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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The phrase “politics as usual” has gained a certain currency in our time. Regrettably, it is no longer relevant. What we are presently witnessing cannot be described as politics as usual. Consider the concatenation of events and factors that now confront us: the upsurge of terrorism and the growing strength of Islamic radicalism, a United Nations that has violated its Charter and is now home to totalitarian regimes and rogue nations, the international ostracism of Israel and an impending war in the Middle East, the American betrayal of its allies and a foreign policy that supports the Muslim Brotherhood and faux Arab revolutions, the corrupting influence of the left in the mainstream media and the universities, the potential economic implosion of Europe and possibly of the United States as well, and perhaps most distressingly at so critical a historical juncture, the election of Barack Obama, a man with neither business, military nor executive experience, to the most powerful office in the world.

What we are observing is, in fact, the politics of the unusual, a perfect storm of forces and influences that threaten the democratic polity of the West and augur a coming epoch of peril and convulsion. And the one bulwark that might have resisted the towering wave of oncoming misfortune appears to be crumbling before our eyes. I am referring, of course, to the United States of America.

What happened to New Orleans when Katrina struck is only a microcosm of the devastation that is now brewing. People rushed to blame President Bush for the disaster that devastated the city, but they were dementedly wrong or simply seeking to extract political profit from a natural catastrophe exacerbated by civic ineptitude. There can be no doubt, however, that President Obama is at the center of the approaching tsunami. I have long argued that the most dangerous man in the world is not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-il or Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, but Barack Hussein Obama. This, I believe, is no exaggeration.

In a troubling article for American Thinker, Stella Paul contends that in electing Obama to the presidency, Americans “tried to create a god to defend our freedom, because it was easier than the hard work needed to defend it ourselves.” The result proves that outsourcing courage or delegating integrity, especially to an unknown quantity, always backfires. To cite the title of the famous 1949 book charting the defection of former communists, Obama, like communism itself, ineluctably became “the god that failed.” Paul goes so far as to claim that “the destruction that Obama wrought may ultimately dwarf the wreckage of 9/11.”

Judging by the poll data, a majority of Americans—a considerable number prone to buyer’s remorse—have come round to sharing this view of Obama’s dreadful stewardship of the nation and the destabilizing effect he has had on world affairs. His conduct in office has sapped the economic strength of the U.S. and impaired the rule of law (e.g., his bypassing congress in the Libyan adventure), sowed fear and confusion among our allies, prepared the scene for the rise of inimical movements and states, and materially weakened the democratic West. But the jury is still out on whether he is “only” a bungling amateur or is motivated by a spirit of ingrained hostility toward his own country.

The debate is gaining momentum as both the foreign and domestic situations plummet from bad to worse. Is Obama merely incompetent, a man completely out of his depth who has no understanding of real-world economics or realpolitik, who cannot deliver a coherent speech without the aid of a teleprompter, who is compelled to rely on the advice of sharpers and operators, and who has absolutely no prior, genuine accomplishments to his credit outside of a capacity for political maneuvering, polished mendacity and, as David Remnick gushed in The Bridge, the ability to wear perfectly creased trousers? A community organizer as president? A feckless nonentity as Commander-in-Chief?

I begin with a disclosure. Salim Mansur is a friend of mine, so if I were in any way skeptical of his deposition I would not have consented to write this review. Friendship is too precious a value to risk giving needless offense, either by being too brutally honest or by producing a piece of dishonest puffery. And since even the best of us have written problematic books (including yours truly), it is best in such cases to say nothing adverse in print and leave it to others to dissect the writer’s efforts.

That I write a review of a friend’s book, then, means that I suffer no crisis of conscience in praising it for its many virtues: clarity, painstaking research, intellectual scrupulousness, a surfeit of historical and juridical information, and a powerful argument backed by strict evidence and leading to a set of forceful conclusions.

Mansur presents his thesis with lucid precision in his Introduction: “The idea of an ‘official’ multiculturalism program to be sponsored by the state, supported by tax-payers, and monitored and enforced by thought-police (human rights commissions) was at best dubious, and at worst by its very nature poised against Western liberalism. Moreover…it was based on the false idea—another official lie, really—that all cultures are equal.”

The result of this pernicious fantasy was a reversal of cultural norms and the scuttling of reasonable expectations. If all cultures are equal, the heritage culture has no priority and no legitimate claim upon foreign minorities to adapt to the social usages and conventions already in place. “As immigration changes the demographic profile of a liberal democracy,” Mansur writes, “multiculturalism empowers immigrants from non-Western societies to demand that their host country adapt to the cultural requirements of immigrants instead of the other way round.” And this is plainly what has happened. “[I]f the ride continues unchecked,” he concludes, “the end then is predictable.”

