Having covered former Iran hostage Michael Metrinko’s homecoming to Pennsylvania 25 years ago, I remember the mixture of humiliation and rage that proceeded from that long nightmare. The British hostage crisis has been a Broadway farce by comparison. The sailors…
The other night at Columbia, student groups including Lionpac, Columbiaâs version of Aipac (the Israel lobby), held a panel on âWhat to do about Iran?â They invited three experts. One was a fullblown neoconservative, Herbert London, the ruddy-faced former mayoral…
Sen. Joe Biden’s refrain these days is that the violence in Iraq requires a “political solution.” I.e., it’s not religious fanaticism, it’s not Islamofascism, it’s not a clash of civilizations, it’s not a war on terror; suicide bombers are motivated…
I’m surprised that I’ve seen no coverage of political theorist Michael Walzerâs lecture at Yivo Institute last month on the issue of Jewish identity: “Are We a People?” Surprised because it was such a strong lecture, and such a disturbing…
The other night NBC Nightly News ran an attack on Wikipedia as being a kind of clown show. NBC said that increasingly Wikipedia is the go-to source for college kids. Then it said that Wikipedia is not composed by experts,…
M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum has a fine piece this week about Hebron (all but endorsing my view that the situation in the West Bank is worse than apartheid). This week 200 settlers in Hebron grabbed another building…
The other night I was reading a yellowed copy of Labyrinths, a (once-trendy) book of stories by Jorge Luis Borges (who died in ’86), when I came on the story “Three Versions of Judas” and was stunned to see that,…
From the moment I met my wife 17 years ago, I asked her to explain things to me, because she has more common sense than I do. She drew the line at a couple of things. I wasn’t allowed to…
Zalmay Khalilzad is now a lock for the U.N. Ambassadorship. Smooth as a crocodile. Even looks like one. Here is a wonderful portrait of Khalilzad as a grad student in the late 70s, from Anne Norton’s book, Leo Strauss and…