SS revelation imbued the Swedish Academy’s words “with unintentional irony.”

In Germany, the news about Grass being a onetime SS member was so big that writers held public debates about it.  One playwright, reported Deutsche Welle, “said he couldn’t get excited about Grass’ fall as a moral authority for the simple reason that he never believed in Grass as a moral authority.”  Author Henryk Broder, perhaps the sanest and most reliable guide to goings-on in Deutschland, said: “I always found him foolish and unbearable….But the public excitement is justified. If it had turned out that Mother Theresa had worked in a brothel, after being declared a saint – just as Grass was with his Nobel Prize – there would have been public outrage, too.”

Probably the only decent thing for Grass to have done after his SS revelation would have been to slink into obscurity – and perhaps volunteer anonymously at an Israeli hospital, or something like that, to atone for his hideous past and his rank hypocrisy.  But no.  Now he’s written this lousy poem, “What Must Be Said,” of which The Atlantic has published an English translation by Heather Horn.  Where to begin?  For one thing, no one would mistake this for Goethe or Heine: it’s a crude, clunky op-ed in verse in which Grass explicitly rejects his fellow Germans’ supposed hesitation to criticize Israel, assails Israel for threatening Iran with nukes, and condemns the German government for supplying arms to the warmongering Jews.  For another thing, Grass’s pretense that he is bravely violating some nationwide code of silence to speak a vital truth is hogwash: such attacks on Israel are daily fare in the German media, as they are in the media throughout Western Europe.  Grass’s poem doesn’t break new ground; on the contrary, every word of it is a European cultural-elite cliché.

The news rocked Norway – well, rocked a good portion of the Norwegian elite, anyhow.  The Swedish Nobel Foundation, reported the newsweekly Ny Tid on February 1, was investigating the Norwegian Nobel Committee.  The question: was the committee awarding the Peace Prize in accordance with Alfred Nobel’s intentions?

For at least one influential person in Sweden, Fredrik Heffermehl, author of a recent book, Nobel’s Peace Prize: The Vision that Disappeared, the answer was a resounding no.  Why did this matter?  Because even though Nobel, who died in 1896, had instructed in his will that the Peace Prize be awarded by a committee chosen by the Norwegian Parliament (the other Nobels are all awarded by Swedish institutions), it turns out that under Swedish law, the committee’s authority can be revoked if it can be demonstrated that the testator’s intentions are not being carried out.  What alarmed official Norway, in short, was the possibility that, if the Swedish Nobel Foundation bought Heffermehl’s argument, it would wrench away from the Kingdom of Norway its single biggest claim to international fame.

Fortunately for Norway, it dodged that bullet: on March 8, the Swedish Nobel Foundation cleared the committee of any wrongdoing.  Was it correct to do so?  What kind of a job have the Norwegians done in selecting Peace Prize winners?  That’s the question posed by Jay Nordlinger in his new book Peace, They Say, a critical history of the prizes that is at once highly judicious and deliciously readable.

What should a peace prize be?  Does the idea even make sense?  In 1901, many people thought it did.  One way to understand the prize, indeed, is as the relic of a time when pacifism seemed, to many reasonable people, a realistic proposition – a time before World War I exposed the terrifying depths of brutal irrationality to which even “modern” and “advanced” people could sink, and before the rise of Communism and Nazism showed the susceptibility of “modern” and “advanced” people to totalitarian ideologies which simply had to be resisted military.  All of which would make it clear, at least to people of a non-utopian bent, that “making peace” is a far more complicated business than simply holding peace conferences and signing peace accords.

To be sure, even back then not everyone was naïve – not even all Peace Prize laureates.  Take Teddy Roosevelt, for instance, who won in 1906 for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War.  “Peace is generally good in itself,” he said in his Nobel speech, “but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness…No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong.”  Wise words.  “Very, very seldom has a Nobel peace lecture sounded this way,” Nordlinger underscores, noting that TR’s speech “has stuck in the craws of many peace-prize devotees.”  Indeed, many people who take the prize seriously can still get down in the dumps about the thumbs-up to TR, whom they consider the very archetype of the American imperialist warmonger.

