The 2nd Annual Essay Contest for The Propagandist introduced us to some excellent works by our regular contributors as well as first-time pundits. Our readers were treated to critical analysis of issues as far-ranging as Turkey's democratic drift, the threat of jihadism in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden and the consequences of the Arab Spring.

(A quick apology to our contributors and readers in getting the results out. We know we're a few days late. Hopefully, the winner wasn't counting on the prize money to help make a mortgage payment over the weekend.)

Without further ado, the winning submission of the 2nd Annual Essay Contest for The Propagandist is (drumroll, please)...

• Better Jews. The Moral Vanity of Israel's Leftist Jewish Critics, by Adam Levick

Here's an excerpt:

This recurring tendency of Jews, such as Murane, to pay greater attention to their own moral performance than to the necessities of survival is a trait which Ruth Wisse characterizes as “moral solipsism”.

 

In displaying the resilience necessary to survive in exile, many Jews have come to fetishize weakness, and believe that they could pursue their mission as a “light unto the nations” on a

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Note to any Al Qaeda would-be successor to Osama bin Laden: the established life expectancy for someone in your chosen career path is approximately one month.

An overnight attack by an unmanned aircraft killed Ilyas Kashmiri, an Al Qaeda-linked operative blamed for several high-profile attacks in Pakistan and India, local news reports and a statement by his banned militant organization said Saturday.
 

If borne out, this would be the second major U.S. anti-terrorism coup in quick succession following the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden early last month by Navy SEALs. Analysts had identified Kashmiri as a possible Bin Laden successor.

Now, who wants the job? Any takers? Sheesh. Don't all put your hands up at once.More >>

The political far-right certainly has its own share of idiots and lunatics. But the far-left's conspiracy-theorists and identity-politics chieftans have gained a significant amount of mainstream acceptance over the years. Their views have often given (pseudo-)intellectual support to clerical fascists and power-mad thugs.

Time to cut them down a notch.

First, the indomitable Christopher Hitchens lashes out at Noam Chomsky for his less-than rigorous intellectual stance about Osama bin Laden and 9/11:

It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew'

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It took barely 24 hours for the troops-out-of-Afghanistan chorus to break into an outpouring of editorials demanding the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan now that Osama bin Laden is dead. Now you have your prize, they smugly hummed, so let's call it a day. Though there is sometimes an underlying resentment that bin Laden was taken from this world--like when Chris Hedges says his "stomach sank" upon hearing the news--the stoppist opportunists are seizing what they can from the moment anyways.

The "bin Laden's done, now let's desist" argument suffers from numerous fallacies, the first of which is an appalling historical amnesia. It's not in the very distant past that the US already once washed its hands of Afghanistan prematurely after some fairly significant covert meddling in Afghan affairs, in the interest of their own foreign policy objectives.

As Afghanistan turned to face a post-Soviet world at the dawn of the 1990s, it found America's back turned, and much of the rest of the international commmunity followed suit. Into the post-Najibullah void poured the competing muj factions who unleashed violence and chaos over a population in desperate need of a functioning state, rather than a...More >>