Lots of fun!

And the Mad Mullahs need to know that’s policy.

Well, they donít hate, for example, the UK like they hate Israel. It is not simply because Israel backs the US. They hate the Jews in the way they do because the Islamists have imported from Europe so much of the western tradition of antisemitism, e.g. the ProtocolsÖ of Zion. Why do they do this? Note that modern antisemitism was in good part exported into the region by the KGB, seeking Islamic friends – starting, I believe, from around the time of the 1967 war. How were the Jews a useful symbol to both parties in the hate? In a rather traditional role, they represented the hidden hand that supposedly manipulates the market system, the enemy of both parties – all the more so for the radical Islamists today. Thus if the US remains the public face of the market, the Jews remain as the hidden conspirators, proof of its injustice. In the Islamistís mind, when the Jews are driven into the sea, the system will start to crumble under the growing weight of the oppressedís ability to win ìjusticeî. Please note much of the western left thinks very much alike.

Most fundamentally, antisemitism is rooted in what makes Jews most fundamentally different from any other nation or ethnic group; this is that they were, historically, the first to discover monotheism and national identity ñ i.e. an identity based on something more than ethnicity which depends on its claim to (and presence in) a specific territory and local deities. National identity (like, of course, monotheism) can transcend its homeland. (In North America, we often call, e.g., Italians an ìethnic groupî, but in fact that is a national identity based on a national high culture (from Dante to modern cinema) that can transcend geography and be meaningful universally. But the local or regional identities (e.g. Calabrian) that were paramount for many ìItalianî immigrants, fade in time, while their descendants in the new world tend increasingly to remember their Italian (rather than Calabrian) ancestry. Ethnicities without nations tend to disappear in the modern world.) Anyway, if the Jews are the first nationalists and monotheists, all later reworkings of these key discoveries imply a reaction to the Jews, which is only positive if one just accepts the Jewsí priority, forgets about it, and gets on with oneís own thing. But to do that one has to be either a loving or very carefree person, or, if intellectually inclined, one has to understand and appreciate what the Jewish or Mosaic revelation has entailed historically. Otherwise, one is reacting to something of a mystery and in time this can only produce hate and conspiratorial thinking, or an often smarmy Judeophilia.

Those who hate us are irrational. We must be patient, strong, and not fall for the many rationalizing guilt trips on offer (if only we weren’t the Americans’ friends…

He was also in Libya at the same time I was. His poster was plastered all over town, as was Jacques Chirac’s, who was also there at the same time. (I believe they came separately, but their pictures were paired.)