Thoughts About Shalom Freedman's "Life as Creation" and About the Root Causes of Antisemitism

Shalom Freedman's 1993 book Life as Creation: A Jewish Way of Thinking About the World presents 780 aphorisms divided into six sections, with each section containing 10 chapters of 13 aphorisms each. The sections are "Mankind in Creation," "Jewish Creation," "God and Creation," "Creation and Everyday Moral Life," "Creation and the Life of the Mind," and "Literary Creation." In "An Additional Word to the Reader" (p. xv), Freedman explains, "The reader can begin anywhere, with any subject or entry that is of interest. But a line of argument does run through the work, and therefore the reader is advised to attempt a consecutive reading. Wisdom literature of this type does not lead itself to swift-paced, once-over-lightly reading. This is the kind of work that challenges the reader to interpretation and rereading."

The "line of argument" is that God created humans to emulate Him by creating freely. Humans can create in several ways, including partnering with God in realizing "the divine plan for the world," creating in the moral realm by "doing justice and mercy," and producing great creative works in philosophy, literature, science, and other fields. Part of the divine plan requires believing that "present evil is transient and that, of all evils that have been, there will come a compensation in greater redemption for the injured innocent" (p. 4).

It is inspiring to believe that we humans can partner with God both by "doing justice and mercy" and by using our individual gifts to create works of enduring value, but it is disturbing and puzzling that evil is so prevalent, even if we believe (or merely hope) that evil is "transient."

"Transient" means something much different to God--who by definition exists outside the boundaries of time and space--than it does to humans. Antisemitism is an evil that has existed for millennia, and has become more prevalent in recent years. The virulent persistence of antisemitism is as disturbing as the survival of the Jewish people against long odds is remarkable; antisemitism does not seem transient in Auschwitz' gas chambers, nor does it seem transient to those who narrowly escaped such a fate but mourn the loss of family members and friends. 

In chapter 17 of the "Jewish Creation" section, Freedman provides 13 aphorisms under the heading "Jewish Creation and Hatred of the Jews":

1 God chose the Jews even though He knew this would make them the most hated people in the history of mankind. No people wants to know that it is less valued, less loved, than another.

2 Jewish physical weakness, combined with spiritual greatness and later intellectual distinction, created the conditions by which evil hatred could lead to repeated efforts at the Jews' physical destruction.

3 The hatred and resentment the Jews experienced from other peoples helped them to create mechanisms of survival and adaptability that frequently worked. But there was no way to use these devices to escape from the systematic destruction devised for them by the European people, which prided itself on being supreme in all things--and was surely supreme in one--the doing of evil.

4 Christianity and Islam each has its own separate tradition of repaying with evil those who provided them with their first understanding of God.

5 The price the Jews have had to pay for being loved so strongly by God has been being hated so strongly by humanity.

6 It is natural to resent those who are more successful than us, those who do better than us. But the wish to destroy them comes only when we sense they are depriving us of our own world. Thus, the closer the Jews came to being at the center of creation in various European societies, the more strongly they were hated.

7 The Christian son accuses the Jewish father of having tried to murder him so he can justify his own desire to be rid of the father's conscience.

8 Not only do other peoples envy the Jews, the Jews also envy other peoples. This has played a part in Jewish creation, in the Jewish learning to take upon themselves the character of other peoples. Time and again the Jews have known how to imitate and become the others in the effort to belong to worlds they eventually discovered were not their own.

9 Most peoples consider themselves chosen at some point in their history. How difficult it must be for a people to relate to a prior claim of chosenness, especially one based not on position or power but on closeness to God.

10 The Christians envied the Jews for what no people in antiquity would have thought to envy: their suffering.

11 Envy of the Jews appears to be a constant theme of human history that will not disappear until the messianic age when all know God is One.

12 The projection of one's own forbidden impulses upon the scapegoat is the simple psychological device of much hatred of the Jews. The Jews are frequently accused of everything the others inwardly know is wrong with themselves.

13 The effects of others' hatred of the Jews is also expressed in desperate efforts on the part of Jews to re-create themselves as others. In other words, hatred of the Jews also leads to that cowardly kind of Jewish response known as assimilation, the sacrifice of one's true self for a promised self that will never be completely real.  

It must be emphasized that the Jewish belief in being the "Chosen People"--which is referenced in Freedman's first aphorism--is a very misunderstood and misrepresented concept; this has nothing to do with Jews believing themselves to be superior or believing non-Jews to be inferior: it is a core Jewish belief that the Jewish people were chosen by God to have additional responsibilities involving not only the observance of 613 Biblical commandments (non-Jews are only bound by the seven Noahide laws) but also being a "light unto the nations" (in the words of the prophet Isaiah).

