“The Treason of the Intellectuals,” writes Adam Kirsch, “is one of those books that is famous even though almost no one actually reads it.” Its author, Julien Benda, lambasts the people he calls clercs (a word that bears a religious connotation that “intellectuals” does not) for forsaking integrity and truth-seeking in favor of populist fads, and thus failing in their duty to society. Delving into the historical backdrop to the 1927 book, and especially the Dreyfus affair—in which a Jewish army captain was framed on charges of espionage—Kirsch points to its connections to the situation of French Jewry, and the flaws of its argument.

Though David Broder’s new translation keeps the traditional English title The Treason of the Intellectuals, in the text he renders clerc as “scribe,” an inspired choice that captures the association of wisdom, writing, and the sacred, evoking the Biblical sofrim Ezra and Baruch. Benda was mainly interested in the failures of French scribes. His examples included Georges Sorel, who urged the working class to revolt in Reflections on Violence, and Charles Maurras, the founder of the protofascist group Action Française, who would later be convicted of collaborating with the Germans during World War II.

But the name that appears most often in the book is Maurice Barrès, [who] was radicalized by the Dreyfus case. . . . Instead of truth and justice, he glorified la terre et les morts, the earth and the dead, which he saw as the basis of the mystic unity of the French nation. It was on these grounds that Barrès became a fierce anti-Semite, seeing Dreyfus as a representative of a conspiracy of aliens whose earth and dead lay elsewhere.

In The Treason of the Intellectuals, however, anti-Semitism is the dog that doesn’t bark. Benda acknowledges early in the book that “the movement against the Jews” is one of the chief drivers of the political hatred he deplored; later he observes that “the scorn which the likes of Barrès have displayed toward the Jews . . . has brought real damage to the objects of their contempt.” Yet that is the sum total of his discussion of the subject. It would be easy to read Treason without realizing that it is a book by a Jewish writer attacking notorious Jew-haters and that the Jewish question had been bound up with the very issues Benda was writing about since the Dreyfus affair.

[And] as Mark Lilla writes in his probing introduction to this new edition, Benda himself ended up committing exactly the kind of treason he denounced. In the 1930s, he joined many erstwhile liberals in becoming a fellow traveler, defending the Soviet Union despite its blatant crimes against “truth and justice.” The scribe who once believed it was unacceptable for France to imprison one innocent man now defended the right of the Communist party to execute thousands.

Here at Mosaic, we’ve published quite a lot about many Arab states, but one that’s barely received mention is Oman, located at the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The sultanate has stayed out of the recent conflicts of the Midde East, and is known to have sub-rosa relations with Israel; high-ranking Israeli officials have visited the country clandestinely, or at least with little fanfare. For precisely this reason, Oman has held itself out as an intermediary and host for negotiations. The then-secret talks that proceeded the Obama administration’s fateful nuclear negotiations with Iran took place in Oman. Ari Heistein explains the similar, and troubling, role Muscat is playing with regard to the Houthis in neighboring Yemen:

For more than three decades, Oman has served in the role of mediator for the resolution of disputes in Yemen. . . . Oman allows for a Houthi office in the capital, Muscat, reportedly numbering around 100 personnel, to operate from its territory for the purported function of diplomatic engagement. It is worth asking why the Houthis require such a large delegation for such limited engagement and whether there is any real value to engaging with the Houthis.

Thus far, efforts to negotiate with the Houthis have yielded very limited outcomes, primarily resulting in concessions from the Saudi-led coalition and partial de-escalation when it has served the terror group’s interests. Rarely, if ever, have the Houthis fully abided by their commitments after signing off on international agreements. Presumably, such meager results could have been achieved through other constellations that are less beneficial to the recently redesignated foreign terrorist organization.

In contrast, the malign and destabilizing Houthi activities in Oman are significant. They include: shipment of Iranian and Chinese weapons components [and] military-grade communications equipment via Oman to the Houthis; the smuggling of senior officials in and out of Houthi-controlled areas via Oman; and financial activities conducted by Houthi shell corporations to consolidate the regime’s control over Yemen’s economy and subsidize the regime.

With this in mind, there is good reason to suspect that the Houthi presence in Oman does more harm than good.