A couple years back a publisher who signed my (meager) checks asked me how I could justify being so critical of American policy in the Middle East and Israel when I’d never been to Israel. I’d traveled all over creation,…
I got some great comment on a post I did on the taboo liberal journalists experience when tempted to talk about Israel. Anonymous grapples smartly (if casuistically) on to the point that the lobby has actually worked against Israel’s best…
Today I was sent this powerful speech denouncing the Muslim world as primitive, by an avowedly-secular woman speaking Arabic. It aired purportedly on al-Jazeera. My friend John Coyne says, “The woman is Wafa Sultan, an Arab-American psychologist from Los Angeles.”…
Bad news is good news for journalists, and a Middle East in flames has launched a network star: Richard Engel of NBC. Never one to pontificate or editorialize, the Arabic speaker and BBC veteran lets human beings tell the story…
If you ever needed a reminder of how important the realist intellectuals’ spring assault on the Israel lobby is, today’s Times bore it out. Its polls show that most Americans feel that Israel’s indiscriminate destruction in Lebanon will lead to…
Joe Lieberman thinks Jewishly; note his lovely comment to Jason Horowitz re his support for Israel as an underlying issue in the Dem. primary Mr. Lieberman paused, stepped toward the blue sedan that would speed him to a meeting outside…
So many of us, leftleaners, were confused through the first week of the Lebanon fighting. It was obvious that Nasrallah was provoking something, wrongly; it is obvious that Iran is not a good actor; those rockets were targeting civilians in…
Several times in the 1880s, Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about his efforts to eat “strawberries in the spring.” He was talking about learning to enjoy things in the moment, also of not trying to rush something…
On truthdig, antiwar activist Tom Hayden offers his experience of being certified by pro-Israel forces, including the Berman machine in Los Angeles, back when he was running for state office: Twenty-five years ago I stared into the eyes of Michael…