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…
Yesterday’s Times had a fine piece on the politics of Barack Obama’s position re Palestinians. In a speech last weekend, Obama spoke of Palestinian suffering. The Times made clear this was a misstep. Yet by singling out Palestinian suffering on…
This morning I feel proudly Jewish. Not my usual response to the news. But today’s Times has an unbelievable story by Alan Schwarz about dementia felling former NFL great John Mackey and many other former football players; and it puts…
For the last year I blogged at the Observer, now I’m blogging on my own. I did the Observer blog for nothing with the hope that if it worked out, I’d get paid. After a year I asked for a…
Today Reuters reports on the flood of Christian Arabs who are leaving the Occupied Territories because of the issue of access to holy sites, including the fact that Bethlehem is surrounded by the towering security fence, and it’s hard to…
Everyone is stunned that a process that should be occurring 9 months to a year from now is occurring now: the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. It is completely premature. And now the Republicans seem to be following in…
My dad’s real smart, even if he doesn’t agree with me on my Middle East politics, and a couple weeks ago he said something that stuck. He was saying that Jimmy Carter’s book is a sign of rising anti-Semitism (something…
I continue to get heat from Chomsky supporters for my (yes, ill-tempered) post the other day. Richard W. Symonds writes, I still question your view that he did not “deliver” his “$5 lecture” – it was not advertised as a…
A few weeks back I brought up the charge of dual loyalty with respect to the neocons who claim that Israel’s interests and the U.S.’s interests are identical. A very sensitive question, yes, and a lot of people got upset…