The eight Arabs just arrested in connection with terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow are all doctors or medical staff in a hospital, in one way or another employed by the National Health Service. The pursuit of medical careers got them into Britain without proper scrutiny and then provided a cover that cunningly shielded them from suspicion. These may well be the most educated and capable of all the Islamist terrorists revealed to date.

Their intention, clearly, is to set Muslims irretrievably against the British. Civil strife, the Islamists believe, is the necessary prelude to their victory over the degenerate infidels. In Baghdad, Afghanistan, Gaza, Pakistan, this same fantasy runs wild.

Some courage is required on the part of a Muslim to impose reality on the Islamist fantasy. Fatwas and murder prevent dialogue. But just as there once were faithful Communists whose inside knowledge of the party transformed them into informed and determined anti-Communists, so now there are jihadis whose experience has led them to expose Islamism.

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The death of Jakov Lind at 80 ought not to go unnoticed. Lind, the author of Soul of Wood, Landscape in Concrete, and Ergo, was a man of great talent, an idiosyncratic and powerful writer who carried with him the experience of surviving the Nazis. I used to run into him occasionally in the company of other multi-lingual émigrés comprising a pocket of literary London. The conversation usually turned to the subterfuges that had enabled him to stay alive during the war. He had had some instinct that if he could pass himself off as not Jewish, the safest place to be was inside Germany itself. He pulled it off. A teenager, he worked on barges on the Rhine. Towards the end of the war, he was a courier for the Luftwaffe, an occupation surely as dangerous and improbable as any. I remember him one evening explaining that quite a few Jews escaped by passing themselves off like this, and they were known as “submarines.” I also remember him saying cryptically, “We learnt to live in a cupboard.”

Born in Vienna, as Heinz Landwirth, he acquired pseudonyms easily. After the Anschluss in 1938, his parents managed to emigrate to mandatory Palestine, but for unclear reasons left their son behind. He went to Holland, and his odyssey began. After 1945 he rejoined his parents in Palestine, and I believe took part in Israel’s war of independence.

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Contrary to popular belief, the French are not really respecters of persons. They like to scoff, and they are better at it than most people. Philippe Val is a good example. In his mid-fifties, he is an ex-singer, a film buff, and a self-professed anarcho-kook. Since 1992 he has been editing a weekly satirical magazine called Charlie Hebdo, which has a circulation of 100,000. A collection of his writings has been published under a title that tells its own story, and may be translated as Good Screwings with bin Laden.

Jyllands Posten, a Danish publication, was hardly more in the public eye than Charlie Hebdo when in 2005 it commissioned a dozen cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, and ran them. A Danish imam, an Islamist, saw his chance and raced around the Muslim Brotherhood cells in several Arab countries. Soon they had arranged demonstrations, the burning of the Danish embassy in Beirut, and the boycott of Danish exports like cheese and Legos. To its lasting disgrace, Carrefour, the French supermarket chain, made a point of advertising that it did not sell Danish products.

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Until 2005, the French novelist Irène Nemirovsky, author of the much-lauded Suite Française, had been more or less completely forgotten, even by specialists in French literature between the wars. Her name did not feature in critical surveys or in the memoirs of contemporaries. Pure chance has led to the discovery of this gifted woman and her work.

She was born in Kiev in 1903, the child of Léon Nemirovsky, a rich Jewish banker, and Faiga (or Fanny, as she called herself), a self-regarding and unfeeling mother. Fleeing the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the family settled in Paris, where Léon rebuilt his fortune. Outwardly Irène seems to have been something of a Jazz-age, party-going flapper, but in fact she was observing the human behavior around her with penetrating originality.

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Lucie Aubrac has died at the age of 94. She certainly lived an adventure in World War II, but what sort of an adventure even now nobody can say with certainty. Perhaps she was a heroine who took part in armed struggle against the occupying Germans. That was her view of herself, as expressed in her 1993 autobiography Outwitting the Gestapo, and as shown in Claude Berri’s film Lucie Aubrac in 1997. President Jacques Chirac uttered what might be called the official eulogy for her, saying, “A light of the French resistance has been put out tonight. Lucie Aubrac embodied the commitment of women in the resistance.” The obituary in the Times of London took the story of her heroism at face value, with no mention at all that an alternative version ever existed.

