At least Osama bin-Laden, despite being a psychotic mass murderer, knows who his friends are.

While the exact date of the taping cannot be determined by bin Laden's words, he suggests it was made in August by saying, "... just a few days ago, the Japanese observed the 62nd anniversary of the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by your nuclear weapons." The anniversary was on Aug. 6. He goes on to call Noam Chomsky "among one of the most capable of those from your own side," and mentions global warming and "the Kyoto accord."

One could call this humorous if it weren't so obviously true, in the sense that Chomsky is indeed one of those most capable of accomplishing binLaden's goals of driving the West to surrender and destruction. Of course, they are both psychopaths with a Sadean fetish for mass murder, tyranny and death. Great minds, such as they are, apparently think alike.

Someone in Europe appears to have finally understood the most pernicious aspect of 21st century antisemitism -- the congenital inability of most of its practitioners to understand the fact of their antisemitism.  From Haaretz:

Robin Shepherd is not the first person to try and define the world's oldest hatred, but he is perhaps one of the most unlikely. The senior research fellow at the Chatham House think tank in London has no significant connection to the Jewish people, and his visit to Israel last week was only his second. But he still believes his decision to spend a year researching the new European anti-Semitism is perfectly relevant for any serious observer of international affairs.

Shepherd is only beginning what he expects to be a year of research on the subject, probably culminating in a book, but he already has a number of basic insights. The first is a clear differentiation between the old and new European anti-Semites, or as he puts it, "subjective" and "objective" anti-Semitism.

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Regarding Leo Strauss, there is something particularly bizarre in the fact that the discussion always turns to politics. Not Politics in the Aristotelean sense, but everyday politics; the transient concerns and resentments of the current moment. Strauss, who thought in terms of the entirety of Western civilization, would likely have found this quite bizarre.

The truth beyond the debate over whether Strauss is the neo-con devil incarnate or simply misunderstood is that Strauss probably would not have cared one way or the other. His primary concern was, in fact, the role of the philosopher in society; both in historical and theoretical terms.

Strauss, like other Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany such as Hannah Arendt, struggled throughout his career with the question of what, exactly, had gone so horribly wrong in Germany and in the West as a whole. He was, in other words, trying to wrap his head around the fact of Auschwitz; and the sense that Auschwitz was not some horrifying aberration from the Western tradition but the fulfillment of something dark and terrible at the heart of that tradition.

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The New Republic has an interesting profile of an evangelical priest who converted to Orthodox Christianity because of his disatisfaction with the frivolousness of evangelical ritual.  I couldn't help but notice a certain synchronicity at work.

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Everytime you think that an American national holiday might have passed in peace, you find out that America's most famous faux-historian Howard Zinn showed up just in time to -- paraphrasing Hunter Thompson -- piss down everybody's throats.

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

Well, no. The great evil of the 20th century was atheistic totalitarian collectivism, of which Zinn has been a lifelong supporter. I believe the body count is now upwards of 100 million and likely to climb if the likes of Hugo Chavez get their way. The great evil of the 21st century, on the other hand, seems to be shaping up to be totalitarian theocratic collectivism.

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