A damaging document

'All men," wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant ethicist, "are naturally inclined to obscure the
morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity. This is why religion is more frequently a source of confusion than of light in the political realm."

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Chomsky, sophistry champion

Among Jewish contributors to modern intellectual life, few carry as much name-recognition as Noam Chomsky. Visiting London last week, he drew enthusiastic crowds to a lecture given in honour of Edward Said, the Palestinian literary critic, and an interview at the British Library with Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian columnist and my fellow JC contributor.

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Civilisation beyond the Church

It is particularly difficult for a Pope that comes from Germany to come here,” said Benedict XVI at Auschwitz in 2006. This was surely true.

But the Pope, who resigned this week, might have mentioned, too, the difficulties for the Roman Catholic Church in confronting its own historical contribution to the hatreds that fuelled the Holocaust.

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From nonsense to indecency

John Rentoul, the political commentator, and I have a friendly competition to find ever more outrageous examples of a genre of newspaper commentary that he calls "Questions to Which the Answer is No". This is a headline that floats a bogus and unsupported theory by posing it as a question.

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Unlovable, but not self-hating

Postwar America found not only prosperity but a new literary voice. Philip Roth, one of its principal exponents, has now laid down his pen. Having written 31 books, Roth has decided that he has said what he wants to say. He told the New York Times last week: "I sat around for a month or two trying to think of something else and I thought, 'Maybe it's over, maybe it's over'."

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Hobsbawm’s blinkered vision

The history of the past century is dominated by the clash between universalism and nationalism. Eric Hobsbawm, who died last week at the age of 95, wrote about it and lived it. He combined scholarly brilliance and monumental political error.

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Fine writer’s love of conspiracy

"He is materialising my fear that he will do something to disgrace his oeuvre," Christopher Hitchens told me an in interview a few months before his death. The "he" was Gore Vidal, the author and essayist. They had once been allies. Vidal had only semi-jokingly nominated Hitchens as his successor in the world of letters.

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Islam must let bad ideas perish

In his memoirs, published last year, Ken Livingstone referred to "several commentators and minor intellectuals" who, he said, had become obsessed with Islam. These included Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Martin Bright and me.

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Don’t let the Philistines succeed

"It's fundamentally ignorant to censor and suppress art," James Shapiro, the Shakespeare scholar, told me, referring to the campaign to ban Habima from the Globe. Habima performed last week; the actors withstood disruptions and heckling. It recalled the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra's Proms concert, when protesters purporting to defend Palestinian rights interrupted the performance.

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Dangerous lies that spread from Auschwitz to Srebrenica

The words "I was wrong" rarely appear under journalists' bylines. But in the Observer this week, John Simpson, the veteran BBC correspondent, acknowledged that he had been mistaken about a libel trial arising from the Bosnian war.

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Pantomime cases against Israelis make a mockery of international justice

There is a concerted effort by Israel's adversaries to try to delegitimise it by using the rhetoric rather than the substance of international law. It is tempting to ignore such an obviously tendentious and malevolent campaign.

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Man who put tragedy into words

WG "Max" Sebald, the novelist, was killed in a car crash near his home in Norfolk ten years ago this week. He was 57 and at the peak of his creative powers. He was posthumously awarded the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for his novel Austerlitz, of which a tenth anniversary edition has just been published.

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Bigotry and xenophobia well to fore

Anti-Israel campaigners have every right to assemble, demonstrate, picket and argue. But preventing speech that they disapprove of is no legitimate part of a democratic society. Shouting down a musical performance is the same type of outrage, but a degree worse. It is not mere boorishness but militant philistinism. Its near equivalent is book-burning.

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Analysis: We are bolstering the delusions of terrorists

Terrorist groups sometimes abandon violence and sublimate their aims in constitutional politics. The old Official IRA renounced the armed struggle and transformed itself into the small, left-wing Workers’ Party.

Similarly, the meeting between Britain’s ambassador to Lebanon and a Hizbollah MP will have been intended by the Foreign Office to strengthen the political process.

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Analysis: Press TV peddles pernicious tosh

Press TV is the English-language arm of Iranian state broadcasting. I am regularly invited to appear on the station’s discussion programmes and have sometimes accepted. I have seen no evidence of any censorship of my contributions to those programmes, but I do not regard Press TV as reputable.

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Analysis: Listen to him, but remember that he is a liar

V Since his crushing libel defeat in 2000 against Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, who had identified him as a Holocaust-denier, David Irving has pursued an itinerant lifestyle, selling his self-published works and evangelising for his cause. He has also suffered, disgracefully, a period of incarceration in Austria. But his ill-treatment and pathos should not obscure his character and methods. He is no historian. He is forever a discredited figure owing to his falsifications and bigotry.

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