This is the lede headline on the front page of today's Financial Times. The president is Horst Köhler and he is a deeply conservative man. The German president does not have much real power but he has intellectual and moral credit. And since his lashing is of the bankers who were responsible for a "massive destruction of assets," it is important to know that Köhler was the managing director and chairman of the board of the International Monetary Fund, that is, the real working head of the I.M.F.

Global financial markets have become a "monster," the president said, as reported by Bertrand Benoit and James Wilson. He also bemoaned the excessive pay of top executives which he believes leads them to make more and more injudicious judgements in business. "Scandalous" is how he characterized the whole system.

"The complexity of financial products and the possibility to carry out huge leveraged trades with little (of their) own capital have allowed the monster to grow...also responsible (is) the grotesquely high compensation of individual finance managers," said the former C.E.O. of I.M.F., a person who surely knows.

How about a candidate for the American presidency uttering such truths? How could he or she, being so indebted to tycoons?

A headline in today's Boston Globe reports that "Edwards, rights group, back Obama." The article by Scott Helman actually delivers two shockers to Hillary. The first is that John Edwards, who has real rapport with and real understanding of working class Americans, has endorsed Barack Obama.

The second, probably deeper shock is that the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) has also chosen Obama over Clinton. I can imagine Hillary's whining: "After all, I've done for them." Here's what she really said: I am "disappointed because of the work I've done for so many years." Just as I said she said.

Of course, the NARAL folk are realists, and they have a cause to defend and project. But it's hard to imagine there are strong emotional ties between Hillary and, really, anyone. Except that Ellen R. Malcolm, founder of Emily's List, said it was a matter of respect. It was "tremendously disrespectful" to Clinton to "not giver the courtesy to finish the final three weeks of the primary process." But Emily's List is in the business of supporting women for public office, not men. Ergo...

And as for Hillary's conceit that she is the natural choice of working class Americans, here's another stunner. According to Foon Rhee, also in the Globe, a Quinnipiac University poll released yesterday gave John McCain a seven point lead (48% to 41%) among whites without a college education over Hillary. McCain's lead over Obama in the category was also seven points: 46% to 39%.

But in a survey of all voters, Obama beats out McCain 48% to 37%, a lead of 11%. Clinton would also lead MCain, but by only five percent, 46% to 41%. Even aside from Hillary's character, which lead would be easier to protect.

When I write of history I do not mean events and happenings of a year ago, although it would be an improvement of public understanding if mainstream media could at least get this time frame right. The distortions, both because of ignorance and malice, of the history of Palestine and of the State of Israel are so grievous that one hardly knows where to begin. 

But the most crucial moment is clear...and virtually unknown or deliberately forgotten by press professionals who have the esteem of the public. 

First a bit of prelude. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine goes back to the late nineteenth century, when pre-Zionists and Zionists began their return to, well, yes, Zion. Of course, there had been Jews in the Holy Land throughout the centuries of the dispersion, although they were not masses of Jews. Neither were there masses of Arabs in Palestine, although there were more than there were Jews. Jerusalem, on the other hand, had a majority of Jews since the first census in 1842.  With the Jewish migration (which meant Jewish capital and enterprise) came also an inward Arab migration -- a tremendous inward migration -- from other parts of the Ottoman Middle East.  After all, Syria and Lebanon and Jordan and Iraq did not then exist as countries. Moving from one of them to Palestine was like moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and nearly as short. No borders, no frontiers, no passports, no visas, no police.  And when Zionists said that Palestine was a country "without a people" it meant just that: Palestine was populated by clans and tribes who had virtually no consciousness of nationhood or of peoplehood. 

Then came the British who were committed on their own initiative and then by the League of Nations to a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. The Brits were not consistent in meeting their solemn pledges. But such minimal Arab resistance to early mass Jewish arrival and to Jewish work as occurred was, on the one hand, vigilante terror and, on the other, explicit cooperation in the selling-off of land to the arrivals by both the local effendi and the local fellah.  And then came mayhem.  It was clear from the late twenties and early thirties on that the only resolution to the conflict was a partition of Palestine.  On this almost no one would claim that history is other than black and white. The Arab leadership would not countenance territorial arrangements that would allow for a Jewish state. And nothing was done to have Palestine become an Arab state. The destiny of Palestine would be in the hands of Egypt and other entities formed out of the Turkish empire in the aftermath of its defeat in World War I.

Which brings us to the Partition Plan for Palestine approved by the United Nations on November 29, 1947, the crucial moment, the single most crucial moment is the hundred years of tears and blood. The local Arabs had contempt for this plan and the surrounding Arabs made war on this plan. The Jewish Agency for Palestine went ahead and declared the independence of Israel on May 14, 1948. Had the Palestinian Arabs accepted the proposal, they would now be celebrating the sixtieth year of their independence and sovereignty in territory far larger than the land assigned to the Jews. We know what happened then. I believe that the Palestinians -- they did capture the nomenclature if nothing else! -- are as far from independence as ever.

Much is being written these days about Israel's sixtieth birthday. Some potted history, some truly serious.  Efraim Karsh, whom TNR subscribers have read often in our pages and on our web site, has done a clarifying, no, truly illuminating historical essay for Commentary on many of the grave matters on which I touched above.  Make sure you read the footnotes for sometimes -- and this time certainly -- the footnotes are half of the story. This will be an essay that changes people's minds. Truth will be the beneficiary.

Another piece I recommend is in last month's Commentary. By the gifted young writer David Billet, it is a review of Bernard Avishai's The Hebrew Republic. (Avishai was once before reviewed in TNR, that time by the brilliant literary and political intellectual Marie Syrkin, alas, now dead. But she got his number.)  his book, like Avishai's first, is a tale of his disenchantment. Poor preening boy. He needs to have the approval of Tony Judt and the rest who believe that justice is only done when the Jewish state is maximally endangered.

So Hillary has lent another $6 million to her campaign. But the campaign will never pay it back, no way. So who will? If she loses the nomination as she now seems utterly bound to do, it will be the Obama campaign or the Democratic National Committee. Which means that Obama partisans and regular party enthusiasts will be doing the funding of her ambition and her vanity.

Of course, Bill will still be able to speak to the Emirates and those silly synagogues in California and New Jersey. But, with her presidential career finished and he having been exposed as more of a lout than I ever thought, his fees will be much lower.

Ever since Jeremiah Wright made his debut on the wider American political stage many people -- and especially white liberals -- have been wondering: what do he and his church represent in black religious life in the country? When most white liberals (sometimes, I confess, me included) talk about African-American matters, they speak from a very thin, even wobbly base of knowledge. That's been happening in the last six weeks again. It's my impression, in fact, that the consensus in this camp was that Wright was something of a prototypical figure and his church was very much like hundreds, maybe thousands of others. But this was bad news, and so the like-minded made it into a moral tale: white racism was still so rampant that millions of blacks were compelled to see the country, more or less, through Wright's eyes or through eyes like Wright's.

I've finally read an illuminating piece by two scholars who really know American blacks and black institutions, They are Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, a husband and wife team, he the Winthrop professor of history at Harvard, she a political scientist and the vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who are optimists about the African American future -- optimists, if only policy-makers weren't so attached to a grim view of what African Americans can accomplish.

In any case, they've written this article, "Examining the United Church of Christ," at realclearpolitics.com that puts Trinity into its proper place in relation to other black churches and shows how different it is from them. The U.C.C. is actually a white church with a few black subalterns. This used to be the old, sensible and modest Congregational Church which maybe still feels guilty for those of its seventeenth and eighteenth century communicants who were in the slave trade.