Delectable Lie is a detailed exfoliation of this root argument, examining how multiculturalism—and, of course, its corollary, political correctness, which discriminates against the expression of dissent—have inexorably sedimented themselves in the political process, “twisting our history” as they did so, “tearing apart” national identities and invidiously replacing them with “even older identities of a pre-modern past,” thus effectively eroding the “idea of nation as a people…identified on the basis of kinship relations or language.”

One has only to look at the importation of Sharia law into Europe and the proliferation of no-go zones, in effect Islamic mini-emirates, in European cities to see how cultural civility and national coherence can be subverted. In the U.S. Islamic advocacy proceeds apace, terror attacks are a constant menace, mosques pepper the landscape, the President appoints Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers to influential posts, and the Shariate relentlessly advances. In Canada—Mansur’s chief concern—Islamic organizations flex their muscles, terror plots are hatched, mosques and religious schools indoctrinate the young, and our human rights commissions see to it that criticism of Islam is muted, punished and all but ruled out.

One recalls Ottoman thinker Said Nursi who prophesied nearly a century ago, in his famous Damascus Sermon, that “Europe and America are pregnant with Islam. One day they will give birth to an Islamic state.” The way things are going, he may have been right. And it is via what Mansur calls the “delectable lie”—the idea of cultural parity, the raising of the concept of “diversity” (which really means “conformity of opinion”) to the status of a social paradigm, the practice of accommodation to the sensitivities of immiscible groups in the fatuous conviction that the favor will be reciprocated, the untenable belief that the desire for freedom, prosperity and electoral democracy reigns in every human heart, in short, the diktats of multiculturalism—that Nursi’s vision would be realized.

The Anglo-Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif is not a bad writer but she’s not a very good one either. Her reputation rests mainly on one book, The Map of Love, which sold over a million copies and was shortlisted for the 1999 Man Booker Prize, and on some tendentious and partisan political journalism for The Guardian. What unites her fiction and her journalism is an overt sympathy for the Palestinians—she was the founder of the annual Palestine Festival of Literature—and a corresponding hostility toward Israel. Clearly, these are political attitudes that endear her to a literary establishment and wide readership who share these conventional leftwing and pro-Islamic sentiments, and which may partially account for the book’s success.

Publishers Weekly anoints Soueif as “the intellectual heir of Edward Said,” and there is certainly a slight modicum of truth to this promotion to the ranks of influence and repute. In her slanted and one-sided Guardian essay, “Under the Gun,” collected in Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, she laments that her life “has been overcast by the shadow of Israel,” proceeds to reduce the complex nature of Israeli-Palestinian relations to the dimensions of a fairy tale, misrepresents UN Resolution 242 in passing, and raises the 2000 Intifada to the heights of an epic struggle of the pristinely innocent against the barbarously guilty. For Soueif, “the discord between the Arab world and the U.S. is entirely to do with Israel,” aping the palpably flawed position associated with Said and his followers, like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their shabbily confected The Israel Lobby. Soueif does her best to advance and popularize such gross distortions of truth in both her commentary and her fiction.

The Map of Love pushes all the right buttons in the great console of ready-made opinion that prevails today. It purports to be a love story unfolding on several parallel historical planes, set a century apart in colonial and modern Egypt. An English widow, Anne Winterbourne, moves to Egypt and falls in love with an irredentist radical, Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi, whom she marries in 1901. In 1997, her great granddaughter, Isabel Parkman, embarks from New York on a journey to Egypt to trace her family history, and falls in love with the symphony conductor and activist Omar al-Ghamrawi who has embraced the Palestinian cause, an obvious surrogate for Edward Said. The novel is admittedly rich in evocative description but is fatally weakened by an air of romantic sensationalism, an haut goût of maudlin evangelism and an insinuating current of predictable disinformation.

Soueif’s novel brings to mind another cartographical production, Harold Bloom’s celebrated critical volume, A Map of Misreading (a companion to The Anxiety of Influence). Among the various litcrit categories or “revisionary ratios” that Bloom develops we find one he names “Apophrades” (from the Greek for “impure days,” inauspicious events”), which he redefines as a form of poetic and literary influence resembling “the Return of the Dead”—the great writers of the past who haunt and intimidate the present-day author with precisely their greatness. What Bloom calls “the imagination’s struggle with its own origins” leads to the imagination surrendering to a “teleological error,” its projected ends marred by a faulty and melodramatic reading of both its past and its present.

In the case of The Map of Love, the structure of the device is repeated on the plane of narrative. The writer constructs a false tableau of the now that is meant to subsume and transcend the sentimental ideal of the then. It is, in effect, an impure or inauspicious transaction. A supposedly exalted past when men were heroic and larger than life and women were wise and adventurous is reprised and strengthened in a simulating present.