Of course, in the annals of the Nobel Peace Prize the Teddy Roosevelts are far outnumbered by idealistic naifs like German diplomat Gustav Stresemann (1926), who won for his role in securing the Locarno Treaty, which, he asserted, meant “lasting peace on the Rhine, guaranteed by the formal renunciation of force by the two great neighboring nations.”  And how about Frank Kellogg (1929), who won for the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a multilateral peace treaty that promised to outlaw war?  (“Maybe illegalization would not stop war,” says Nordlinger, by way of explaining the treaty’s logic.  “But it would make it…well, illegal.”)

Yes, the Nobel committee has made some admirable choices.  As Nordlinger rightly observes, Albert Schweitzer (1952) was “[o]ne of the golden men of the 20^th century” and Andrei Sakharov (1975) “one of the noblest human beings of his age.”  The selection of the “heroic and defiant” Carl von Ossietzky (1936), a German pacifist who was a Nazi prisoner at the time of the award, was gutsy – a deliberate affront to Hitler.  Then there was General George C. Marshall (1953), who won for the Marshall Plan, and who, echoing TR, warned in his Nobel lecture of the danger of demilitarization, describing the military as a “vast power for maintaining the peace.”   (Nordlinger suggests, persuasively, that Marshall is perhaps “something like the ideal peacemaker” – a man who, after winning the war, went on to strengthen the peace.)  Nordlinger esteems anti-apartheid activist Albert John Lutuli (1960), saying that “[i]f freedom champions are to have peace prizes, the Nobel prize for 1960 is one of the best the committee has ever bestowed.”   And Nordlinger tells a story about Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964) that I hadn’t heard: Coretta King wanted to save some of the prize money for the kids’ college fund, but King insisted it all “be poured into the cause.”

Reading about the winners of the Peace Prize, one is struck by the alternation between terrible choices and terrific ones – and by how the egomania of so many of the fools, knaves, and mediocrities contrasts with the humility of so many of the greats.  Marshall is a prime example of the latter.  Nordlinger tells how, not long before winning the prize, Marshall attended Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.  As he walked into Westminster Abbey, he noticed that the whole congregation was rising to its feet.  The modest general “looked around to see who had entered.  It was he.”  Nice story.

In Norway and elsewhere, one of the most controversial prizes remains the one awarded for the Vietnam peace accords to Henry Kissinger (1973), who was honored jointly with Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam.  “The critics,” as Nordlinger pungently notes, “thought it outrageous that the American secretary of state had won the Nobel prize, not so much that the representative of a totalitarian and mass-murdering dictatorship had done so.”  Here’s an admirable detail about Kissinger: when the peace agreement failed and the North Vietnamese overran the South, he shipped his gold medal, diploma, and prize money back to Oslo, saying he felt “honor bound” to return them.  But the Norwegians wouldn’t take their stuff back.  Kissinger has expressed embarrassment about his prize ever since, writing to Elie Wiesel (1986): “I  was not proud of my Nobel, but I am of yours.”

Kissinger’s chagrin over winning his prize contrasts estimably with the conduct of many other winners (including some of the most famous) who have campaigned shamelessly for it.  Then there are the “professional…laureates,” whose prizes made them famous and have milked them for all they’re worth, jet-setting from one lucrative speaking gig to another.  “Often,” notes Nordlinger, “Nobel peace laureates come to be seen as all-purpose, global gurus.”   And then there are the winners whose post-prize behavior has hardly done the Nobel name proud.  Betty Williams (1976) has said more than once that she’d like to kill George W. Bush.  Argentinian human-rights Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (1980) gave a Nobel speech that was “beautiful, balanced, pointed, and wise” – then devolved into “an activist of the hard Left” who “is the type to be invited to Castro’s birthday parties.”  (Nordlinger wonders: “What would Perez Esquivel say to Cuban prisoners of conscience, if he ever faced them?”)  Desmond Tutu’s (1984) Nobel lecture was “eloquent,” but he has since become a “harsh critic of Israel” and equated Bush with bin Laden.  Rigoberto Menchú (1992), a purported human-rights activist, is another one who “has been staunchly supportive of Castro and his dictatorship.”  Mandela, likewise, has “heaped praise” on Castro and Qaddafi, “strengthening them with his moral authority.,” even though “[o]ne word from him, in behalf of Libya’s political prisoners, or Cuba’s, could have done a world of good.”

Well, as it turns out, rather amazingly, the Norwegian judiciary has upset Krekar’s plans.

Here’s the story.  Back in June 2010, Krekar – who at the time was facing possible expulsion to Iraq, where he insisted he was in danger of execution –issued the following warning: “My death will cost Norwegian society.  If, for example, Erna Solberg tossing me out of the country leads to my death, she will suffer the same fate.”  Solberg is head of the Norwegian Conservative Party.

