Seeds of Hate

JIHAD AND JEW-HATRED

Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11.

By Matthias Kuntzel.

Translated by Colin Meade.

180 pp. Telos Press Publishing. $29.95.

One day in Damascus not long ago, I visited the understocked gift shop of the Sheraton Hotel, looking for something to read. There wasn't much: pre-owned Grishams, a hagiography of Hafez al-Assad, an early Bill O'Reilly (go figure) and a paperback copy of ''The International Jew,'' published in 2000 in Beirut. ''The International Jew'' is a collection of columns exposing the putative role of Jews in such fields as international finance, world governance and bootlegging. ''Wherever the seat of power may be, thither they swarm obsequiously,'' the book states. These columns, which are based on the ''Protocols of the Elders of Zion'' -- they are a plagiary of a forgery, in other words -- were first published in Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent more than 80 years ago.

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The Ghost of Purim Past

Three years ago, while visiting Tehran, I was introduced to a charmless man named Muhammad Ali Samadi, who, I was told, would parse for me the Iranian theocracy's peculiar understanding of Judaism and Zionism. Mr. Samadi said that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, held no brief for anti-Semitism. Then, a moment later, he deployed an epidemiological metaphor to explain the role of Jews in history. "There are always infections and diseases in man," he said. "In the world there is an infection called international Jewry."

A year later, Mr. Samadi became the spokesman for the Esteshadion, or Seekers of Martyrdom, a group that has as its mission the training of young Iranians to kill Salman Rushdie, commit acts of suicide terrorism against Americans in Iraq and blow up Jews everywhere.
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Protect Sharon From the Right

Not long ago, at a West Bank settlement outpost surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by dyspeptic German shepherds, I attended a joyful event: a brit milah, the circumcision of an eight-day-old boy. This outpost was home to just a handful of families, but more than 100 people came to celebrate with the boy's parents.

Many of the visitors made the rough trek through Arab villages to get to this hill. These young settlers are the avant-garde of radical Jewish nationalism, the flannel-wearing, rifle-carrying children of their parents' mainstream settlements, which they denigrate for their bourgeois affectations--red-tile roof chalets, swimming pools, pizzerias--and their misplaced fealty to the dictates of the government in Jerusalem.
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Reverse Engineering

AMERICAN GROUND
Unbuilding the World Trade Center.
By William Langewiesche.
205 pp. New York:
North Point Press/
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.

At the very end of William Langewiesche's slim but powerful account of the dismantling of the wreckage of the World Trade Center comes a story that served, at least for me, as an antidote to the overwhelming saccharinity of the recent Sept. 11 commemorations--that great "emotional bath," as one television anchor put it.

Langewiesche tells of a visit he paid this spring to a pier on Newark Bay, to watch, he writes, the heavy structural steel columns of the trade center "being sent away."
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New York's Finest

NYPD
A City and Its Police.
By James Lardner
and Thomas Reppetto.
Illustrated. 368 pp. New York:
A John Macrae Book/
Henry Holt & Company. $27.50.

A friend of mine, an ex-New York City police officer, once told me the following story: One night during his rookie year he had given chase to a robbery suspect. The chase led to a stairwell, where the suspect turned on my friend, pummeling and kicking him. My friend managed to subdue the suspect, but not before he was bloodied up good.

The rookie officer brought the handcuffed suspect, who was unhurt and ostentatiously nonchalant about his arrest, to the precinct house, expecting praise, or if not praise--this was the N.Y.P.D. after all--then silent approval for his valiant deed. He did not expect to be met by withering scorn.
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Inside Jihad U.: The Education of a Holy Warrior

About two hours east of the Khyber Pass, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, alongside the Grand Trunk Road, sits a school called the Haqqania madrasa. A madrasa is a Muslim religious seminary, and Haqqania is one of the bigger madrasas in Pakistan: its mosques and classrooms and dormitories are spread over eight weed-covered acres, and the school currently enrolls more than 2,800 students. Tuition, room and board are free; the students are, in the main, drawn from the dire poor, and the madrasa raises its funds from wealthy Pakistanis, as well as from devout, and politically minded, Muslims in the countries of the Persian Gulf.

The students range in age from 8 and 9 to 30, sometimes to 35. The youngest boys spend much of their days seated cross-legged on the floors of airless classrooms, memorizing the Koran. This is a process that takes between six months and three years, and it is made even more difficult than it sounds by the fact that the Koran they study is in the original Arabic. These boys tend to know only Pashto, the language of the Pathan ethnic group that dominates this region of Pakistan, as well as much of nearby Afghanistan. In a typical class, the teachers sit on the floor with the boys, reading to them in Arabic, and the boys repeat what the teachers say. This can go on between four and eight hours each day.
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Where the Political Is Personal

A Little Too Close to God
The Thrills and Panic of a Life in Israel.
By David Horovitz.
311 pp. New York:
Alfred A Knopf. $26.

When I first picked up David Horovitz's "A Little Too Close to God," my first thought was, "Dayenu" (loose translation for those reading the English-only Haggadah: "Enough already"). It is a well-known fact that the People of the Book are in reality the People of the Book Proposal, and so the world has been overly blessed by books that make the following two observations: (1) Israel is filled with Jews! And (2) They're all nuts!

But despite the title, Horovitz gives us an entertaining (if occasionally exasperating and disorganized) memoir of his life as an English immigrant in Israel. What makes "A Little Too Close to God" particularly interesting, however, is the jeremiad embedded in the narrative.
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Epidemic Proportions

Q: Several pharmaceutical companies have recently decided to slash the price of antiretroviral drugs for developing countries, most notably Africa. But even with the price cut, a year's supply of drugs still would cost about $1,000--more money than most Africans earn in a year. So is there less to this than meets the eye?

It is true that most Africans with H.I.V. won't have access to the drugs. But not everybody is living below the poverty line. People working in the private sector often have insurance. This is going to benefit tens of thousands of people.

But for the vast majority of Africans, this is only symbolic gesture.

Look, we aren't naive. Ninety to 95 percent of Africans who carry the virus don't even know they are infected. So we've got to work on a lot of very basic issues. This is just one step, but it's important because it's the first time the big pharmaceutical companies accept the principle of equity pricing, that the same product can be sold in a poor market for less than it's sold in a rich market.
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A Continent's Chaos

"What is it that Americans call Africa?" asked the president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, looking up from his bowl of Rice Krispies. "A basket case?" The president was amused by the idiom, and a smile momentarily crossed his face. It was a bright morning in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, and the presidential peacocks, strutting outside Obasanjo's villa, were screeching in the heat.

Obasanjo, who is a former general, a former political prisoner and, for the past year, the democratically elected president of Africa's biggest country, let the smile fade as he asked: "And why is it a basket case? How did it come to be this basket case?"

We were talking about Sierra Leone. More to the point, we were talking about blame. Whom do we blame for everything that has gone wrong in Sierra Leone? Certainly not Nigeria: Nigeria spent billions of its own dollars, and sacrificed the lives of hundreds of its soldiers, trying to keep the peace.

Could it be the United States?
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Diaper Diplomacy

As part of my never-ending and so far entirely fruitless campaign to get high-ranking Clinton administration officials to change my children's diapers, I recently dragooned Jamie Rubin to my baby girl's room in order to teach him a thing or two about the real world.

For those of you not keeping up with the latest shifts in State Department personnel, a primer: Rubin, who was Madeline Albright's assistant secretary of state for public affairs and her close adviser--as well as a C-Span media-briefing sex god--recently gave up his high-powered job and all its high-powered accouterments to follow his wife to London, where he will care for his new baby while his wife works.
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