Ours is an age when the moral authority of accusers is at its height. Also the moral authority of accusations. There was a time when accusations had to be proven. That requirement has long since passed. After all, why would anyone bear false witness? So everybody is a witness, especially those with phantasmagoric tales to tell, especially those who yearn to testify against liberal societies which have established and proven processes to alert their own demos about evil. There are many of these foul witnesses: some ideologues, some ideological liars, some resentful, some haters. Like haters of Jews, of which in the arrested world of Islam there are more and more. As there are more and more among philo-Islamists, a cultural sickness in the West not yet fully gauged.

1. The Fall of Human Rights Watch

Robert L. Bernstein is of the best of American liberalism, of the best of American intellectual liberalism. He was chairman for a full quarter century of Random House, a distinguished New York publishing house. He was also the founder of Human Rights Watch. That was roughly 30 years ago, and he was the working chairman for two decades. Subsequently, he was the organization's chairman emeritus, watching--I would guess--with horror as the institution he established lost track of the defining distinctions between democratic societies and tyrannies.

Human Rights Watch was a light for those actually or spiritually imprisoned in the many real-life gulags spread throughout the world. But human rights are violated in both closed and open societies, and HRW didn't ignore the abuses of milder despotisms or, for that matter, of vaguely progressive commonwealths. There are such.