Here is Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, writing in the Financial Times about the latest American Enterprise Institute shindig, where neocon bigwig Bernard Lewis received an award and made a speech defending the Crusades as the first phase of the necessary struggle against “Islamofascism”:
Were one to start counting ironies here, where would one stop? Here was a Jewish scholar criticising the Pope for apologising to Muslims for a holy war against Muslims, which was also a massacre of the Jews. Here were the theorists of the invasion of Iraq, many of them also Jewish, applauding the notion that the crusades were not so terrible and embracing a time horizon that makes it impossible to judge their war an error. And here was the clubhouse of the neo-conservatives, throwing itself a lavish party when the biggest question in American politics is how to escape the hole they have dug.
In attendance: Dick Cheney, applauding; Clarence Thomas, the first to rise for a standing ovation; Richard Perle, Robert Bork, and Reason editor Nick Gillespie. We hear the crab bisque was “better-than-average.”