Yet sufficient resources are made available to fund an endless round of conferences, workshops, dinners, research teams, guest facilitators, visiting assessors, teachers’ union perks and “productivity” raises for chief administrators. No matter. The committees continue to proliferate, in order to promote yet another in a series of unnecessary reforms or syllabus revisions, negotiated in a bland and vacuous eduspeak that sounds authoritative but says next to nothing. And this is the real nub of the issue. It is a language that has critically devitalized us, cutting us off from knowledge of the past and insulating us from the reality of the present, let alone the future. As Uwe Poerksen tells us in Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language, (and as the administrative documents should make clear), “we are dealing with a new type of language usage—one might call it modular—and a new word type—plastic.”

The standard recipe on which the planners and functionaries rely in contriving their peculiar medium of cored and pulped pseudo-expression, shorn of nuance and showing no trace of their origins, is characterized by Poerksen as follows: (1) “take a handful of basic plastic building blocks” (‘development,’ ‘factor,’ ‘consolidation,’ etc.); (2) “combine them with the typical technical and pseudotechnical vocabulary of the planning section” (‘unit,’ ‘zone,’ ‘region,’ etc.); (3) “add sparingly colorless verbs” (‘to document,’ ‘to secure and strengthen,’ etc.); (4) “and season to taste with a few meaningless adjectives and adverbs for emphasis” (‘important,’ ‘highly,’ etc.). And presto! the lexico-syntactical gloop we know as the management style of discourse, which may be adapted and applied indiscriminately to any of the professional and sociotechnical areas of bureaucratic control, including, to our growing discomfiture, the domain of educational reform and administration. As Poerksen notes, the language of education “can often no longer be distinguished from the language of administration.” And this is one of the major reasons that nothing is ever done except further harm.

Poerksen’s most interesting suggestion is perhaps that the plastic language now universally exploited by our experts had already been foreseen and parodied as Orwell’s Newspeak, a language typified by a reduced vocabulary, recombinant terms (doubleplusuncold=very warm), binary values (old=bad, new=good), arbitrary meanings (war is peace), logical transparency (he thinked), abstraction and abbreviation—in other words, “the language of a totalitarian state completely divorced from history.” Poerksen lists some thirty-odd features of Plasticspeak which move in the same Orwellian orbit, of which I give a dozen of the most significant below. Plastic words:

• are devoid of content
• are modular and recombinant
• squeeze out synonyms
• lack a historical dimension
• dispense with questions of good and evil
• awaken needs that had not previously existed
• cannot be made clearer by tone and gesture
• are more like an instrument of subjugation than of freedom
• arrange for function to overwhelm and obliterate content
• are authoritative
• are polymorphous, elastic and abstract and so bring about unreflected consensus
• justify the existence of experts

What we are dealing with, then, is an operational or single-ply language, whose chief characteristics are the identification of the person or thing with the function and, perhaps even more damaging, the suppression of the historical dimension. In this way we become the victims of rampant bureaucratese, the language of administrative control, which remains one of the most effective techniques of totalitarian domination in any ideological camp. “With a word such as ‘development’,” Poerksen remarks, “one can ruin an entire region.”

Even if we take a less alarmist view of the issue, we see the outcome of this linguistic takeover all around us in the denaturing of serious thought and the destruction of healthy discourse. This bureaucratese is a dialect that spreads like tent caterpillars on a cherry tree, feeding in the sheltering embrace of folios before it finally devours its host. It is a species of mental infestation that applies across the entire cultural spectrum, but is most devastating when it afflicts the formative institution of education.

From such instances we learn what we have done wrong and how the pillar institutions of family and school have collapsed upon our children, rendering them largely unfit for the brave new world we are so busily and blindly preparing for them. The following passages are the concluding paragraphs culled from a handful of typical productions which, for all their touching bathos and occasional inarticulateness, identify a number of important truths we tend to dismiss as professionally inconvenient. I give them in their uncorrected form. As Wittgenstein said in his Tractatus, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

–To conclude this journal, if this is what you call a journal. I know I have stated that the education that I have taken in is not up to standards to what most teachers would think as great academic work. But I believe that I am a reflection of what the education system has provided. It is not only the system that has failed but it is all of the western world. My mother always said, “Back in my days, we learned algebra in elementary school.”

–It is quite apparent that I am quite unhappy with the state of our education system. I do not feel it is giving me the tools I need to succeed in the world, it is giving me what they think I need to succeed. By they I mean the hundreds of bureaucrats working in the educational system. I have been pretty hard on the teachers but ultimately it is they [i.e., the bureaucrats] who should receive the blame. They cram more kids in a class and do this without ever setting foot inside the schools. They wonder why there are so many drop outs or why their standards are not being met. But instead of solving the problem they simply lower the standards or take the difficult material out of the course. As long as they are running the system it will most likely get worse. They have had their change and they haven’t done a very good job, it is time for a new way to educate.                                                                                

–If we want our children to progress as individuals, I think it is reasonable to depend on the trial and error method, personal experience, as well as                preaching a love of wisdom, philosophy, rather then solely our conventional and industrialized, formal schooling we hve today. I believe that along with learning the ability to read, write and communicate in a fashionably and respectful way, we are forgetting to teach our children simply how to think and make decisions on their own.

–I think that the level of education is weak because we are so worried about    getting the bottom percentage of the students to read and write that we dont have enough time to push the top percentage of students to excel. We try to   make sure that everyone is mediocre rather than have certain students excel   and others be weaned out. There seems to be more funding for special education than for talented and gifted programs.

–Why do things get worse and worse when all the bigshots keep telling us their going to get better and better? Why can’t we just have smaller classes    and unburnt teachers and maybe a couple of cheaper books to study from?

–Today educational system doen’t allow people to move a head.

These kids are evidently in serious trouble and I sometimes fear that it may be too late to do much about it. Although my respondents tend unanimously to indict the educational system for their malaise, I am tempted to lay the principal blame on a generation of parents who have given little intellectual attention to their offspring during their formative years. What does not begin well often does not end well. As Cicero put it in the Brutus, “It makes a great deal of difference whom one hears at home on a daily basis, with whom one speaks from childhood on, and also in what manner one’s father, teachers, and mother speak.”

Enter David Suzuki, Canada’s leading climate guru, who predicted some 20 years ago that we had only 10 years remaining before environmental collapse. In the meantime what has collapsed is Dr. Suzuki’s objective credibility—though his prophetic authority persists among the naïve and impressionable. Abetting the strategy of endlessly renewable computation is the complementary trick of selective disinformation. A good example of this technique is provided by the controversy over the discovery of a “mutant” fish near Lake Athabasca which, as University of Calgary economist Frank Atkins wrote, was jumped all over by “the David Suzuki crowd” (NP Posted, March 12, 2009). Of course, the presumed “find” was immediately blazoned in the media and among environmental groups as indisputable evidence of oil sands pollution. Unfortunately for the proponents of this factoid, the “mutation” was nothing of the sort but a natural development that follows on decomposition (Fort McMurray Today, the only news source to report on the scientific reassessment of the canard).

Similarly, one recalls Suzuki’s comrade-in-arms Al Gore who, in Earth in the Balance, blames the Antarctic ozone hole for causing blindness in animal populations: “hunters now report finding blind rabbits; fishermen catch blind salmon.” Reality check: not only has the Antarctic ozone hole begun to close (NASA Science, December 12, 2000; Nature, May 16, 2011), but Chilean scientists investigating the phenomenon had already accounted for the blight as owing to an epidemic of pink eye disease (NewScientist, August 21, 1993).

So it goes: bad math, wrong predictions, the application of a Bozo filter to disagreeable facts, and profitable indoctrination. There can be little doubt that, like aspiring carbon billionaire Gore, David Suzuki is a master in the lucrative field of environmental exploitation. Ezra Levant of Sun News Network has uncovered evidence that Suzuki is allegedly stuffing his coffers with money from multi-national organizations that finance his campaigns against Canada’s oil sands production (The Source, February 7, 2012). Suzuki received a million dollar gift from Canada’s Power Corp, which operates in totalitarian China, one of the world’s leading carbon emitters. This may explain why Suzuki, lecturing by video feed to two hundred Canadian schools, has praised China as a nation “committed to developing a green economy.” Indeed, Suzuki, as Levant has shown, grosses $10 million per annum for his mega-Corporation, apparently only a fraction of which is spent on hands-on environmental concerns.

In an informative talk at the National Archives in Ottawa on March 19, 2012, independent researcher Vivian Krause confirmed the details of Suzuki’s windfall from the U.S. based Moore, Hewlett and Packard foundations. Writing in the Financial Post for April 21, 2012, Krause goes on to state that Suzuki’s American funding was for many years “underreported or not reported at all.” This is rather telling, especially when one considers that since 2009, the Canada Revenue Agency “requires nonprofits to report the total amount of funding that they receive from foreign sources.” For 2009 and 2010, the Suzuki Foundation reports “accounted for 5% or 6% of total revenue.”

These are “texts” that should be marked with an obelus, as writings of questionable value. They are, quite frankly, a sort of legerdemain. One thinks, too, of the famous dictum attributed to Tertullian: Credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd.) Actually, the Church Father had written: credibile est, quia ineptum est (probability can be derived from improbability). Same difference. Climate warmists are the Tertullians of the modern age, extracting conviction from rank implausibility and offering their legendary computer models as proofs of the ineffable.

For Lord Christopher Monckton, who specializes in exploring scientific frauds, the reasoning of our climate extremists represents an instance of the logical fallacy known as the argumentum ad petitionem principii, where the premise is also the conclusion. “We tell the computer models that there will be strong warming if we add CO₂ to the air. The models show there will be strong warming. Therefore the warming is our fault” (Financial Post, April 21, 2012). Monckton’s scathing and authoritative analysis, predicated on Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, tears the anthropogenic thesis to wretched little shreds. (Aristotle’s volume is well worth consulting; as the philosopher points out in introducing his subject, “things made of litharge and tin seem to be of silver, while those made of yellow metal seem to be golden.” The application to the current form of “climate science” and its pseudo-scriptural psalters is obvious.)

