I got on a crowded commuter train yesterday and a biggish guy sat down next to me wearing shorts, with a big bag. I was reading the Forward, an article headlined, Bush Riles Muslims With ‘Islamic Fascist’ Remark, when the…

It’s been so long, and gone thru so many bizarre turns, that the JonBenet Ramsey case seems to have lost all reality and become pure entertainment, like a history-channel crime, where no one gets hurt anymore. But I think about…

Chris Matthews is on fire these days. Joe Lieberman’s loss has freed him to offer pitiless critiques of Democrats who voted for the war. Last night he said that they knew it was a bad decision in 2002 but went…

The death the other day in Lebanon of Uri Grossman, 20, an Israeli soldier and the son of the novelist David Grossman, who has been a peace activist in Israel, underscores a big difference between Israeli society and ours: In…

The abduction of Jill Carroll in Baghdad in January, along with the murder of her interpreter, Alan Enwiya, was an important event. Her ordeal demonstrated that the Islamic world has friends in the West—people like Jill Carroll, people who went…

In a great piece in the Times last week, Neil MacFarquhar reported from Damascus that the disastrous Iraq war, chased by Israel’s Lebanon war, has set back the cause of reform in the Arab world. An Arab moderate is afraid…

I’m freshly returned from Israel and want to get down my impressions. Mine was a political trip but it was also personal. I’ll begin with the personal. The best thing about my trip was the feeling of making a full…

In his column yesterday on the Lamont victory in Connecticut, Times columnist David Brooks took up his new cause—saving the Democratic Party—and said that Joe Lieberman, and not the “net roots,” has the wisdom to see that “The civilized world…

Two nights ago on CNN, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Dore Gold in Jerusalem and identified him as Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N. The polished Gold offered, as usual, an articulate statement of Israeli attitudes toward the war effort. “Well for…

Lauren Likkel If you want to understand Muslim anger toward the West, this picture is helpful, for it shows one of the great griefs of Jerusalem. Taken two Fridays ago, by an astronomer at the University of Wisconsin at Eau…