Soon after the 60th anniversary of the birth of Israel as a nation, it is worthwhile to see the affinity between Israel’s struggle and ours — particularly in the world of ideas. Both Israel and the United States are undermined by academic theories that seek to destroy our self-confidence as countries that are worthy and basically good. Israel is part of the West and we both must oppose the vilification of the West done from a platform of out-of-this-world perfection.

We must argue for a balanced picture and a sense of the good we have accomplished, and insist that this be conveyed in our schools at all educational levels. Like us, Israel must battle those forces that project simple-minded portrayals of victims and victimizers, oppressed and oppressor, instead of properly doing justice to the whole historical picture. These forces try to hold past sins against us in order to undermine our will to preserve our own culture and civilization and they use our very ideals to indict us since these fall short of absolute realization.

Also, we both battle in a sea of relativism and irrationality against those intellectual barbarians who would undermine truth and the possibility of arriving at truth — when the truth would disturb the simple-minded picture they want to project — and who bring moral equivalence to nonequivalent things.