March 24, 2022

Obama, Biden, and the Threat to American Greatness

Nearly all great nations come to an end, noted the famed historian, Arnold Toynbee.  America is no different. Whether we care to acknowledge it or not, American greatness is threatened. Our possible demise was accelerated by Barack Obama, a m...

March 9, 2022

Russian Barbarism, American Incompetence, and Ukrainian Suffering

Nothing will excuse the senseless and barbaric war Russia is waging in Ukraine. The war, however, did not take place in a vacuum. To pierce the context of the war is to explain it, not to justify it. Yes, there is, indeed, a distinction with a fundam...

February 7, 2022

The Man Who Replaced Bakke

Allan Bakke was U.S. Marine Corps officer and a NASA engineer. At age 35, he decided to go to medical school and applied to the University of California, Davis. He was rejected. Bakke had a GPA of 3.51 and a 3.45 in the sciences. On the quantitati...

February 6, 2022

The 'Jewish Question' Has Come to America

There has never been in America a Jewish Question, at least, not until now. America was built on the idea of a universal identity and a tolerance of differences. From the evolution of a liberal Protestant theology to George Washington’s embr...

January 28, 2022

The Supreme Court Should Reject Racial Preference in College Admissions

The Supreme Court is going to hear two cases about racial preference in college admissions that allegedly discriminates against Asian students. In the 1978 Bakke decision, the Supreme Court said race could be a factor in admissions, but as anyone ...

January 27, 2022

On Ukraine, America needs to listen to Russia

When it comes to Russian foreign and domestic policy, geography is nearly everything.  It does not make a difference who is in power.  It could be the tsar, Stalin, Khrushchev, or Putin.  Given its position on the globe,...

January 15, 2022

Who kills the police?

Put "race of people shooting police" into Google and you will get page after page of the opposite results: the race or ethnicity of people shot by police. This is obviously no accident.  The media narrative is that police shoot...

January 12, 2022

The ascendance of the inner-city predator

The inner-city predator has been a problem for decades, but never before has the predator received the affirmation of the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system and the mainstream media have conditioned us to see the predators themse...

January 7, 2022

Let Iran attempt to develop a bomb

Let Iran attempt to develop a bomb.  It would make the world generally, and the Mideast specifically, a much safer place. Sometimes the solution to a problem is counterintuitive.  As Henry Kissinger insightfully noted about Rus...

January 3, 2022

A commercial that speaks for America

Chevy plucked the heartstrings of hundreds of millions of Americans with its holiday commercial.  In doing so, it revealed a yearning for a different America than that portrayed in the woke commercials that bombard us with an America that e...

December 14, 2021

Crime does cause poverty

Crime causes poverty, argued James Q. Wilson, probably America's most celebrated criminologist.  Like many observations that are counterintuitive or at variance with current wisdom, Wilson's findings did not resonate with the mass p...

December 10, 2021

Chaos and the Threat to Democracy

Among politics’ strangest alliances are those between the elite and the mob. They don’t happen often. The few times they have occurred produced devastating effects. The most notable of them was the rise of the Nazi party, which recruited ...

December 6, 2021

The Biden administration kicks Israel in the gut

In a vulgar act denying not only established history, but the foundational characteristics of the two major Western faiths, the United Nations believed that it could rewrite the past.  It voted to change the Temple Mount to a Muslim holy si...

November 29, 2021

Undermining democracy with chaos

America will fall not to an external enemy, but to internal subversion that will collapse the body politic.  The method was advanced decades ago by two sociologists, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.  They sought to create a ...

November 26, 2021

Looting for Amusement and Luxury Goods

Walnut Creek is a quiet exurban town outside of San Francisco. It uncharacteristically made national news over the last few days, and not for anything good. It was the scene of a large-scale smash and grab in the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse ver...

September 24, 2021

Biden's Jews

When a friend of mine converted to Judaism, he told the rabbi that he understood the ethics, the laws, and all that was required of him.  But there was one thing that he said that he refused to do.  He refused to become a Democrat...