In 1987, Jonathan Pollard, an NIS intelligence analyst, was convicted in a U.S. court for passing classified information to Israel and sentenced to life imprisonment. As Joseph Puder remarks in an article for FrontPage Magazine, Pollard received the same sentence as John Walker, Robert Hansson, and Aldrich Ames who sold “top U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union [which] claimed the lives of many U.S. agents.” The question of Pollard’s espionage is moot, since America had reneged on a Memorandum of Understanding ensuring that information pertaining to Israeli security would be transferred to Israel, a loyal and trusted ally. In a letter to Barack Obama, pleading for commutation of sentence, former assistant secretary of defense Lawrence Korb points out that “the average sentence for his offense is 2-4 years and today the maximum sentence is 10 years.”

In 2006, in clear violation of international law, twenty-year-old corporal Gilad Shalit was kidnapped on the Israeli side of the border by Hamas irregulars and has spent the last five years of his young life in captivity. In equal violation of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions, Hamas has refused to allow Red Cross visits or contact with the boy’s parents. Its attitude is summed up in a statement made by Abu Marzuk, an official in the Hamas Political Ministry: “The subject no longer interests us. We are not interested in his well-being at all, and we are not giving him any special guard since he is as good as a cat or less.”

But unlike Pollard and Shalit, Israel is comparatively free to act if it so chooses. With respect to the United States, it has the vast majority of the public, almost the entire Republican Party, and even some scattered Democrats on its side. It also has the option of gradually reducing its dependence on American aid. It possesses the expertise to engineer a more autonomous military platform—as my own country, Canada, did in the 1950s when it developed the Arrow. This was the most sophisticated fighter jet in the world at the time, before Canada ill-advisedly trashed the entire project following the political calculations of a blinkered prime minister favoring the American Bomarc missile and the Lockheed U-2. Israel, however, need not emulate the Canadian example of misplaced deference.

Common sense and fair play should have led to Pollard’s release twenty years ago and more. Pollard was far more a victim than a malefactor. But is Israel as helpless as it appears to be in seeing belated justice done? It enjoys, as we’ve noted, broad support in the American heartland and in Congress. It contributes significantly to American R & D civilian and military technology. It returns most of the foreign aid it has received to the U.S. in the form of military purchases, creating American jobs rather than differentially profiting its own economy. And it is America’s most reliable ally—former secretary of state Alexander Haig described Israel as “the largest U.S. aircraft carrier…in a region which is critical to vital U.S. interests.” Although Israel has lobbied for Pollard’s release and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has striven to bring this about, there surely exist many pressure points and leverage opportunities that have not been accessed. It is unconscionable that Pollard has been left to rot in an American jail without his benefactors mobilizing every potential resource at their disposal.

With regard to Hamas, the niceties of diplomatic protocol and the complexities that hamper political and/or military maneuvers were never an excuse to avoid concrete action. I submit that if Hamas were credibly threatened through back-channels with the thorough and systematic destruction of its infrastructure, Gilad Shalit would have been released long ago. Moreover, Israel continues to provide electricity, fuel, material goods and medical care to Hamas, without which Gaza would find itself on the verge of implosion; if Israel were to completely shut off the supply tap, the terrorists would be compelled to reconsider. But such policies should have been enacted before Shalit was abducted, as soon as it had become clear that disengagement did not lead to peace, as had been foolishly hoped, but to the relentless bombardment of Israel soil.

Naturally, Israel would face mounting international pressure and condemnation if it pursued such measures. The “international community” can always be counted on to make common cause with the antagonists of the Jewish state. Hamas knows this and plays the global card to Israel’s continuing detriment. Nevertheless, it is obvious that no matter how Israel may comport itself in any conceivable political or military situation, it will be blamed and denounced anyway, a lesson it has not yet appeared to have learned. It is time, as the Israeli colloquial expression goes, to “change the CD.” Given the ‘damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t’ context, it may as well act to its advantage.

Indeed, there was never any reason that Israel should victual and otherwise prop up a dedicated enemy pledged to the country’s annihilation. What other nation in its right collective mind would feed, support and strengthen a regime that kidnaps its soldiers, targets its civilian centers, and is Charter-bent on genocide. This is, frankly, utter insanity. And there was never any reason Israel should have accepted even one rocket exploding in its villages without unleashing, not a tit-for-tat reprisal which clearly solves nothing, but a devastating counterattack eliminating the major part of the problem once and for all.

There is a fascinating passage from the Koran, surah 101, its initial lines variously translated as “The Disaster! What is the Disaster?” (N.J. Dawood, The Koran), “The Crashing Blow. What is the Crashing Blow?” (M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur’an), “The day of Noise and Clamor. What is the day of Noise and Clamor?” (Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Meaning of The Holy Qur’an), and so on. The Arabic term in question, Al-Qaria, is also translated as “the Clatterer”, giving us the most enigmatic version of all, which can be rendered as “The Clatterer! What is the Clatterer? And what shall teach thee what is the Clatterer?” (See the online version of Abdul Daryabadi). Here below is a very readable reproduction from an Arabic/English Facebook site:

The Clatterer—
what is the Clatterer?
And what teaches thee what the Clatterer is?
The day that men shall be like scattered moths,
and the mountains shall be like carded wool.
Then as for him whose scales are heavy,
he shall be in a pleasing life.
And as for him whose scales are light,
his abode shall be the Abyss.
And what teaches thee what it is?—
A blazing Fire.