Lucie and her husband Raymond Aubrac, both Communists, joined the resistance group known as Libération-sud in Lyons after the fall of France in 1940. In June 1943, leaders of the resistance met in a house in Caluire, a suburb of Lyons, in order to receive orders from Jean Moulin, parachuted in from London as the representative of General de Gaulle.

The Lyons Gestapo was headed at the time by Klaus Barbie, a hardline Nazi and a sadist who personally tortured his victims. He and a Gestapo detachment burst into the house at Caluire, arresting Jean Moulin and eight others, among them Raymond Aubrac. According to Lucie’s story, she then visited Barbie in his headquarters and persuaded him to let her see her husband. During a visit, she and Raymond planned his escape, which took place that October when Lucie led an ambush on the prison van escorting her husband and others to a different prison. Moulin died under Barbie’s torture without giving away any secrets.

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The Teapacks are an Israeli pop group, said to be punk-influenced, whose music is no doubt as ghastly as that of all such groups—if music is indeed the right generic description. “Push the Button,” the title of their latest song, is sung in English, French, and Hebrew, and contains the lines, “The world is full of terror/ If someone makes an error/ He’s gonna blow us up to biddy biddy kingdom come.” Also, “I don’t want to die/ I want to see the flowers bloom/ Don’t want to go kapoot-kaboom.” Not likely to be mistaken for Byron or even Shelley, certainly. But it is, nonetheless, this year’s Israeli entry for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Europe is at best a notional, perhaps geographical, concept, lacking unity or a specific character. Each of its component countries cherishes its own culture and language. Constructed in defiance of this reality, the European Union has been trying to evolve a culture that it can pretend is common (in the sense of general participation). The project is hopeless. All that the controlling bureaucrats in Brussels have been able to come up with are little stunts (such as soccer matches or golf teams) to challenge the United States. The Eurovision Song Contest is their prize exhibit, and indeed common—but in the sense of low and vulgar.

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W.H. Auden was born February 21, 1907, and his centenary year is therefore upon us. “We have one poet of genius today,” wrote Cyril Connolly in 1938 in his inquisitorial memoir Enemies of Promise. This praise has become more or less received opinion, as Auden’s reputation continues to rise, and the debt of contemporary poets to his style of intellect and clever comment remains as evident as ever.

One snag is that Auden in the 1930’s was a Communist fellow-traveler of the silliest kind. Writing his memoir, Connolly certainly knew and approved of the poem “Spain,” which Auden had published the previous year to register his Communist sympathies. “Tomorrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,” is a line that still lingers in the public memory. A more sinister totalitarian recommendation in that poem is “The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.” This caught the eye of George Orwell, who famously savaged Auden as someone who would be elsewhere when it came to pulling the trigger.

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One of the strangest features of the contemporary political landscape is the convergence everywhere of the Left with Muslim jihadis and extremists. Those who once protested against the installation of cruise missiles in Western Europe, say, now demonstrate against the war on terror. Those who praised the Soviet Union as peace-loving are now busy signing petitions and publishing articles to the effect that Iran’s nuclear program and nuclear weapons (if it comes to that) are a third-world success and nothing to worry about. Anti-Americanism has made bedfellows of people whose world views and values are ostensibly incompatible.

David Horowitz was early in pointing out what he called this “unholy alliance.” Now an English writer, Nick Cohen, has tackled this subject in a book with the title, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way. His left-wing credentials are impeccable. His parents were Communists devotedly clinging to the party line, whatever it might be, and they brought him up with a “loathing” of conservatives. The Observer newspaper is the voice of the English Left, aimed at the intelligentsia, and he is its leading political commentator. He knew some Iraqi exiles, including Kanan Makiya, and from them he understood that Saddam Hussein was a fascist, pure and simple. For him, intellectuals—indeed all human beings—have to be against fascism everywhere and at all times, and that too is quite simple.

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Maurice Papon has just died at the age of ninety-six, but his name will always stand for France’s moral collapse in 1940, and that country’s inability—or reluctance—to redress matters afterwards. In his capacity as a ranking Vichy official, the documentation proves, he signed the deportation orders to Auschwitz for 1,690 Jews, 223 of whom were children, organizing sixteen trains for them, the last in June 1944 when German defeat was certain. It was also his idea to send the bill for the expense of the requisite cattle-trucks to the Jewish representative council, thus obliging the victims to pay for their journey to be murdered. One of his German superiors described him as a sincere collaborator, “co-operating correctly with the Feldkommandatur.”

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