September 22, 2021

Gabby Petito and race-baiting

Joy Reid would like you to believe that the attention over Gabby Petito's disappearance and subsequent death is a result of missing white woman syndrome.  For Reid and other race-baiters like her who make a living over mouthing such ina...

September 11, 2021

You said you wouldn't forget — but you do over and over again

You forgot at the Kabul Airport.  You forgot who you were and why you were there.  You betrayed those Afghanis who put their lives on the line for you and the brave young American soldiers you put in harm's way. ...

September 11, 2021

The ADL's CEO tears open the wounds of 9/11 families

The painful controversy over the 9/11, or the Ground Zero, Mosque, as locals called it, was resurrected by the ineptitude and callousness of the CEO of the (Jewish) Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt. Eleven years ago, the ADL stood firml...

September 7, 2021

The New York Times, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and the Biden Doctrine

When it comes to being shameless, the New York Times is without equal.  Not only did it bury the Jewish Holocaust, but its man in Moscow, Walter Duranty, also managed to cover up the Ukrainian Holocaust, known as the Hol...

August 31, 2021

San Francisco's diversity demagogues destroy a prestigious high school

San Francisco's prestigious Lowell High School is the latest educational institution to be sacrificed to the demagoguery of the diversity minions.  Lowell will no longer accept students based on merit, but will accept applicants by lott...

August 30, 2021

Radical Islam and the clash of civilizations

The Biden administration will go to great lengths to downplay the significance of the debacle in Afghanistan.  But no amount of wishful thinking and no number of meaningless creations like over-the-horizon capabilities will deny the reality...

August 23, 2021

The war with radical Islam is ongoing

In the wake of Biden's unmitigated catastrophe in Afghanistan, he has been attempting to assuage his incompetence by providing the public with the false choice between leaving and committing America to an endless war. Even after we leave Afgha...

August 20, 2021

The Taliban are conquerors in their own land

In the coming weeks and months, the world will be offered a new and improved Taliban.  It is the essence of movements based on totalitarian ideologies to have two personas.  On the one hand, there is the face of the nation, Afghan...

August 17, 2021

Afghanistan: Biden's denial of responsibility

There will be blood!  That's the one thing that can be said with any certainty about the catastrophe in Afghanistan.  The ensuing question is, who is responsible for the inevitable bloodletting? The Taliban, obviously....

August 8, 2021

The Predators Among Us

University of Chicago student Max Lewis was commuting to school on the Green Line Elevated Train when a bullet tore into his spine. A good Samaritan nurtured and consoled him until the paramedics came. An active and vibrant twenty-year-old, Lewis cou...

July 19, 2021

An Iran deal, again, with equally bad consequences

When it came to the Middle East, President Barack Obama concluded that it was an endless quagmire into which large amounts of American blood and treasure would flow.  While Obama might have appropriately diagnosed the problem, his solution ...

July 7, 2021

How Hamas expects to defeat Israel

Hamas knows it cannot defeat Israel, so why does it launch seven rockets into Jerusalem knowing that Israel will retaliate? The answer lies in the notion of asymmetric warfare or insurgency — a phenomenon heavily studied in military academie...

July 1, 2021

Alienated patriots and the pursuit of the political millennium

There is a growing anger in America.  You won't see it on PBS or on the mainstream media.  You won't hear it at college orientations.  But patriotic America is angry.  It is angry at athletes who repres...

June 30, 2021

Rebuild Gaza — why?

Nearly anyone who follows events in the Middle East believes that the ceasefire imposed on Israel by the Biden administration won't last more than three or four years, if that long, before Hamas's Iranian rockets are once again launched from ...

June 16, 2021

Academia’s Obsession with Racism

For the 2020-2021 admissions cycle, the English department at the University of Chicago only admitted graduate students committed to working in Black Studies. At the other end of the city, at Evanston’s Northwestern University, white students t...

June 11, 2021

Terrorism: The good, the bad, and the Jew

When al-Qaeda crashed planes into the World Trade Center, did you notice how academics published position papers supporting the Islamic extremist group, and how the local Interfaith Committee commented for the record, "It's our foreign polic...