Freedman's first aphorism does not explain antisemitism other than suggesting that antisemitism's existence is somehow part of the divine plan, without indicating why antisemitism is a necessary part of the divine plan. 

It is true, as suggested by the second aphorism, that the combination of collective Jewish physical weakness and significant spiritual and intellectual achievements by Jews created the necessary preconditions for antisemitism to develop and spread. 

Freedman's third aphorism is correct that during nearly 2000 years of exile the Jewish people developed many different collective and individual survival techniques; it is a cruel paradox that the very techniques that were at least somewhat successful for so many centuries were woefully inadequate--and, in fact, counterproductive--in the face of the Nazis' overwhelming technological power paired with genocidal intent. Enemies of the Jewish people prior to the Nazis did not possess the technological means to kill every Jew, and most of those enemies preferred to degrade and terrorize Jews as opposed to annihilating the Jewish people. Negotiation, ransom paying, and acceptance of discriminatory laws without overt rebellion enabled the Jewish people to survive two millennia of Christian antisemitism rooted in the notion that the Jews should suffer "perpetual servitude" but not total annihilation--but the only way to survive the Nazis was to escape or fight, because any form of accommodation merely delayed the inexorable genocide.

Freedman's fourth aphorism highlights the sad reality that Christianity and Islam--two religions with deep Jewish roots--both have long histories of virulent antisemitism (and those histories have not ended, particularly regarding Muslims but also regarding significant numbers of Christians as well).

The fifth aphorism rephrases the first aphorism.

The sixth aphorism addresses the heart of the matter: a major root cause of antisemitism is envy.

The seventh aphorism speaks a blunt truth that is painful for Christians of good conscience to hear, but it must be stated: organized Christianity (in varied forms, including but not limited to the Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations) promoted (and, in many instances, still promotes) antisemitism based on the Christ-killer slander. The historical reality is that the Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth was executed by Roman authorities, not by the Jewish people who were occupied and oppressed by the Romans. Jews could not order Romans to execute or not execute someone in the Roman Empire, just like Jews could not order Nazis to execute or not execute someone; to suggest otherwise is bizarre and ahistorical.

The eighth aphorism delves into the psychology of Jewish people responding to antisemitism by trying to be more like non-Jewish people, without realizing that antisemites will never let Jews assimilate; some of the worst outbreaks of antisemitic violence take place against Jewish communities with high rates of assimilation/secularization. Nazi Germany is the most obvious example, but it should also be noted that a large number of the victims of Hamas' October 7, 2023 mass casualty terrorist attack were Leftist, assimilated Jews.

The ninth aphorism alludes to envy of the Jewish people because of the Jewish people's perceived or actual closeness to God, echoing and amplifying the sixth aphorism; one of the root causes of antisemitism is the belief/fear that Jews are special.

The 10th and 11th aphorisms discuss suffering and envy. Christianity focuses a lot on suffering--starting with Jesus' agonizing death on the cross--and it is not surprising that collectively Christians envy Jewish suffering, because Jesus is supposed to be the supreme example of suffering but history shows that the Jewish people have suffered (and continue to suffer) immensely. 

We often see examples of the 12th aphorism in both traditional media outlets and social media platforms, as Israel's enemies who attempt genocide against the Jewish people falsely accuse Israel of committing genocide. 

The 13th aphorism reinforces the eighth aphorism and summarizes the psychological impact of antisemitism: many Jews respond to relentless hatred by suppressing or denying their identity.

Much has been written and said about the underlying causes of antisemitism. Freedman's aphorisms attribute antisemitism to a combination of collective Jewish physical weakness, envy, and projection of one's own forbidden impulses. Antisemitism is often described as a puzzling or even mystical phenomenon, but antisemitism can be understood in simple terms: antisemitism is rooted in a combination of fear and shame. Antisemites simultaneously reject Jewish values and feel shame after rejecting those values, as I explained in The Fear and Shame at the Heart of Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism:

Freud once wrote that Jews are not really hated because of the Christian accusation that the Jews killed God but rather because the Jews created the concept of God by giving humanity the monotheistic idea. Freud argued that, subconsciously, people prefer to live like cave dwellers--without any strictly defined moral code--and thus people do not want to hear about a God who admonishes that you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet. Freud believed that Jews are hated for being the messengers of God's moral code.

Adolf Hitler's private conversations with associates, as reported in Hermann Rauschning's book The Voice of Destruction and quoted in Adam A. Winston's article "Criteria for the Distribution of Unclaimed Assets" (published in the September/October 1999 issue of Midstream), support and amplify the viewpoint of antisemitism functioning as a rejection of Jewish values. Hitler is quoted is saying the following:

"Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish, like circumcision."

"Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge: from the dirty and degraded self-mortifications called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence, which only a few can bear."

"Thou shalt not steal? Wrong! All life is theft."

"Against the so-called Ten Commandments, against them we are fighting."

It is worth noting in this context that even when Nazi Germany was losing on the battlefield to the Allies, Hitler refused to divert the resources being used to exterminate the Jews to bolster the war effort; for Hitler, killing as many Jews as possible was more important than winning the war on the battlefield. 

This is an example of why the scapegoat theory does not adequately explain the persistence and virulence of antisemitism. Yes, the Jewish people are often used as scapegoats for a host of ills, but that is a result of antisemitism and not the root cause of antisemitism. As Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin put it in their book Why the Jews?, "Antisemitism was not a vehicle for the Nazis; Nazism was a vehicle for antisemitism" (p. 74).

The fear aspect of antisemitism stems from the fact that the Jewish people and Jewish history are not normal. The Jewish people have not merely survived in the face of overwhelming obstacles; they have thrived, making significant contributions to art, literature, science, and many other human endeavors. How is it possible for a tiny, persecuted minority to not only produce so many successful individuals but also to rebuild their homeland nearly two millennia after being exiled? The powerful Roman Empire destroyed the Second Jewish Commonwealth, but today the State of Israel lives long after the Roman Empire disappeared--and, unlike the rebirth of Jewish nationhood, the Roman Empire will never rise again. 

The Leftist version of history that has conquered large swathes of academia--thanks in no small part to Qatari funding--classifies individuals and nations as either "oppressors/victimizers" or as "oppressed/victims," with those categories strictly defined, usually by race; the Jewish people do not fit neatly into this paradigm, and Israel's rebirth in the 20th century refutes the notion that it is impossible for oppressed people to overcome their dire circumstances, forcing the Left to either reject their preferred narratives or else classify Jews as "oppressors/victimizers." Tragically--for both Jews and for those who are really being oppressed but are ignored as the Left relentlessly slanders Jews and Israel--the Left has chosen to classify Jews and Israel as "oppressors." I discussed this in The Fear and Shame at the Heart of Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism: 

Israel has accomplished so much in just a few decades despite being surrounded by large, hostile neighbors who have repeatedly attacked Israel with the stated goal of destroying Israel--and several of the countries in the region still actively finance and foment terrorist attacks against Israel and against Jews around the world. 

Why has Israel been so spectacularly successful while so many other former British colonies are mired in poverty and ruled by totalitarian regimes? Israel's neighbors--and developing countries around the world--too often do not look at Israel as a role model, but rather as a success story that they fear, and that makes them feel ashamed at their own failures. As a result, many have decided to demonize Israel and to discount Israel as an illegitimate country whose successes are not the product of hard work and ingenuity. Israel has become the personification of the Jew in the world. The irrational fears that many people have about the disproportionate success of individual Jews have now also been directed against the disproportionate success of the Jewish State. 

In the February 1988 issue of Commentary, Hilton Kramer noted that deep-seated hostility toward Israel often emanates from "the political culture of the international Left. It is based on, among other things, that lethal combination of guilt, fear, cynicism, and sentimentality toward the Third World that is now one of the most destructive and disabling issues in world affairs--destructive and disabling, that is, to the democracies (It is a boon, of course, to totalitarianism.). As a model of post-colonial democratic government, Israel is a standing reproach to the ongoing political debacle of the Third World. That isn't the only reason Israel has become a target of the international Left, but it is one of the primary reasons."

It is not a coincidence that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are connected to anti-American sentiments, because those who hate America are often jealous of America in much the same fashion that those who hate Jews and/or Israel are jealous of Jews and/or Israel: "Jealousy is a powerful human emotion. Hatred is a tremendous emotional release. Blame is cathartic. At this time in history, the United States is humane, free, and powerful. The Arab Islamic world is just the opposite. Our success is infuriating to people who value their own culture, who love their traditions even though they no longer work, and who look at our enormous success with inchoate envy...In the future, we'll get around to recognizing the neuroses, if not psychoses, that are far too prevalent within the Arabian heartland of the Islamic world...The transition from women as property to women as full participants in society has been the greatest revolution in human history, and its reverberations will be felt for centuries. Repressive cultures are horrified by it because it calls into question their most fundamental biological, sociological, and religious ideas. However, the oppression of women anywhere is not only a human rights violation, it's a suicide pact with the future" (Ralph Peters, "The Shah Always Falls," interviewed by Fredric Smoler in the February/March 2003 issue of American Heritage).

