Do read Christopher Hitchens' wonderful dismissal of the Ronan Bennett piece I mentioned yesterday.

Here's an extract:Failing entirely to "discriminate", Bennett places criticism of Islamism on all fours with anti-semitism, hostility to the Irish, and to other xenophobic moments in our past. And yes, of course, we remember those bombs that the Jewish refugees from Russian czarism placed in our streets. We remember how (before they became good old assimilated types) they ululated praise for suicide from their synagogues, demanded the segregation of the sexes, insisted on special prayer-rooms at work, exemptions from certain laws and on the censorship of newspapers that didn't "respect" Judaism. One would have to have a capacity for fantasy of something like that order to believe in the Ronan Bennett universe of modern persecution where "those who point to the illegality of Israeli occupation are anti-semites. Those who protest against the war in Iraq are al-Qaida sympathisers and moral relativists." In which known world is that happening?