So it was that on Monday of last week, to the surprise of many, an Oslo court actually took action against Krekar – not only for his threat against Solberg, but also for similar threats against other, less high-profile individuals.  Sentenced to five years in prison, he was released pending appeal.  His lawyer, Brynjar Meling, admitted that the court’s decision took him and his client aback.  And understandably so – after all, Krekar has been a clear and present danger in Norway for years and yet has been allowed to reside in Oslo, living proof of the fecklessness of European governments in the face of the enemy within.  Why start taking this peril seriously now?

In court last Monday, Krekar insisted, in his defense, that his singling out of Solberg was mere happenstance.  “Solberg was just a name that popped into my head,” he said.  “It’s as if I’m talking about German philosophy and mention Schopenhauer or Hegel – it’s just a name.  She was just a symbol for me.”  In other words, he isn’t particularly set on killing Solberg – there’s a whole bunch of other Norwegian officials whom he could just as happily kill instead.  (Great defense: if I’m willing to blow just anyone to bits, you must acquit!)

Krekar went on to say something that came off (such is his wont) as yet another threat: “Muslims must provide security to the country that has given them security.  As long as I received security and safety here, Norwegians were able to enjoy the same thing.”  And now that Norwegians were threatening to lock him up?  The mullah’s point is clear: if Norway makes war on him, he’ll make war on Norway.

Following his court appearance, Krekar headed for the studios of Norway’s TV2 to be interviewed by Al-Jazeera.  When a TV2 reporter asked for a comment on the way out, Krekar got a tad violent (video here).  Two, um, journalists from Al-Jazeera restrained him, whereupon one of them asked TV2′s cameraman to hand over the video of Krekar’s outburst.  His request was, admirably, denied.  One of the two Al-Jazeera boys then complained that TV2 had been wrong to videotape Krekar: it was, he said, a simple matter of “respect.”  Among other things, this encounter tidily demonstrated – old news, of course – that for many Muslims, “respect” between themselves and infidels is a one-way street.

The next day, Tuesday, Krekar was arrested in his home for having issued yet more death threats.  This time, his defense was that the latest threats were merely “hypothetical.”  What had happened, apparently, was this: after his TV2 adventure, he went home and logged into a jihadist chat room where he’d said something to the effect that “if anyone were to kidnap and keep Norwegians imprisoned in a basement just as long as he [Krekar] remained in prison, whether it was five or ten years, it wouldn’t hurt his case.”  Asked by his online interlocutors about the use of knives or grenades, he is said to have replied that these were “teenage methods.”

I spent twenty-one years in classrooms, from kindergarten all the way through graduate school, and when I was done I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with my life.

I had collected an M.A. and Ph.D. in English because I loved reading and writing, but by the time I was done with the whole thing, and had published a few articles along the way in journals with names like English Language Notes and The Yeats Eliot Review, it had become clear to me that I was, by temperament, simply not an academic, and that I did not want to grow old as an English professor, churning out dry, scholarly papers about Henry James or Theodore Dreiser or whatever that the world didn’t need and that virtually nobody would read.  In any case, what with the advent of deconstructionist criticism, feminist criticism, and other such abominations, it was clear to me that English departments were moving very quickly in a direction that had nothing whatsoever to do with the love of reading and writing.  Rather, their focus was increasingly on politics – specifically, lockstep far-left politics.  And instead of striving to write prose that was as clear and direct as possible, ambitious young English professors were aiming for the very opposite: obfuscation, pretentiousness, deliberate obscurity, the point, almost always, being to veil the fact that they didn’t really have anything to say.

I didn’t want to spend my life trudging down that sad, dead-end road.  What to do, then?  How was I to make my way in the world?

One day in 1983, around the time I received my Ph.D. diploma in the mail and threw it in a drawer, I dropped into one of my favorite bookstores, the legendary Gotham Book Mart on 47^th Street between 5^th and 6^th Avenues in Manhattan.  (Like many of my favorite bookstores, and many of my other favorite places in New York, it is now no longer there.)  Among the wonderful things about the Gotham was that it contained a big room consisting mostly of waist-high sets of bookshelves on top of which the latest issues of hundreds of literary and cultural journals were arranged in alphabetical order, so that you could poke through them, and page through them, with ease.  Every month or two I would spend an hour or so catching up with these publications, and maybe, if I had the money, buying one or two.