It has become fashionable for antisemites to assert that they only hate Zionists, not Jews, but, as I noted in Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism, "It is important to emphasize that Anti-Zionism is Indistinguishable From Antisemitism Because Israel is the Jewish Homeland. It is absurd to assert that a person can hate Israel and deny Israel's right to exist but not hate Jews. Further, the denial of a nation's right to exist is a unique form of hatred directed only at the Jewish State and not at any other nation no matter how heinous that nation's actions."

Antisemitism threatens not only Jews but it also threatens the stability of the nations that foment such hatred. Nations that welcome Jews tend to be free and prosperous, but nations that persecute Jews tend to be tyrannical and unsuccessful (or heading in those directions, away from freedom and prosperity, as their persecution of Jews increases); it is not pleasant for anyone to live in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or any nation shackled by the harsh dictates of Sharia. 

Therefore, antisemitism is not merely a Jewish problem; it is a problem for humanity--perhaps humanity's ultimate problem if one considers that disproportionate energy fueling antisemitism at the United Nations, in academia, in media outlets, and in the streets. This hateful, wasted energy could be channeled toward addressing suffering around the world that is ignored or minimized because it does not fit the convenient narrative of "If it's Jews, it's news." If I were a Nigerian Christian or a Uyghur Muslim in China, I would be very disheartened that my real suffering is ignored while false genocide accusations are hurled at Israel.

Appeasement and Isolationism Are Dangerously Misguided Ideologies

Speaking about the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement in which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to give part of Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland) to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, Otto Strasser--an early member of the Nazi party--told historian John Toland in the 1970s, "He (Hitler) would have broken every promise, every signature, because these are not obligations for him. He had no moral connections. He was the most amoral man I ever have seen. And I believe this was one of the reasons for his success."

Chamberlain's inability or unwillingness to recognize Hitler's true nature set the world on a path toward oblivion. Chamberlain declared that he had delivered "peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time." Winston Churchill, who later became Prime Minister and helped lead the Allies to victory over Nazi Germany during World War II, retorted, "You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war."

The main reason that history repeats itself is that very few people learn and apply the lessons that history teaches. One might think that the Jewish people, who suffered so greatly during the Holocaust in the wake of Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, would have learned the lesson that appeasement is not an effective policy toward countries and terrorist groups that openly state their genocidal goals, but--sadly--Israel has often chosen dishonor over war. For example, in 2011, Israel foolishly released more than 1000 terrorists in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli solider illegally kidnapped and held captive by the terrorist group Hamas. More than a decade later, Hamas is still launching terrorist attacks not just against Israel but against Jews worldwide. Israel's appeasement strengthened and emboldened Hamas, other terrorist groups, and Hamas' sponsor state Iran.

Many world leaders have been far too slow to understand or accept the danger posed by Vladimir Putin, whose grandiose goal to build a Russian Empire is very similar to Hitler's goal to conquer Germany's neighbors to provide lebensraum ("living room") for the so-called master Aryan race.

On March 10, 2015, I wrote Garry Kasparov Lambastes West's "Weak" Response to Vladimir Putin's Tyranny, quoting Kasparov's warning about the dangers by Putin: 

We have been facing this problem for quite a while. And so many mistakes have been made. These mistakes created an impression for Putin and his cronies and also his clients like Assad and others in the world. Iranian Ayatollahs. The West is weak. The West is not willing to get engaged. So the West will give them anything they want. Before we talk about the right strategy, what the leaders of the free world must do, let's talk about what they must not do. You cannot project weakness. Yes, I know that America will never consider seriously boots on the ground in Ukraine. Why are you talking about it? Why do you say publicly that you will not do that?

I concluded my article with these prophetic words: 

Hitler took whatever he could take through negotiation and then sought to conquer the rest through war. Putin's Russia and Iran's jihadist regime are following that same blueprint today. Hitler did not have legitimate grievances nor could he be reasoned with or placated. Hitler had strategic goals and he made those goals very clear in his writings and in his speeches. The world was foolish to ignore his words.

When will the West wake up to the dangers posed by today's tyrants, who also speak quite clearly about their ultimate goals? When will a modern-day Winston Churchill or Harry Truman emerge?

Neville Chamberlain was wrong about Adolf Hitler and Chamberlain's mistakes precipitated World War II. President Obama is wrong now about Putin's Russia and about Iran. We can only hope that the consequences of President Obama's mistakes will not be as severe. 

We now see those consequences every day in the form of headlines about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, resulting in immense suffering and loss of life. President Joe Biden, who funds the PLO's "Pay for Slay" program to kill Jews and whose defining moment is the triumph of the Taliban after his retreat from Afghanistan, is unlikely to enact policies to mitigate those consequences and curb the impact of Putin's tyranny. 

