The Isolationist Song in Paradise

Living out in southern Utah, in the red-rock country, I don't hear the news much, nor do I much care that I'm missing it. No radio, no television. Limited access to the Web via a contentedly glacial dial-up line. Lately something about Israel and Hezbollah and the...

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Five Myths That Sanction Israel’s War Crimes

This week I had the pleasure to appear on American radio, on the Laura Ingraham show, pitted against David Horowitz, who most recently made his name under the banner of Campus Watch, leading McCarthyite witch-hunts against American professors who have the impertinence...

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Israeli Onslaught May Spark Aounist Resurgence

Even as the war in southern Lebanon heats up and a cease-fire looks increasingly distant, thoughts turn to what will happen in the aftermath. Since the 1960s, Lebanon’s many religious groups have had strained relations, but a unified Lebanon could be one of the...

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US Now a Bystander in Iraq’s Sectarian War

The United States has been reduced to the role of passive bystander as a new stage of sectarian civil war has begun in Iraq, marked by military units with heavy weaponry carrying out mass killings. Last week's bloody massacre in Mahmoudiya illustrates both the new...

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Israeli Offensive Targeting Relief Efforts?

Ambulances appear to be have become a target of the Israeli military in its quest to oust Hezbollah from southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Red Crescent Society has reported five "security incidents" since the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah earlier this...

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Lebanese Refugees Have Only Their Anger

BEIRUT - Among hundreds of thousands of refugees scattered across city parks, schools, and abandoned buildings in Beirut, new and chilling words have been doing the rounds. A senior Israeli air force official announced on Israeli army radio that "Army chief of...

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Damascus Now Seen As Pivotal in Mideast Crisis

Mocked just months ago as a fool and a lightweight compared to his legendarily shrewd father, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad appears increasingly to have become the "go-to guy" in resolving the two-week-old war between Hezbollah and Israel. While...

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Lebanon: Winners and Losers

Poor Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. "Liberated" Iraq's chief government official came to Washington hoping to shore up the precarious position of his regime as it teeters on the brink of civil war, and all he got was this: "Mr. Maliki's refusal to...

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The Real Challenge From the ‘Shia Crescent’

As Lebanon's civilian infrastructure is being destroyed by the Israeli air force and artillery, the Arab leaders are fighting their own petty "sectarian war." The first salvo of that war was fired by King Abdullah of Jordan in December 2004 when he described...

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