September 24, 2020

The day the rabid environmentalists stole the sun

Putrid orange is the color of the sky in California's East Bay.  It's just after ten o'clock in the morning and so dark outside that all the lights on dusk-to-dawn sensors are still on.  The iconic California sun is no...

June 20, 2020

Political violence then and now

The men who pulled Reginald Denny from his truck during the Rodney King riots and beat him to a pulp had no idea who Rodney King was.  They just wanted the truck. Many of the men who stormed the Winter Palace with fir...

June 15, 2020

The Morning After the Riots End

There will come a morning when the protests stop, the riots end, the fires are extinguished, and insufficiently woke editors will cease to be intimidated. The Democratic leadership will no longer wear kente cloth or take a knee. Before us will ...

June 13, 2020

Silence is Violence: The Quest for Totalitarian Democracy

When a movement says, “silence is violence,” it is no longer democratic, but a totalitarian movement that opposes the very essence of choice -- the right to be apolitical. Mass movements with ostensible democratic goals start out towar...

May 30, 2020

California Seeks to Eliminate SATs and ACTs... and it’s a Good Thing

Under consideration in California’s higher education system is the permanent removal of SAT and ACT scores from its admission requirements. The battle lines of the debate are forming as quickly as they are hardening. At stake is nothing less...

January 12, 2020

The New Bigotry

In the summer of 1951, Harvey E. Clark, Jr., a black man, rented an apartment in all-white Cicero, a Chicago suburb. Attempting to move into his apartment, Clark was stopped by 20 Cicero police officers who threatened to kill him if he returned. T...

December 3, 2019

A woman's murder reignites visions of France's anti-Semitism

Kobili Traore, 29, a Muslim immigrant to France, killed Sarah Halim, 65, his Jewish neighbor, while armed French police stood outside her door, listened to her anguished screams, and did not respond until she was thrown off her balcony to her death. ...

October 27, 2019

Jews Will Not Abandon the Democrats, Even as the Democrats Abandon Them

The quip among Jewish Republicans about President Obama’s trafficking with anti-Semites was that he was so popular with American Jews that had he nuked Tel Aviv, he would have lost no more than 30% of the Jewish vote. The affinity for A...

August 4, 2019

Advice to the College-Bound from the Old, White Professor

In a few weeks, some of you will be going off to college. But before you commit yourself to the decision and the ensuing financial burden, there are a few things you should know. Nearly all college experiences begin with a series of orientation se...

July 23, 2019

Civil Rights, Then and Now

The civil rights movement was in full swing. Governor George Wallace had stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama only to be finessed by President John F. Kennedy federalizing the Alabama National Guard. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had ...

July 18, 2019

An Angry Old White Guy on 'AOC Plus Three'

It is the inevitable nature of revolutions that they enter a point of hysteria when, like Saturn, they turn on themselves and devour their own children. While the hysteria of the current aspiring revolutionaries, or “power grabbers,” t...

July 1, 2019

The San Francisco School Board's bonfire of the vanities

In an act of sublime idiocy, the San Francisco school board has decided to paint over a mural of George Washington in a local high school. To those who know the mural's history, this is a consummate act of the microaggression revolution devour...

June 27, 2019

Government Intrusion in Higher Education Is Sowing the Next Debt Crisis

It was one of those moments whose significance only became apparent years later. It was part of the pro forma interview process for a faculty position. I was to be interviewed by the university’s bursar. He was an elderly gentleman, tall, er...

June 22, 2019

'Activism' gets Choosy

There are few limits to the self-adulation of virtue signalers. In the June 07, 2019 posting from the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, there is an article from its sister group in nearby Silicon Valley about its journey to the San Di...

June 12, 2019

The Homeless, Illegals, and the Politics of Virtue Signaling

We have no idea how many of the homeless are illegal immigrants, but we do know that homeless shelters in big cities will not cooperate with blanket ICE searches for illegals. Shelter workers are trained to request a warrant for a specific individ...

June 1, 2019

Exposing a University’s Hypocrisy

On May 14, 2019, Professor Rabab Abdulhadi gave a guest lecture at the University of California Los Angeles that was laced with distortions of history and anti-Semitic tropes.  Abdulhadi characterizes herself as a scholar/activist, an oxymoron t...

