Israel Matzav

The still lethal obsession

No matter how many prizes Professor Robert Wistrich's massive tome A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad garners the book still deserves more attention than it has received. Indeed no amount of attention would be sufficient.

Its packed 938 pages of text reflect neither authorial grandiosity nor editorial lassitude. The copious detail amassed is required in order that Wistrich's central arguments not be dismissed as cherry-picked quotes used to exaggerate the seriousness of the phenomena under discussion. Random House, a commercial publisher, did not request him to cut a single sentence.

A Lethal Obsession stands as a refutation of three widespread misconceptions fostered in the West, partly out of ignorance and partly out of fear. The first is that radical Islam is a relatively minor phenomenon in the Muslim world. The second is that the Palestinian-Israeli dispute is primarily about borders, and amenable to solutions on that basis. And the third is that a nuclear Iran can be deterred in the same manner as the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Islamic anti-Semitism, Robert Wistrich

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:48 PM