Just as the Holocaust expressed the quintessential nature of National Socialism, so did the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia (1975-78) represent the purest embodiment of Communism: what it turns into when pushed to its logical conclusion. Its leaders would stop at nothing to attain their objective, which was to create the first truly egalitarian society in the world: to this end they were prepared to annihilate as many of their people as they deemed necessary. It was the most extreme manifestation of the hubris inherent in Communist ideology, the belief in the boundless power of an intellectual elite guided by the Marxist doctrine, with resort to unrestrained violence in order completely to reshape life. The result was devastation on an unimaginable scale.

The leaders of the Khmer Rouge received their higher education in Paris, where they absorbed Rousseau's vision of "natural man," as well as the exhortations of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre to violence in the struggle against colonialism. ("One must kill," Sartre wrote. "To bring down a European is to ... suppress at the same time the oppressor and the oppressed.") On their return to Cambodia, they organized in the northeastern hills a tightly disciplined armed force made up largely of illiterate and semiliterate youths recruited from the poorest peasantry. These troops, for the most part twelve - to fourteen-year-old adolescents, were given intense indoctrination in hatred of all those different from themselves, especially city dwellers and the Vietnamese minoriry. To develop a "love of killing and consequently war," they were trained, like the Nazi SS, in tormenting and slaughtering animals.

Their time came in early 1975, when the Khmer overthrew the government of Lon Nol, installed bv the Americans, and occupied the country's capital, Phnom Penh. The population at large had no inkling what lay in store, because in their propaganda the Khmer Rouge promised to pardon servants of the old regime, rallying all classes against the "imperialists" and landowners. Yet the instant Khmer Rouge troops entered Phnom Penh, they resorted to the most radical punitive measures. Convinced that cities were the nidus of all evil - in Fanon's words, the home of "traitors and knaves" - the Khmer Rouge ordered the capital, with its 2.5 million inhabitants, and all other urban centers to be totally evacuated. The victims, driven into the countryside, were allowed to salvage only what they could carry on their backs. Within one week all Cambodian cities were emptied. Four million people, or 60 percent of the population, suffered exile, compelled to live under the most trying conditions, overworked as well as undernourished. Secondary and higher schools were shut down.

Then the carnage began. Unlike Mao, whom he admired and followed in many respects, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, did not waste time on "reeducation" but proceeded directly to the extermination of those categories of the population whom he suspected of actual or potential hostility to the new order: all civilian and military employers of the old regime, former landowners, teachers, merchants, Buddhist monks, and even skilled workers. Members of these groups, officially relegated to the lowest class of citizens and deprived of all rights, including access to food rations, were either summarily shot or sent to perform forced labor until they dropped dead from exhaustion. These condemned unfortunates constituted, potentially, over two-thirds of the population. They were systematically arrested, interrogated, and tortured until they implicated others, and then executed. The executions involved entire families, including small children, for Pol Pot believed that dissenting ideas and attitudes, derived from one's social position, education, or occupation, were "evil microbes" that spread like disease. Members of the Communist Party, considered susceptible to contagion, were also subject to liquidation. After the Vietnamese expelled the Khmer Rouge from Cambodia, they discovered mountains of skulls of its victims.

The peasants were not spared, being driven into "cooperatives" modeled on the Chinese. The state appropriated all the food produced by these communes and, as in pharaonic Egypt, having stored it in temples and other government depositories, doled it out at its discretion. These measures upset traditional rural practices and led to food shortages that in 1978-79, following an unusually severe drought, produced a massive famine.

The killings intensified throughout the forty-four months that the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia. People were executed for such offenses as being late to work, complaining about food, criticizing the government, or engaging in pre-marital sex. In sadism, the brutalities were fully comparable to those perpetrated by the Nazis. Thus on the Vietnamese border

Khmer Rouge soldiers would rape a Vietnamese woman, then ram a stake or bayonet into her vagina. Pregnant women were cut open, their unborn babies yanked out and slapped against the dying mother's face. The yotheas [youths] also enjoyed cutting the breasts off well endowed Vietnamese women.