May 16, 2019

History, Myth, and Rashida Tlaib

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s characterization of Palestinians welcoming Jewish Holocaust survivors is another window into the mind of the Palestinians, and yet another reason why a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians is illusory...

May 1, 2019

The New York Times and the Climate of Anti-Semitism

On the eve of the shooting at a San Diego synagogue, the New York Times published a despicable anti-Semitic cartoon that could have come from the pages of Der Sturmer. The cartoon used the same tropes and images that the Nazis used to stoke anti-Semi...

April 17, 2019

Pelosi's Pacific Heights needs refugees

Pacific Heights is one of San Francisco's most expensive neighborhoods.  It boasts dramatic views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands, and the blue waters of San Francisco Bay. Oracle founder Larry Ellison is one of its mo...

March 25, 2019

Rockets hit Tel Aviv, and the conflict changes

Shortly after Israel's 1982 incursion into Lebanon, I sat in a kindergarten classroom in the border town of Kiryat Shmona.  There was a gaping hole in the ceiling where a Katyusha rocket had struck.  By some miracle, it was a ...

March 20, 2019

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Progressive University

How is it, considering the economic nonsense she spouts, that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could graduate cum laude from Boston University, with a degree in international relations and economics? Worse, how is it that her generation could embrace the ver...

March 8, 2019

The Democrats Cannot Hide Their Anti-Semitism Problem

The Democrats will not produce a meaningful resolution denouncing anti-Semitism. The vile hater, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, will not be named. Her position on the powerful Foreign Relations Committee will be as secure as ever. The resolution will dilu...

February 12, 2019

The jihadis in Congress

Ilhan Omar, the freshman congressional representative from Minnesota, is in the news again for her anti-Semitism.  Some have called her misinformed.  But Omar appears to know precisely what she is doing.  Each new o...

February 7, 2019

The Democratic Party and the Decline of the Vital Center

As the Democratic field of candidates proliferates, the traditional liberal center of the Democratic party must be watching with horror.  The current group of candidates appears intent on securing office by promising the electorate an unending s...

January 7, 2019

Cultural character and immigration

Seventy years ago, The Lonely Crowd appeared on the shelves of college bookstores.  As a sociological work that explored the evolution and impact of cultural character, its authors – David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel D...

November 19, 2018

The totalitarian democracy of Stacey Abrams

“Democracy has failed in Georgia,” said Stacey Abrams in what hardly could be called a concession speech after a ballot recount confirmed that the Republican candidate, Brian Kemp, had defeated her in Georgia’s gubernatorial contest...

October 6, 2018

The Politics of Hate and the Soul of Democracy

The politics of hate will not win. So say those who have a strong abiding faith in human decency but a frail understanding of history. As noted by Eric Hoffer, the reflective student of mass movements, hate is the great unifier of political causes, t...

August 9, 2018

His Majesty King Mob comes to Portland

The mob is an intrinsic part of society, a permanent moral underclass.  Mobilized into action by appeals to the basest human instincts, it spreads destruction and chaos, feeding on the anarchy it creates. The failure of a society is seen...

August 19, 2017

Charlottesville Is Not about the Forces of Good vs. the Forces of Evil

If President Trump called out each right-wing bigot that invaded Charlottesville, it would not be enough. Some obsessive Trump antagonist standing behind the arc of Klieg lights while holding a microphone would find that somehow, somewhere, he had le...

July 8, 2017

Slavery, White Guilt, and the Politics of Absurdity

Black Lives Matter used the Fourth of July for its denigration of “racist” America. Accusations of American racism typically begin with references to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, although they do not end there. While the indictment is ...

July 5, 2017

Rescue at Entebbe: The continuing lesson

On July 4, 1976, Israeli commandos launched one of the most daring hostage rescue missions of all time: the raid on Entebbe.  Its military audacity and tactical details have become a textbook case of the use of special forces and the elemen...

