A couple of weeks ago, as part of my normal routine, I was alternating between the left and right media to see what plans were being hatched by faux conservatives and illiberal liberals to pillage and plunder my family, to advance the imperial state, and to engage in half-truths, hyperbole, demagoguery, and outright propaganda.

I gritted my teeth, took a deep breath, and turned on the Sean Hannity radio show.

I found that his former theme song of bad music and belligerent lyrics ("We'll put a boot up your ass"} had been replaced with a new theme song of equally bad music, presumably sung by some popular country and western "artist," whose name I don't know and don't want to know, given that his vocal talents are the same as a cat when you step on his tail. 

Demagoguery and bad art go hand in hand.

By tuning into the Hannity show, I had entered a bipolar world, a world of black hats v. white hats, good v. evil, friends v. enemies, conservatives v. liberals, Republicans v. Democrats, and Americans v. Muslims, Russians and Chinese—a world in which, ipso facto, one side is right and the other side is wrong.  

A bipolar world also exists at the New York Times, CNBC, CNN and other media on the left.  The only difference is that the good and bad parties are the opposite of those on Sean Hannity and other conservative media.

There are three possibilities on any given political issue:

One party is right and the other party is wrong.

Both parties are right.

Both parties are wrong.

In a bipolar world, there is only the first possibility.

In any event, Hannity's guest was an Israeli diplomat.  Comfortable in Hannity's bipolar world, the diplomat spoke with righteous indignation about the latest Palestinian terrorism, which had resulted in the death of a Jewish mother and child.  Both he and Hannity went on to excoriate the Palestinians, as if Jews had not engaged in widespread terrorism for decades in Palestine prior to the Holocaust and afterwards.

Time to pause for a few caveats: 

It's possible to have great affection for the Jewish people, as I do, without embracing Zionism.  And admittedly, if I were forced to make a choice between living under the Israeli government or the Palestinian government, I'd choose the former in a nanosecond.  But unless one wants to live in a bipolar world, it's not necessary to hide the truth about Jewish terrorism in order to say good things about Jews and Israel. 

Furthermore, it's naïve for anyone to think that terrorism, force, and the confiscation of other people's property hasn't been the way of the world ever since humanoids stood upright and entered the African savannah.  Virtually all land in the world was stolen at some point, including land stolen by indigenous tribes from other indigenous tribes, long before colonialists and imperialists came on the scene.  Former terrorists and conquerors are today's civilized establishment.  None of us should be self-righteous about Zionist or Muslim terrorism, especially me.  After all, I'm writing this from a house that sits on land taken by force from the Salt River Pima Indians. 

Enough caveats.  Back to the subject at hand.   

Coincidentally, at the same time as I had tuned into the Sean Hannity show, I was reading Anonymous Soldiers, a scholarly book on the history of Zionist terrorism in Palestine, written by Bruce Hoffman, a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center, which is hardly a bastion of left-wing thinking.  The book covers the tumultuous period in Palestine from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to Great Britain withdrawing from Palestine and its United Nations mandate in 1948.  The author doesn't deny or downplay Arab terrorism.

Let's start with a quote in the book from a high British official in Palestine in 1945:

The young Jewish extremists, the product of a vicious education system, know neither toleration nor compromise; they regard themselves as morally justified in violence directed against any individual or institution that impedes the complete fulfillment of their demands . . .

On the other side are the Arabs, for the most part backward and less politically alive.  As far as Palestine is concerned there is probably nothing that has contributed so much to the growth of a sense of Arab nationalism as has the pressure of Zionism.  Their political leadership may still be inept.  Their daily life may still be hampered by medievalism and marred by ignorance and religious bias.  But even in their poverty and ignorance . . . the mass of the Palestinian Arabs are still capable of resisting, savagely and tenaciously, what they may consider an attempt to reduce them to a minority status in a land which they regard as theirs. 

The official who wrote this did not live in a bipolar world.  He didn't think much of either side in the Zionist-Arab conflict.  But he and other British officials had plenty reason to be angrier with the Zionists.

It wasn't as if Arabs hadn't engaged in terrorism.  But Arab terrorism, which culminated in the Arab Rebellion of 1936, was largely in response to Arabs being double-crossed by the Balfour Declaration, which revealed that the British promise during World War I of Arab independence was a lie.  Arabs felt that Zionists had joined forces with British imperialists against them.  The Declaration had opened the door for Jewish immigration to Palestine, largely from Russia and Eastern Europe, including many socialists and communists, who had no moral, legal or cultural ties to the Holy Land, other than a shared belief in the Old Testament.

Zionist terrorism, by contrast, was mostly in response to quotas that Britain had put on the immigration of these foreigners in the 1920s and 30s, in order to reduce the Zionist pressure for the establishment of a separate Jewish state, which, as the British knew, would result in a perpetual bloodbath, with Britain in the middle.  Even worse from the British perspective, the terrorism was directed at them, the very people who were trying to keep peace between Jews and Arabs—and the very people who had suffered immensely in World War II in defeating the Nazis.

It's amazing that Sean Hannity, Donald Trump, and other inhabitants of the bipolar world rail against immigration from Latin America, claiming that the immigrants take jobs away from Americans, bring crime, vote for socialists, and change the American culture.  Yet at the same time they can't see how Palestinians might resent an influx of European and Russian foreigners.

Demagoguery and a lack of empathy go hand in hand.

Zionist terrorism took many forms:  the bombing of public markets, railroads, and government buildings; attacks on cinemas, police stations, and Arab villages; the shooting and kidnapping of British soldiers; and the assassination of high British officials, including the assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo.

Lord Moyne had been a Member of Parliament, secretary of state for the colonies, a leader of the House of Lords, and minister of state in the Middle East.  His assassination would be comparable to Secretary of State John Kerry being assassinated today.

Zionist terrorism culminated in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which was not only a high-class hotel and meeting place for Jews, Britons, Arabs, and foreign dignitaries, but also the location of government offices.  It would be akin to bombing the Willard Hotel in Washington.

The 1945 bombing stood as the most lethal Middle Eastern terrorist attack until the 1983 suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon.  The death toll of 91 included 41 Arabs, 28 Britons, 17 Jews, and two Armenians, a Russian, and Egyptian, and a Greek national.  Nearly 70 others were injured.

Irgun leader Menachem Begin, who would later become prime minister of Israel, had sanctioned the bombing.  He would later claim that British authorities and hotel management had ignored warnings to evacuate the hotel. There is even a plaque at the site today that repeats the same canard.  The fact is that there wasn't enough time to evacuate before the bombs went off, especially in the face of the confusion and panic caused by Irgun terrorists entering the hotel with guns to place the explosives while their compatriots set off a diversionary bomb across the street. 

Regardless, the King David bombing and the preceding decades of terrorism run counter to the Israeli mythology and propaganda about Jewish settlers being a beleaguered and victimized minority in the midst of Arab fanatics—a counterpoint that cannot be found in Sean Hannity's echo chamber.

Well, it is now time for me to switch to an echo chamber on the left, where I'll hear that Jews are evil incarnate, Muslims are angelic victims, and indigenous peoples lived in peace and harmony before Europeans came along.