Appeasement and isolationism are two sides of the same tarnished coin. The United States should not appease tyrannical regimes, nor should the United States pretend that what happens in other parts of the world is of no consequence to the American people. Declaring that "war is not the answer" may sound great, but the reality is that in many instances there is not a peaceful way to deal with tyrannical regimes. Non-violent non-cooperation is a very effective strategy for dealing with injustices within a free, open society: it worked for Mahatma Gandhi's followers in opposition to the British, and it worked for Dr. Martin Luther King's followers in opposition to American discrimination against Black people. However, as I noted in Violence, Non-Violent Non-Cooperation, and Human Nature, "Gandhi's public assertion that European Jewry should accept without resistance whatever fate Hitler's executioners delivered is not only absurd but it is obscene. As Rabbi Shmuley Boteach explains, 'What Gandhi failed to realize is that when dealing with moral or at least somewhat humane governments, nonviolent resistance has its place. But when dealing with murderous barbarians such as ISIS or the Nazis, no level of nonviolent resistance will ever change their minds. Gandhi's philosophy would only guarantee that they take over the world.'"

Appeasement was a fatally flawed strategy in 1938, and it remains a fatally flawed strategy today. War is awful, but--as Churchill sagely noted--dishonor followed by war is even worse. If Putin's Russia, Iran, and other tyrannical regimes are not stopped today, it will become more costly (both in terms of human suffering and money) to stop them later.

Yeats' Warning About the "Passionate Intensity" of True Believers

In his poem "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats warned, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." The sad profundity of this couplet is regularly on display in our troubled world, perhaps best encapsulated in Hamas' warning to Israel, "We love death more than you love life." The Hamas true believers are so passionate about their cause--the annihilation of the Jewish State as a prelude to making the non-Muslim world submit to Islam--that they are not only willing but eager to kill and be killed for it; meanwhile, after every outrage committed by Hamas--and by other terrorist groups--there is a vocal segment of the Western world that responds by asking, "How have we wronged these people?" Blaming the victim is neither a sound psychological approach nor the basis for a strong foreign policy. The sane response to extremist, uncompromising genocidal murderers is to do anything possible to stop them, as the West belatedly figured out regarding Nazi Germany.

In A Poet's Apocalyptic Vision, David Lehman describes how Yeats' poem is a "chilling statement of our condition" that "extrapolates a fearful vision from the moral anarchy of the present." Lehman adds that Yeats' powerful couplet "retains its authority as an observation and a warning. We may think of the absence of backbone with which certain right-minded individuals met the threats of National Socialism in the 1930s and of Islamist terrorism in the new century. Both dogmas demand of their followers a 'passionate intensity' capable of overwhelming all other considerations."

Perhaps the fastest way to offend someone in our world dominated by "political correctness" is to speak truth to power. Many people do not want to hear the truth, especially if the truth contradicts their deeply held beliefs. For instance, while it is sometimes true that there are two sides to a story it is also sometimes true that one side is simply right and the other side is simply wrong. It is not politically correct to speak of good and evil anymore but that does not mean that there is no such thing as good and evil.

The 9/11 attacks did not happen because of America's foreign policy decisions (which is not to say that all of those decision are beyond reproach) and those attacks were not the desperate but understandable actions of downtrodden people. The truth is that the 9/11 attacks were acts of unspeakable evil committed in the name of a backwards-thinking ideology that is determined to force the rest of the world to submit or die; some people spoke that truth in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and those people were deemed bigots, because the supposedly politically correct thing to do is to try to figure out what rational motivation caused the attackers to kill so many innocent people. The problem is that there was no rational motivation; there is no reasoning with people like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. If you try to reason with such people then you are only delaying the inevitable battle until the conditions of that battle are less favorable for you. Confronting Hitler in 1933 would have been easier than confronting him in 1936. By 1939, there was no longer a choice: Hitler had to be confronted and he had exploited six years of naive appeasement to build Germany into a world class military power.

If Western leaders are unwilling or able to learn from the political and historical lesson of how Hitler duped Chamberlain at Munich, then they should heed the poetic words that Yeats wrote after World War I before it becomes necessary for the 21st century Yeats to make similar declarations after World War III.

Garry Kasparov Lambastes West's "Weak" Response to Vladimir Putin's Tyranny

In a December 2014 Reason.com interview, former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov did not mince words when asked to assess the West's policies concerning Russian dictator Vladimir Putin:

We have been facing this problem for quite a while. And so many mistakes have been made. These mistakes created an impression for Putin and his cronies and also his clients like Assad and others in the world. Iranian Ayatollahs. The West is weak. The West is not willing to get engaged. So the West will give them anything they want. Before we talk about the right strategy, what the leaders of the free world must do, let's talk about what they must not do. You cannot project weakness. Yes, I know that America will never consider seriously boots on the ground in Ukraine. Why are you talking about it? Why do you say publicly that you will not do that?