Cases were reported of children being ordered to kill their parents.

The toll of these massacres was appalling. According to reliable estimates, the population of Cambodia at the time the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 was 7.3 million; when the Vietnamese took over in 1978, it had declined to 5.8 million. Allowing for the natural population increase during the intervening four years, it should have been over 8 million. In other words, the Pol Pot regime was responsible for the death or population deficit of some 2 million Cambodian citizens, or over one-quarter of the population. These victims represented the best educated and most skilled elements of the nation. The gruesome experiment has been characterized as a "human tragedy of almost unprecedented proportions [that] occurred because political theoreticians carried out their grand design on the unsuspecting Khmer people."

Some Western intellectuals, unwilling to blame this unprecedented slaughter on the Communists, attributed it to the Americans, who in 1964-73 had bombed Cambodia in an attempt to destroy the Vietcong forces that had sought there. It is difficult to see, however, why the Cambodians' rage against the Americans would vent itself in the killing of 2 million of their own people.

It may be noted that there were no demonstrations anywhere in the world against these outrages and the United Nations passed no resolutions condemning them. The world took them in its stride, presumably because they were committed in what was heralded as a noble cause.

Kingdom of Heaven asks a question that has plagued historians for decades: what would happen if a late 20th-century, secular, agnostic, multiculturalist, progressive, sensitive Hollywood type were to be transported back in time to participate in one of history's grandest spectacles? Could one of the most embarrassingly culturally insensitive chapters of our history be rewritten or perhaps even avoided altogether, through the efforts of one determined, sensitive man who is as open-minded about stuff as we are?

It's a neat idea, and it is arguably needed now more than ever. So Ridley Scott, himself a knight like Walter Scott before him, sets the Wayback for the late 12th Century, and sends a former elf named Legolas back to medieval Jerusalem, just to see if he can single-handedly make the Crusades more palatable to modern sensibilities by forging a caring, mutually-fulfilling Christian-Saracen support network in the Crusader Kingdom.

Legolas has a degree of success, at first. Jerusalem folks, it is agreed, should stick together; Jerusalem folks should all be pals. Mohammedans dance with the infidels' daughters; Crusaders dance with the Saracens' gals. You're OK! No, man, you're OK! You and me are free to be you and me. These kids are all right.

And it might have worked, too, were it not for those meddling Knights Templar. Legolas ladles out prodigious quantities of chicken soup for the soul, and practically does himself an injury trying to buy the world a coke and keep it company, but there's just no way these Knights Templar are ever gonna be Peppers. No way. It only takes a few bad apples to spoil the whole idyllic, culturally tolerant People's Republic of Jerusalem, and these Templars are apples of surpassing badness. So in the end, the butterfly effect is negligible. The wise and gentle Saracens are finally provoked by the diabolical Templars into sacking Jerusalem, despite Legolas's spendidly anachronistic touchy-feely neurotic handwringing. Yet the handwringing does lend the story an otherwise hard-to-identify triumph-of-the-human-spirited-ness and transforms it into a Valuable Lesson for Us Today. As a caption reminds us at the end, the resulting conflict in the Middle East has lasted to this day. Maybe one elf with a time machine can't do it alone, after all. But, maybe, next time, with your help...

