It’s easy to figure out why the various dictatorships in the Middle East have made a scapegoat of Israel. It allows the various imams and sheiks to keep their oppressed masses focused on a common enemy, lest they awaken and realize that it’s not the Jews who keep the men poor and powerless and keep the women ignorant and oppressed.

Trying to figure out why government leaders, universities and individuals, in so-called civilized nations choose to side with Arabs and Muslims, who not only out-number Israel’s Jewish population 300,000-1, but who represent the antithesis of everything Americans and Europeans allegedly hold dear is the real mystery.

A visitor from another planet would see on one side a people, Israelis, who are educated and accomplished, who believe in freedom of speech, religion and assembly, who defend a free press and who subscribe to the full equality of the sexes.

On the other side, he would see people who, in the 21st century, think, live and behave no differently than their ancestors did 1300 years ago. They stone to death adulterers, they behead their enemies, they perform female mutilations as part of their religion, they make martyrs of those who suicide-bomb school buses and pizza parlors, they rain missiles down on civilians and, proving that they nevertheless have a droll sense of humor, they refer to their religion as one of peace.

If you asked the alien which group a free and democratic people would favor, he would assume it was a trick question. When told that the majority of people in the western world favored the latter group, he would assume it was a trick answer.

His next order of business would be to get back to his space ship and get away from these lunatics as fast as he could.

The question as to why America’s leaders, academicians and young people, choose to hate Israelis, why they continue to believe the worst of them even when the photos and news stories purporting to show their villainy are proven to be clumsy attempts at propaganda, can only be explained by a deep-rooted anti-Semitism.

When Americans, who have experienced not only 9/11, but scores of other brutalities at the hands of Israel’s enemies over the past 30 years, continue siding with those same enemies, it’s impossible to explain except as rampant anti-Semitism.

When a nation that is rooted in Judeo-Christian values, whose Constitution and Declaration of Independence were based on those values, sides with those who despise liberty and freedom, the contradiction cannot be explained except as an anti-Semitism that is bred in the bone. And isn’t it odd that the very same people who go around insisting that “separation of church and state” actually exists in the Constitution have no problem at all defending Muslim theocracies?

No matter how many trains are blown up in Spain, no matter how many riots and murders are committed in France or England, Russia, Germany or Holland, the anti-Semites of Europe inevitably excuse the actual perpetrators, while holding the Jews accountable.

Perhaps if God made an appearance and announced: “When I made them my chosen people, I did not choose for them to be sacrificed to the barbarians,” the world would shape up.

Short of that, my money is on the barbarians.