Month: April 2002

In this exclusive interview, Jean-Marie Le Pen heaps contempt on the palm-greasers, opportunists and back-scratchers who make up the French political establishment. If there is calm in the eye of the storm, it was certainly to be found at Jean-Marie Le Pen’s sumptuous villa in Saint-Cloud, Paris, on Tuesday afternoon. In the world outside, … Continue reading “‘Why Does Everybody Hate Me?’”

I thought it was a little curious when our newspaper, on the day of the coup that ousted Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for 48 hours or so, received an exultant fax from one George A. Folsom of the International Republican Institute. "The Venezuelan people rose up to defend democracy in their country," crowed Mr. Folsom. … Continue reading “Financing Venezuelan Mischief”

I heard the shooting from the balcony of my apartment. Ismail, Yusuf, and Anwar tried to infiltrate the Netzarim settlement in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday night. They may have carried knives with them. That’s what Abdul Aziz Rantissi said, a leader of Hamas in Gaza. They weren’t suicide bombers as the New York Times … Continue reading “War on the Horizon: Gaza”

If war is the health of the State, as Randolph Bourne put it, then the Israeli state must be bursting with a monstrous vitality – and so it is. The beleaguered and shrinking private sector groans under the burden of a parasitic state that grows fat on an endless stream of American "aid," both economic … Continue reading “Israel: A Socialist Sparta”

What do Europeans want? And would they like it if they got it? Do they sometimes say no when they mean yes, fake pleasure at things that really can’t be desperately good for them, and maybe even have a pronounced tendency not actually to know what it is the silly moos want? Truth to tell, … Continue reading “Superduperstate”

In his new book, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), H. W. Brands sets out to answer the question: How did American liberalism fall on hard times? The question refers, of course, not to classical liberalism but to the kind of 20th-century liberalism that wanted a strong, activist central … Continue reading “Cold War Liberalism:”

How’s this for a pincer movement? The same issue of the Wall Street Journal that ran Benjamin Netanyahu’s screed calling on the US to "expand democracy" and "free speech" to the Middle East – presumably by overthrowing the current brutes in power – featured WSJ deputy features editor Tunku Varadarajan demanding that the parameters of … Continue reading “Winning Through Intimidation”

The stunning victory of the French National Front‘s Jean Marie Le Pen over Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has European and American elites in a tizzy. They are right to tremble. For the grandfatherly ex-paratrooper represents everything they hate – nationalism, traditionalism, populism – and threatens the values they seek to ensconce: Euro-federalism, multiculturalism, and … Continue reading “The Meaning of Le Pen”

We’ve talked on the phone several times, but when I had an almost-free day last week I thought it was time to talk with Chalmers Johnson face to face. His 2000 book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Henry Holt Metropolitan, now in an Owl books paperback, $15.00, 266 pp.) was selling well … Continue reading “Chalmers Johnson: Changed Cold Warrior”

On April 17, we entered the Jenin camp for a third time,accompanied by Thawra. We had met Thawra the night we first entered Jenin. She came into the crowded, makeshift clinic organized by Palestinian Medical Relief Committee workers, cradling Ziad, an 18 day old infant born on the first night of the attack against Jenin. … Continue reading “Searching For the Truth In Jenin”