In an open letter sponsored by the Cato Institute addressed to President Obama, himself a stalwart adherent of the climate change hypothesis, over a hundred scientists from more than a dozen countries stressed that “the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated” and that the “computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior” (Climate Science, March 31, 2009). Still more piquant, climate modeling even fails to “predict” the past. In an online article entitled “Deep Ecology, Neo-Paganism and the Irrationalism of Global Warming Hysteria” (January 2008), E. Calvin Beisner, founder of the Cornwall Alliance for Environmental Stewardship, has shown how rickety such computer constructs are. He writes: “In their most candid moments, the modelers know the models do not describe and cannot properly be used to predict future temperatures. They know the models fail even to retrodict past climate without multiple and enormous ad hoc adjustments.” That Beisner is an evangelical Christian who has resisted the temptation to turn what passes for science into theology is encouraging.

As often as not, the constructs that emerge in the theoretical sim world do not qualify as proof of what happens in the real world. Rich Trzupek fittingly remarks, “‘climate change’ is a figment of a computer’s imagination” (FrontPage Magazine, February 1, 2012). But this has not prevented the climate models from becoming the Authorized Version. NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin, who has professed some skepticism about certain aspects of global warming research, especially with regard to these theoretical computer models that tend, as he says, to run before they have learned to walk, was startled to realize that “you can’t express any sort of contrary opinion or a comment without it being treated almost as a religious issue” (Newsmax.com, March 17, 2008). Princeton physicist William Happer, writing in the Wall Street Journal (March 27, 2012) is of the same mind, bemoaning that “what used to be science has turned into a cult” and denouncing the “credulous support of schemes to reduce ‘carbon footprints’…by funding ever more computer centers to predict global warming.”

More recently, a coalition of 49 former NASA scientists and seven Apollo astronauts has accused the bureaucracy of both NASA and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, with which it is affiliated, of diddling with the facts. They write: “We believe that [their] claims that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.” (Watts Up With That, April 10, 2012).

Further, the Interim Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) of August 29, 2011 showed unambiguously that the UN suppressed or ignored much of the countervailing data that challenged its official position. This is hardly surprising since the IPCC, which certified and entrenched the so-called “scientific consensus,” is essentially a political body with an agenda of its own. Mark Hendrickson of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College points out that the IPCC “does not speak as one voice,” since some of the “leading scientists on the panel contradict its official position.” Others have resigned in protest against its policymakers’ summaries, which are “produced by a committee of 51 government appointees, many of whom are not scientists.” It turns out that those “who compose the summaries are given considerable latitude to modify the scientific reports,” and Hendrickson quotes a U.S. State Department official who informed an IPCC co-chair that “it is essential… chapter authors be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner” (Doc’s Talk, May 25, 2009).

Hendrickson cites warmist crusader and suspect guru Al Gore’s ally, former Under-Secretary of State Tim Wirth, who has gone on record justifying the kind of scientific fraud perpetrated by the IPCC. “Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,” he said, “we will be doing the right thing.” Further data casting serious doubt on this railroaded consensus may be found at Inhofe EPW Press Blog, Daily Tech online, and the journal Energy and Environment, whose findings are based on a survey of the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database covering almost 9000 scientific publications.

But the fix is still in and soldered tight by all sorts of disreputable means. In her new book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Scientist, Donna Laframboise shows that “IPCC has been recruiting 20-something graduate students” as lead authors, many of whom had not even earned their degrees and some of whom were majoring in non-climate disciplines. More than a third of the 2007 IPCC report (or Climate Bible) consisted of so-called “grey references,” that is, unaccredited studies. The IPCC has also chosen “to muddy the water by aligning [itself] with lobbyists” and relies heavily on non-peer reviewed material, including newspaper items, press releases, magazine articles, unpublished graduate theses and Green activist sources.

And then there is the taradiddle, emanating from a University of Illinois 2009 survey, that 97.4% of scientists agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. This is easily debunked when one considers its selection methodology. As Rich Trzupek explains (FrontPage Magazine, August 30, 2011), citing Lawrence Solomon’s crushing putdown (FullComment, December 30,  2010), the Illinois researchers decided that of the 10,257 respondents, the 10,180 who demurred from the so-called consensus “weren’t qualified to comment on the issue because they were merely solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists, astronomers and the like. Of the remaining 77 scientists whose votes were counted, 75 agreed with the proposition that mankind was causing catastrophic changes in the climate. And, since 75 is 97.4% of 77, ‘overwhelming consensus’ was demonstrated once again.” The real percentage of concurring scientists in the survey is less than .008%. That these 75 were, as Solomon writes, “scientists of unknown qualifications” adds yet another layer to the boondoggle.

As for Germany’s most famous living novelist, Günter Grass pretty well consorts with the paradigm, The Tin Drum having established him as a major literary and political voice of the twentieth century. Admittedly, subsequent books like Dog Years and The Flounder were notable achievements. But absent the beating of The Tin Drum, the callithumpian parade of Grass’ works in the public arena would have been far less spectacular. He cannot be dismissed as a one-shot Johnny, but his oeuvre arguably does not justify his inflated réclame. Indeed, for some time now, he has been living off the interest from the capital he invested in his heyday. Sadly, Grass lost it long ago.

This has not prevented him from generating considerable controversy with the publication in the German daily Süddeutschen Zeitung of an anti-Israeli poem titled What Must Be Said (Was gesagt werden muss). As Sebastian Hammelehle informs us in Der Spiegal Online, the German expression “what must be said” connotes the conversational cliché “There’s no law against saying that…”, which would appear to carry the same smarmy patina in our culture as “Some of my best friends are Jews.” Thus Grass does not hesitate to assert in the poem that Israel is a country “to which I am bound.” The lie is so palpable as to be embarrassing.

Similarly, Frank Schirrmacher, an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, points out that Grass’ use of the word Überlebende (survivor) “to describe his situation and the plight of Germans in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran,” is disingenuous. “Traditionally, the word “survivor” is associated—in a German-language context—with Jewish survivors of the Shoah.” Schirrmacher believes that Grass, who in his youth was a member of the Nazi Waffen SS, is engaged in a duplicitous attempt to “make peace with his own biography.”

It must be said that, whatever his motives and talents may be, Grass is obviously not a poet and What Must Be Said is demonstrably not a poem. The language of the piece is scarcely even workmanlike, fishtailing between the unctuously pulpiteering and the colorlessly prosaic. There is nothing about this dismal effort that says “I have to be a poem.” Had it been written as a short prose essay with a heavily propagandistic slant, there would have been no detectable difference. The thing has no literary merit whatsoever; to put it bluntly, it is an execrable piece of fustian.

The same must be said of the sentiment the “poem” expresses, which, as Hammelehle puts it, constitutes a “lyrical first strike” against the Jewish state. Except that there is nothing lyrical about a flat and pompous verbal eructation riddled with lies, false assumptions, evasions and catarrhal flecks of disinformation.

Once again, Israel is confronted by a major threat to its existence, namely, the so-called Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ) scheduled for March 30^th. It is organized by the usual suspects—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the swelling tribe of Ayatollah lovers, the devil’s spawn of radical Leftists—whose intention is to mobilize a million people to breach Israel’s borders and converge on Jerusalem. They are convinced that Israel will either find itself helpless before a “peaceful” onslaught of this magnitude or be forced to take action that would lead to a PR disaster. From their perspective, it’s a win-win situation. One way or another, Israel would be gravely weakened and, according to an unlettered exchange between some of the event’s organizers, “Thius will undermine the Israeli state…& the Zionist edifice which is unraveeling as we speak, will soon fall.”

A million unarmed zealots determined to challenge the Jewish state are by no means unarmed. They are enemy combatants armed with the sympathy of the international community and the propaganda weapon furnished by a world-wide anti-Zionist media. They know that Israel is bound to lose the propaganda war regardless of how it decides to respond. Islamic states do not suffer from a similar dilemma. After all, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has slaughtered over 9000 of his own people in attempting to repress a popular uprising. But the GMJ organizers—including such well-known bigots as George Galloway, Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who sit on the advisory board—have little or nothing to say about this ongoing atrocity. Clearly, they are not eager to Occupy Damascus since they might actually get hurt. But Jerusalem is another matter. They will have the Israeli Left cheering them on and can bank on the reluctance of the IDF to apply lethal force.

The GMJ is also armed with a formidable body of outright lies and gross distortions that the radical Left, in concert with Islamofascist dogma, has adopted as doctrinal truth. The so-called Anti-Imperialist Camp, which supports the march, and the official GMF website have listed the standard batch of falsifications as ideological ammunition for its adherents. Among the myths and libels enumerated in these venues, we learn:

• that Palestinians are being expelled from Jerusalem, a claim refuted even by the Leftwing The Nation which recorded a 3% growth of Arab Jerusalemites compared to a mere 1% growth of the Holy City’s Jewish residents. According to the globalpost, the Arab population of Jerusalem has grown 209% since the Jordanian defeat in the 1967 war.

• that 85% of Palestinian territory has been despoiled by “foreign settlers.” Of course, the organizers are referring to Israel proper, oblivious to the fact that it was Israel that was robbed of 78% of its legally mandated territory, which became the artificially constructed Emirate of Transjordan.

• that only Jewish citizens benefit from Israeli democracy, a lie so brazen that only the terminally brainwashed could believe it.

• that Israel is in violation of international law—when it is Israel, and only Israel, that is in compliance with the League of Nations Mandate, the dispositions of the San Remo Conference, Article 80 of the UN Charter and UN Resolution 242, as well as the laws of war validating the results of the 1967 and 1973 hostilities.

• that Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine, a contention that scurrilously negates several historically attested facts, for example, that there is no such country called Palestine, that a significant proportion of the Arab inhabitants of the contested area are not indigenous “Palestinians” but relative latecomers originating in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and North Africa, and that Jerusalem throughout history was the political and spiritual capital of the Jewish people. Indeed, Jews formed the majority of the city’s population for much of the census-taking period, as is evident from such meticulously documented volumes as Mitchell Bard’s Myths and Facts and Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial.