Yusuf Ali, whose translation and commentary has come to be regarded by many as definitive, parses this surah as referring to the Day of Judgment “when men will be distracted and the landmarks of this world will be lost, but every deed will be weighed in a just balance, and find its real value and setting.” Taking the liberty of the infidel, my own reading of surah 101 differs markedly from the canonical interpretation.

Who are the Clatterers? They swarm everywhere in the Western world. Some of these Clatterers are out-and-out bigots who pontificate in the media, the academy and the political arena. We know them well. Others are guilty of what political commentator George Jonas calls “pragmatic anti-Semitism,” the trendy form of the pestilence taken on board by opportunistic politicos and fashionable highbrows, “just as it was in the 1930s.” Some are “Chatham House” specialists who wish to influence public policy in the direction of a kind of mob-friendly gliberalism. Yet others primarily from the postmodern, multicultural and anti-globalist Left, inspired by the special pleading of the late Edward Said, have espoused the Arab/Muslim/Palestinian cause as inherently virtuous and reasonable.

It is instructive to focus on the primary postulates of Edward Said and his tribe of like-minded postcolonialists. The 1978 publication of Said’s Orientalism prepared the way for the revisionist climate that governs much of the intellectual thought-world today. It marked a decisive shift in contemporary sentiment in favor of Islam and against the West, which is to say, America, Israel and Zionists. Said’s tutelary presence is still everywhere to be found, as we can see in the now-ubiquitous denigration of America, Israel and Zionism and the corresponding rehabilitation of the Arab/Muslim axis and of the Palestinians in particular.

One of Said’s major premises is that the Arab world suffers from the West’s “simple-minded dichotomy of freedom-loving, democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian, and terroristic Arabs,” a distinction which obfuscates “a clear view of what one talks about in talking about the Near East.” This is obviously no longer the consensus, but the argument continues to be made for partisan purposes, especially in Middle East Study departments running riot on Western campuses. By a “clear view,” of course, Said meant to reverse the terms of his rhetorical formulation. Said has done his dirty work superbly, reinforcing the canard of the Arabs as merely “a surmountable obstacle to Israel’s creation.”

To appropriate one of his own images, the impression arises of Said riding into the field of Middle East scholarship like Rudolph Valentino’s flamboyant Sheik Ahmed Ban Hassan intent on a rescue mission. Said, himself not a Muslim but a self-proclaimed Christian Palestinian—although it now turns out that, like Yasser Arafat, who claimed to be from East Jerusalem, he was an Egyptian—is the Pied Piper of our current Orientalists and postcolonial mandarins, a public figure whose intellectual respectability and personal charisma have made him a very effective evangelist for the movement.

The problematic nature of his oeuvre seems not to matter. To little avail, Ibn Warraq in Defending the West has convincingly shown that Orientalism is a veritable tissue of fabrications, misconceptions, internal contradictions, damaging omissions, historical blind spots, false attributions and extremely shabby scholarship, all amounting to what Warraq calls a form of “intellectual terrorism.” For all his suavity, Said possessed an intifadic temperament. The famous episode of the Columbia prof chucking stones at Israeli soldiers is only a physical embodiment of his textual lapidations. Ironically, in developing his position, Said condemns Western orientalists for employing “retrograde intellectual tactics,” which is precisely what Warraq reveals him to be guilty of.

Arabist Robert Irwin’s demolition of Said’s “labyrinth of false turns, trompe l’oeil perspectives and cul-de-sacs” is no less devastating. In For Lust of Knowing, Irwin writes that “the distortion of subject matter in Orientalism is so fundamental that to accept its broad framework as something to work with and then correct would be merely to waste one’s time.” Said’s book, he continues, “seems to me to be a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentation.”

Apart from Warraq and Irwin, as well as Bernard Lewis in his well-known quarrel with Said, Kanan Makiya (incidentally, no great friend of Israel) in Cruelty and Silence, Martin Kramer in Ivory Towers on Sand and a seemingly repentant Christopher Hitchins, who once collaborated with Said, very few thinkers have had the audacity or the courage to call Said’s bluff. Why have we so capriciously accepted his thesis that the West has worked with prefab stereotypes of the Orient? Why, with few exceptions, have we not investigated how the Orient has assembled an equally illusory straw man of its presumed Western oppressor? (One such exception is furnished by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margolit’s Occidentalism, dealing with the “dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies.”) And why, for that matter, have we waited so long to explode Said’s self-perpetuated myth of origins—or to savor the piquant fact, as Jack Cashill conclusively documents in Hoodwinked and again in Deconstructing Obama, that he was born in a Jewish hospital in Jerusalem where his parents rightly evaluated the odds of a safe delivery? And that Said, whose father was a naturalized American, also held American citizenship from birth.