There's a long tradition of this sort of thing in movies, of course. Our hero will be the one guy with contemporary sensibilities, brooding and fretting amidst a swarm of depressingly ignorant, unevolved, unprogressive barbarians. He's not sure whether all this conflict is such a hot idea after all. "Maybe there's more to life than wealth and power and glory," the reluctant warrior will say. "After all, what has the minotaur ever done to me?" What he really wants, he realizes, is a more just society, good schools for our kids, funding for the arts, abortions that are safe, legal, and rare, some cage-free eggs, a 12 pack of Kabbalah water, maybe, and the love of one special person who truly loves you for who you are deep down inside. Of course, in order to give love, he realizes, one must be open enough to receive love, which isn't always as easy as it sounds. Above all, he really only wants to be the best parent he can be, even though it's hard to know if you've made the right choices till it's too late. Or that's how it seems sometimes. You need to set boundaries, but you need to give them the freedom to make their own mistakes, even when it hurts. It's a real dilemma. He throws down his weapons, sighs, pats the minotaur on the nose, and trudges off. We know how he feels...

...[I]n last Friday's sermon televised on Palestinian Authority television the paid employee of the PA described the Jews as an AIDS-like virus responsible for all the world's evils, blamed their economic sabotage of Germany for the Holocaust, and predicted the future triumph of Islam over America, a time when "everything will be relieved of the Jews, even the stones and trees." Yes, this is the same Palestinian Authority whose elected leader, himself a published Holocaust denier, will soon visit the President of the United States and whose organization will receive millions of taxpayer dollars.

Anyone familiar with the history of Islam and its 14-centuries-long violent jihad against the West and the Jews will not be surprised or shocked by these events. They express perfectly the arrogant intolerance of a religion convinced it has been chosen by God to rule the world, and so is justified in using every means, whether violence or propaganda, to fulfill that divine mandate. As the final and complete revelation of the divine, Islam feels no need to respect or tolerate other religions or secular notions like "human rights," for they are all the detritus of infidel history to be swept away in the final triumph of the one true religion.

Hence, while we in the West anxiously monitor our words and deeds for even the slightest offense against Islamic sensibilities, we receive in exchange no such consideration; indeed, our eager protestations of respect merely excite more contempt. Thus even as we protest our respect for Islam, Jews continue to be vilified with anti-Semitic rhetoric redolent of Nazi Germany, Palestinian terrorists befoul one of Christianity's most sacred churches, the Al-Aksa mosque in Jerusalem still sits on the site of the Jewish Temple, and in Istanbul Hagia Sophia, once one of Christendom's greatest churches, is still a mosque. Worse still, a whole revisionist history in which the intolerant, imperialistic conqueror is transformed into the tolerant, peace-loving victim of Western imperialism is propagated by self-loathing Westerners whose bigotry against their own culture confirms the Islamist view that we are indeed Godless heathens and spiritual cripples.

Just look at Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, a truly Orwellian reversal of history in which the fanatical jihadists are depicted as tolerant and civilized, the Christian believers are caricatured as either venal hypocrites or psychopaths, and the only good Europeans are those who have lost their faith. The mentality that would spend over a hundred million dollars on this historical lie is that of a psychological dhimmi, the non-Moslem who concedes Islam's superiority and hence right to rule him. That is, the world-view of those for whom appetite and pleasure are the highest goods, flabby tolerance is the camouflage of moral exhaustion, and respect for the culture of the "other" is merely an expression of disbelief in the value of one's own.

...only the irrational and ignorant would believe, this willingness to demonize the culture that created you and to extol as superior the culture that wants to destroy you can only be described as suicidal. Certainly the Islamist sees it that way, which is why he feels confident in predicting the ultimate triumph of his religion: he is willing to die and kill for his beliefs, whereas significant numbers of Westerners don't really believe that there is anything worth dying and killing for.

Increasingly we Westerners resemble the Eloi of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, beautiful, gentle, highly civilized hedonists whose fate is to be devoured raw by the brutal Morlocks. We are the beneficiaries of a culture created by those before us who forged European civilization in the fires of resistance to Islamic jihad: in Spain, in Sicily, in Eastern Europe, in Greece — the plunder, rape, slaughter, massacres, sacks, kidnapping, and enslavement perpetrated by the armies of Allah were for centuries fought by those whose names now most Westerners have forgotten or would be embarrassed to claim as their own. Don John, Charles Martel, Leo the Isaurian, Prince Eugene, Montecuccoli, Andrea Doria, El Cid, Sobieski, Charlemagne, Suvorov, Boucicaut,, Hunyadi, Fernando II of Castile, Alfonso I of Aragon, Guiscard, Harold Hardrada-who among us knows anything about the men who fought and killed so that Europe, and Europe's offspring America, today looks like Europe and America instead of looking like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Syria?

