Instapundit points to a fascinating article by Lee Smith regarding why intellectuals will always be against Israel and on the side of the nihilistic islamic radicals trying to eradicate it from the face of the earth.
here is a bit, but click over for the rest of it to read about the “death instinct.”
But intellectuals are no more rational than the rest of us, and none of us are wholly rational in our politics. The attractiveness of the resistance takes place on an emotional level, for like all of the most intellectually captivating modernist grand concepts it is a rejection of the Enlightenment, the boredom and the mediocrity of regular politics. The Enlightenment did away with the blood, the magic and mysticism of the great leader, he who decides life and death with a word. And this is what is to be recovered in the resistance: the charisma and authenticity of the human being unrestrained by what Nietzsche called slave morality. From Pound and T.S. Eliot to Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault and their disciples, for a century the West’s greatest minds have taught that the privilege, and duty, of the Western intellectual is to unmake the West, even—or especially—through violence, even if someone else, like the resistance, must serve as the agent of apocalypse and rebirth. The notion that Israel is condemned because it is more powerful than its adversaries is patently false: The intellectuals are nothing if not spellbound by the economy of force, and equally so in the purgative bloodshed that ensues. The aspect of eros that Pound found in Il Duce and Foucault found in Khomeini is what the Western acolytes of the resistance see in Hamas and Hezbollah.
Some journalists shed tears when Arafat died, others are smitten by the beauty of Islamist militants: The “green eyes” of Hezbollah’s deputy Naim Qassem “are framed by thick, dark lashes and he has long elegant hands.” Saddam Hussein, we are told, did much to advance the rights of women. In Cairo I knew a former CNN producer whose first affair with an Arab intelligence officer was in Saddam’s Baghdad—a great city, she explained, if you didn’t mind the constant surveillance and widespread torture.