June 26, 2017

The assassination of the political system (it's not about Trump)

A play in Central Park delights the audience with the brutal assassination of the president.  A comedian amuses her followers by holding a replica of the severed head of the president.  To adoring fans, a pop singer revels in her dreams of ...

November 28, 2016

Reflections on the death of Castro

Few things separate us as much as our views of Castro.  To some, he is a great hero of socialism.  To others, he was a conqueror in his own country, a brutal dictator. Few will acknowledge that he might have been both.  Castro...

October 24, 2016

Like Sanders, Trump has to be stopped

Donald Trump is being pilloried for not accepting the results of an election that has not yet happened.  And elites on both sides of the political divide are excoriating him for not announcing in advance that he will follow the traditional proce...

October 3, 2016

Forget bias – Holt showed no understanding of the office itself

Forget the bias.  Lester Holt’s moderating the presidential debate was an intellectual disaster. Here was a moderator who had no depth of knowledge about the presidency.  He did not research the way in which the presidency function...

September 15, 2016

Reforming Higher Education

As the price of higher education has gone up, both the quality of the education and the opportunities it creates have vastly diminished. What has survived is the myth of higher education: the idea that higher education is a means to a professional...

June 3, 2016

Sanders, Trump, and the Politics of Payback

There is a specter haunting America. It is the specter of the common working man and woman. The person who does the daily work that keeps the society moving. The person who inhabits the rungs of the working class and the lower middle class. The perso...

December 3, 2015

Obama and Israel: Nothing Has Changed, Nothing Will Change

Amid the hoopla of the 2008 election campaign, when much of the world saw candidate Barack Obama as the very incarnation of the messiah, and some even openly proclaimed him so, the Israelis were not buying the narrative. Neither have they since. T...

May 30, 2015

Wake up, Tiger Mom!

Yes, Tiger Mom, your son did not make it into the Ivy League because he is Asian. All those Advance Placement courses, SAT seminars, extra math classes in the church school on Sunday after services did get him to crash through the 2200 base scor...

April 15, 2015

How the Environmentalists are Destroying California

If you drive through California’s Central Valley, you will see, along both sides of the ribbon of highway, acres of scorched earth. The arid land goes on in some places as far as the eye can see. This land was once rich in fruits, nuts, and veg...

February 7, 2015

After Paris, Rethinking Intelligence Bashing

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, might we ask Senator Diane Feinstein if she’d like to rethink her very public discussion about the CIA and enhanced interrogation? Such discussions are meaningless when they take place as 9/11 reced...

August 8, 2014

When It Comes to Israel, The Standards of Warfare are Different

Watching the condescension with which a Sky News reporter interviewed, or more accurately, harangued Israeli Economy Minister Naftali Bennett about civilian casualties in Gaza, I would have thought that Britain must have set some high moral standard ...

June 7, 2014

The Real Bergdahl Error

For more than a decade, starting with a fellowship at the National Institute of Justice and subsequently conducting research in Europe and Israel, I studied hostage negotiations. Some of these were hostage and barricade situations, a tactic wide...

June 1, 2014

Jihad and Higher Education

Since the riots of the late 1960s to promote the creation of a black studies department under Nathan Hare, a professor who believed that the academy should be an inspiration for action in the streets, San Francisco State University has had a reputati...

May 12, 2014

Lessons for Israel from the Failed Peace Talks

Over the past two weeks, Israeli National Security Adviser Yossi Cohen sent letters to the White House and European leaders outlining the deceptive Palestinian strategy to exploit the peace talks for short-run, tangible benefits with no intention of ...

May 4, 2014

French Islamic Congress Sinks into Anti-Semitic Hate Fest

In some deep corner of hell, Hitler is smiling.  One Hundred and Fifty Thousand Muslims gathered in Paris to attend the Union of Islamic Organization’s Thirty First Congress. It was advertised as a gathering about immigration, assimilation...

April 15, 2014

Resuscitating Affirmative Action

The renewed debate in California about affirmative action is exposing the flaws in a contentious policy that attempts to justify a racial spoils system with the shibboleth “equality of opportunity”.  The idea that somehow we can obli...

