Shalom laYehudim, Shalom laBnai Noach, Shalom laGoyim. It’s the evening of the 4th day, zion beShvat, Parashas Beshalakh, tav-shin-ayin-alef, the evening of the 3rd day Tuesday, 11 January, 2011, webcasting from Israel with one eye, the one still working, on the United States of America.

Interesting coincidence today for this dual citizen of Israel and the good ole’ USA. Variations on the same theme of a story. In the US, the national chatter is over freedom of speech, the freedom of speech for the huge demographic segment of the American electorate, the non-inside the Beltway people who like and support the ideas and values and attitudes of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, conservative politicians, Tea Party people.

The Nightmare on Main Street in Tucson, Arizona has had the liberal, even libertine pundits and politicians shrieking about conservatives being the real culprit, inciting such violence with their speech. They, not the madman with the gun, are responsible for the heinous murder of six people and that congresswoman’s grievous wounding. It is the speech of conservatives that bear responsibility for these crimes. That’s how contemporary liberals think.

I used to be liberal. And I can chart two points in my career when I started the process of deliberalizing and completed it; when I finally had to admit it to myself that I no longer was a liberal. Between 1967 and 1984. And what launched the process was the Six-Day War, rather the reaction to the Six-Day War by the Left. And this, by the way, was the beginning of the Neo-Conservative movement, people who no doubt also recoiled as I did at that leftist response to Israel’s wonderful week of glory. They didn’t like it, and by the fall of that year the Left was bashing Israel’s racist, fascist, imperialist aggression of the previous spring.

It was an extraordinary assault on the truth. And in the earth-shaking year of 1968, the idea of the Ancient Ones was percolating to be born in 1969. That is, the birth of the Palestinians as a political player and the birth of their “narrative,” which is a full-bore assault on the truth of historical facts, a functionally full-blown denial of reality of virtually psychotic intensity…