Henry Makow has summed up years of his research on the modern so-called feminist movement in an important new collection of essays, published by Silas Green in book form under the title Cruel Hoax.

The two principal conclusions of Dr. Makow's research can be summed up simply. First, contrary to its professed nature, the so-called feminist movement is anything but a grassroots, liberal, spontaneous Zeitgeist. Quite to the contrary, Makow traces its origins to a long-term plan by very elite banking interests to destroy the family as part of a grand goal of remaking a world social environment more conducive to absolute, despotic control. Second, Makow arrays a battery of facts to show that the so-called feminist movement is to the disadvantage of men, women, and children... but above all to the detriment of women, thus making it the Cruel Hoax.

As a collection of essays, Makow's work makes for easy reading. One can bookmark it and read it in bite-sized chunks during a busy week of work. The 239-page book is broken down into four major sections. Book I is entitled "Feminism, Communism, and the NWO."  Book II is "Homosexuality and Heterosexuality." Book III bears the bold title "How Heterosexuality Works." The fourth and final book is "Freemasonry, Brainwashing and the Illuminati." Each of these books is broken down into about ten separate essays, making their absorption a manageable task for a busy reader.

Dr. Makow is the ultimate big-picture thinker. With a doctorate in English literature, his initiation into the world of sexual politics got a rough start when he praised the heterosexual vision of D.H. Lawrence in college courses, arousing the ire of faculty feminists. As his personal pilgrimage progressed, Makow's wide reading and penetrating curiosity took him into many other areas that he discovered to be relevant to the issue of sexual politics.

Religion is a central concern of his book. Makow, who is a Jew, is intensely interested in the seventeenth and eighteenth century doctrines of Sabatai Zvi and Jacob Frank. Although Makow, echoing the sentiments of some Orthodox rabbis of their times, refers to these doctrines as heretical, the lack of a universally accepted formal mechanism for identifying Judaic doctrines as heretical makes this assessment somewhat subjective. Be that as it may, Makow links these doctrines to elements of the Kabbalah, rather than the Torah, and traces some roots of their doctrines in ancient near-eastern cults such as those of Astarte, and to more modern movements such as Satanism. Makow is emphatic that the inherent enmity between the patriarchal vision of classical Judaism and the sex-worshipping world view of the Astarte cult has been revived in modern feminism.

Makow is also deeply interested in history, particularly the history of the communist era and the world wars. He traces the origins of communism to the same banking interests that have a long-term commitment to the destruction of the nuclear family. He does not hesitate to name names of individuals or organizations. The Tavistock Institute, Ford Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, and many other influential organizations come under fire in his book. So also do some of their most powerful and wealthy supporters.

Above all, Makow is interested in human psychology. What do men want? What do women want? His central answer to this question is simple. Women want love and security. Men want power. In exchange for granting power to her man, in the traditional arrangement, the man gives love and security to the woman. If the woman insists on competing with a man, he can give her neither love nor security. If a man fails to attain some measure of power, he cannot respect himself enough to control his world to protect and provide for his family. Makow claims that every psychologically healthy woman wants to recreate the protection of a loving father... if she ever had that experience. Those women who lacked that experience, Makow contends, are quite likely to reject men and fail to attain their love or protection.

Makow has no sympathy for the promotion of homosexuality as a lifestyle. While he announces his personal friendship with individual homosexuals, he also denounces the attempt to portray homosexual relations as a normal state of human affairs, or as preferable to heterosexual relations.

Cruel Hoax focuses on the time frame of the last two hundred years or so, with occasional references to ancient religion, both Judaism and its near-Eastern rivals. Makow makes no reference to the ancient battle on this topic between Plato, whose Republic was implacably hostile to the nuclear family, and Aristotle, whose Politics made it the foundation of all society. Nor does Makow make reference to the gigantic figure of Edwin O. Wilson, whose masterwork Sociobiology (1975), coolly and emphatically stated Makow's essential point of inherent differences between the roles of sexes in species across the vast world of animal life... specifically including Man. Wilson's book, of course, unleashed a firestorm of criticism in its time from the same forces that denounced Makow's praise of heterosexual love.

Now on to the most sensitive part of Makow's book. By naming the Rothsch ilds as centrally involved in the highest level of the banking cartels fostering modern feminism, Makow has come under attack on the internet as an anti-semite or self-hating Jew. These attacks have been matched by attacks from demonstrably anti-semitic websites vilifying Makow as a sly defender of Jews for his constant reference to Illuminati rather than Jews as the architects of modern feminism and communism. Attacked from both sides, Makow has tried to assign blame where appropriate, but to refrain from casting aspersions on innocent people of all persuasions.

To my surprise, as I completed reading his treasure-chest of essays, I came to my own conclusion about Makow's true position, a conclusion that may surprise even him. Makow is bitterly opposed to the worship of the sex-goddess Astarte, or Ishtar. His God, to whom he freely refers, is a loving patriarchal God, the God referred to in the four letters of the sacred and unspeakable name YHWH. He is also bitterly opposed to any self-deification, the worship of the god Lucifer, the proud fallen angel. He regards Eve as a helpmate sent to Adam from a loving God. By denouncing the allegedly heretical nature of some views espoused by so-called Jews, he follows in the tradition of the prophets of the Northern Kingdom, Amos and Hosea. Like Gideon, he is zealous to destroy the Baalim and the Asherah. Makow's book is new. But it is also as old as the Hebrew prophets who inveighed against the sex goddess and her links to the various forms of Satan worship. As one completes Makow's book, he stands before us as a Torah-true Jew.