Buttressed by such fabrications, the GMJ has effectively declared war on Israel and has embarked on what is nothing less than a massive invasion of its sovereign territory. The email previously cited envisions a “human tide” of one million people now, but aims for five million “next time…& it will only grow from there.” Obviously, this is war by another name, and Israel is being attacked with a view not only to inflict a humiliating defeat upon it but to eliminate it entirely from the roll-call of the world’s nations. In essence, this is only a more “humane” version of the Iranian project to wipe Israel off the map.

I first came across Richard Cravatts in an article he wrote for Pajamas Media on November 19, 2010, describing York University in Toronto as “a cesspool of anti-Semitic, pro-Palestinian activism.” York is notorious in Canada as one of its most prominent Jew-bashing institutions, taking its cue from larger and more prestigious universities like UC Irvine and Berkeley that promote, in Cravatts’ words, “slanted scholarship for jihad.” Genocidal Liberalism expands Cravatts’ investigative sweep to encompass the entire malign phenomenon of antisemitism cum anti-Zionism that has corrupted the moral integrity and academic rectitude of the American liberal professoriate.

Cravatts doesn’t pull his punches, relentlessly anatomizing the pedagogic bias currently in place, which is neo-Marxist in its orientation and undeniably anti-Jewish in its expression. “In the campus war against Israel, a new rhetoric has evolved.” The university, he charges, is by and large no longer “a place where civility and reasoned scholarly discourse normally occurs,” given the “gradual ratcheting up of the level of acrimony against Israel and Zionism” and the Left’s insistence that such criticism, no matter how incendiary or libelous, “is no more than political commentary on the Jewish state.” He furnishes a near- interminable list of “strident anti-Israel initiatives” that mar the intellectual life of the “liberal” and “humanistic” university, including academic boycotts of Israeli professors, the fostering of vociferous and occasionally violence-prone anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish Muslim student groups on campus, the furthering of divestment and disinvestment from Israeli companies and companies doing business with them, and the shutting down of pro-Israel speakers.

Cravatts points to an influential 1965 essay by Herbert Marcuse entitled Repressive Tolerance, which planted the seed of political and epistemic subversion in the fertile soil of American academia. “Purporting to endorse freedom of expression for all,” Cravatts writes, the essay instead reserved “that right, in actual practice, only to favored groups.” The program “could only be accomplished…by favoring ‘partisan’ speech to promote ‘progressive’ or revolutionary change,” which would be, in Marcuse’s phrase, “intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” By the latter, Marcuse meant classical liberal thought with its emphasis on tradition, individual autonomy, civic responsibility and limited government. Our contemporary Marcusians have learned their lesson well. In this way, the door was opened for the delivery of mendacious doctrines from post-colonial fanatics and postmodern destabilizers like Edward Said and Michel Foucault who have done so much damage to the principles of intellectual honesty and objective study on which the university is presumably founded.

Marcuse, a leading member of the left-wing Frankfurt School, clearly drew his inspiration from German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom Cravatts does not mention but whose spirit pervades current “humanistic” thought. The godfather of the current mob of academic gangsters, Heidegger was appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, using his considerable reputation to further the Nazi supremacist dogma. For Heidegger, the function of the university was to provide what he called, in his Rector’s Address, “service to knowledge” as an obligation to the National Socialist state, that is, to entrench a species of politicized education—in this case, the absurd theories of National Socialism, the restriction of free expression, and, ultimately, a lethal campaign against the country’s and the continent’s Jewish inhabitants. The current academic campaign against Jews and Israel, expressed in the condemnation of Israel as an apartheid and occupying regime engaged in the “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians, is merely an updated and partially laundered variant of the German original. It is a palpable lie masquerading as an apodictic truth supported by fraudulent research and revisionist infatuations. The invention or suppression of facts and the propagation of fictitious memes and venomous tropes have become the liberal academy’s stock in trade.

I should indicate that Cravatts’ subject has been addressed before by several erudite and committed writers who have lobbied to clean up the latrine of higher education in America. David Horowitz in such books as Indoctrination U and Reforming our Universities, Gary Tobin et al. in The Uncivil University (referenced several times by Cravatts), and Stephen Norwood’s chilling The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower expose the academic Left’s growing rapprochement with tyrannical doctrines and especially with the metastasizing Islamic movement, such rapprochement constituting a symptom of its abdication from founding principles and the betrayal of its mandate. There is no doubt that the natural corollaries of the narrow, deformed and prejudicial temper prevailing in academia are anti-Jewish odium and anti-Israel denunciation. The two are indissolubly linked. Loading “cruel and destructive invective on Zionism,” says Cravatts, the professors are in reality “promulgating vile, disproportionate opprobrium that frequently shows its true face as raw anti-Semitism.”

Norwood, for his part, reveals how Harvard, Yale and Columbia during the 1930s embraced or were sympathetic to the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. Today, as Cravatts amply demonstrates, the educational establishment cultivates an equally comprehensive sympathy for Islamofascist themes, curricula and organizations. Third-rate thinking, ignorance, ingratitude, chicanery and political indoctrination have become the mainstays of the Humanities, Middle East Studies programs and misnamed Social Sciences departments.

As an instance of such dissembling, Cravatts directs our attention a BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions) manual, Fighting the New Apartheid: A Guide to Campus Divestment from Israel, authored by Palestinian-born Fayyad Sbaihat of the University of Wisconsin, in which we read that the divestment campaign should avoid “debating facts on the ground.” In order for the BDS agenda to be successful, “Israel must be characterized as a pariah state” regardless of “specific events and facts [which] can prove illusive when one attempts to build a case around them.” This confession of transparent duplicity is not only astonishing in itself, but also in its being ignored or tacitly supported by many college administrators, left-leaning teachers and impressionable students.

The BDS conference held at the University of Pennsylvania in early February 2012 provided yet another instance of the distortions, dishonesty and malevolence targeting Israel, as legitimized by the academy. One of its principal speakers was Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada website, who is fond of comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany. Another was English professor Amy Kaplan, who went so far as to suggest methods for introducing the Palestinian mythology and the BDS campaign into completely unrelated classes in order to advance an anti-Israel prepossession clearly intended to influence unsuspecting students—and was subsequently defended by her chairpersonette, Nancy Bentley.

One remarks, too, in this regard the March conference at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, under the heading “Israel/Palestine and the One-State Conference.” Featuring such rabid anti-Israeli pseudo-scholars and shameless fact-twisters as Stephen Walt and Ilan Pappé, the colloquium plainly envisages the end of the Jewish state. Historian Bruce Thornton writes of Pappé in particular, “That such a travesty of the profession of history is invited to speak at a prestigious university testifies to how intellectually and morally corrupt the American academy has become.” Harvard is one of 17 American universities receiving substantial donations from Arab sources—$329 million from 1995 to 2008, the last year on record, and doubtlessly another hefty sum since.

Indeed, as Cravatts notes, “in the past 30 years…the Saudi royal family has funneled $70 billion into universities in the West…to create scholarship and teaching that is almost uniformly designed to demonize Israel, advance the Palestinian cause, and undermine Western values…while…helping to enable the spread of Islam.” Money talks, of course, but not always loudly; it also whispers seductively into the curricular ear. The scholars who benefit are “good students of the funding game.” Shying away from embarrassing their patrons and focusing on the “alleged shortcomings of Israel and the U.S.,” they have found a way of getting “several millions dollars dropped in their laps.” This goes some distance toward explaining the prevailing pro-Arab, anti-Jewish climate that vitiates our putative Lyceums.

Heidegger and Marcuse would surely have been pleased. As are the swarms of their disciples among the, let’s say, intelleftual anti-Zionist crowd, who have risen from the preceptorial slime and identified with America’s, and the West’s, enemies. The seminars of loathing they teach and promote, euphemized as “educational events,” lay all the blame for the Middle East’s dysfunctions at Israel’s feet. And in so doing they have not only trained their sights on a pluralistic and democratic Israel while fawning before an autocratic and venal Islamic polity, but have materially facilitated the wave of antisemitic sentiment that is now flooding the world.

Antisemitism is not only an emotional, indeed almost glandular, disorder, it is likely the most contagious intellectual pathology known to humankind. Today, it has infected not only North American and European campuses, but has spread even to Israeli universities, many of whose teaching and administrative staff, under the convenient banner of anti-Zionism, have become willing and enthusiastic carriers of the disease. “Many Israeli professors,” Cravatts observes, “veer to the Left politically and many, incredibly, share the same virulent anti-Israel, anti-Zionism sentiments.” The same is true of American and European Jewish anti-Zionists “who, in a peculiar act of introjection, attempt to psychically expunge…the liberal guilt that condoning Zionism would bring upon them.” The plague has become ubiquitous when even those eventually targeted for exclusion become its most ardent advocates. It is clear that a species of indefeasible madness has taken hold of the academic community.

When a civilization begins to decay and enters the twilight of its existence, it is invariably vanquished by an army of barbarians. This seems to be what is happening now, judging from the mental debility and cultural exhaustion that have stricken our cognitive elites. These barbarians now proliferate as an advance guard in the contemporary academy. They have almost nothing to say about any of the bloodbaths and savageries daily being enacted in country after country throughout the world—Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Iran, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Libya, Sudan, China—but when it comes to the Jewish state, with its scattered settlements in its ancient homeland of Judea and Samaria and not a single Israeli remaining in Gaza or in south Lebanon’s buffer zone, the chorus of revilement erupts into a veritable cacophony. The “visceral hatred by the Left,” Cravatts writes, and the “singular obsession many academics have with Israel, and only Israel, from among the world’s countries,” is a symptom of the double standard “that has permeated the university” and “an indication of just how far [it has] diverged from [its] purpose.” It is, in fact, a sign of its descent into the realms of scholarly perversion.

As I have stressed before, there is nothing sacrosanct per se or inherently prestigious about the university. Like any human institution, it can profane its founding principles and grow decadent and oppressive. The German universities of the 1930s, as we’ve seen, despite their long tradition of rigorous scholarship, were by no means beacons of informed thought and genuine research but propaganda factories working overtime. One must always remember that the university may as easily become a turbine of indoctrination as a generator of intellectual vitality or a transmitter of genuine knowledge.