Because of the brutal violence of those warriors against jihad, we in the West today enjoy the luxury of cynicism, cheap irony, effete tolerance, and hedonism. We moral dwarves stand on the shoulders of those giants and spit on their heads, thinking our ingratitude is really an intellectual sophistication superior to the primitive superstitions and naïve ideals that have made our lives of freedom and prosperity possible. Meanwhile jihad by other means — demography, immigration, terrorism, the oil weapon — continues apace, at least until the time when a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon falls into the hands of a modern jihadist and we are returned to the sort of slaughter our ancestors suffered for centuries. Maybe then we'll wake up.

The new biology is reasserting the primacy of the whole organism - the individual - over the behaviour of isolated genes...

And what about "selfish genes", the concept introduced by the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins to describe how some genes promote their own proliferation, even at the expense of the host organism? The concept has been hugely influential but has tended to promote a reductionist gene-centric view of biology. This viewpoint has been fiercely criticised by many biologists, such as the late Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that the unit of biology is the individual not her genes. Systems biology is reasserting the primacy of the whole organism - the system - rather than the selfish behaviour of any of its components.

Experienced ABC journalist Tony Eastley said it was a "figure of speech"; his boss, Greg Wilesmith, called it an "error".

But Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone said a comment made by Eastley in an interview about the Vivian Alvarez Solon affair was "indicative of an attitude" at the national broadcaster.

Listeners to ABC radio's AM may have choked on their cornflakes yesterday morning.

While attempting to establish how the seriously injured Ms Alvarez Solon, an Australian citizen, came to be deported to the Philippines, Eastley came out with the throwaway line that Government officials dropped her off in the country - perhaps from a moving car.

Senator Vanstone took umbrage, saying his comments were "extraordinary" and "indicative of an attitude" at the ABC.

ABC acting head of national programs Greg Wilesmith swiftly removed the interview's controversial parts from the transcript and audio links on AM's website.

"In the course of the interview and in the course of a question, Tony had made an error," he told The Age yesterday.

"It seemed to us best to remove the error rather than allow the inaccuracy to stand."

Mr Wilesmith described Senator Vanstone's assertion of an "attitude" at the national broadcaster as "a nonsense".

"I don't think that Tony Eastley's interview with Senator Vanstone is going to affect the relationship between the ABC and the Government at all because clearly live radio has certain perils and on this day... there was a slip of the tongue," he said.

Eastley admitted that there were "sensitivities" between the ABC and the Government, although he dismissed the notion that there was a poor attitude towards the Government at the broadcaster.

"I'm not surprised (that the interview was changed on the website) because of sensitivities and the like between the ABC and this Government," he said.

"(The comment) wasn't meant in real terms - that an immigration official had pushed a woman out of a speeding car... I wasn't casting aspersions on any immigration officials or the department."

The non-religious person today is... rather like a person who wanders into a shop to buy a breakfast cereal and finds only one variety is for sale. Moreover, this variety isn't very tasty, because the kind of atheism that flourishes today is old and tired.

Today's prominent atheists - people such as Jonathan Miller and Richard Dawkins - hawk around a belief system that reeks of the 19th century, which is not surprising, for that is when it was born. Dawkins is virulently anti-religious, passionately pro-science and artistically illiterate - thus manifesting all three of the main characteristics of the old atheism in a particularly pure form. His attacks on religion are so vitriolic and bad-tempered that they alienate the sensitive reader and give atheism a bad name. As a friend of mine once commented, no other atheist has done more for the cause of religion than Richard Dawkins.