On that day in 1983, amid all the familiar titles, I discovered copies of two or three issues of a magazine I’d never seen before.  I was immediately taken with it.  First of all, it was just plain beautiful – the design, the typeface, the layout, the feel of the paper, everything.  Second, once I opened it and began reading, I realized that I’d stumbled across a community of people with whom I strongly identified.  The articles were about literature, art, classical music, and culture generally, but they weren’t written in the pretentious academic prose to which I’d become accustomed, and the writers didn’t approach their subjects with the usual political presuppositions and prejudices.  No – these were men and women who were plainly saying what they actually thought, and were doing so in language that was consistently intelligent and engaging.  Nor did they mind tipping over sacred cows, including the sacred cows of the left, although they did so in the most elegant possible way.  In short: real writing by real people about real stuff.

The magazine was called The New Criterion.  The issues I perused at the Gotham Book Mart were its very first.  It was edited by Hilton Kramer, the former chief art critic of the New York Times and one of the most imposing names on the New York intellectual scene of the day.

Audaciously, I wrote to Kramer, including some clips of my published work – which at that time didn’t amount to very much – and asking if I might write for his magazine.  I didn’t hold out much hope, but thought it was worth a try.  To my surprise, I received a reply almost at once from Kramer himself (this was back when letters were typed on pieces of paper and stuffed in envelopes, which were then stamped and placed in something called a mailbox), asking me for more information about my critical approach and tastes.  I answered his questions as best I could, and the next thing I knew I was reviewing three books by and about the novelist Thomas Wolfe for The New Criterion. 

Being asked to write for The New Criterion made me up my game.  I worked at striking the right tone, finding the right voice.  I looked more closely at the work of the critics whose writing styles I admired the most, including people (such as Gore Vidal) whom I didn’t exactly agree with about a whole lot of things.  And above all, I studied Hilton’s own writings, which, I soon found, were models of intellectual ardor, aesthetic discrimination, and critical independence.  He was a world-class champion of true aesthetic greatness, of high modernism in literature and art, of human liberty, and, most broadly, of civilization itself; and he was an enemy of fashionable, trashy postmodernism, of all the new, pernicious “isms” that rejected the very concept of aesthetic or literary merit, and of Communism and its fellow travelers (of whom he had known many on his own journey).  He was always serious, because he took culture and art seriously and had a genuine, and thoroughly legitimate, sense of urgency about the direction in which culture and art were headed.  But his seriousness was never a dull, plodding affair.  He wrote with the passion of a crusader, and with an acerbic wit that was inimitable.  I loved to read him on anything, even on obscure artists in whom I had no interest, simply for the joy of experiencing his prose.

After last week’s killing of three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse, early reports suggested that the murderer was a white, right-wing racist who was targeting minorities.  Indeed, one could be excused for getting the impression, from those first accounts, that the authorities and the media wanted him to be a white, right-wing racist – a lone maniac like the guy who mowed down dozens of teenagers in Norway last July.  Yet the Toulouse terrorist turned out, like so many perpetrators of unspeakable European atrocities in recent years, to be an Islamic jihadist – a self-declared Mujahideen and member of al-Qaeda who said he was out to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and the military involvement of France in the Islamic world, and who, if a van had not blocked the path of his scooter, might have succeeded in executing as many young people as Anders Behring Breivik did on the island of Utøya.

If at first many highly placed Frenchmen were eager to attribute the Toulouse murders to right-wing racism, the revelation of Mohamed Merah’s identity initiated a rush to dismiss the relevance of the killer’s religion and his openly expressed motivations and associations.  Nicolas Sarkozy, who was quick tomeet with Jewish and Muslim leaders at the Elysée Palace, was equally quick to tell the French people that “our Muslim counterparts have nothing to do with the crazy motivations of a terrorist.”  Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris, declared that “what happened in Toulouse…had nothing to do with Islam.”  And in Le Monde, Jean-Yves Camus, an “expert” on radical Islam and the extreme right, insisted that in determining the root cause of the murders, “the impact of the re-Islamization of French Muslims by the conservative currents, that is to say fundamentalists, is less important than the unleashing of a radical anti-Zionism that has gone too far and that does not emanate from our own Muslim compatriots, far from it.”