The usual understanding of Israel as an aggressive, colonial, apartheid state robbing the Palestinians of their heritage is quite possibly the greatest political scam of modern times. It is the outcome of a mixture of historical amnesia, ideological prejudice and reflex hostility, which serves to keep it mind-proof. This species of unreason explains why, in the interminable conflict raging in the Middle East, the Palestinians have been given a free pass.

It is why the press has bowdlerized the word “terrorist” and substituted inoffensive synonyms like “militant,” “activist” and “insurgent.” It is why any Israeli response to Gaza rocket fire is denounced as “collective punishment” and a violation of international norms by the United Nations, which has no problem turning a blind eye to the continuing barrage of rocket fire, kidnappings and attempted kidnappings, and ambushes emanating from the terrorist enclave.

This knee-jerk reaction to Israel is the reason Hezbollah was permitted to re-arm itself in violation of UN Resolution 1701. It accounts for the fact that Human Rights outfits and NGOs have been hijacked by the anti-Israeli crowd hiding behind their anesthetic titles. It is the reason that foreign nations funding left-wing, anti-Zionist groups that operate in Israel object to the passing of transparency legislation by the Knesset, though they themselves stringently monitor such interference in their own affairs. It accounts for the sanctimonious and hypocritical outcry against the Israeli security barrier as an apartheid wall, without evincing the slightest concern for the Jewish victims of Palestinian terror: 1,218 fatalities and 8,431 maimed between 2000-2007.

Such unfounded partiality explains why so dysfunctional a society as “Palestine” is the recipient of lavish American and European largesse, despite the hemorrhaging economies of most Western nations.  It is the reason that the rejection by the 1974 Palestinian National Council of UN Resolution 242, which recognized Israeli sovereignty, is never mentioned. It throws light upon the general refusal to acknowledge that the casus belli in the region is not a wrangle over borders but the Palestinian rejection of both the concept and reality of a Jewish state, which is why the Haq al-Awda or “right of return” of millions of foreign-born, manufactured “refugees” has been a non-negotiable issue for the Palestinians, from Arafat to Abbas. In fact, in no other case on record has the United Nations recognized multi-generational descendants as authentic “refugees” entitled to repatriation.

Nor is the fact ever mentioned that the first Arab women to exercise the vote were those who live in Israel. It makes no difference to the soi-disant  international community that an independent “Palestine” adjacent to Israel would be officially Judenrein, or Jew-free, which means it would not be a democratic state. It makes no difference that the Palestinian Arabs have failed or reneged in every area of their commitments to Israel and the “peace process,” from putting the lid on media incitement to debelling the terrorists in their ranks to reforming the school curriculum.

Further, the claim bruited by Arab propagandists of various stripes that the Palestinian refugees were driven out by Israeli forces during the War of Independence is more than likely only minimally valid. The brunt of the responsibility for the flight of Palestinian villagers and fellaheen must be borne almost exclusively by the Arabs. “Every year,” writes Sol Stern in A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred, “the legend grows about the historical crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948.” This is the “nakba myth,” which “has become a lethal political cocktail.” But it is for the most part falsified history.  Even Sir John Glubb of “Glubb Pasha” fame, the British general of the Arab Legion that conducted a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against the newborn Jewish state, wrote in the London Daily Mail for August 12, 1948 that “The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war.” Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, interviewed in the Beirut Telegraph for September 6, 1948, stressed that “these refugees [are] the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state,” and the Jordanian daily Falastin in an article for February 19, 1949 blamed the “Arab states which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes.” These are only a brace among other such affidavits.

With all this information at our fingertips, readily accessible to anyone who cares to do a modicum of research, the question practically asks itself. Why is the international community so quick to accept Palestinian victimhood and to condemn Israel? The answer is self-evident. What the Palestinians have going for them is the latent—and more often manifest—hatred of Israel and the Zionist enterprise in much of the world, which is only the contemporary permutation of age-old antisemitism and which they can tap into and exploit to their own advantage. This is why the Palestinian narrative has “taken.” As Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick puts it, “Anti-Semitism is back in style. Its new justification is not race or religion. It is nationalism….And like its racist and religious predecessors, its aim is to deny the right of Jews to be free.”

The Western embrace of the Palestinians may be nothing more than the furtive policy and privy intention of an international community that plainly wishes for Israel to disappear from the historical proscenium. The fact that Israel within its current borders, as well as Judea and Samaria (aka the “West Bank”), comprise the historic and legal home of the Jewish people is conveniently brushed aside. I am reminded of a moving passage from poet Clive Wilmer, in his New and Collected: “I can’t live where I once lived, though/the roof there used to cover me.” Moreover, there is little willingness to recognize that when terrorism becomes a way of life as it has for the Palestinians, there is scant prospect for peace.

In a speech given to the Domestic Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag in June 2008 on the subject of a renascent antisemitism, journalist Henryk Broder distinguished between a prejudice and a resentment: “a prejudice concerns a person’s behavior; a resentment concerns that person’s very existence. Anti-semitism is a resentment. The anti-Semite does not begrudge the Jew how he is or what he does, but that he is at all. The anti-Semite takes offense as much at the Jew’s attempts to assimilate as at his self-marginalization. Rich Jews are exploiters; poor Jews are freeloaders….The anti-Semite blames Jews for everything and its opposite.”

Of course, this is a story as old as the Judean hills. If there is anything “new” about it in the current historical moment, it resides in the form this ancient “resentment” happens to take. Its racist, religious and class manifestations persist, but a fourth ingredient has been added to this toxic soup of roiling hatreds, namely, a national element that goes under the rubric of anti-Zionism. The “historical strain of anti-Semitism continues,” writes Phyllis Chesler in The New Anti-Semitism, “but in the last fifty years it has also metamorphosed into the most violent anti-Zionism.”

What Jews cannot be forgiven today is the rebuilding of a national home. The re-creation of the state of Israel in its ancestral territory is broadly regarded as a colonial incursion into the Middle East and, in many cases, as the latest installment in a vast Jewish conspiracy to pursue the gradual conquest of the world or to assert a sinister hegemony. This conviction is obviously nonsense if not sheer madness, but it serves a time-dishonored purpose: the justification of an aversion to everything Jewish, whether expressed, in Norman Cohn’s phrase, as a warrant for genocide, or as a free-floating revulsion to the mere fact of Jewishness—even where no or very few Jews are present.

Examples abound. Soeren Kern, a senior analyst for the Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos in Madrid, considers Spain the most antisemitic country in Europe, nearly half of its people harboring negative opinions of Jews. Yet the Jewish community in Spain is infinitesimal, with only 12,000 Jews out of a population of 42 million, less than .05% (Pajamas Media, December 30, 2008). Similarly, there are only 1,300 Jews in Norway, approximately .003% out of a population of 4,645,000, yet Norway is a major Scandinavian purveyor of anti-Zionist and antisemitic attitudes and beliefs, and indeed challenges Spain for the European laurels (Behind the Humanitarian Mask, Manfred Gerstenfeld, ed.)

Not to be left behind, Sweden, where Jews form .01% of the population, is a veritable hotbed of antisemitic sepsis, its  largest daily, Aftonbladet, accusing the Israeli army of harvesting the organs of abducted Palestinians and its foreign minister Carl Bildt endorsing the blood libel as “freedom of expression.” One remembers, too, the graffiti in Potsdam after German reunification: Juden Raus, “Jews Out.” There were no Jews in Potsdam. As of this writing, Britain seems to have leaped into the forefront of the European antisemitic pack, with France breathing down its neck. Jews constitute .25% of the census in the former, .73% in the latter. Both countries have large Muslim immigrant populations, which increasingly influence the official tone of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli feeling. Political authorities like Catherine Ashton and Nicolas Sarkozy are among Israel’s most fervid critics and appear little concerned with the plight of Jews in their own nations.

According to reports, South Korea, where scarcely a Jew is to be found, is also trending in the same direction, as witness a “top-selling series of comic books,” other anti-Semitic texts, a demonstrable strain of public sentiment, and a Secretary-General of the United Nations, the rather contemptible Ban Ki-moon, who considers Israel an occupying power that practices “violence against civilians.”

Then there is Japan, a world-leader in the promulgation of antisemitic material, though one would have to search far and wide to find a Jew in that country. Many writers, publishers and organizations in Japan are preoccupied with Yudakaya, “the Jewish peril.” According to the Stephen Roth Institute, books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The International Jew and Mein Kampf are regularly reprinted in new editions. Prominent authors, publishers, journalists and academics—the list is daunting—who blame Jews for everything from AIDS to cancer to Alzheimer’s to the revival of Nazism, are widely read. “Fascination caused by ignorance, but also in some cases fear and hatred of Jews,” says Roth, “probably explain the great popularity of…anti-Semitic yudayamono (Jewish books).”

I have often written, sometimes bemused, sometimes incensed, about what is surely the strangest fact of Jewish life, namely, its self-division. Since time immemorial, the Jewish people have been at war with themselves, both in the Holy Land and the Diaspora, allowing themselves to succumb to one of history’s most mordant ironies. In turning against themselves, they have effectively collaborated with those who would suppress, conquer or extinguish the Jewish community.

The template was already established in the Book of Genesis, where we read how one brother slew another in jealousy and resentment and a group of conspiratorial brothers sold their sibling into slavery. From that point on, the biblical archive presents a saga of recrimination, envy, hatred and fratricidal strife that in different degrees has imperiled the very survival of the Jewish “nation.” The pattern was consolidated in the story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, the three rebels who “rose up” before Moses and challenged his authority. As the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen these people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people” (Exodus 32:9).

