The American Spectator

So whose fault is the death of those civilians?

Here, then, is a microcosm of the struggle between Israel and its enemies over the last 50 years: One side conceals itself among local populations, deliberately targets civilians, and seeks to maximize casualties; the other side retaliates with uniformed military personnel, deliberately avoids harming civilians, and seeks to minimize casualties.

Not all stories have two sides. The current crisis in the Middle East is one such story. The Israelis are morally right. Their enemies are morally wrong. If you can’t figure that out, you’re morally lost.

Che Mania is upon us again with the New York premiere last week of Jose Rivera’s play School of the Americas, a loose concoction of Cliff notes agitprop, walleyed hero-worship and prison-cell romance that re-imagines the final days of murderous Communist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. This follows 2004’s critically acclaimed movie The Motorcycle Diaries, which Rivera also wrote, an account of the evolution of young Che’s political consciousness — which, in turn, spawned a flood of academic papers on the Guevara Marxist legacy as well as a tacky tee-shirt craze among heavily pierced adolescents anxious to rebel against their bourgeois parents.

For anyone with even a slight acquaintance of Guevara’s body of work, of course, Che Mania is no more morally justifiable than, say, Joseph Goebbels Mania. Indeed, one of the ongoing mysteries of American culture is why Communists do so much better in the P.R. department than Nazis. Both Communism and Nazism are utopian in their conception and genocidal in their execution. The latter justifies its mass exterminations in the name of ethnic purity; the former, in the name of socio-economic purity. Either way, the shallow graves get filled.

Once you recognize that Communism and Nazism are moral doppelgangers, your perspective begins to shift. For example, former Senator Joe McCarthy morphs from the arch-villain of George Clooney’s Hollywood imagination to a kind of cross between Simon Wiesenthal and Ted Kennedy, an obsessive boor who might be forgiven his quirks and excesses because, in the end, he was on the side of the angels. On the other hand, the graying ponytailed leftists skulking around the faculty lounge at the local university morph from endearing cranks to the Boys From Brazil — stubborn holdouts in the cause of ideological holocaust.

It’s worth remembering the true nature of his mission as Che Mania rolls on.