It is certainly true that “radical anti-Zionism” – not to mention vicious anti-Semitism – is on the rise throughout Western Europe.  But it is also true that before the current wave of Jew-hate really took off, a deep-seated antagonism for Jews was already endemic among Muslims in France.

People across France were supposedly shocked at the massacre, shocked to discover that Jewish schoolchildren in their own country could be murdered in such a fashion.  I don’t know what to make of those declarations of shock.  The fact is that Jewish schoolchildren in France have been in danger for years, and anyone who cares anything about the subject has known this for years.

As the rest of Schueler’s article made clear, he wasn’t referring here to the kind of reasonable “limits” on free speech that prohibit, for example, direct incitement to violence and murder.  No, he was talking about much broader and vaguer and more pernicious “limits” – the kind that ban, for example, “offensive” statements, or, more specifically, statements that certain groups of people might object to as “offensive.”

Which groups?  Well, groups like the Muslims who are an increasingly formidable presence in Sweden, notably in the southern city of Malmö, where their presence has caused an increasing amount of what may euphemistically be described as social friction.  Thanks to a rising tide of anti-Semitic activity by Muslim youth, for example, more and more Jews are abandoning Malmö for other parts of Sweden or for Israel.  Schueler sought to blame Malmö’s problems not on Muslims (needless to say) but on (of all people) the Danes.

His argument?  Malmö, owing to its geographic proximity to Denmark, has been influenced not only by Danish music, drama, film, literature, and cuisine, but also by political ideas that, in Schueler’s view, have poisoned Denmark and threaten to poison Sweden, too.  Among these ideas: “biker-gang culture, hatred for immigrants, and so-called straightforwardness.”

Ah yes, the poison of straightforwardness!  Ask any honest broker who is familiar with the looming disaster that is now Malmö and they will not mention “biker-gang culture.”  They will, if they are candid enough, tell you about the proliferation in Malmö of other types of gangs with another type of “culture.”  They will not talk about “hatred for immigrants” but about immigrants from the Muslim world who, with increasing audacity and arrogance,  have made very clear their contempt for the West, for democracy, for sexual equality, for Christianity and Judaism, for freedom of speech and religion, for gays, and for the traditional culture and social values of the country in which they live.  But no, Schueler was not about to enter that territory.

“In Denmark as in Sweden,” lectured Schueler, “it is sometimes argued that there are only certain things that should be said, thought, and debated when it comes to topics like feminism, Islam, immigrants, cultural differences, crime, and multiculturalism.  If you do not take a politically correct stance on these questions, it is said, you are excluded from the media.”  Schueler put this in such a way as to seem to be suggesting that such claims are ludicrous – that accusations of censoriousness on the part of the Swedish media are false – even though the whole point of his article was, in fact, to defend this censoriousness as the only appropriate posture for responsible journalists to take.

Which brings us back to the Free Press Society, which was founded precisely in response to this insidious pattern of censoriousness.  The group is modeled on the Danish organization of the same name, established in Copenhagen in 2004 by Lars Hedegaard, who, as Schueler was quick to inform his readers, has “expressed strong anti-Muslim views” and “has been convicted of racist statements in accordance with the Danish equivalent of the law on incitement to racial hatred.”  The truth of the matter is that Hedegaard’s “crime” was stating objective facts about Islamic belief and practice, including the religion’s deplorable treatment of women – and stating them, moreover, in a private conversation in his own home.  Schueler wrote as if Hedegaard’s conviction on such charges proves that he is a disreputable character, when in fact what it proves is that, when it comes to freedom of speech, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.

There was more.  Hedegaard, it seems, gave a talk at the opening of Malmö’s Free Press Society, and Schueler quoted a remark apparently made by him on that occasion in which he acknowledged the centrality to Islam of the commandment to bring the whole world under Islamic domination.  Schueler made no comment about Hedegaard’s remark – which was a simple statement of fact – presumably because Schueler was confident that for his readers, as for him, the remark itself constituted transparent proof of Hedegaard’s dangerous extremism.

In the June 8, 1970, issue of New York magazine, Tom Wolfe published an article that has been recognized ever since as having perfectly captured a critically important moment in the history of the American cultural elite.  “Radical Chic” was Wolfe’s devastating, unforgettable account of a party he had attended at the Park Avenue duplex penthouse apartment of Leonard Bernstein, then at the height of his fame.  The guest list broke down into two categories.  Category #1 was a who’s-who of world-class artists, celebrities, and New York high-society types: actor Jason Robards, comedian Mike Nichols, playwright Lillian Hellman, artist Larry Rivers, composer Aaron Copland, photographer Richard Avedon, choreographer Jerome Robbins, songwriter Stephen Sondheim, Hollywood director Otto Preminger, Today show host Barbara Walters, and many, many more.  Category #2 was a selection of Black Panther leaders from around the country, among them one Robert Bay, who just 41 hours earlier, as Wolfe noted, had been “arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called ‘criminal facilitation.’”

