Reviewing While Blinkered

In a review in the Globe and Mail of Tarek Fatah's The Jew Is Not My Enemy and Martin Gilbert's In Ishmael's House, Paula Newberg calls antisemitism "a tough nut to crack."

Well, yes. If you haven't done your homework and have a left wing mindset and filter everything through an "internationalist" sieve, it must be utterly baffling. Here, for instance, is how Paula, billed as "Marshall B. Coyne Director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University," wraps up her clueless review:

To their credit, neither Fatah nor Gilbert restricts his analysis to the problematic Israel-Palestine dispute. Both are concerned with far broader questions; both seek to understand the background to ethnic, racial and religious hatreds, even if solutions are far from accessible. This month's survey from the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center suggests that relations between the West and the so-called Muslim world are still deeply in need of repair, from all sides. The larger challenge - what happens to modern internationalism and our system of states if social fragmentation at a time of fiscal constraint fractures the political landscape more deeply - remains open to further inquiry.

Gee, and here I thought the "larger challenge" was "jihad is the way, sharia is the goal."

Shows how little I know.

Note that Jonathan Kay's review of the Gilbert book which first appeared in Commentary was markedly different from Newberg's.