STOP BY ENOUGH Middle East "peace" rallies these days and you’ll feel like Churchill in the late 1930s, who wondered how much longer his countrymen would be swept up in pathetic attempts to rationalize Hitler’s behavior. I go to these things compulsively, wondering how much further into the absurd these delusional people will go. These gatherings, populated with anti-Western, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist zealots, quickly move from espousing annoyingly earnest rhetoric of the "give peace a chance" sort to damning Israel as the sole villain in the Middle East. It’s bad enough that rally-goers unthinkingly equate Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat, a dictator, with Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, a democratically elected leader. Even worse, with increasing enthusiasm they liken Sharon to Hitler.

At least here in the United States this inane thinking is expressed with words. In Europe, the rhetoric has devolved into vile acts. There, proponents of "peace," aided by unruly mobs of Arab thugs, proclaim their peaceful urges in fine Orwellian style by burning synagogues, beating up Jewish kids playing soccer, and harassing old folks ambling along the streets. Meanwhile, pampered aristos casually malign Israel in the course of conversation: just this past December, at a fancy dinner party hosted by Daily Telegraph owner Lord Black, the French ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s described Israel as "that shitty little country."

Practitioners of anti-Semitism have recourse to all the antique rationales: the Jews killed Christ; the Jews are clannish; the Jews control the fill-in-the-blanks (media? banks? transportation system? universities?). Over the last century, though, many anti-Semites have devised a fanciful, self-serving escape clause: they are not anti-Jewish, they tell themselves and the world, just anti-Israel. These last are oblivious to Martin Luther King Jr.’s acute, unapologetic observation that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

For their part, Arabs, less sophisticated in the nuances of anti-Semitism, simply call for the murder of Jews, including ultra-Orthodox residents of parts of Jerusalem — Jews who don’t even recognize the existence of Israel. Such murder is advocated in the tightly censored press of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Meanwhile, in the last 19 months, Arabs have launched 60 suicide bombings in Israel. Iraq gives $25,000 to the families of each of these mass murderers. Iran was recently caught shipping 50 tons of high-tech weaponry to the Arafat war machine. (It was intercepted in the Red Sea by Israeli naval commandos.) Iraq gives $25,000 to each of the families of these mass murderers. And who knows how much silent money has been funneled in that direction from the Saudi royals. The ruse of mere political opposition, which sustained some Westerners’ delusion that the Arabs simply (simply!) wanted to undermine Israel, has been abandoned. It is now full steam ahead: "Death to the Jews" has joined "All Palestine for the Palestinians alone" in the rhetorical arsenal. And by Palestine, they mean Israel as well as the territories.

I WORK AT NIGHT as a radio talk-show host. Lately, my callers and I have been engaged in two main topics: the collapse of Cardinal Law’s "moral" authority owing to his failure to deal with priests who molest kids, and the war between Israel and the Palestinians. What I hear about the Middle East is a drumbeat of ignorance masquerading as historical fact, coupled with unashamed calls for, as one man put it a few weeks back, "completing the job Hitler began." This man moved gingerly from demanding first that Israel remove its troops immediately from "Palestinian territory" — there is, of course, no such thing — to dissolving the whole country and sending its Jewish inhabitants packing "back" to Europe, to finally advocating, with amazing sang-froid, the total annihilation of the Jewish people.

Of course, this one call isn’t representative of what most Americans are thinking. But I do receive a disproportionate number of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish calls to those who take the other side. What this suggests to me, after 26 years in the business, is that Jews and pro-Semitic gentiles simply don’t care to be heard publicly. Perhaps they are too placid (or maybe too stupid) to recognize that while few listeners ever call, lots of people pay attention to those who do, and the average listener absorbs what seemingly informed callers have to say.

One thing has become clear to me as I have listened to the balance of my show’s callers weigh in against Israel. It is that our government’s mixed-signal preachments on terrorism and the Israeli-Palestinian horror have contributed to European disdain for Israel, Arab determination to annihilate Jews, the United Nations’ clear tilt against Israel (most recently by calling for an investigation into what happened at the Jenin refugee camp while doing nothing in response to the lethal string of suicide bombings against Israel), and the American "peace’ movement’s insistence that Israel is the sole offender in this war.

It’s understandable, though hardly commendable, that because Europe has thus far been spared the jolting horror experienced in this country on September 11, 2001, Europeans just don’t "get" the nexus between the US war against terrorism and the Israeli version of the same. But then how could they get it when President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell don’t know how to express it?

After all, Bush and Powell have tangled themselves up in conceptual and strategic knots. In 1991, Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, convinced the first president Bush not to pursue the Gulf War to its logical conclusion: the destruction of Saddam Hussein and his terror regime. Now Powell and others have convinced the second president Bush that the only way to prosecute the war on terrorism is to re-establish a "coalition" with "partners" among Arab dictatorships who would rather live in a world in which Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction than see any Arab regime come under attack by infidels. So what we get from alternate sides of the presidential mouth is "You are either with us or against us" and "We will pursue terrorism wherever it is found," along with "I say it again: Israel must withdraw without delay from Palestinian areas." Translated from Bushonics, that means: the United States will go full-tilt against forces that proclaim their intent to destroy America, but Israel mustn’t do the same against forces that proclaim their intent to destroy Israel.

Foolish consistency may well be the hobgoblin of little minds, but rational consistency is essential to policymaking. The administration’s statements may possibly be intended as a "fool you" gambit to make the Arab extremists believe that Washington regards Israel’s attempt to root out terrorism as illegitimate. But if so, it’s a "fool us" gambit in that Arab dictators and their howling mobs have taken such statements seriously and stepped up their murderous assaults. In Clintonian terms, Bush has empowered the Arab killers and continues to enable them by causing them to think that they are free to share their murderous rage with the world. What most Americans don’t understand, and what my angriest callers don’t "get," is that allowing Israel to be ravaged will inspire similar tactics against us.

Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently estimated that the percentage of the Israeli population killed by suicide bombers — nearly 500 deaths — translates proportionally in American terms into many tens of thousands of people. No thinking person could say with any seriousness that if we suffered such atrocities in our malls, restaurants, buses, and other public places, we would do anything less than what Israel is doing: exact a horrendous price from the perpetrators.