I could give you many examples where they violate the simplest rules of negotiation. The secret letter from Obama to the Ayatollahs, without mentioning the fact that it's an insult for Sunni allies. It's the first time that the United States and the free world had a great chance of creating a Sunni coalition to stop Sunni terror. Then stabbing them in the back by writing a letter to the Ayatollahs. By the way, they never responded. And now, at the time when the nuclear deal is about to be reached or not. He's asking them to help with ISIS. ISIS will probably be destroyed. You need more planes, maybe some soldiers, material resources. ISIS is not a global threat, it's very local. For the sake of Iranian cooperation, this relatively small issue to put at stake the global cooperation of Sunnis and also the non-proliferation policies, that's exactly what you're not supposed to do.

Kasparov's harsh and accurate words are particularly meaningful and timely considering the race to stop Iran's jihadist, expansionist regime from building nuclear weapons; this is vitally important, yet President Obama seems oblivious to the danger and downright hostile when anyone (most recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) points out just how catastrophic it would be if Iran builds nuclear weapons. The Middle East is ablaze with jihadist extremism and Iran is fomenting much of it. A nuclear-armed Iran would be a menace to the entire world. The damage that President Obama has done in abandoning America's allies and failing to stand up to tyrannical dictatorships will not be easy to fix.

This problem predates President Obama, though. Kasparov is equally unimpressed by Bill Clinton's administration:

Many talk about Clinton's presidency as a great success. I wouldn't doubt certain achievements in economy. But geopolitically, it was the greatest disaster among all because it's not about the final position. The game is still on. In 1992, America was all powerful. It could design the world map the way it wanted. In 2000, al-Qaeda was ready to strike. So what happened in these eight years?

Eight years of complacency, of doing nothing. Nobody formulated policies for Russia, for Soviet Union, for Islamic terrorism. It requires a global vision. The same way as Winston Churchill, Harry Truman had these policies designed in 1946, in 1947. The Marshall plan. There were plans. Plans they learned from World War II and they knew that to oppose Stalin and to oppose Communism, they needed to come up with a grand strategy and also leadership.

When I hear about potential dangers of confronting Putin today, my first question is, "Is he more dangerous than Joseph Stalin in 1948?" For 11 months, American and British planes had been supplying West Berlin besieged by Stalin's troops. And Joseph Stalin didn't shoot a single American plane. Why? Because Harry Truman already used nuclear weapons. And Stalin, as every good dictator, had an animal instinct. He knew where he could be repulsed. So he knew that Harry Truman could not play a game. It happened in 1962, when Khrushchev recognized that he pushed JFK to the ropes. And Ronald Reagan. And don't tell me that the Soviet Union in 1981, 82, 83, was less powerful than Putin's Russia today.

Harry Truman was a strong President, as was Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are not strong Presidents; they have convinced our enemies that America is weak and it will take a lot of work to disabuse America's enemies of that notion.

After Neville Chamberlain's cowardly appeasement of Adolf Hitler, Chamberlain declared that he had ensured "peace for our time." Chamberlain also said something that is eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric used by those who support President Obama's inaction while the world burns: "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing." Instead of challenging Hitler early when Hitler's Nazi Germany was not at full strength, Chamberlain preferred to make broad concessions to Hitler, believing Hitler to be a reasonable man who had legitimate grievances that could be resolved through negotiations. Chamberlain did not think that it was worth it to fight Hitler or even to make preparations to fight Hitler merely to help "people of whom we know nothing." That short-sighted attitude persists today. Why should America intervene in far-away conflicts? Why should America care if Iran gets nuclear weapons? Isn't it true that by "imperialistically" dictating to other countries America creates enemies where none previously existed? That kind of thinking is what led to World War II and what made the Holocaust possible. Even 60 years ago, conflicts involving "people of whom we know nothing" quickly threatened the very survival of an America that felt safe because of being shielded by two big oceans.

Hitler took whatever he could take through negotiation and then sought to conquer the rest through war. Putin's Russia and Iran's jihadist regime are following that same blueprint today. Hitler did not have legitimate grievances nor could he be reasoned with or placated. Hitler had strategic goals and he made those goals very clear in his writings and in his speeches. The world was foolish to ignore his words.

When will the West wake up to the dangers posed by today's tyrants, who also speak quite clearly about their ultimate goals? When will a modern-day Winston Churchill or Harry Truman emerge?

Neville Chamberlain was wrong about Adolf Hitler and Chamberlain's mistakes precipitated World War II. President Obama is wrong now about Putin's Russia and about Iran. We can only hope that the consequences of President Obama's mistakes will not be as severe.

