It appears I have been going too easy on Gazeta Wyborcza. Here’s Tony Judt on Adam Michnik, its editor: “Today, America�s liberal armchair warriors are the �useful idiots� of the War on Terror. In fairness, America�s bellicose intellectuals are not alone. In Europe, Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish intellectual resistance to Communism, has become an outspoken admirer of the embarrassingly Islamophobic Oriana Fallaci…” Refreshing to see a Western European who is aware of the existence of Eastern Europe. Judt’s article is at The London Review of Books.

Judt was supposed to give a talk at the Polish Consul in New York but it was called off at short notice. According to Judt this was after pressure from Jewish organisations. Judt is critical of Israel and is as a result sometimes accused of anti-Semitism. In reporting this incident, Gazeta Wyborcza (October 6th) scrambled to find a Judt quote which might seem to justify such charges. This was what they came up with:

The very idea of a Jewish state, a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exceptional privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are permanently excluded comes from a different era. In short: Israel is an anachronism.

Chilling indeed: can Judt really be saying that establishing religion is out of date?

The church was disestablished in Ireland in 1869.