Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs, announced on May 1, gives (theoretically, at least) Washington the opportunity to make an exit from Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it most certainly underscored the surreal nature of Washington’s relationship with its “ally” in the region. Bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in...
Year: 2011
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Glenn Beck, the Straight Dope
A few years ago, I was invited to appear on Glenn Beck’s television show. We were scheduled to discuss the nonsecurity spending Congress had stuffed into the supplemental appropriations bill being used to pay for the Iraq war: money for peanut farmers, spinach growers, etc. (The Iraq occupation itself should probably fall into the category...
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All That Jazz
I greatly enjoyed and appreciate Tony Outhwaite’s recent tribute to George Shearing (“No Apologies for Jazz,” Cultural Revolutions, April). Well done. In late 1954 or early 1955 I twice traveled from my assignment at Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois, to the University at Champaign-Urbana to hear some live jazz. The first time, it...
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“Bibi” Votes Republican
Not since Nikita Khrushchev berated Dwight Eisenhower over Gary Powers’ U-2 spy flight over Russia only weeks earlier has an American president been subjected to a dressing down like the one Barack Obama received from Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday. With this crucial difference. Khrushchev ranted behind closed doors, and when Ike refused to apologize,...
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Democratizing the Middle East: A Realist Alternative
The most significant aspect of President Obama’s speech on the Middle East (May 19) is the absence of a plan to revive the “Peace Process.” The passing storm over his statements regarding the 1967 borders notwithstanding, it is already evident that there will be no new initiatives in the months to come. This is...
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Democratizing the Middle East: A Realist Alternative
The most significant aspect of President Obama’s speech on the Middle East (May 19) is the absence of a plan to revive the “Peace Process.” The passing storm over his statements regarding the 1967 borders notwithstanding, it is already evident that there will be no new initiatives in the months ...
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Israel in a Post-American Era
In 1918, the United States proved militarily decisive in the defeat of the Kaiser’s Germany and emerged as first power on earth. World War II, ending in 1945, produced two truly victorious nations, the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin and the America of Harry Truman. Out of the Cold War that lasted from Truman...
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Israel in a Post-American Era
In 1918, the United States proved militarily decisive in the defeat of the Kaiser’s Germany and emerged as first power on earth. World War II, ending in 1945, produced two truly victorious nations, the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin and the America of Harry Truman. Out of the Cold War that lasted from Truman to...
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The Persecution of John Demjanjuk
“John Demjanjuk Guilty of Nazi Death Camp Murders,” ran the headline on the BBC. The lede began: “A German court has found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to murder more than 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp in Poland.” Not until paragraph 17 does one find this jolting fact: “No evidence was produced...
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Ancien Régime: Final Thoughts II
Tocqueville has offered many insights into the origins and legacy of the French Revolution. In conclusion, perhaps, we should consider three of his main points. I He rejects the interpretation that the FR was the culmination of a conspiracy to destroy Christianity and/or the Catholic Church; II He sees the FR as a...
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Ancien Régime: Final Thoughts II
Tocqueville has offered many insights into the origins and legacy of the French Revolution. In conclusion, perhaps, we should consider three of his main points. I He rejects the interpretation that the FR was the culmination of a conspiracy to destroy Christianity and/or the Catholic Church; II He sees the FR ...
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Jerks, The Individualist, Part II
Self-made millionaires set the tone for this class, and any scholar or man of letters who has had to raise money among men of wealth and influence will see himself in Eliot’s Prufrock. These poor fools have to listen, hour after hour, to Dives’ tales of victories on the golf course and of his...
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Of Gods and Men
There are few movies I am still thinking about several days after seeing them. One such movie is Of Gods and Men, the superb French movie about the martyrdom of seven French Cistercians from the small monastery of Notre Dame de l’Atlas in Algeria in 1996, in the midst of the Algerian civil war. This...
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Jerks, The Individualist, Part II
Self-made millionaires set the tone for this class, and any scholar or man of letters who has had to raise money among men of wealth and influence will see himself in Eliot’s Prufrock. These poor fools have to listen, hour after hour, to Dives’ tales of victories on the golf course and of his personal...
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Of Gods and Men
There are few movies I am still thinking about several days after seeing them. One such movie is Of Gods and Men, the superb French movie about the martyrdom of seven French Cistercians from the small monastery of Notre Dame de l’Atlas in Algeria in 1996, in the midst of the Algerian civil war. This...