Despite the damaging critiques of his work, Said-like thinking has become epidemic among the emir class of intellectual Clatterers. The fact that the Muslim Middle East currently has little to offer the world except lessons in state repression and religious fanaticism and the efficient distribution of bloody, indiscriminate killing techniques seems to have escaped these luminaries almost perfectly. The so-called “Arab Spring” has furnished ample evidence that Clatterdom inevitably gets the world wrong: Libya is a bloodbath, Tunisia is leaning toward renewed fundamentalism, al-Qaeda is making inroads in Yemen, Egypt is going rogue. Station our Clatterers in Tahrir Square, the symbol of revolutionary freedom, and they will have their heads duly smashed by the emblematic truncheon.

In lionizing Edward Said, popular novelists such as Ahdaf Soueif in her novel The Map of Love (the character Omar is a stand-in for Said) and debatable scholars such as Rashid Khalidi, who currently occupies the Edward Said Chair of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and their peers and colleagues do not advance the cause of truth and understanding but promote culturally vetted stereotypes while adding ever more entries to the pseudodoxia epidemica. The tendency to rely on clichés, unreflected truisms, popular beliefs and what Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum called “Idols of the Theatre”—faults arising from received systems of thought—should be seen for what it is, a form of intellectual evasion that spares critic, novelist or scholar from having to study the relevant issues independently, outside the dispensary of commonplace assumptions. It should be more than enough to downgrade their intellectual credit rating.

Let us examine four prominent Clatterers, who may not necessarily regard themselves as Said’s lineal descendants but are heavily indebted to his blazing the trail for their errant if influential ideas.

Acclaimed Norwegian novelist Jostein Gaarder, author of the best-selling Sophie’s World (30 million copies worldwide) is plainly an intellectual lightweight who would merit little interest had the recent terrorist atrocity in Norway not brought him once again to the world’s attention. Writing in the New York Times for July 28, 2011, Gaarder regurgitated the usual leftist claptrap, blaming the “thousands of right-wing extremists” and an apparently teeming horde of “Islamophobes” for Anders Behring Breivik’s murderous rampage. “Those who claim to protect the next generation of Norwegians against Islamist extremism,” Gaarder huffs, “are, in fact, the greater menace.” This is the same man, let us remember, who wrote an article called “God’s Chosen People” in the daily Aftenposten for August 5, 2006, accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and of contemplating “a final solution to the Palestinian problem” (italics mine). According to this literary simpleton, Judaism is “an archaic national and warlike religion.”

Clearly, he has never read the Koran or troubled himself with the Sunnah or familiarized himself with the millennial antisemitism of Christian Europe—or the vile Jew-hatred of his own country. For Gaarder, the Good Samaritan is “today, we would say, a Palestinian,” as Said too would have contended. The Israelis, on the contrary, are “baby killers” and “Zionist terrorists.” Gaarder’s ignorance of history, no less than his disregard of local and immediate events, are infused by a hatred so great that, as blogger Christian T. on the NIJ site puts it, his “racist mind-set has become axiomatic.” Gaarder has recently published a partial retraction (original in Aftenposten for April 20, 2011), but it is very far from convincing. Indeed, it looks like nothing so much as damage control. His real attitude is very different. He is proud that his country has welcomed 200,000 Muslim immigrants, “including more than 30,000 Pakistanis.” And this demography is growing rapidly.

In a BBC interview on January 4, 2008, the senior prelate of the Church of England, Rowan Williams, argued in favour of recognizing certain aspects of Sharia law, which in any case “seems unavoidable,” and that Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.” Indeed, the rise of Sharia courts in Britain, part of an effort to turn various British cities into Islamic states as promoted by the Islamic Emirates Project, is gathering momentum daily. The UK is riddled with “Sharia law enforcement zones” and, according to Soeren Kern, a senior analyst of the Groupo de Estudios Estratégicos in Madrid, with as many as 85 Sharia courts. Kern cites Bangladeshi-born Lutfur Rahman, mayor of Tower Hamlets in East London, who is “dedicated to changing the ‘very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed…from ignorance to Islam’.” And this state of affairs is, for the most part, winked at by the authorities. Recently, when about-to-be-married Tommy Robinson, head of the English Defence League, walked into an alleged Muslim ambush in East London during his stag night, he and his friends were taken into custody while the “violent Muslim youths” were allowed to go free. The police admitted that the orders to arrest Robinson and his group “had come from above.” The U.K. is no longer OK.

