...my friend and fellow activist, Akbar Ganji, who spent six years in Evin prison, condemned the "intolerable" human-rights violations in Iran. But he also argued that funds from the U.S. to promote democracy in Iran had "made it easy for the Iranian regime to describe its opponents as mercenaries of the U.S. and to crush them with impunity."

I respectfully disagree. There are many sides to this debate, but one thing is clear: Those in Iran who favor receiving foreign assistance and consider international solidarity essential to the success of Iran's homegrown civic movements cannot speak freely. If they do, they will be subject to immediate retaliation by the regime. The lack of robust, transparent appeals for outside help by civic leaders should not be confused with a lack of need or desire for such help.

This is not merely the "normal" Anti-Semitism of racial prejudice or religious and social discrimination. This is also not the kind of hostility to Jews found in the Koran. We are dealing here with a hardcore Anti-Semitism which dehumanises and demonises Jews, and which has a great deal in common with Nazi ideology. In Islamism this hatred of Jews is given a further radical edge by its association with the idea of religious war, with a global religious mission, a belief in Paradise, and the rewards of martyrdom. This makes it at the same time suicidal and genocidal....

This culture of death which extinguishes the instinct that normally unites all human beings, the survival instinct, is something beyond imagination. It is something George Orwell was not able to write about. The shocking malice of such messages leads people who wish to keep a firm hold on normal patterns of reason to suppress them or block them out. "We instinctively look away, as we do whenever we are confronted with monstrous deformity," writes David Gelernter.

Nothing is harder or more frightening to look at than a fellow human who is bent out of shape. But while this may to some extent excuse the attitude of the ordinary citizen, it cannot justify the way the media, the academia and the politicians have been behaving. Our task is to do the opposite. We must not look away, but instead look inside the fantasy world of the perpetrators and seek to grasp the immanent logic behind their actions. If one wants to combat and repel the Islamist ideology, one must first take it seriously as a specific outlook, with its own principles and history.