To say that the events of September 11, 2001, had a distorting effect on American foreign policy is to seriously understate the case. What happened in the wake of that catastrophe, in the highest councils of the US government, has been called a coup by none other than...
You might think that China’s political system is in no way comparable to our own – and further, you might not be blamed for thinking that the 1973 Chinese Communist propaganda campaign, "Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius," has zero to do with the...
A screaming mob of whites gathers in a public square, their placards proclaiming their hatred of blacks, their shouts of "N----r!" reverberating and bouncing off the walls of nearby shops and homes like the ominous thunder of a coming storm. They loot shops...
David Ignatius, writing about the furor around the rumored nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, remarks that the first enlisted man to be considered for the job "has taken so much flak he deserves another Purple Heart." That about sums up the...
Year’s end prediction columns are always problematic: my last one wasn’t all that accurate, as it turned out. I was dead wrong on the Big One — war with Iran, to which I assigned a 65 percent probability. This year, however, it looks as if the issue — like a huge,...
Naftali Bennett is the rising star of Israeli politics, and his party, Jewish Home, is projected to be the third largest in Israel: he is also an upfront racist who has made the presence of Africans in the country a major campaign issue, calling for their immediate...
I’m taking Christmas off, which means no column the day after. I don’t usually take off for this particular holiday, but this year I’m, frankly, quite tired: exhausted, really. I need a break, however brief: I’ll be back on Friday. I don’t know how many Christmas...
This Christmas is a bleak one for those who hold out hope that there might be peace on earth — or just a more peaceful earth. In the Middle East, wars and rumors of war roil an already volatile region. A proxy war in Syria shows every sign of metastasizing into a...
There has been a lot of pushback against the neoconservatives' preemptive smear campaign against Chuck Hagel, much of it illuminating, but none as clear-headed as that by Paul Pillar in The National Interest, who starts out his piece this way: "The effort to...
The campaign to demonize Chuck Hagel in the run up to his possible confirmation hearings as Secretary of Defense is going full swing. As I told my readers the other day, “get ready for a mudslide of smears and innuendo as the [Israel] Lobby homes in for the kill.”...