It actually looks as if Sweden might predecease the U.K. as a viable, sovereign Western democracy as it hurtles into the Islamic abyss. Pat Condell has delivered a chilling account of the advanced state of the country’s Islamic plummet which should be consulted by anyone who still believes that coddling the Islamic demographic is a sign of enlightened thinking, social justice and the benefits of unmonitored diversity. We see the same love affair with Islam and multiculturalism being pursued in Denmark, Austria and Holland where prominent individuals are prosecuted on the grounds of “hate speech” for warning against the Islamic aim to subvert the liberal traditions of these countries. Norway is rapidly becoming a kind of earthly Jannah for Muslim immigrants (Arabic for the heavenly garden, or Paradise). In other countries, such as France and Germany, love is plainly alloyed with fear; nevertheless, parties seeking votes in the many Muslim enclaves that chequer the social and political landscape will continue to “make nice.”

What is occurring in Europe is by no means an isolated phenomenon. Events there will soon be appearing in an American theatre near you and, indeed, they already have. One need only consider the possible—perhaps likely—erection of a mosque in the immediate vicinity of Ground Zero; jihadist recruitment among the Somali community in various states, primarily Minnesota; the planning and execution of terrorist assaults on American soil and against military installations, the latest attempt being the plot by Nasser Abdo to attack Fort Hood once again; the effective lobbying and propaganda efforts by radical Muslim organizations like CAIR and ISNA; the spread of Muslim influence on university campuses around the country; the president’s policy of outreach to the Muslim world, including the infamous “apology tour,” the appointment of Islamic ideologue Dalia Mogahed to the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and the formal recognition of the Muslim Brotherhood as a partner in dialogue; the media with few exceptions promoting the Muslim agenda, rarely identifying jihadists as Muslims but as “lone gunmen” or “of Asian origin,” and going soft on the threat of Sharia law; and much more.

We recall that when Nidal Malik Hasan, who was also an army major, shot thirteen unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood, then-chief of staff Mike Mullen worried about a possible anti-Muslim backlash! The counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) put in place in Afghanistan, ostensibly to win the “hearts and minds” of the local people, has resulted in the needless deaths of American soldiers whose operations are severely hampered on the field of battle. As Diana West, author of The Death of the Grown-Up, observes: “When the fear of giving offense to the local Islamic community (by shooting Taliban or wearing body armor) trumps self-preservation…we know the military’s dhimmitude is complete.” Clearly, the military is catering not only to Afghan villagers but to the growing Islamic constituency on American soil.

The Islamic fact is solidly entrenched in the U.S. and continues to bore its way ever more deeply into the body politic, with the collusion of the Democratic administration, a significant portion of the judiciary, the press, the army, and the vociferous left-wing intelligentsia. The European experience is being imported wholesale into the country. Pointing this out is quickly denounced as Islamophobia. The truth is that significant elements in the country have succumbed to an epidemic of Islamophilia.

Corresponding to this love-in with Islam—schmoozing with terrorists, to quote Aaron Klein—we note the demonization of Israel in the mainstream media, the court of public opinion, the European Union, the United Nations, the majority of NGOs and the current American administration. This is a sign not only of collective bad faith, international hypocrisy, millennial prejudice and pure malevolence, but quite simply of massive intellectual derangement. It is facilitated by a refusal to sift the historical facts from the welter of lies and disinformation that deliberately cloud the historical and political context, the dismissal of the provisions of international law and, once again, the abandonment of reason.

It should be clear by this time that there is no medium of intellectual exchange with the left, that facts do not matter, that logic is helpless to convince or to prompt even the slightest reconsideration, and that practically every counter-argument can be turned on its head and interpreted as confirmation of the original idée fixe. As I wrote in The Big Lie, this is a tendency or disposition that bespeaks the resurgence of a political romanticism wedded to motives rather than consequences, unachievable ideals rather than practical values. It consists largely of the cryogenized remnants of an antique crusade for unperturbed happiness and tranquility, actuated by a child-like desire for transcendence that is the curse of liberal political civilization, and that, in various spiritual and revolutionary forms, has caused untold harm and suffering in the past.

Ultimately, it amounts to a prepossession that resembles a species of clinical paranoia, associated with symptoms like unbridled hostility where disagreement is perceived, extreme sarcasm often rising to livid vulgarity, an intense need for control and the belief in personal infallibility. It is, in effect, a squalid amalgam of hubris and the herd mentality. Obviously, the disorder is not exclusive to the left, but it is on that side of the political spectrum where it manifests most prominently and insistently.

Let us briefly examine three of the hot button issues of the current historical moment as illustrations of the closed and irrational mindset of the “progressive” left: global warming, universal health care and Israel.

