Useful Idiots: Israeli Style I

The past few days I've been reading Mona Charen's book, Useful Idiots:How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First. It's an amazing expose of the kind of ultra-orthodoxy of the Leftist and Liberal Left (communisants as Raymond Aron called them in The Opium of the Intellectuals). in the context of the Cold War. The upshot of Charen's book is that neither the Left nor the Liberals ever wanted the West to win the Cold War. Their passon is to bash the US, even as the communist bloc committed crimes next to which the failings of the United States blanche. Now the same geniuses are apologizing for Islamism and blaming the US for the rise of Islamic terror.

The book is a gripping and angering read. It also hits home here in the Holy Land, because this is exactly how the denizens of the State of Tel Aviv deal with the ongoing fight between us and the Arabs. Nothing Arabs do is wrong (or unjustifiable). Everything Jews do is racist etc. etc. blah blah blah. Now, there certainly are awful things we've done (or been forced to do). Yet even Benny Morris has admitted that we come out far better than they. But then, of course, Morris is no longer loved by the Left because it turns out that, at the end of the day, he's a Zionist. He dares to say that the Jewish People has a right to exist and to exist in its own country. That's too much for the Israeli Left, who Dan Margalit has called the Palestinian Right.

Anyway, from time to time I'm going to try to collect and post 'Useful Idiot' comments that come my way. Might even be worth a book. Meanwhile, read Charen's and Amnon Lord's The Israeli Left.