From the Publisher

s of this writing, the UN Security Council has passed a resolution calling for a “cessation of hostilities” in the war between Hezbollah and Israel. It is an extremely one-sided resolution that addresses the terrorist and the victim as morally equivalent.

By the time this issue of The Journal reaches your hands, the world will have turned twelve times over. It changes by the minute. Yet if we were to acknowledge the truth about our enemy, things might seem pretty constant.

Analysts pathetically verbalize answers and insights that are simultaneously complex and shallow. There is less to analyze if you face up to the fact that the enemy is pure evil and is driven by evil.

The Iranians like to call us the “Big Satan,” and Israel the “Little Satan.”

In his Paradise Lost, John Milton, the Puritan poet, quotes Satan as saying, “Better to reign in hell, than serve in Heaven.” That is the way Iran views this conflict. After centuries of lagging behind the West, a sense of inferiority and anger has set in. They remember when they were the center of cultural gravity.

Iran’s leaders resent not the dominance of America and the West, but its success. Our success is their definition of American evil. The G-d of Milton was not evil. It was Satan who was evil. Satan did not like the order of things; he wanted to be in charge. That was his failing. And so it is with al-Qaeda and Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Simply put, as with Satan, if you can’t improve upon it, destroy it. This is the crux of the conflict.

We can look for complicated explanations, but there is no need. We are engaged in what biblically or mythologically has been called the struggle between light and darkness.