Hollywood's Obscene Ties to Adolf Hitler

One of the many long-standing calumnies hurled at the Jewish community is that the Jewish community supposedly "controls" Hollywood movie studios and uses this alleged control toward nefarious ends. While it is undeniable that many Hollywood studio owners and high ranking executives have been of Jewish descent, that does not at all mean that some kind of Jewish communal agenda dictates the conduct of those individuals or their studios; in fact, the opposite has often been the case: many of Hollywood's Jewish people not only feel no connection to the Jewish community but they feel indifferent, if not down right hostile, toward Jews and Judaism.

Ben Urwand's book The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler provides chilling examples of the full extent to which Hollywood studios in the 1930s and 1940s permitted the Nazis to censor the content of American movies. The August 9, 2013 issue of The Hollywood Reporter contains an excerpt from Urwand's book and the magazine's Andy Lewis offers this summary of Urwand's findings:

The 1930s are celebrated as one of Hollywood's golden ages, but in an exclusive excerpt from his controversial new book, The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler (Harvard University Press, on sale Sept. 9), Harvard post-doctoral fellow Ben Urwand uncovers a darker side to Hollywood's past.

Drawing on a wealth of archival documents in the U.S. and Germany, he reveals the shocking extent to which Hollywood cooperated and collaborated with the Nazis during the decade leading up to World War II to protect its business.

Indeed, "collaboration" (and its German translation, Zusammenarbeit) is a word that appears regularly in the correspondence between studio officials and the Nazis. Although the word is fraught with meaning to modern ears, its everyday use at the time underscored the eagerness of both sides to smooth away their differences to preserve commerce.

The Nazis threatened to exclude American movies--more than 250 played in Germany after Hitler took power in 1933--unless the studios cooperated. Before World War I, the German market had been the world's second largest, and even though it had shrunk during the Great Depression, the studios believed it would bounce back and worried that if they left, they would never be able to return.

Beginning with wholesale changes made to Universal's 1930 release All Quiet on the Western Front, Hollywood regularly ran scripts and finished movies by German officials for approval. When they objected to scenes or dialogue they thought made Germany look bad, criticized the Nazis or dwelled on the mistreatment of Jews, the studios would accommodate them--and make cuts in the American versions as well as those shown elsewhere in the world.

It was not only scenes: Nazi pressure managed to kill whole projects critical of the rise of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, Hollywood would not make an important anti-Nazi film until 1940. Hitler was obsessed with the propaganda power of film, and the Nazis actively promoted American movies like 1937's Captains Courageous that they thought showcased Aryan values.

Historians have long known about American companies such as IBM and General Motors that did business in Germany into the late 1930s, but the cultural power of movies--their ability to shape what people think--makes Hollywood's cooperation with the Nazis a particularly important and chilling moment in history.

Brave Jewish screenwriters like Ben Hecht and Herman Mankiewicz urged the Hollywood studio leaders--many of whom were also Jewish--to defy Nazi censorship and to make movies that clearly portrayed the true nature of Hitler's regime but Hollywood resisted such entreaties not only when the Holocaust could have been prevented but even after the Holocaust happened and the Allies defeated the Nazis. Urwand writes that several Hollywood studio executives visited post-war Germany but that this tour did not affect the executives' feelings or cause them to alter their policies:

The executives had witnessed the devastation, and toured one of the most notorious concentration camps in Europe. They had seen firsthand one of the sites where the murder of the Jews had taken place. But they did not put it on the screen. Decades would pass before any reference to the Holocaust appeared in American feature films.

Urwand provides some stunning anecdotes. For instance, Urwand reports, "The head of MGM in Germany, Frits Strengholt, divorced his Jewish wife at the request of the Propaganda Ministry. She ended up in a concentration camp." Urwand also cites a January 1938 letter sent by MGM's Berlin office to Hitler's office that ends with the words, "Heil Hitler!" The fact that a corporation founded by people of Jewish descent and run by people of Jewish descent worked on such friendly terms with the Nazis defies the ludicrous assertion that some shadowy Jewish conspiracy controlled or controls Hollywood. All of this brings to mind the joke about the Jewish person who asks his Jewish friend why he is reading anti-Semitic magazines instead of more reputable publications, only to receive the reply, "In the newspaper all I read about is people persecuting the Jews but here I can read about how we are actually running the world!" The winking irony of the joke is funny but it is sobering to consider the dichotomy between the powerlessness of the Jewish community through the centuries compared with the power attributed to Jews by the Nazis and other anti-Semites.

Urwand's scholarship has not been questioned, but some critics assert that his tone is too harsh and that the Hollywood studio leaders in the 1930s could not have imagined the full extent of what the Nazis were about to do. The simple answer to that is that Hitler boldly declared to the world all of his plans not only in Mein Kampf but also in numerous widely disseminated public speeches. Anyone who did not know what Hitler stood for and what he intended to do was a fool.

