Good post. I liked the article and almost read the entire thing.
It's very well put and thought out and it's interesting reading for people who are willing to read it and digest it.

Of course, only people who are interested will read it and the people that need to read will not hear a word of it, if they do manage to read a few paragraphs of it.

Would be nice to meet those British politicians one day and look them in the eye though.

Hmmm. What strikes me is how naive this guy seems to be. He's obviously clueless about the roots and aims of the palestinian struggle but he's ready to assume its justice based on what he's been told by the very same people he exposes as virulent antisemites.

As for the "root cause" of Islamist terror, they have little, if anything, to do with the ideology of the European counter-revolution. While the counter-revolutionaries may have despised the Enlightenment, they never blew themselves up in the midst of crowded public places to make their point. They didn't advocate "martyrdom." The root cause of Islamist terror is found much closer to its home, and its origins predate the Enlightenment by close to a millenium. IMNSHO.

Melanie Phillips' has a link to Cohen's blog which posts his essay in her post "Britain and its Jews".
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001440.html

The complex answers and solutions to liberal writings about Israel amaze me in light of a very simple situation. Moderrn liberalism, has brought us a an old foe in new garb. It has created a phenomenon, I call altruistic Nazism. To understand it one need only look back at Nazi Germany in the early 30’s as it was striving to come out of a depression brought on by WW I and the ensuing national isolation in Europe. While FDR was telling Americans that the way out of the depression was to work their way out, and promising that Government would offer all Americans an opportunity to do so, the Nazi party in Germany was telling its people that their economic wealth had been wrongly taken from them by the Jews. Nazism, at its core, is an economic argument claiming that the wealth of White Christians was stolen by Jews and needs to be taken back. The solution to this problem is as old as the Bible and is a two step solution. First, all that the Jews posses must be taken (back) from them. Then the Jews must be punished. The first anti-Jew activities in Germany were economic. This desire to take back what was theirs rallied and motivated Germans into the early conquests of WW II. Still because of the resulting war and destruction WW II was a turning point in the hatred of Jews. The time honored economic arguments against the Jews, employed by the Nazis, were now associated with the near destruction of all of Europe and therefore shunned. Post WW II Neo-Nazism has never taken roots outside the fringes of society. Yet the true “neo” Nazism is not found in the hate groups recycling traditional Nazi ideology. The existence of the State of Israel makes possible a new hatred of Jews not relevant before WW II. The truly modernized Nazism is in the altruistic Nazism fast becoming an acceptable and integral part of the mainstream left. Their argument is a simple twist on an old theme that, through its nuances, skirts the unacceptable elements of the old Nazi argument. While the old Nazism (selfishly and destructively ) claims that the Jews have stolen wealth from White Christian and White Christians must take the wealth back for themselves, the new argument states that the Jews have stolen from the Moslems and other disenfranchised groups and it is up to the Modern Liberal to (altruistically and constructively) take it back and give it to its rightful owners. While the old Nazism was rooted in the core Christian belief that Jews killed the Messiah and now work to control the people of the world, the new Nazism finds its foundation in the liberal belief that the root of all suffering can be found in some imbalance, every imbalance is an injustice and every injustice has a discernable malefactor. Blaming the Jews is not a dated religious belief but the result of dispassionate and enlightened deduction.

This is how Israel and the Palestinians always come into play at every anti-Iraq-war event. While the relative merits of the Iraq war itself are a topic for calm discussion, this type of debate does not stir the blood of young liberals. A call to selflessly work to return to the Palestinians that which the Israelis have taken from them can be preached as a higher calling to young liberals and serves as a solid rallying point. Unburdened by the history of the old selfish Nazi argument, and adorned in enlightened beneficence, this new form of anti-Semitism can be advocated by the left loudly and proudly.

The article in the Globe was not written because the authors do not get it. The problem is that those who oppose the argument miss the point of its being written. The imbalance exists, the Jews have more, QED. The fact that an imbalance exists demonstrates an injustice and is both sufficient evidence one exists and sufficient motivation to work for a remedy. Those who protest the article do not get it because in this world view such protests, asserting the relative merits of the parties to an imbalance or the long term results of correcting such a perceived imbalance are never relevant to any specific case and particularly in this instance, shed not light on the nature of the problem or its solution. Rather given that the conclusions were reached using the formulaic imbalance->injustice->malefactor->call-to-action analysis that forms the foundation of modern liberal thought, any debate is an attack on this core belief yet at the same time is irrelevant since it does not directly address this belief. Those who protest such a conclusion in the face of the obvious existence of an injustice can easily be deduced to support the injustice and (in the case of the Palestinians) it Jewish perpetrators.

Moreover, any claim that debate needs to be held about the relative merits of the parties to an injustice and the merit of any proposed solution, assaults the very foundation of modern liberalism, and we should expect liberals to fight like a lion backed into its den. Those who oppose the liberal knee-jerk excuse for rational thought need to ignore the desperate defensive moves of a this trapped beast and to directly attack and discredit its foundation.

I have only two quibbles with atricia's argument. The first is that the Nazis were so hostile to Christianity that their call was hardly for White Christians to take back what the nefarious Jews had "stolen". It was Aryans (so-called) they championed, quite a different thing. In the recent book "Hitler Strikes Poland" by Alexander B. Rosslind the backgrounds of the senior SS officers who commanded the initial murder groups in Poland in the wake of the German army are examined. To achieve high rank in the SS they invariably had to renounce their religion, whether Catholic or Protestant. The true Nazi had no belief in any Christian religion.

The other quibble is that I would have compared liberals defending their fantasies, not to lions backed into their dens, but to cornered rats.

With regard to Michael's quibbles:
1. The first “quibble” is based on my being unclear in my writing not on my being unclear on Nazi ideology. While Nazi ideology regarded Aryans to above all else and rejected religious beliefs, it is disingenuous to disassociate the anti-Semitism of the Nazis from that of the Church. The anti-Semitic elements of Nazism were taken directly from the time honored anti-Jewish doctrines the various European churches had used for centuries. The rhetoric was the same, the caricatures were the same and the economic oppression, segregation, and massacres were not new to Europe, particularly not eastern Europe. This is why the people of conquered European and Asian countries such as Poland, Russia (and it’s western satellites), and France all participated in the extermination. The did it as Christians at the same time their country was being taken from them for the benefit of Germany and her Aryan people.
2. Regarding he second “quibble,” I reject it. The term “rat” carries with it bigotry and bias which I reject out of hand. My reference to the animal kingdom was to portray the vehemence with which die-hard liberals will defend their world-view. It was not intended to be or to elicit any form of demeaning metaphor.