...“Israel is a country of heroes,” Nirenstein says in Italian-accented English, now turning her undivided attention to our hour-long interview. “My book tries to destroy the vile myths perpetrated about its being ‘colonialist’ or an ‘apartheid state’ on the one hand, and about terrorists ‘being militiamen fighting for freedom’ on the other.”

Nirenstein does this, she explains, by dissecting what she calls the “sick words” that have infiltrated the language and consciousness of an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe - terms she and a group of Italian academics plan on collecting for a glossary, “because such word abuse prevents even the possibility of understanding what Israel is all about.”

She comes by her passion for Israel - and familiarity with the conceptual distortions characteristic of “autocratic ideologies” - honestly. The daughter of Holocaust historian and long-time Al Hamishmar correspondent Aharon “Nir” Nirenstein (who came to Palestine in 1936 from Poland, and went to Italy in 1945 with the Jewish Brigade) and Corriere della Sera journalist Wanda Lattes, Nirenstein was an ardent communist in her youth. And, just as Zionism was part and parcel of her upbringing, so too, she says, was she caught up in the “mental corruption” that caused her generation to look to the likes of Che Guevara for inspiration, while attributing the world’s ills to “capitalist imperialism.”...