There are interesting parallels between America's dealings with Nazi Germany during the 1930s and America's current reluctance to forcibly confront countries like Iran, Pakistan, North Korea and Syria. How could anyone know what these countries stand for and intend to do? We know because those countries' leaders have loudly and repeatedly stated their beliefs and intentions.

Releasing Convicted Murderers Will not Bring Peace to the Middle East

"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."--Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

"All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be."--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak out for me."--Martin Niemoller

The isolationist school of thought suggests that what happens in other countries does not matter but the reality is that all people and nations are intimately connected. An injustice anywhere has ripple effects that spread out like a tidal wave. In August 1990, two teenage boys named Lior Tubal and Ronen Karmani were abducted, bound, gagged and murdered, their bodies dumped in a valley. Their only "crime" was that they were Jews. The perpetrators of these horrific murders were captured, convicted and given four life sentences each (they murdered two other people in addition to Tubal and Karmani).

Esther Pollard wrote a powerful essay that explains why Tubal and Karmani's murderers should never be set free. Some people may object that everyone deserves forgiveness. Only the person or persons who have been wronged can offer forgiveness; the primary tasks of a nation's justice system are to punish people who break the law and deter people from breaking the law in the future: releasing murderers from jail represents a huge failure in both regards. Here are wise words about such prisoner releases:

The release of convicted terrorists before they have served their full sentences seems like an easy and tempting way of defusing blackmail situations in which innocent people may lose their lives, but its utility is momentary at best.

Prisoner releases only embolden terrorists by giving them the feeling that even if they are caught, their punishment will be brief. Worse, by leading terrorists to think such demands are likely to be met, they encourage precisely the terrorist blackmail they are supposed to defuse.

The author of that well-reasoned declaration is none other than Benjamin Netanhayu, who is now Israel's Prime Minister; the prisoner release that he has authorized--not just of two murderers but of over 100 terrorists, many of whom are convicted murderers--is a repudiation of everything for which he claimed to stand when he ran for office in the first place.

Don't believe the fiction that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Those who compare Yasser Arafat to George Washington engage in a very dangerous moral equivalency, failing to recognize critical differences between the goals and the modus operandi of the PLO compared with Washington's Revolutionary War troops. Vladimir Nabokov called such confused thinking "poshlost," a Russian term for which he provided a wide-ranging definition:

Poshlost speaks in such concepts as "America is no better than Russia" or "We all share in Germany's guilt." The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as "the moment of truth," "charisma," "existential" (used seriously), "dialogue" (as applied to political talks between nations), and "vocabulary" (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost.

In Hitler's Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss, Laurence Rees notes that every step of the way on the path to genocide Hitler calculated exactly what the Nazis could get away with both in terms of internal opposition and external opposition; when the democratic nations of the world met at the Evian Conference in 1938 and the Dominican Republic was the only one that agreed to take in Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis, Hitler took that as a powerful sign that no one would lift a finger to stop the Nazis from implementing the "Final Solution." Rest assured that today's would-be Hitlers take note when democracies show signs of weakness and/or weariness in the face of evil; the issue is much deeper than the likelihood that some of the specific individuals released by Netanyahu will murder again: when murderers are set free, a climate is created in which the value of human life is cheapened. Hitler knew that Turkey was not punished for massacring Armenians in the early part of the 20th century and that Stalin's Soviet Union got away with killing millions of her citizens in the 1930s; that history of injustice emboldened Hitler to proceed with his plan to kill every Jewish man, woman and child on the planet. In contrast, when German citizens protested Hitler's so-called euthanasia plan--his doctrine to kill mentally and/or physically ill people who Hitler deemed to be "life unworthy of life"--Hitler scaled back the program. Standing up against evil can make a difference, while being silent in the face of evil not only permits but rather encourages even greater crimes to be committed.

Many people scoffed when the year 1984 passed and the world supposedly did not resemble George Orwell's dystopian vision--but perhaps we are already living in that 1984 world without even realizing it, a world in which language and justice have become distorted beyond recognition or salvation. Suggesting that the release of cold-blooded murderers is some kind of justifiable "sacrifice for peace" is sickening and, as Solzhenitsyn powerfully wrote (in reference to the crimes against humanity committed by the Soviet Union), there will be terrible consequences as a result of Netanyahu's shortsighted, cowardly act. Appeasement only whetted Hitler's appetite for conquest and appeasement will predictably have the same effect on the nations and terrorist groups that are not only plotting to destroy Israel but also to destroy all Western democracies; those who do not speak up for Israel--and against Netanyahu's prisoner releases--should keep in mind Niemoller's heartbreaking and prophetic words.