Even when Victor Hanson goes a little over the top (which he does in this piece, I think) he’s always, as the Brits say, a cracking good read: The Pied Piper of Tora Bora.

The educated of the Middle East hid in the dust and melee of bin Laden’s entranced throng, but joined in at the back nonetheless. Did their ears prick up to his wafting notes out of envy — and with it, a sense of inferiority? Or was their behavior explicable — because they merely lacked the courage to demand of their own culture an end to fundamentalism, polygamy, sexual apartheid, the clan, statism, and all the other pathologies that prevent Islam from moving ahead in the modern world?

In their equivocation, contortions, and passive-aggressive circumlocutions, the educated too are close to going over the edge with all the rest of the piper’s zombies. Every time a novelist or journalist — whether the respected Nobel laureate Mr. Mafhouz or Abdul Rahman al Rashed of the state-owned Al Sharq al Awsat — announces that the American bombing of Afghanistan was as much an act of terror as September 11, the piper smiles and plays on. No Western chauvinist, no crazed nativist or half-educated xenophobe has done so much to discredit the Middle Eastern intellectual as has the snickering minstrel bin Laden.