Anti-American French rightists, says Levy, disdain America as an ``inauthentic'' nation. They understand authenticity in tribal terms -- as a function of racial homogeneity reflected in cultural uniformity. Sound familiar? It should. It is an ingredient of fascism.

What G.K. Chesterton said (somewhat) in jest -- ``There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong'' -- some French and other European rightists say in ferocious earnest. And they are at least correct that America is what they despise -- multiracial, cosmopolitan, voluntary (i.e. peopled by immigrants) and unified not by blood but, as the 16th president said, by dedication to a proposition.

Levy, who regards the murder of Pearl as an epoch-defining event -- a ``micro World Trade Center'' -- bought a tape of the decapitation from one of the vendors who sell the videos near Pakistani mosques. That is but one chilling fact from Levy's impressive immersion in the milieu that produced the English-born Muslim who organized Pearl's kidnapping.

That man, Levy reports, ``was able to recite entire pages of 'Mein Kampf' by heart.'' Levy's book suggests that the Cold War may come to be remembered as a parenthesis in a much longer war against the remarkable resilience and insufficiently understood variousness of fascism.