What is most striking with Peretz here is that all the principles underlying his analysis of Obama's Cairo speech and the attendant historical realities should be perforce obvious, apparent. Peretz's is not an analysis that requires a great deal of depth and breadth and subtlety. What it does require is an appreciation of the bullshit, the equivocations as if pronounced from on high, the additional maundering pronouncements that result from those shallow, intoned equivocations, etc. But if those qualities, all that b.s., is that really that difficult to see through, unless one is under the thrall of the Obama/MSM view of the world. There is nothing in Peretz's analysis that is truly profound, virtually all of it, perhaps literally all of it, is more or less on the surface for anyone to see, should they care to in the least.

Nevertheless, it's important that principled people on the Left articulate these issues.

In recent years, Israel has become a "right wing" cause in the eyes of many on the Left, especially young people who don't know history - and who, through the proPalestinian movement, have come to see Israel as a colonialist/imperialist power.

Certainly, TV images of the Intifada, the al-Durah affair, the Second Lebanon War - Gaza - have all reinforced the image of Israel as heavily armed oppressor. This alone makes Israel the enemy of the Left which historically supports the oppressed.

Unfortunately the brevity of newsclip or photo image says nothing about the past, even the recent past - and sometimes the imagery gives exactly the wrong impression. For example there was a case in which a beaten Jew, rescued by the IDF, was headlined as a Palestinian beaten by the IDF.

The atrocities at Sabra and Shatilla were blamed on Israel - the facts were lost in the revulsion, the sheer horror of the crime.

How many people saw beyond the photo or TV images and made connections between the murdered victims and the PLO's attacks on Lebanese Christians?

Worse - when people like Bridgette Gabriel speak out, they are smeared as "right wing" - what does right or left have to do with the brutalization of innocents?

So - when history is selectively reported, ideologically reported - there's a grave danger it will be wrongly reported.

But the other problem with Israel, besides quick and shallow value judgements or snapshots of history, is its extremely long history. In this case missing facts, facts from hundreds of years ago, nevertheless influence reality today, and our perceptions of it.

The well-intentioned desire to help the oppressed is a key to Leftist philosophy. So the presentation of Israel as an imperial power, when in fact it's a nation made up of remnants of an abused diaspora and refugees from wars and oppression - as well as indigenous Jews and Arabs - is guaranteed to make Israel an enemy of the Left.

This is a knee-jerk response rather than a reasoned response.

And, it's dependent upon perceptions. If a person had no map, no historical grounding - news and UN and NGO coverage of Israel would present the image of a state the size and power of the Soviet Union, ill-intentioned and oppressive.

These snapshots and incomplete narratives don't tell the story of the bitter struggle against the British Empire or abuse of Jews for more than 2,000 years, nor do they tell about the destruction of the First Temple by Babylon, nor of the destruction of Judea by Rome. They don't even tell about the terror of the rockets falling on Sderot.

So - I applaud President Obama for trying to reach out to the Muslim world. But, sacrificing facts in the process won't build a firm foundation for future relations.

Maybe there was only so much that could be said at the time.

Maybe in the next speech, we can get to the expulsion of 800,000 or more Jews from the Arab world, historical links of am Yisroel to Eretz Israel, the importance of Jewish - as well as Christian and Muslim religious customs and ideals.

The desire to create a Palestinian state may stem from noble intentions but states don't grow by magic. It took the Yishuv decades of brutal work, much of it under the gun, to "make the desert bloom".

The old left understood this.

Oh, certainly. I was not remotely suggesting Peretz should not have bothered, to the contrary, it's a very good piece and worthy and needs to be said. I was more simply noting that what he's analyzing and articulating does not require perspicacious depth; that the very fact it needs to be said is itself a reflection upon the obfuscations, the fog of the rhetorical/propaganda war that needs to be seen for what it is. I applaud Peretz's commentary here, very much so.

Its New Left politics, speaking "truth" to power. Truth is personal and group oriented, not an objective reality. If you deeply believe something then that is your truth, and power that disregards your truth for objective reality is abusing your human rights to create your own reality....which is just as morally and culturally credible as any other "truth reality."

It recieved its own terminology after a while, post modernism.

The Western New Left is a pox on humanity.

Yes - "post modernism" - certainly an interesting way of looking at history.

Isn't it a little like cubist painting? Instead of painting a landscape for example you paint angles of it and they're all layered, what you see is a pastiche of viewpoints.

I think there's some validity to this, in that each person has a perspective on "what happened", and I don't think anybody would argue that personal stories and narratives aren't important.

A prime example of this is "The Mighty Eighth" by Gerald Astor, which recounts the air war "as told by the men who fought it" - rather than in terms of battle plans, aircraft production, etc. Other histories of the war take a broader, less personal or more linear focus but the former doesn't alter the essential outlines of the latter.

Maybe, historians can't write history, stereoscopic history, without personal details and this is particularly true now, for example with the montage of real-time twitters and you-tube videos and i-reports that are coming out of Iran.

What's missing so far is a coherent overview of what's actually happening and of course only from a distance and after time will anybody really understand "what happened".

Many decades before computers and Facebook Durrell wrote "The Alexandria Quartet" in layers, multi-faceted - from various points of view - the reader isn't sure what is "true" and neither is the main character - until much later -

Now, history is being written and understood like Durrell's four-part novel, that loops back and forth in time, from perspective to perspective. And in fact things don't happen in only one dimension or to only one person or in a straight line.

And - how do you tell the history of peace? The everyday defies the big historical narrative, perhaps it can only be told through the lens of the personal, and through the things people make, things they treasure and pass along.

But, these valuable personal narratives or even national and religious narratives, important as they are, don't mean x, y or z didn't happen.