[(Continued from p.11)]
ish vampires torture victims to obtain blood to make "Purim pastries." When this was widely reported in the Western press the editor distanced himself from the articles. But regardless of the bad press it gets them abroad, the blood libel is irresistible to the Saudis. A few months later it is back, with a columnist in the Saudi state-controlled daily Al-Jazirah (who is also editor-in-chief of the Islamic Research periodical published by the Islamic Clerics Association of Saudi Arabia) "reporting" again that Jews use human blood for baked goods for their holidays.In Not Seeing Red: American Librarianship and the Soviet Union 1917-60, former AFSI executive director Stephen Karetzky has written a fascinating book on a previously wholly ignored subject. The emerging Soviet state placed enormous emphasis upon libraries: indeed, Lenin and his wife Krupskaya were directly responsible for the ideological and institutional shaping of the totalitarian library system. The reaction of American librarians was all too similar to the wilful blindness of intellectuals to Soviet reality described so well by Paul Hollander in Political Pilgrims. Even though the Soviet approach to librarianship was clearly antithetical to that of the United States, leading U.S. librarians wrote about it admiringly and actually helped Soviet librarians to implement the system in the first three decades after 1917.
It is important to remember that for most American professionals, it was the USSR's library world which was their primary entry point for learning about Soviet society. After World War II, Karetzky documents the other ways in which American librarians fostered the myths about Soviet society that have been shattered after its fall.
While the Western press hovers over the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza (recently anxiously reporting on every brick that crashes in Arafat's compound), there has been very little notice taken of the ongoing toll of Arab lives in Algeria. Dare we call it racism? Whatever the term, the West seems to care little when Arabs kill other Arabs. In the last ten years (almost precisely the period of Oslo), an estimated 120,000 Algerians have been killed as a result of Islamic terror. Markets, homes, cemetaries, beaches -- the Islamists consider them all fair game.
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Outpost - 12 - October 2002