April 12, 2014

America Should Exit the Middle East Peace Negotiations

When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas torpedoed the latest round of Israeli/Palestinian peace talks by an eleventh-hour escalation of demands, he not only undermined the efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry to bring peace to the trou...

December 22, 2013

The American Studies Association Is a Joke

My Israeli colleagues have complained that the American Studies Association's recent boycott of Israeli universities and scholars is a betrayal of Israel by America.  Apparently, my Israeli colleagues know little about American studies. A...

December 7, 2013

The Iranian Agreement and the Strategy of Deterrence

Iran is going to have nuclear weapons. Unless we are willing to launch a strategic bombing campaign against Iran, we cannot completely stop them. And this administration is not going to do that. We know it; the Iranians know it. Iran wants nuclear w...

November 27, 2013

The Iran Deal and the Future of the Middle East

Critics of President Barack Obama's Middle East policy should begin with a new set of premises:  Obama is not stupid.  No one believes Iran will dismantle its nuclear program. Of course, the Iran agreement will not work.  But that's...

November 20, 2013

Gun Control, the Jews, and the Third Reich

In 1996, in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the modern Olympics, the German government issued a set of four stamps. One of these celebrates Alfred and Gustav Flatow, cousins, who were gold medalists in the 1896 Olympics. Alfred took...

November 18, 2013

ObamaCare's Chicago Moment

Bowing to pressure from his own party, President Obama caved on Obamacare, extending by fiat the cancelled health insurance policies that have his fellow Democrats facing next year's elections with dread. Even California Senator Barbara Boxer, who ha...

November 7, 2013

A Survivor Emerges as a Victim of ObamaCare

Edie Littlefield Sundby has been the face of cancer survival and an inspiration to a lot of cancer patients. When her doctors told her she had cancer, she took an 800 mile walk away from the disease. Ms. Sundby beat the slim odds of surviving stage-4...

October 12, 2013

Legislating Through Appropriation

So you're one of those Democrats that -- with a sense of moral outrage -- demand a clean bill to raise the debt ceiling and fund ObamaCare. Here's the problem. Since 1978, the debt ceiling was raised 55 times, and in over half those legislative strug...

September 14, 2013

Putin's Letter to America

It is indeed strange for America and the world to receive a message on the value of both caution and international law from Russian President Vladimir Putin. After all, if there is anything Russia is known for, it is taking decisive and strong action...

May 29, 2013

Is a Revolution in the Offing?

I used to own a poster from the old USSR of the "famous charge" on the Winter Palace during the October Revolution.  The focal point of the poster was an ordinary soldier, with a fixed bayonet on his rifle, waving others forward toward the well...

May 19, 2013

Two Modern-Day Deborahs Fight Anti-Semitism

Deborah (Dvora) is the only woman judge mentioned in the Bible. She embodies the fighting women of the ancient world, warrior women who became victorious despite great odds and the initial reluctance of their men to go into battle. Deborah delivered ...

March 22, 2013

San Francisco's Jewish Leadership Embraces Their Personal Jihad

When buses of the San Francisco Municipal Railway began sporting ads announcing Pamela Geller's retort to CAIR's, this is my jihad as campaign, the local Jewish community leadership practically stampeded over itself to denounce Geller and her organiz...

January 19, 2013

The Algerian Hostage Situation

The hostage situation in Algeria has descended into chaos and Western governments are venting their criticism at the Algerian government for storming the Al Qaeda-linked hostage takers and precipitating a shootout. The Western governments might wish ...

September 30, 2012

Culture, Statecraft, and Obama's Middle East Failure

A nation advances its interests not just by the exercise of good policy decisions, but also by the acknowledgement of policy failures.  Obama's Middle East policy has been a consummate failure, and the repeated fabrications of what happened in B...

August 20, 2012

Romney Really Needs to Fight Back

If Mitt Romney wants to fight back against the onslaught of Obama's vicious and deceptive negative advertising, then Dontae and Angela Adams need to become household names in America.  In fact, they need to become symbols for what the Obamas are...

