January 12, 2015

Will Western Leaders Really Encourage Free Speech?

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is adamant.  In the wake of the brutal massacre of the staff of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris  on Wednesday, he referred to the media rights exercised by the satirical French magazine as “...

January 9, 2015

The Terror Returns to Paris

"Terror" has worn many faces in Paris over  the past 225 years. First there was la Terreur, in the early 1790s when the French Revolution spiraled into a orgy of bloodletting.  Then came the extra judicial executions of th...

January 3, 2015

Palestinians Can Thank the U.S. For Their International Stature

A kleptocratic, corrupt, racist, terrorist-sponsoring political organization led by liars and thieves feels sufficiently emboldened to demand of the U.N. Security Council recognition of its sovereignty – and almost succeeds. How did we ...

December 5, 2014

Israel's National Identity Problem

News has arrived that the Netanyahu Government coalition, less than 20 months old, is fragmenting, due, among other things, to tensions over the potential passage of a new bill before the Knesset.  Titled "Israel, the Nation State of the Je...

November 23, 2014

Obama and the GOP Should Learn the Lessons of the 1860s

President Barack Obama delivered a speech that has been widely characterized in the media as presenting a red cape to a charging bull.  His decision to extend executive action to offer a solution to America's complex illegal alien probl...

November 20, 2014

Ben Bradlee and the Death of American Journalism

When Ben Bradlee, the cosmopolitan former editor of the Washington Post, died on October 21st, the world of American journalism mourned the loss of one of its greatest icons. Bradlee, after all, was almost singlehandedly responsible for the abrupt sh...

October 24, 2014

Paul Krugman's Indefensible Defense of Barack Obama

Readers of Rolling Stone magazine have long known what to expect from the biweekly's acidulous commentaries: anarchist screeds from the rather unbalanced Matt Taibbi; thinly researched and often specious investigative pieces from Tim Dickinson;...

September 22, 2014

The West and National Identity

On Friday morning the Scottish people must felt like the failed suicide who awakes in hospital the next day and wonders to himself: "Now why in the hell did I do a stupid thing like that?" The convincing drubbing that the independence mo...

August 20, 2014

Can you Tell Who the Bad Guys are Now?

You would have thought that Barack Obama and David Cameron, the nominal leaders of the free world, would have had it all figured out by now. Obama, in the sixth year of his presidency and Cameron in his fourth as prime minister, have both neverthe...

August 10, 2014

The First World War's Relevance to Our Times

The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War has been greeted with not much more than a yawn by citizens of the West. Sure, there have been the obligatory documentaries, the reconciliation hugs by the leaders of France and Germany and...

August 7, 2014

The Next War on Israel's Horizon

As Operation Protective Edge winds down, there is growing speculation about the next and far more serious military threat that the country may be forced to confront. On its northern border with Lebanon, the Israeli army is faced with the daunting pro...

May 2, 2011

Will Bin Laden's Specter Still Hover Over American Life?

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October 28, 2010

London's Islamic Republic

‘Eurabia' has become a popularly employed neologism in recent years to describe the slow melding of cultures in Europe.  Those fearful of an eventual eclipse of European civilization by a fast growing Muslim population have emphasized Euro...

October 10, 2010

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

The resumed Israeli-Palestinian peace process is not four weeks old, and it seems to have already been reduced to the realm of a Gilbert and Sullivan farce. Utilizing the issue of the West Bank settlement construction freeze as a point of contention,...

October 9, 2010

What John Lennon Failed to Imagine

It's a landmark event for Beatledom. John Lennon, dead these thirty years, would have turned seventy years old today.For many '60s survivors who grew up in thrall of the Fab Four, the idea that such an important symbol of the youth culture has a...

May 9, 2010

No Blanks: Kent State 40 Years Later

The student antiwar movement of the late '60s and early '70s lives on in American consciousness as a symbol of high-minded idealism. Some like to point to the altruism and innocence of the movement and the way it stirred students out of their apathy,...

May 1, 2010

How the Dominoes Fell

Declaring the Vietnam War a just and necessary American war these days is about the equivalent of suggesting that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were humanitarians. So seared into American consciousness is...

March 25, 2010

Petraeus of Arabia

[See important update below - editor]If supporters of Israel have been roiled lately by the tense exchanges between Washington and Jerusalem, they are soon in for another shock. On March 13, a report on the Foreign Policy Magazine website r...

March 23, 2010

Be Careful What You Wish For

Bells rang out across the land. The people, freed from centuries of oppression by a feudal system of health care, rushed into village streets, banging drums and shaking tambourines. Thirty-two million people, in one voice, wept with gr...

March 18, 2010

The President's Middle East Playbook

Barack Obama has achieved the impossible: He has managed to bring together secular Israelis and ultra-Orthodox Jews in a heated campaign against him. His administration's determination to use an Israeli housing construction project in Northern Jerusa...