Brother against brother, prophet against people, king and priest, and even nation against nation form an indelible part of the Jewish chronicle. The history of the Two Kingdoms provides a continuingly relevant object lesson. After the death of King Solomon, the Israelite communality broke apart into the two warring monarchies of Israel and Judah. The shedding of kinship blood critically weakened the two kingdoms, leading to the conquest of Israel by the Assyrians and the reduction of Judah first by the Chaldeans, then by the Egyptians, and finally by the Babylonians. The Jewish epic may be described as: divide and be conquered. Indeed, surah 59:14 of the Koran tells us something very true about Jews: “There is much hostility between them: their hearts are divided…” It seems that the wise counsel of Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah has no resonance for the backsliders: “All of Israel and those who are joined to it are to each other like brothers. If brother shows no compassion to brother, who will show compassion to him?”

The fault line in the Jewish sensibility is tectonic in its dimensions and destructive in its effect. Perhaps the single most resonant case study in self-division involves the institutional founder of the Christian faith. The story of St. Paul is too well known to require much in the way of comment, yet it is richly instructive. A rabid persecutor of the followers of Jesus, Saul of Tarsus experienced a blinding conversion to the new faith and was shortly thereafter  called by the name of Paul (Acts 13:9). He then became the Apostle of Christianity, considering his Jewish identity a mere rehearsal for a larger identity and at times expressing strong disapproval of Jews who held to their traditional beliefs and identity. (His quarrel with the Desposyni, the “servants of the Lord,” led by James the brother of Jesus who wished to preserve the purity and exclusivity of the original faith, is a matter of historical record.)

But the details of the Apostle’s former activities and subsequent religious convictions are specific to the time. Jews today do not persecute Christians. Indeed, they are the ones who are relentlessly persecuted—by Muslims, by secular antisemites and unhinged fanatics from both sides of the political spectrum (though massively from the Left), and by several Christian denominations associated with The World Council of Churches, replacement and liberation theologians, and the Quaker-Presbyterian axis promoting its BDS campaigns. More to the point, and the most indigestible perversion of all, countless Jews harry and denounce their own congeners. The tendency to a kind of binary kinesis seems inherent in the Jew, whether it is himself he loathes or his own people he reproaches and undermines. It is the psychic split itself, not its local content, that transcends the ages. In this respect, the Saul/ Paul fracture represents a longstanding Jewish archetype.

This history of self-estrangement, political strife and cultural rupture has been played out from the biblical era through the centuries of religious factionalism and reciprocal excommunication culminating in our own epoch. The profound antipathy between assimilated Jews and their irredentist counterparts in Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron, as well as the caste-like contempt of Western Jewish intellectuals for the Ostjuden, that is, their assumed “plebeian” and “uneducated” East European brethren, are facts of modern Jewish history. The shame of many of the Jewish Councils in Nazi Europe that collaborated with their murderers (not all, as Gershom Scholem justifiably argues in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis) cannot be forgiven, despite attempts to explain it away as the least of worst alternatives. The legacy of the celebrated Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the equally acclaimed Jewish political writer Hannah Arendt, who could never forget their German patrimony and were corrosively suspicious of the Zionist project, has been broadly and unambiguously noxious. In the present moment we observe their offspring, that is, left-wing “peace activists,” liberal rabbis and “post-Zionist” intellectuals, who strive to erode the Jewish character of the state of Israel and so deprive it of its legitimacy. The Jewish Left, as it dances around the golden calf of a fictitious peace, represents perhaps the gravest danger to the survival of the country.

Many Jews, as I wrote in Hear, O Israel!, tend to transpose the fight against iniquity and oppression to other nations and communities rather than press for the rights of their own people. Or they believe, “in traditionally Marxist fashion,” as Sol Stern writes in City Journal, “that the way to fight anti-Semitism was through the broader struggle for international socialism.” Thus they pursue their fugitive merit. Like Paul, their main focus falls on the Corinthians and Ephesians et al. of the time. Indifferent to the reality of their own condition—ignoring the rain clouds until they are drenched and catch pneumonia, as the 19^th century Jewish philosopher Max Nordau noted—these are the ostensibly benevolent Jews who wish to “repair the world” (Tikkun Olam). That it would be a world in which their place would nevertheless remain precarious escapes them entirely.

The benevolent Jews are bad enough. Their spirit of pharisaic charity, however, is exceeded by that of the reprobate Jews, who take their “idealism” to the next level of unctuous self-effacement. They struggle against injustice by reprehending, for example, not Palestinian terrorists and Hezbollah jihadists but Israeli Jews themselves whose right to national legitimacy they perceive as an affront and do everything in their power to misrepresent. Again, like Paul, they regard their own people as “those who please not God, and are contrary to all men” (1 Thessalonians 2:15).

In Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, James Fallows cites Homer Bigart, the doyen of the Vietnam War press corps, who “used to tell younger reporters that their first task was to drop the assumption that they understood a story before they reported it”—sage advice that has gone largely unheeded. Indeed, today the media game has changed dramatically. Reporters and news writers not only assume that they understand a story before it unfolds, they approach events with a cookie-cutter mentality, a prefabricated plot line. They come equipped with an entrenched political perspective that enables them to shape the news according to prior specification, a practice that has come to be known as “agenda journalism.”

For example, former head of India’s counter-terrorism agency Bahukutumbi Raman, writing for the South East Asia Analysis group, refers to “agenda and motivated journalism.” Jonathan Tobin writing in Commentary deplores the “agenda journalism” at The New York Times, which has “graduated into agitprop style distortions of the truth,” and Simon Plosker at Honest Reporting skewers the “Guardian’s agenda journalism.” More recently, Tom Blumer at PJ Media takes issue with the Associated Press’ promotion of something called “The New Distinctiveness” or “Journalism with Voice” which, as Blumer shows, quoting several salient examples, “has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with spin.” In short, “Journalism with Voice” is merely a fancy term for “agenda journalism.”

Blumer renames the Associated Press as the Administration’s Press since its chief purpose appears not to report the news fairly and accurately but to re-elect the Obama administration. But AP is only one division in the president’s army. It is no secret that Barack Obama rode to electoral victory in the armor-plated limousine provided by the mainstream media. The propaganda vehicle successfully deflected every salient criticism along with the hail of biographical data that would have put his campaign in serious jeopardy.

Similarly, the controversy over the now-defunct Journolist group does not cloud the fact that a number of its members were clearly playing partisan politics, attacking Republicans and suppressing unsavory facts about Obama. Jonathan Chait in The New Republic considered the rumpus exaggerated, but Mark Fitzgibbons writing in American Thinker and Roger Simon at Politico reveal the “malice” (Fitzgibbon’s word) and discernibly left-wing bias that governed the listserve’s procedures. One recalls, too, the forced resignations of CBS anchor Dan Rather and CNN executive vice president Eason Jordan, implicated in their respective scandals. And who can forget Newsweek’s mutilation of the truth in its Koran-flushing perjury? (The editors were obviously unfamiliar with H.J. Simson’s classic 1937 study, British Rule, and Rebellion, where he discusses the Koran-shredding ploy used by the Arabs to incriminate British officers during the Palestinian rebellion of 1936—though Newsweek was plainly, so to speak, on the same Palestinian page.) None of this should surprise us. In today’s media consortium in the West—the European media are guilty of the same kind of yellow journalism—it is obvious that a basic trust has been broken. The Fourth Estate has become the Fifth Column.

Naturally, journalism was always to some extent agenda driven. Every shade of the political spectrum boasted its particular newspaper, patronized by its targeted readership. The agenda was pretty well explicit. The difference today is threefold: the mantle of principled objectivity in which our journalists conspicuously garb themselves; the fact that the agenda is often undeclared, allowing the media to sail under false colors; and the expansion of global coverage into the visual, electronic and digital dimensions which purport to be mere aggregate news gatherers transposing the world directly and without deviation to the airwaves and the screen. In this way, the media is able to caramelize its product and, as a result, the underlying cookery generally goes undetected.

Robert Kaplan has justly written in Policy Review for December 2004 that “the ongoing centralization of major media outlets, the magnification of the media’s influence through various electronic means and satellite printing…has created new realms of authority akin to the emergence of a superpower with similarly profound geopolitical consequences.” This “superpower” has, for the most part, invaded the public mind with an army of reporters, columnists, think-tankers and editors engaged in the diffusion of fables and distortions. For what we used to call “journalistic integrity” is a rara avis and news reporting has come increasingly to reflect editorial policy—even the headline will often flaunt a compressed editorial opinion—making it difficult for the interested reader or viewer to arrive at a reasonable approximation of the truth, so far as it can be reliably determined.

As I mused in The Big Lie, when even so sedate a commentator as William Watson refers in passing in a National Post column to that “demonic moron” George W. Bush, we know we are no longer in the world of accountable journalism, a world shrinking at a vertiginous rate. Another example of such a betrayal of responsibility is Charles Brooker’s now-infamous column in The Guardian for October 23, 2004 in which he called for the assassination of President Bush: “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr.—where are you now that we need you.” Such jaundiced sentiment masking as informed opinion shows how corrupt our press has become and explains how Aidan White, general secretary of the International Association of Journalists, can describe Hezbollah’s propaganda tool, the Al-Manar television network, as a “free press.” Like to like.

Foreign correspondence features the same decadent symptoms as the national brand of specious advocacy and cultivated ignorance. The Western media today is terminally infected by the lazy incompetence of journalists who are generally unfamiliar with the areas and issues they report upon, have little or no knowledge of the languages of the regions to which they have been posted, rely on “fixers” and second-hand or biased sources of information, arrive on the job with their own set of prejudices, and are, for the most part, profoundly uneducated in politics and history. The general modus operandi is simple: jump to premature conclusions, accept orchestrated events as veridical and interpretation as fact, ignore confuting or problematic data, and suppress or damp down countervailing intel when the truth eventually emerges. There is now little that may serve to distinguish our notable news organs from, let us say, the Palestinian daily Al-Hayat al-Jadida or the Arabic television channel Al Jazeera.