July 26, 2012

You Didn't Build It...because I Didn't Earn It

It isn't socialism that explains Obama's dismissive "you didn't build that" remark toward people of talent and individual initiative; it's the culture of affirmative action.  As I listened to Obama's silly, if not pathetic, comments, I was remin...

May 13, 2012

Naomi Schaefer Riley and the Corruption of the Academy

Even though The Chronicle of Higher Education long ago reflected the leftist agenda of its readership, I never could have imagined it would stoop so low as to fire someone for writing a piece at variance with the political correctness it has come to ...

March 11, 2012

Obama and the Politics of Ritual

Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington this week and danced the minuet with Barack Obama.  They held a handkerchief between them and at AIPAC they came together.  And once Obama's Jew-charm ceremony was completed, they danced apart.  Th...

December 11, 2011

Islamists, Dictators, and Bad Choices

For those of us who lived through the fall of the shah of Iran, the Egyptian elections are 1979 all over again.  Then, a naïve President Carter decided that a compliant dictator who was aligned with our security interests was less worthy of our ...

November 17, 2011

Penn State's Scandal and the Truth about Power in Academia

The sexual abuse scandal at Penn State gives us a glimpse into power -- the power with which universities arrogantly operate and how they consider themselves islands quarantined from the legal and moral concerns of the larger society.  ...

October 2, 2011

We Should Listen to What Abbas Is Really Saying

Serving his sixth year of a four-year term that expired on January 9, 2009, the unelected president of a people who first came into existence in 1964 appeared before the United Nations and demanded a homeland.  Mahmoud Abbas, once again calling ...

December 14, 2009

Afghanistan: The Senseless War

With the impending escalation in Afghanistan, we have finally arrived, after decades, at a bipartisan foreign policy. Regrettably, it is the wrong consensus for the wrong policy.Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. There is no way to win in Afgha...

November 30, 2009

Terrorist Criminal Trials and the Coming Jihad

After the bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi, the police found amid the belongings of one of the perpetrators a list of the unindicted co-conspirators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York. The list was submitted to the lawyers f...

November 27, 2009

Terrorist Criminal Trials and the Coming Jihad

After the bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi, the police found amid the belongings of one of the perpetrators a list of the unindicted co-conspirators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York. The list had been submitted to the lawy...

October 13, 2009

Obama and the Foreign Policy of the Empty Suit

Having been one of the journalistic minions to have protected Barack Obama from scrutiny, Newsweek's Howard Fineman has finally figured out what many of us knew.  Obama is an empty suit who thinks he can talk his way around anything.  Finem...

August 26, 2009

Chicago, Obama, and Health Care Reform

There has been no lack of writing about the influence of Marxist Saul Alinsky on Barack Obama's political ideology.  But what appears to have escaped notice is the influence of the political culture of Chicago on Barack Obama.  These influe...

July 11, 2009

Rachel Corrie Meets Horst Wessel at SF's Jewish Film Festival

Rachel Corrie was the naïve Marxist and International Solidarity Movement member who went into Gaza to put her body on the line to keep open tunnels that supplied suicide bombers with the means to kill Israeli civilians.  Standing for hours...

January 4, 2009

Hamas and Its Liberal Supporters are Responsible for the Current Crisis

Hamas cannot bomb Israel out of existence.  Hamas has dropped ten thousand rockets on civilian targets in Sderot since 2001.  Hamas' suicide bombers have killed hundreds of Israelis eating in restaurants, dancing in discos, and riding on bu...

December 2, 2008

Mumbai: A Message for America

Americans have been assured that the horror and terror that exploded across television screens from Mumbai in late November will not affect our own sense of security. Such assurances are as disingenuous as they are comforting.  The murders carri...

September 29, 2008

The Financial Mess: How We Got Here

"How can you vote Republican when they so messed up the economy?" a liberal friend screams at me with such vehemence that I had to put the phone a full arms length from my ear.  Of course, my friend never heard of the Community Reinves...

January 18, 2008

The Feminists and the Jews

Of the three women pictured here, one is the President of the Supreme Court, the second the Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the third is the Speaker of the Parliament.  Women in positions of real power, and all are memb...