Yesterday I faulted the U.S. press for not doing surveys on American public opinion re Jews & Israel. Well, it turns out that Haaretz just published such a poll in Europe, conducted by the Anti Defamation League, showing that over…
The book business sometimes promotes books as “widely anticipated.” This is usually a lie, but for Farrar, Straus and Giroux this September, it’s not. A great number of people are breathlessly anticipating the publication of The Israel Lobby book by…
I missed a central point when writing about Robert Pape’s theory about suicide terrorism yesterday. Pape says that an essential aspect of the practice is that suicide terrorists are venerated by their societies. They are martyrs, and are assured of…
One of my many disappointments with the media is that in the wake of the attacks in England and Mike Chertoff’s gut-check, we have seen no Op-Eds by Robert A. Pape, the realist at the University of Chicago who knows…
George Ajjan tells me that at a meeting of Arab community leaders last night (in New Jersey, I presume) a friend told him about an article in Haaretz describing a growing trend to delegitimize the idea of a Jewish state…
New York Magazine’s profile of Katie Couric is already famous for her admission that she repeatedly slapped a staffer on the arm after he put the word “sputum” in her script a few weeks back, sputum being a word she…
Yesterday’s profile of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in the Times was an important expression of mainstream liberal opinion. It was fair and limited. The author, Roger Cohen, is agonized by the moral position of an Israeli society that has…
I spent the weekend at my wife’s family’s community in the Pennsylvania mountains, an old Quaker retreat with a distinctly elite flavor. I made a faux pas when I whipped up a fruit salad for the dinner Saturday and used…
I like Scott’s comment from yesterday, that maybe the Iraq war will do to the current Establishment what Vietnam did to the last one, break it down. Certainly this disastrous war goes way beyond George Bush and even Dick Cheney….