One of the Panthers addressed the gathering.  His theme: although, for example, “21 members of the Black Panther Party” had been indicted recently “on ridiculous charges of conspiring to blow up department stores and flower gardens,” the Panthers were a peaceable group whose real concerns were indicated by the clinics and children’s breakfast programs they were setting up around the country.   “We recognize,” he said, “that this country is the most oppressive country in the world, maybe in the history of the world. The pigs have the weapons and they are ready to use them on the people…ready to commit genocide against those who stand up against them…..All we want is the good life, the same as you. To live in peace and lead the good life, that’s all we want.”  The Panthers’ lawyer compared the prosecution of the Panthers to the Reichstag fire – both being efforts by tyrannical governments to eliminate the opposition.  And then the Panthers solicited contributions, in response to which the glitterati shouted out pledges – a few hundred dollars here, a few thousand there.

And then an art-gallery owner, depicted by Wolfe as a social climber who had recently arrived from Chicago, shouted out: “Who do you call to give a party?”  Because this wasn’t the first and it wouldn’t be the last party for the Black Panthers to be held in a fancy Manhattan home.  Holding parties for Black Panthers, in the upper-class Manhattan of the very late Sixties and very early Seventies, was the height of chic.  While presented as an act of high morality, it was in fact, as Wolfe explained, an example of “nostalgie de la boue, or romanticizing of primitive souls.”  It was also a way for upper-crust folks to distinguish themselves from the earnest, middle-class types who supported earnest, middle-class civil-rights groups like the NAACP.  At the root of it all, the fact was that the category #1 people at Leonard Bernstein’s party had everything, except for one thing – namely, the freedom from guilt that goes with not having everything.  And so – as an act of atonement, of expiation – they held and attended these parties, thereby not only liberating themselves from limousine-liberal guilt but also lifting themselves up, in their own eyes, to a moral high ground from which they could look down upon the middle class with a pure, guiltless, delicious condescension that made their lives, and their privilege, complete.

As Wolfe’s article made clear, in order to have a successful Panthers party one had to steer delicately around certain awkward details, such as the reality of these people’s violent criminal activity, the reality of their revolutionary goals, and the reality of their profound racism and anti-Semitism (Wolfe quotes a virulently anti-Semitic poem from a Black Panther publication).  Instead, one had to keep the focus on the illusion that the Panthers were heroes of their people, innocent victims, believers in All Good Things who had been utterly misrepresented by a hostile media establishment.

Cut to March 14, 2012, and another address in Manhattan – namely, the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side.  The occasion: a panel discussion entitled “Combating Islamophobia.”  The panelists: a rabbi, Marc Schneier, and an imam, Shamsi Ali. The moderator: Chelsea Clinton.  Among the 225 people in attendance, fortunately for us, is the author Phyllis Chesler, who has now recorded this event for posterity.  Like Tom Wolfe in 1970, she has captured a twisted moment in the history of the New York cultural elite in all its moral vacuity, social irresponsibility, and unblushing self-congratulation.

For those of us unfamiliar with Rabbi Schneier, Chesler provides a brief and helpful résumé: “He has landed in the media many times both for his marital woes (four divorces) and for his interfaith work. He runs a very popular synagogue in Westhampton Beach on Long Island, which offers non-stop entertainment, lectures, films, gatherings, communal hot lunches and dinners, as well as religious services. He is also the son of Rabbi Arthur Schneier, the long-time rabbi of Park East Synagogue who began the tradition of having politicians and celebrities address his congregants.”  One gets the idea.

Schneier is also “Principal Officer” of something called the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, which “reported gross receipts of $825,638.00 for 2010” and “receipts totaling nearly 3.7 million dollars for the period between 2006 and 2010.”  Among the foundation’s directors is billionaire Alexander Machkevitch, so “one might conjecture that he has funded some of the work of this Foundation.”  In addition to his foundation income, Schneier earns “a handsome salary and a rabbinical allowance” from the Westhampton Synagogue.