Evidence is piling up to suggest that the human contribution to global warming—assuming it exists—is far less than originally assumed and that a meteorological calamity is highly unlikely. Fully two-thirds of the scientists attending the 33^rd International Geological Congress in Norway in August 2008 were hostile to, even contemptuous of, the UN’s IPCC reports on global climate catastrophe, which had been shown to be fatally compromised by glaring errors, false predictions and spurious sources. The science is not only not “settled” but demonstrably fraudulent, whether we are considering Michael Mann’s now infamous “hockey stick” graph and tree-ring manipulations, Al Gore’s exploded theories, the Hadley email dump, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri’s melting Himalayas (and other absurdities since discredited), the hopelessly astray IPCC computer models, the deliberate and methodical suppression of findings that indicate the planet has been cooling since at least 2002 and probably several years before that, James Hansen’s underwater New York, the Goddard Institute’s specious data—we can exceterize indefinitely.

Yet our climatophrenics soldier on, utterly indifferent to the mounting wave of countervailing evidence that threatens to swamp, not New York or the islands of the Pacific, but their own rickety constructs. The hermetic mind, in whatever form and at whatever stage in its evolution, is a monstrous thing, and climatophrenia is one of its most arresting contemporary manifestations. The truth is that Global Warming, to quote Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, “has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices” (Global Warming Politics, May 18, 2009). This is not to say that GW proponents do not believe in their delusion; many plainly do and will act to criminalize their adversaries and blithely reject any incontrovertible data which challenges their position. Their ideas are vacuum packed.

When it comes to universal health care, the facts are already in. It is undeniable that the single payer health care system is an unmitigated disaster wherever it has been implemented. The British experience with socialized medicine has been sufficiently traumatic to deter any responsible reformer from going the same calamitous route. The Canadian system, from which I and my fellow citizens suffer, is little better, subject to an acute shortage of doctors and nurses, massive overcrowding, interminable wait times and bloated bureaucracies that swallow up half the operating budget. Yet when the evidence of systemic failure is presented to the governing elites—the Obama administration is a conspicuous example—it is simply ignored or, as in Michael Moore’s propaganda film Sicko, distorted to suggest the opposite. Moore gives the Canadian health care industry the thumbs up; I live in this country and know that he is doctoring the truth.

Of course, there may be another agenda at work here, namely, as with the great global warming scam, the covert statist intention to assume increasing control of the economy and social life. Nevertheless, the statists for the most part are convinced they are right in proceeding as they do despite the clear repudiation of their congenial tenets furnished by the real world. The counterfeit narrative must be maintained at all costs, its opponents and critics demonized, and every antithetical detail or circumstance reinterpreted as elements in a nefarious plot against the integrity and well-being of the innocent and at-risk.

And then there is the left’s propaganda offensive against the Jewish state along the entire continuum from the religious to the secular, from the Likud administration to the settlers in Judea and Samaria, and of course we must not forget the denunciation of the so-called “occupation.” When it is indisputably demonstrated that the definition “occupied territories” is legally and historically wrong, that there are no 1967 “borders,” and that since 1917 the territories were “disputed” but not sovereign, the left merely covers its ears. When it is mentioned that the Palestinian Authority fully controls 94% of the “West Bank” and that the remaining 6% is monitored by the IDF to prevent terrorist infiltration, the topic turns to the “separation wall.” When it is pointed out that the “wall” is mainly fence and that its purpose is to keep out suicide bombers (and that several other nations have erected far more extensive dividing barriers for security purposes, without the slightest international reproof), the subject moves to the “occupation” of Gaza.

The temper of mind of the current occupant of the White House has led to considerable controversy and much speculation respecting causes and origins. For some, like Stanley Kurtz and Dinesh D’Souza, Obama’s strange and troubling attitudes are not hard to fathom and track to their source; his insecure past, random upbringing and dubious influences may well have given us the third-rate and self-regarding dilettante orating on the national stage today. For others, mainly among a skeptical lay populace, the president remains something of an enigma. But most of his critics agree that, as the intellectual ward of sundry leftist ideologues, his lack of any significant political accomplishments prior to his elevation to the presidency and the crippling dearth of fresh ideas and original solutions to national problems should come as no surprise. Whatever factors might account for his lack of fit—D’Souza, for example, believes that Obama is motivated primarily by an anti-colonial rage learned from his father—it is becoming increasingly clear that Barack Obama is egregiously unqualified for the highest office in the land.

This is not to suggest that he is entirely without gifts. He does command a potent rhetorical flair, albeit with the help of his ubiquitous teleprompter. He flashes a winning smile when it suits. He knows how to target and malign his adversaries, a technique he picked up from the writings of his mentor, Saul Alinsky, which he has followed with exemplary fidelity. His studied mellifluousness is able to cajole an impressionable audience (so long, that is, as he stays on teleprompter and the device works properly). Such attainments make him a formidable figure in any conceivable debate, encounter or address.

But aside from the neo-Marxist agenda he rigidly adheres to, his is not a stable personality. He is a classic narcissist, enamored of his mediatric presence, self-indulgent, thin-skinned, incapable of making clear decisions that require the labor of thought and which he generally outsources to his aides and advisers, and indifferent to the consequences of his actions—or lack of such. It is fair to assume that he is far more preoccupied with his own welfare than with the welfare of the nation he was elected to govern, which he never ceases to lecture on the virtues of austerity while himself enjoying abundant leisure, frequent vacations and a millionaire’s income. This makes him not only a narcissist but a hypocrite.

