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 WestÂpeople 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 causeÂsaving the Democratic PartyÂand 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…
Every now and then in life, and maybe just when you want it, god throws down a thunderbolt. It happened to me on Friday in Hebron, in the Occupied Territories. A group of seven Israelis and I were sitting in…
Joey Cavod has pointed out Biblical errors in an article I wrote for the Observer this past week. In explaining the ancient attachment of Jews to the West Bank, I wrote, “David bought Shem, and that is Jerusalem. Joseph bought…
I’m in a little town in Israel near the Lebanon border, full of reporters. They’re flirting, over their expense accounts, as the shells are fired nearby, and the rockets land. At dinner, the restaurant’s dog shoved in under my table,…