There's a lot of different flavors of fascism, but the one thing they all seem to have in common, the one nugget of bile lying at the intersection of all their poisons, is anti-Semitism.

I had thought that the heroic role Israel plays in fundamentalist evangelical apocalyptic fantasies would eventually come to protect them from this ancient bigotry, but I suppose the roots of racism run strong and deep, and are intertwined intimately in the fabric of fascism. You will note that it is not Israeli/Palestinian politics or Zionism that is the target here, it is the idea of Jewishness itself, the cultural/religious/ethnic complex at the heart of Jewish civilization. that seems to resonate with Herr Heimbach and his Teutonic Kamerads.

I like the Jews. I feel comfortable and at ease around them. I respect them for their conservative antiquity and I admire their modern liberality. Even if I disagree with some of their policies and positions, I have a tendency to favor them as a people and as a culture, and to side with them, and to give them the benefit of a doubt. And I think they have earned the right and cultivated, even perfected, the ability to see and recognize real evil in the world.

I'm not surprised that digging even slightly into the skinhead mentality that seems to be on the march in our country eventually reveals this bottomless reservoir of reckless hate lying just below the surface. This is truly an ancient foulness, a gangrenous pus as old as Babylon and as evil as Hell.

The time for equivalence is over. The time has come to take sides.