A 'Brain-Dead Liberal' Awakens

I found this review, by Rick Richman, of David Mamet's new book, "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture" to be interesting.

Excerpt: In a chapter entitled "The Intelligent Person's Guide to Socialism and Anti-Semitism," he first argues that "social justice" is a sort of Sunday religion that does not carry over to the pressures of the workweek, and he illustrates his thought as follows:

One may bemoan the plight of the Palestinians, who have elected a government of terrorists and daily bomb their neighbor to the West, but we realize that any support past the sentimental is elective: we do not want to live there, nor to go there, and we blink at the knowledge that monies spent in their support may be diverted to the support of terror, and of organizations pledged not only to kill all the Jews, but to kill Americans and Westerners of all faiths.
Where does sympathy stop, and where may it not become sanctimony and hypocrisy?

And then he answers his own question with a mini-drama:

Our American plane has been forced to land at some foreign airport, by the outbreak of World War III. It will not be allowed to depart. Two planes are leaving the airport; we must choose which we want to board. One plane is flying to Israel and one to Syria, and we must choose.

That's where the sympathy stops.

No one reading this book would get on the plane to Syria. Why? It is a despotism, opposed to the West, to women, to gays, to Jews, to free speech. ... And yet one may gain status or a feeling of solidarity by embracing the "Arab cause."

Mamet's mini-drama works even if you believe Israel is not a "laudable precious democracy" but "guilty of all the horrors" alleged against it:

I assert that you would still fight with every force and argument at your command to get on the Israeli plane, you and every hard Leftist and every head-shaking misinformed One Worlder and anti-Semite up to and including Jimmy Carter and Noam Chomsky, would, if the issue were his life, suspend his most cherished convictions of Israeli perfidy, and plead for the protection of that state you would then not only acknowledge but assert to be your ally ...

There is nothing any reader of this book would not say or do to get himself and his family on the Israeli plane.

Read full American Thinker review here.