The popular trope of an evil genius who has mastered the technology of ultimate destruction and wields a death ray he is preparing to unleash from space has long entertained us. We don’t take it seriously, of course, and relegate it to the realm of a diverting fiction. But what happens when such comic book-and-James Bond-type scenarios leak into the real world? Unfortunately, we tend to make what philosopher Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind, calls a “category mistake,” which he defines as the tendency to represent certain facts “as if they belonged to one logical type or category…when they actually belong to another.” For the death ray is real; it exists in the empirical world. To assume that it is merely a feature of an imaginary realm that has no purchase on concrete, everyday life is, to quote Ryle, “one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind.” In the case we are considering here, it is a mixing of categories which issues in the kind of misunderstanding that can be fatal.

For the facts are these:

The “evil genius” is an Iranian ayatollah, who may go by many names. He is the de facto political leader of the Shi’a branch of Islam. His intention to destroy the United States of America and obliterate Western civilization is on record. Indeed, as historian Emmanuel Sivan has warned in Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics, the igniting of a planetary conflagration is an integral part of Shi’a Islam’s belief and thought. Known as Shi’ite Twelver theology, it posits that Allah’s kingdom will be established on earth by the Twelfth or Hidden Imam, whose advent can be hastened by kindling an act of apocalyptic violence. This is why the concept of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) is idle when applied to Iran; as the astute Canadian blogger Bill Narvey points out, Iran’s leaders believe that their “religious prophecies [for] world supremacy can only be realized by…a deadly apocalyptic showdown with the non-Muslim world.” The Muslim death count is immaterial since all good Muslims are assured of eternal life in Jannah, the Islamic paradise or heavenly garden. As for the death ray, it is no fantasy; it is an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, that can literally demolish the electrical grid of an entire nation. An attack of this nature can be launched undetectably from, for example, a nondescript vessel in the Pacific or the Gulf or via “satellite” trajectory. The social and economic devastation would be massive and likely terminal. As Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen write concerning the possibility of a high-altitude EMP attack over American territory, “There is a sword of Damocles over our heads. It is a threat that is real but has been all but ignored.”

William R. Graham, chairman of the Congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack, testified that Iran has already conducted EMP missile tests from frigates in the Caspian Sea. Additionally, Graham draws attention to Iranian military writings that “explicitly discuss a nuclear EMP attack that would gravely harm the United States.” And Iran could get away with it since it is almost impossible to identify the origin of what—especially if it is carried out by sea—would be essentially an anonymous attack. As Bob Owens indicates in a recent PJM article, “the most likely avenues of attacks are locally launched missiles from submarines or freighters in the Gulf of Mexico or off either coast, where distance to detonation from launch is measured in seconds, and which are not the focus of our outward-facing early warning and detection systems. Such vessels could be easily scuttled after launch, and the rogue agent responsible for the attack may not be found until well after the attack is over, rendering our nuclear counterstrike abilities utterly moot.”

As mentioned above, the damage to the nation’s electrical grid following an EMP assault would be catastrophic. The cascading effect on major infrastructures would result in the destruction or critical impairment of the financial system, the communications network and cybernetic functioning, farming, distribution of food and water, fuel production and delivery, all forms of transportation, law enforcement, medical care, trade and industry and, of course, military defense. The state of civilization in America would be peeled back by hundreds of years and a state of nature in all its raw ferocity would supplant it.

Like many Jews of a largely secular persuasion, or like those who oscillate between doubt and belief, I have often wondered what I had to do with other “flavors” of Jewish communicants. Strolling along the streets of Montreal’s Outremont borough, home to a substantial Orthodox society, I feel absolutely no connection to the black-coated, earlocked, fur-hatted inhabitants who hasten by me without so much as a glance, immured in their own sequestered worlds. They may be bent on the preservation of Halachic Judaism and the maintenance of a sacramental community, but they have little interest in the world beyond their exclusionary domain and certainly none in the lives of individuals like me. “Ghetto orthodoxy,” writes James Parkes in A History of the Jewish People, “has no understanding of the moral problems of a modern and independent state.” Or, he might have continued, of modern and independent people.

At the same time, encountering Reformist and Reconstructionist Jews at local events, I feel no affinity with such nominal adherents to a faith they have re-interpreted as little more than a cultural tradition, that is, a set of mores and usages without serious reference to the God of the Hebrew scripture, the Mosaic and Noahide commandments, the poetry of David and Solomon, or the magnificent fulminations of the great prophets. How would they respond if angels appeared at their doors, as before Abraham (Genesis 18), or a divine command resonated in their ears, as in the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Jonah, or a latter-day Elijah descended upon their complacency? Heaven forfend!

Between these two constellations of Jewish postulants, the gap appears unbridgeable. In what way can they be regarded as members of the same extended family? Observing common holidays to which they attribute different meanings on the level of spiritual gravity is not a binding agent but merely a fugitive exercise in consanguinity. I am reminded of a Jewish joke that underlines the problem. An Orthodox and a Reform rabbi find themselves seated side by side at a religious conference. In the process of getting to know one another, the Orthodox rabbi recounts that he has recently officiated at a Bar Mitzvah in which he was informed that the celebrant received the gift of a Harley. Puzzled, he asks his Reform neighbour, “But what is a Harley?” “It’s a motorcycle,” comes the reply, “but what’s a Bar Mitzvah?”

And then, of course, there is the swarm of Jewish antisemites and anti-Zionists (which amounts pretty well to the same thing these days) whose names swell the roll-call of Judaism’s treacherous sons and daughters—a prime example of how a historical community can attack itself like an immune system gone haywire. The prophet Isaiah correctly foretold the future: “Thy destroyers…shall go forth of thee” (49:17). The so-called Jewish S.H.I.T. list (Self-Hating and/or Israel-Threatening Jews) furnishes the names of nearly 8000 contemporary Jewish tergiversators. These are people who casually court disaster in the remorseless anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist posture they affect, aiming their execrations and weaponizing their prose against their fellows. Living in what I’ve elsewhere called a latter-day Iberian delusion—if one recalls the eventual fate of the Spanish conversos—their only consolation in the ever-possible event of a resurgent and maniacal anti-Jewish national movement is that, like the Jewish Councils in Nazi Europe, they would be among the last to go, once their revisionist services were no longer needed by the demons they have agreed to traffic with.

What is it, then, that ultimately brings us together, that presumably unifies us as a people, and that, in effect, paints the bulls-eye on our backs? The answer should be obvious: it is precisely that which sews the yellow badge upon our lapels. As the great Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl came to believe, the Jew is defined by his enemies. However else he may understand himself, a Jew is also a Jew by default, in the same way that Hans Meyer (a.k.a. Jean Améry), as he recounts in At The Mind’s Limits, discovered he was a Jew with the passing of the Nuremburg Laws in 1935. A Jew remains a Jew even without positive determinants.

What many Jews do not seem to understand about antisemitism is that it is both a ubiquitous and an equal-opportunity pathology. As former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler said recently at the signing of the Ottawa Protocol, a welcome if belated attempt to codify and affirm resistance to this malignant phenomenon, antisemitism is not only the longest known form of hatred in the history of humanity, it is the only form of hatred that is truly global. However we may describe it—as an irrational revulsion, or the need to scapegoat a convenient group for supposedly inexplicable miseries and reverses of which that group is innocent, or classic projection, or, to cite Ruth Wisse writing in The Weekly Standard, “the organization of politics against the Jews” in order to “win rather than assume the allegiance of subjects or citizens”—it eventually strikes Jews everywhere and indiscriminately. For the antisemite, all Jews are alike regardless of their politics, their professions, the degrees of their faith or lack of such, or even their rebellious and venomous denunciations of their own brethren.

There is a passage in Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness that makes this collapsing of distinctions painfully clear. Referring to the Nazi “cleansing operations” in the Polish town of Rovno, he writes: “the Germans opened fire and slaughtered on the edge of pits, in two days, some twenty-five thousand souls…well-to-do and proletarian, pious, assimilated, and baptized, communal leaders, synagogue functionaries, pedlars and drawers of water, Communists and Zionists, intellectuals, artists, and village idiots, and some four thousand babies.”

The message is that we’re all incriminated. As I wrote in The Big Lie, “Warm Jews, lukewarm Jews and cold Jews are equally at risk. At the end of the day, the antisemite never stopped to take their temperature.” Similarly, as the Jerusalem Post commented after the Mumbai massacre in November 2008 in which Chabad House was attacked and its occupants murdered, “the terrorists did not inquire whether their victims were haredi, Orthodox, traditional or secular.” If Noam Chomsky or Jennifer Lowenstein had happened to be on the premises, they, too, would have been tortured and killed. In the minds of Jew-haters, being Jewish is sufficient warrant to disqualify a person from remaining a member of the human race.

It is this perennial hatred, I submit, that forms the peculiar ethnic or historical collagen that binds the Jew to his community, even should he repudiate his people with his whole soul or turn against them with the rancor of the benighted. This vicious odium is the force or substance that constitutes his or her identity. Jewishness obviously has nothing to do with race, as the Nazis believed, since there are Jews of every hue and physical type. To define a Jew according to rabbinic law as someone born to a Jewish mother only begs the question and involves us in a regressus—what makes a Jewish mother Jewish, apart from excessive nagging and the artful manipulation of guilt? Is Jewish identity a function of following the thirteen articles of faith articulated by Maimonides? But not all Jews are capable of abiding by every one of these, and the last article asserting belief in the resurrection of the dead is hardly substantiated in the Old Testament, in which there are, depending on how one counts, only six references to the afterlife. Rabbi Akiva proposed that knowledge of the Torah is the essential touchstone of Jewishness, in which case the majority of the world’s Jews are not really Jewish at all and a certain number of Gentiles are.

The Jewish community is now under siege as it confronts a global wave of antisemitic virulence not seen since the 1930s. Almost everywhere we look, we observe the unmistakable signs of a mounting assault on the Jewish people, whether in the state of Israel surrounded by genocidal enemies or in the Diaspora, especially in Europe where Jews must increasingly remain alert or suppress their identity in the face of ramifying acts of vandalism and a devil’s assortment of hate crimes.

As if this were not enough, the situation is complicated by a bitter historical irony endemic to the Jewish people itself, namely, the tendency to engage in various forms of fratricidal conflict even as it is under sustained attack. The biblical record is dispositive, as is the political drama of the ages in which time and again an endangered community descends into a maelstrom of warring factions, thus rendering it ever more vulnerable to the predations of its adversaries.

