I have recently been reading Paul Scott’s series of novels about the last years of British India. It’s hard not to notice that the British rulers of India, especially the military men, rather favored Muslims over Hindus. You get the same impression from Kipling’s stories, and from George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books . There was a perception that Hinduism was a bit snivelly, pacifistic, commercial, and lower-middle-class. This is very unfair to Hinduism, whose most sacred text, after all, is a battlefield conversation , and whose military castes could, at the height of their vigor, have given any samurai or ghazi a run for his money. (And that’s not even to mention the fightingest Hindus of all .) The perception was plainly there, though. It was much fortified in later years by Gandhi, with his doctrine of non-violence, his spindly frame, his fussiness about diet and sex, his high-pitched voice and his clerkish glasses. (Gandhi’s War Medal — for organizing a battlefield ambulanc...

Who recently said: “These Jews started 19 Crusades. The 19th was World War (1). Why? Only to build Israel.” Some holdover Nazi? Hardly. It was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews — whom he refers to as “bacteria” — controlled China, India, and Japan, and ran the United States. Who alleged: “The Arabs who were involved in 9/11 cooperated with the Zionists, actually. It was a cooperation. They gave them the perfect excuse to denounce all Arabs.” A conspiracy nut? Actually, it was former Democratic U.S. Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota. He denounced Israel on a Hezbollah-owned television station, adding: “I marveled at the Hezbollah resistance to Israel. . . . It was a marvel of organization, of courage and bravery.” And finally, who claimed at a United Nations-sponsored conference that democratic Israel was “much worse” than the former apartheid South Africa, and that it “undermines the international community’s reaction to...