Perhaps more interesting is his concept of who qualifies as an enemy or a problem. It is certainly not the genocidal and anti-American Iranian regime with which he has sought to enter into sympathetic conversation, or the Syrian butcher Bashar Assad whom his secretary of state has called a “reformer,” or the Muslim Brotherhood which patently envisages the subversion of America and which he now esteems as a formal partner in dialogue, or the Russian autocracy currently flexing its muscles in the international arena, or China and its expansionist designs. Obama’s policies with regard to these actors are limp and recessive, if not actually non-existent.

On the contrary, Obama has redefined the concept of an enemy or a problem to incorporate America’s democratic allies, such as Honduras and especially Israel, two countries that have felt the brunt of his scorn and even his anger. No less distressing, Obama has turned his vindictiveness on diverse sectors of his own people, be they conservatives, Republicans, Tea Partiers, certain News organizations, radio hosts, middle class white voters, various job-producing industries, defenders of the southern border against cartel-related violence and infiltration, patriots who reject blanket amnesty for “illegals,” those who earn more than $250,000 per annum and, indeed, anyone who dares challenge his ascendancy or oppose his socialist and redistributionist program for the nation.

Tom Blumer, who refers to Obama as a “punk president,” remarks that the president’s administration “seemingly treats anyone who would disturb its budding empire as an enemy and not merely as an opponent.” No “seemingly” about it. Blogger Doug Ross has provided a salient if partial list of those whom Obama reckons as enemies. For Obama, the enemy or the problem is not someone who wants to blow up Times Square or enter the country illegally or build a mosque in the vicinity of Ground Zero but anyone who entertains a different idea of what national security, social cohesion and economic prosperity may entail.

It is pretty much common knowledge by this time—except to his diehard supporters—that President Barack Obama is ill-equipped to occupy the highest office in the country. The only campaign promise he has not broken is the pledge to “fundamentally transform” America, which he has done in record   time, at great cost to both America’s solvency and its standing in the world. Aside from his undoubted socialist convictions and his undeniable anti-Israel bias, which he shares with his voting constituency, he is a man who cannot box his compass, whether morally or directionally. Indeed, he functions several vertiginous levels below his pay grade and, aside from following a nation-killing neo-Marxist agenda, basically has no idea where he is going in the real world of practical affairs.

This is bad news for just about everybody—heritage Americans, Muslims,  minority communities, geostrategic allies and especially Israelis, the latter having taken the measure of his ineptitude and disingenuousness more effectively than most. It is by no means surprising that Israel should have figured out who Obama is and what he represents since its very survival is at stake—but then, so is America’s. Obama’s constant swerving, misreading the map, reversing course and flaunting the rules is by now too well known to require much in the way of comment. Steered by someone who does not know how to drive and may not even have his license, the nation has gone completely off track and lost its way, mired in debt, its gas tank near empty, sideswiped by its competitors, like an old jalopy rusting in an empty field.

I often think of the America I saw as a kid when I would accompany my father two or three times a year on his business trips, mainly to New York, Baltimore and Washington, plus a few other places as well. It seemed so different from everything I knew back home in Canada with its “lethal combination of passive-aggressiveness and smugness” (to quote a recent email from a friend). It was a country bursting with vigor and adventure, brash, pugnacious, swashbuckling and multifaceted, laced with an invigorating sense of manageable danger. It was an intoxicating land. And of course, like any kid, I loved American cars, the tailfins of the Cadillac, the wraparound windshields, the lavish chrome, the luxobarges, the Texas pick-up trucks with rifles strapped to the roof of the cab, the hot pony cars, and Jeeps everywhere. The Jeep became my youthful symbol for the U.S. (as it did for the husband of a colleague who gratefully remembers the G.I.s at the end of World War II rolling through his liberated city in convoys of Jeeps).

My impression of American pep and moxie was reinforced years later when I was a student at Berkeley and drove across the U.S. several times, east to west, north to south, and back again—once in a rented Jeep along the magnificent route from San Francisco to Seattle. This was Rubicon country for me. Canadian poet Peter Van Toorn could have been describing America when he wrote that it “Just jeeps right up. Five hundred turkeys/on each hubcap…For traction.” How things have changed, celebration of a dynamic, can-do nation having turned to mere nostalgia. Even the Jeep badge, or a part thereof, has been carved up and shunted overseas. The new Chrysler co-branded, Fiat-planned micro-Jeep, like the Jeep mule based on the Fiat Qubo, will be built in the former Yugo plant in Serbia (Motor Trend, July 2011). Adding insult to injury, an Italian company now enjoys a controlling interest in emblematic America.