We note this peculiar dilemma unfolding in every quarter of the compass. In Israel, the judicial, academic and literary Left form what I’m tempted to call an unintelligentsia that diligently works against the very survival of the nation, often siding with or abetting those—European-funded NGOs, Palestinian irredentists—who are intent on destroying it. It is as if they are paying their karmic debt for the sin of being Israelis. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of many in the Diaspora who embrace the bogus Palestinian narrative, promote “interfaith dialogue” with duplicitous Muslim clerics and organizations, make common cause with anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish campus groups, or consider the state of Israel a historical liability.

Such manifestations of canting dishonor are evident everywhere in the West, not only in Europe but in America as well. Much has been written about Reconstructionist congregations, Jewish university administrators, Jewish student associations, diverse pseudo-rabbinical groups (for an extensive list, see my The Big Lie and Hear, O Israel!), and large formal organizations (the most notorious of these being Jeremy Ben-Ami’s J Street), often linked with a leftwing political orientation, that proliferate in the U.S. Similarly, there is a strong “collaborative” inclination in my own country of Canada, on the level of both major Jewish social institutions, such as the former and influential Canadian Jewish Congress more preoccupied with a scattering of Nazi  skinheads than with the growing Islamic threat, and of smaller, ad hoc coalitions like the Shalom-Salaam “dialogue group” that inveighs against Israeli “aggression” and supposed brutality.

A case in point is provided in microcosm in my home town of Montreal where, even as I write, a boycott of a Jewish-owned shoe store which sells Israeli products is in progress. The campaign against Chaussures Naot (Naot Shoes), which threatens to put the establishment out of business, is prosecuted by a group that styles itself as Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU) and accuses Israel of practicing apartheid and other human rights violations. Every Saturday afternoon, PAJU pickets the store, attempting to dissuade potential customers from entering on the most important shopping day of the week.  Naturally, these very same people would not dream of picketing the Jewish General Hospital, built with Jewish money, using Israeli medical innovations and serving the public irrespective of race, religion or ethnic origin, whose care they may one day require.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a panCanadian amalgamation of the Quebec-Israel Committee, the Quebec Jewish Congress, the Canada-Israel Committee and the Canadian Jewish Congress, initially adopted a hands-off, observer status vis à vis the PAJU demonstrators. But even this marginal and “evaluative” presence was, presumably, regarded as too intrusive. According to a report in The Canadian Jewish News, CIJA has since backed off, claiming that the battle has now been won thanks to public and official support for the embattled business, and concerned lest pro-Israel activism “may be associated in the public mind with activism that mocks traditional Muslims or associates Muslims as a people with repression.”

No surprise here for an organization which Isi Leibler, chair of the Diaspora- Israel relations committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, has described as a “cowardly” and “undemocratic body headed by professional public relations consultants.” After all, CIJA has circulated an internal document promoting a “risk-averse” approach and titled “The Ten Commandments,” instructing its members to take a low public profile. Commandment 5 states, in part: “Do not directly attack or assign blame to the Palestinians or their leadership.” Commandment 7: “Do not ask the government of Canada to appear—or be—more favourable to Israel.” Commandment 9: “Do not attack the media for being biased against Israel.” This form of anti-advocacy is known in the Yiddish idiom as the sha shtil philosophy—hush hush, do not speak up—an attitude whose consequences across the generations have been monstrous.

This reaction is typical of many Jewish groups and organizations that fall into line with a general policy of political correctness and craven appeasement rather than assume a resolute moral stance against the spreading plague of antisemitism and its deceptive confederate, anti-Zionism. In refusing to take issue the enemy, they effectively empower political covens like PAJU, Shalom-Salaam and numerous others. What is even stranger in this particular instance is that CIJA’s vice-president and spokesman Luciano Del Negro, who is not Jewish, allegedly has a damaging past of affiliations with the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Canada (PCCml), modeled on the late Albanian prime minister Enver Hoxha’s ultra-totalitarian Party of Labor. Indeed, according to the nationalist Tribune libre de Vigile, Del Negro was at one time Secretary General of the PCCml.

It should be clear by this time that Barack Obama is not good for America, not good for Israel and the Middle East, and, on the larger scale, not good for the world. The disaster of his presidency will ramify for years to come whether he is re-elected or not. And the so-called “free world” will be the worse for his administration’s policy blunders and its abdication of America’s historic and “exceptional” role as liberty’s guarantor.

The damage he has inflicted on the nation he was elected to lead has been rehearsed at great length by many observers and in many different places. Here we might briefly note his broken campaign promises (Gitmo, network transparency, crossing the aisle, renditions, predator strikes, etc.); his cold- shouldering of Congress in the Libyan adventure, a violation of American law; the implication of his administration in the Gunwalker scandal, which makes Watergate look like small potatoes; the illegitimate switch in the order of creditors in the Chrysler meltdown; his astronomical inflation of the American debt and deficit and the consequent downgrading of the country’s credit rating; his patronage of the public sector unions, the outrage of crony capitalism (Siga), and favoring the bogus Green industry at taxpayer’s expense (Solyndra, Beacon Power Corp.); his refusal to drill for oil domestically and his deferral of the Canadian Keystone Pipeline project, which would have fostered significant employment and helped free the United States from dependence on Middle Eastern and Latin American tyrannies; his support for the anarchic and disreputable Occupy Wall Street movement—this is only an abridged list. That he has enfeebled the United States, perhaps more than any other president in its history, including the lamentable Jimmy Carter, cannot be doubted by anyone who retains a modicum of political and fiscal sanity.

His inept meddling in the Middle East is only more of the same, shunted offshore. Obama has endorsed Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly fundamentalist Justice and Development Party in Turkey, which is manifestly hostile to the U.S. An Islamist government has been installed in Tunisia in a revolution heralded by Obama as a beacon of Maghrebian liberty. Obama’s complicity in deposing Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, an American ally, has had the effect of empowering the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood and jeopardizing the peace treaty with Israel. The region is now ready to erupt. Similarly, his part in ousting Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who posed no threat to American interests, created a radical, Sharia-inspired government in Tripoli and, additionally, has released a flood of looted weaponry into Gaza, where it will be used by Hamas’s terrorist regime. It is evident that, like a reversal of the Midas story, whatever Obama touches turns into lead—or in the case of his reluctance to seriously challenge the Iranian ayatollahs, into uranium.

With respect to Israel, one of America’s staunchest allies and crucial technological and intelligence partners, Obama’s disdain and bad faith are obvious to all except those who are themselves anti-Israel or who are intent on deceiving themselves because unwilling to admit that their electoral support was egregiously misplaced. Obama’s response to French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent diplomatic gaffe in calling Benjamin Netanyahu a “liar” speaks volumes: “You may be sick of [or “fed up with”] him, but me, I have to deal with him every day.” The administration’s attempt via Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, to soften and deflect the plain connotation of the statement is frankly disingenuous.

Much has been written of late about the so-called “1000 to 1” prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas, involving kidnapped Israel soldier Gilad Shalit and a horde of Palestinian terrorists and terror enablers. Israeli public sentiment seems massively behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to sign off on so lopsided a transaction, rescuing a single captive held for five years in illegal detention at the price of releasing a veritable army of conscienceless murderers.

The Israeli intellectual community, however—or at least that part of it not associated with the political left—by and large regards this species of human barter with overt revulsion, arguing that saving the life of a single Israeli citizen comes at the cost of future massacres perpetrated by the same terrorists who have been freed. They also contend that the exchange can only provide an incentive to future kidnappings and that Israel’s bargaining posture has been severely weakened.

There are exceptions. Writing in FrontPage Magazine, my epistolary friend David Hornik, while expressing some misgivings, gives several apparently credible reasons in support of the prisoner swap: Israel has upgraded its ability to defend against terrorist attacks; the released malefactors will be distributed across several different regions where they are likely to be rendered comparatively innocuous; and “for Israel to violate its obligation to its soldier is an even greater evil” than the moral horror entailed by freeing so many killers.” But Hornik appears to be in the minority.

His compatriot Steven Plaut thinks otherwise, raising at least an equal number of apparently credible reasons to deplore the exchange of a single kidnapped Israeli soldier for 1000 Palestinian criminals, many of whom are diehard terrorists. “It was a cynical slap in the face to the victims of those terrorists,” he writes. Additionally, Israel has once again shown itself incapable of resisting extortion. Moreover, the political leadership had other ways to deal with the situation, such as “assassinat[ing] 30 terrorists a day…or kidnapp[ing] the family members of Hamas leaders…until Shalit was free,” or simply instituting the death penalty since ‘no one has ever been murdered by a terrorist who has already been executed.”

Others like Isi Leibler are in staunch agreement with Plaut. “Continuing to capitulate to [the Palestinians’] excessively disproportionate demands,” Leibler warns, “will inevitably culminate in greater disasters.” Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick believes that the “position that releasing 1,027 terrorists would not endanger Israel [is] demonstrably false” and that the public consensus for the deal will soon evaporate. Louis Rene Beres, professor of Political Science at Purdue University, asserts that under the legal principle of Nullum crimen sine poena (no crime without a punishment), codified in international law, no government “has the legal right to free terrorists in exchange for its own kidnapped citizens.” It remains the legal obligation of the state to incapacitate such criminals, known in law as Hostes humani generis (Common enemies of mankind), “from committing new acts of mass murder.”

One wonders, though, if Plaut, Glick, Leibler, Beres, Spyer et al. had been in Gilad Shalit’s shoes, incarcerated for five years without contact with the outside world and expecting to be executed by his terrorist captors, whether they would have honorably rejected the exchange worked out by the Israeli government and refused to be liberated. Perhaps they would have. I know I wouldn’t. If Gilad had been their son, would they have demonstrated with seminarian righteousness in front of the Knesset to abandon him to his captivity, on the grounds that his release would only incentivize the terrorists to pursue their kidnapping strategy? I know I wouldn’t have. I would have acted precisely as Noam Shalit did and kept up unrelenting pressure on politicians and legislators to arrange my son’s freedom. I am aware how easy it is to maintain a noble, rational and sacrificially patriotic posture when one is not personally implicated, like those Western Islamicists who lost no one in the Twin Towers or do not have to live with lifelong mutilations.

