The return of anti-Semitism

Go to Google.com. Then hit "Google News." Then type in "Ahmadinejad," the name of Iran's radical president.

On any given day there is a better than 50 percent chance that President Ahmadinejad will have given a speech denouncing Zionists and their supporters in the United States, predicting the obliteration of Israel (and the United States if America comes to its defense), and/or mocking the historical reality of the Holocaust.

Iran's president is so focused on his hatred of the Jews that his fervid exclamations have become routine and thus no longer "news."

Ahmadinejad is no fluke, no accident, and definitely not a "nutter." He is a religious fanatic of the sort the left falsely sees on the right all the time, only much, much worse. His particular brand of Islam believes in the return of the hidden "Twelfth Imam," a return that can be accelerated by human-induced chaos.

Iran supports Hezbollah, and here the campaign to eradicate Israel has its front line. While Iran pursues its nuclear ambitions, Hezbollah pursues the death of Jews on a daily basis.

For whatever reason, the American political class finds it difficult to recognize the awful reality of the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas-al-Qaeda axis. It isn't as though this movement were silent as to its objectives. But large numbers of Americans and Europeans are simply unwilling to recognize the size and scope of the menace.

We are reliving the 1930s, including a fresh outbreak of upper-class anti-Semitism that manifests itself in indifference to the Jews of Israel. Herman Wouk's character Aaron Jastrow once said of the philosopher Santayana that Jastrow could smell his anti-Semitism upon entering a room. That aroma can be found in many places now, and nowhere more easily than essays on the Israel-Lebanon war that neglect the fact that Hezbollah attacked Israel and aims to kill civilians, while Israel aims to kill terrorists.

The most dangerous form of this anti-Semitism is silence about Iran, its President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Khamenei, and their objectives. Not minding if Jews die is a disgrace most thought gone from the West.