Jonathan Spyer has addressed this issue in a particularly subtle and brilliant way. “The seemingly simple, impassioned statement—‘what if it was your son who had been kidnapped’—is…an accurate reflection of the attitude of a large body of Israeli Jews today vis à vis the collective ‘Israeliness’ to which they belong.” It is precisely this attitude, this “possibly dysfunctional version of communal concern” which makes no strategic sense, on which Israel’s enemies “have pinned their hopes of eventual victory.” He concludes that “the question  of how adequately to combine the modernity of outlook essential for social and economic success, with the communal commitment necessary for societal survival, remains a central and currently insufficiently answered one for Israel.” There is no simple resolution to the dilemma confronting the nation. Nevertheless, when it comes down to the level of the individual, who among us, Spyer included, would be willing, Abraham-like, to sacrifice his child to a higher strategic or commanding purpose?

The macabre prepossession of the international community with the “problem” of Israel is now so widespread that it has become like a cultural neurosis or even a fact of nature, that is, something that is habitual, taken for granted and rarely questioned. One drinks it in with the morning coffee, if not with one’s mother’s milk. It is treated as the central issue in the geopolitical world beside which every other consideration fades into comparative insignificance.

The People’s Republic of China has overrun Tibet, resettled it with its own citizens and imposed autocratic rule? Not on the radar. Zimbabwe has forcefully dispossessed its white farmers and mercilessly persecuted its own people? Of no account. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptian Copts are fleeing the country to avoid killings, rapes, church burnings and forced conversions? A mere bagatelle. Islamist and Salafist factions are emerging in Egypt in the wake of the much-touted “Arab Spring,” promising renewed violence whether in Helwan, Imbaba, Tahrir Square or Alexandria? A tepid reproof by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and so on to other things, mainly Israel. The Muslim Brotherhood is making inroads into the Islamic world and promulgating Sharia law in the West? Of little interest. Iran is brutally suppressing its own population and Syria is indiscriminately slaughtering its people? No flotillas. Russia is systematically murdering and imprisoning investigative journalists? It’s an internal Russian matter. Reports indicate that Venezuela and Cuba may construct missile emplacements targeting the U.S.? Forget about it. Libyan rebels are massacring black Africans? Nothing to worry about. Sudan is conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign in Darfur? It doesn’t register. Somalia is imploding owing to the bombings and depredations of the al-Shabaab terrorist network? Not our problem. Pakistan-sponsored terrorists wreak havoc in India? It merits a passing headline and is then dismissed. The Taliban is again turning Afghanistan into a killing field? Unfortunate, but there it is. Turkey refuses to acknowledge and apologize for the Armenian genocide it carried out? Well, that was long ago.

But when it comes to the Israeli/Palestinian nexus, the focus is unswerving. The UN debates the issue endlessly and propagates one denunciation of the Jewish state after another. The EU and the U.S. are fixated on a resolution to  what they appear to consider a planetary imbroglio. Something called the “Quartet,” which has been aptly called a “chorus of jackals,” has been concocted to deal with the matter to the exclusion of far more pressing concerns. The media are pitching in with obscene insistence. NGOs, churches and labor unions have exceeded their mandates and competencies in engaging with a Levantine quarrel. And public opinion, especially in Europe, has been galvanized by what is in essence a parochial dispute and really none of its business.

The media and the political class are especially culpable. As James Fallows argues in Breaking the News, the media are busy practicing what is called predictive journalism and engaging in professional spin, disguising editorial opinion as impartial news coverage and thus adding political prejudice to the ostensibly neutral transmission of facts. The political class is given to what Michael Freund has dubbed “selective provocation syndrome,” that is, “when one deems Israel’s actions to be provocative while ignoring similar moves by the Palestinians.” The Palestinians, he points out, are building thirteen times the number of dwellings in Samaria and Judea as are being built by Jews, in order to establish facts on the ground in the disputed territories. “So why,” he asks, “is this too not regarded as a ‘provocation’ that undermines peace efforts?” And replies: “I guess not all ‘provocations’ are considered equal.”

Clearly, the debate is intensively weighted on the side of the Palestinians, which means that the Israelis are regularly condemned for defending themselves, for acting in accordance with historical and legal principles, and for their reluctance to sign away legitimate territory and, in effect, to jeopardize their very survival. There is little recognition of the fact that Israel has constantly signaled its willingness to embark upon realistic negotiations. As Barry Rubin writes, “So if the world isn’t going to listen to Israel’s proposals, won’t credit its eagerness to negotiate and won’t accept plans that also include Israel getting something for its troubles, there is no way Israel is ever going to satisfy it.”

The situation is frankly preposterous and provokes two salient questions: why such an unrelenting convergence of interest on this tiny slice of the world’s geography, so scarce in natural resources and constantly threatened with destruction, called Israel?; and in the context of consensual advocacy, why Palestine?

The world remains focused on Israel because Israel is a Jewish state, the Jewish family on the international block, a distinctive presence which activates the latent—as well as the manifest—content of a malingering and inexcisable anti-Semitism. For this is anti-Semitism pure and simple and it would be disingenuous to try and mitigate the truth by seeking for nuanced and textured evasions intended to downplay mankind’s longest hatred. Jews, the feeling goes, do not deserve their own state. They presumably form a collection of wandering tribes and disruptive social interlopers, justly scattered among the nations and deserving of marginalization, a historical “fossil” according to the celebrated historian Arnold Toynbee and, according to the anti-Zionist delator Tony Judt, an “anachronism.” But such pronouncements and convictions are merely an attempt to launder one’s irrational bigotries or dissemble one’s innate aversions. The current situation makes this blatantly evident. The name of the game is Judeophobia.

For the disproportion between the world’s response to a healthy, robust, legitimate and embattled democratic state the size of New Jersey and the vast cesspools of tyranny, oppression, insurgence, violence and depredation that litter the globe is incommensurable. With only occasional exceptions, the world trains its gaze almost exclusively on Israel. “One wonders,” writes Matthew Hausman, “how they can be so consumed with Israel’s alleged indiscretions and yet ignore the totalitarian and theocratic tendencies of the nations comprising the Arab-Muslim world.” Good question.

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One of the more difficult problems a reviewer faces when dealing with a Horowitz book is how not to go on indefinitely, for each new release takes its place in a qualifying continuum compelling awareness of the whole. In other words, Horowitz has reached the point in time in his career when, as T.S. Eliot said about literature in general in his seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a new work involves “the presence of the past.” “The existing monuments,” Eliot writes, “form an ideal order…which is modified by the introduction of the new (or nearly new).” The new not only reconfigures the present but alters our perception of the past as well.

At the level of Horowitz’s “individual talent,” we might propose, analogically speaking, after the publication of a veritable library shelf of books and pamphlets, that he is not only a writer but a literature, that is, he now constitutes his own tradition which each new production both adds to and revises. We know Horowitz as a committed political commentator anatomizing the left’s ideological control of the media, the electoral process, the common discourse and the classroom. From Radical Son to The Politics of Bad Faith to  Unholy Alliance to The Professors to Indoctrination U to One-Party Classroom, and, indeed, a bibliography that spans more than 40 years and approximately the same number of books, including over a dozen which he co-authored, Horowitz has established himself as one of the major political authors of the era.

With the publication of his latest offering, A Point in Time, the third in a meditative trilogy following upon The End of Time and A Cracking of the Heart, the perspective has begun to shift. These are intensely personal volumes, lamentations on mortality, the inevitable dissipations of time, the futility of the quest for meaning and coherence, the losses that afflict us every step of the way on our journey toward the mausoleum that closes on every human purpose. But the lien between the personal and the political is clear. Reviewing A Point in Time in National Review Online, Bruce Thornton also remarks on the complementarity between the “the three volumes of memoirs laced with philosophical reflections” and “Horowitz’s other work, which focuses more practically on contemporary ideologies and the pernicious policies they create.”

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David Horowitz’s writing career spans more than forty years and at least as many books. The major portion of his work deals with political and education subjects from a conservative vantage, establishing Horowitz’s reputation as one of the most notable and controversial figures in the arena of public commentary.  His impact on current intellectual thought and discourse has been increasingly consolidated over the last decade and a half or so, from the 1997 Radical Son to the 2009 One-Party Classroom.  Commanding respect as well as inviting censure, his name is now indelibly associated with contemporary cultural critique and political analysis at the cutting edge of social relevance.

With the publication of The End of Time in 2005 and especially A Cracking of the Heart, a memoir of the life and death of his daughter Sarah, in 2009, Horowitz’s perspective begins to vary from the political to the personal.  The old feminist cliché that “the personal is political,” to cite Carol Hanisch’s well-known 1969 essay, is reversed in Horowitz’s case.  For him, the political is personal and has always been so, as earlier intimated in Radical Son.  And not only is the political personal, but the personal is exceedingly personal, for Horowitz writes not only from the standpoint of an erudite scholar immersed in his discipline, but also from his own firsthand, vivid, and deeply felt experience.

There is often a gaping divorce in academic and political writing between the theoretical and the empirical.  Cloistered academics and the general run of media pundits tend to be insulated from the graphic immediacy of real life — a privileged remoteness from what we might call unprocessed experience — which allows them to float their often vapid exhalations with aerial insouciance.  The opposite is the case here.  Horowitz does not merely sit behind a writing desk, deliver copy, or orate to a classroom.  He is also in the trenches, receiving threats to his personal safety as he travels about the speaking circuit accompanied by bodyguards.  He is in the thick of it.  There is a profound, almost visceral involvement with every one of the issues Horowitz treats, be it “the politics of bad faith,” the corrupt and doctrinaire Academy, the American presidency, the theory and practice of economic subversion, the drama of Israel under attack, or, more recently, his close family.  It is from his analytical fidelity to his own passional experience that Horowitz derives his immense authority.

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