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Obama on Osama—a Volcano of Lies
Barack Obama, who pledged to restore ethical honor to the White House after the Bush years, is now burying himself under an active volcano of lies, mostly but not exclusively concerning the assassination of Osama bin Laden. There was scarcely a sentence in the president’s Sunday night address or in the subsequent briefing by...
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Vanishing American Footprint
With his order to effect the execution of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs, 40 miles from Islamabad, without asking permission of the government, Barack Obama made a bold and courageous decision. Its success, and the accolades he has received, have given him a credibility as commander in chief that he never had before....
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Pakistan: The Problem, the Solution
The most significant fact to emerge from the killing of Osama Bin Laden is that Pakistan’s military intelligence service (ISI) had been sheltering him for years. This confirms what we have been warning for the best part of the past decade: that Pakistan is an irredeemably flawed entity, unable to turn itself into a...
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Obama on Osama—a Volcano of Lies
Barack Obama, who pledged to restore ethical honor to the White House after the Bush years, is now burying himself under an active volcano of lies, mostly but not exclusively concerning the assassination of Osama bin Laden. There was scarcely a sentence in the president's Sunday night address or in the ...
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Pakistan: The Problem, the Solution
The most significant fact to emerge from the killing of Osama Bin Laden is that Pakistan’s military intelligence service (ISI) had been sheltering him for years. This confirms what we have been warning for the best part of the past decade: that Pakistan is an irredeemably flawed entity, unable to turn itself into a stable...
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Vanishing American Footprint
With his order to effect the execution of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALs, 40 miles from Islamabad, without asking permission of the government, Barack Obama made a bold and courageous decision. Its success, and the accolades he has received, have given him a credibility as commander in chief that he never had before. The...
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The Straight Dope—June 2011
beyond the revolution Our Sacred Anticanon by Thomas Fleming views The Triumph of Nice by Philip Jenkins The King James Bible at 400: Love’s Labor’s Lost by Aaron D. Wolf news Glenn Beck, the Straight Dope by W. James Antle III A Saint Is Born: An Interview With Roland Joffe by Matthew A. Rarey reviews The Robot’s Focus by Derek Turner A Journey: My Political ...
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An Orthodox Muslim: Bin Laden’s Theology and Terrorism
One annoying old canard, reinserted into the mainstream media reporting of Osama Bin Laden’s death, is the claim that his theology represents a radical break with traditional Islam. The usual propagandists and apologists for “normative Islam”—peaceful and tolerant, and totally at odds with terrorist violence—are back peddling their old wares. CNN had Ebrahim Moosa, a professor...
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Jerks: The Individualist, Part I
The Rugged Individualist “Who is John Galt?” I don’t know, and I couldn’t care less, but lots of disgruntled young people waste time on the internet asking this question, as pointless as it is pretentious. John Galt was, of course, the fictional protagonist of Ayn Rand’s mammoth novel, Atlas Shrugged, in which he leads a work-stoppage...
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An Orthodox Muslim: Bin Laden’s Theology and Terrorism
One annoying old canard, reinserted into the mainstream media reporting of Osama Bin Laden’s death, is the claim that his theology represents a radical break with traditional Islam. The usual propagandists and apologists for “normative Islam”—peaceful and tolerant, and totally at odds with terrorist violence—are back peddling their old wares. CNN had Ebrahim Moosa, a...
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Dr. Trifkovic Interviewed on RT
Dr. Trifkovic Interviewed on RT by Chronicles • May 5, 2011 • Printer-friendly abc123″>8 Responses<a href="#respond"
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Jerks: The Individualist, Part I
The Rugged Individualist “Who is John Galt?” I don’t know, and I couldn’t care less, but lots of disgruntled young people waste time on the internet asking this question, as pointless as it is pretentious. John Galt was, of course, the fictional protagonist of Ayn Rand’s mammoth novel, Atlas Shrugged, in which he leads a work-stoppage of...
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Rule By Assassination II
Piecing the story together as best I can–I’ll insert hyperlinks tomorrow–it now appears that a Navy Seal Death Squad was sent in with orders to kill Bin Laden unless they found him entirely naked. Unarmed, he was taken into custody and executed. The rationale, apparently, was that he might be wearing a suicide...
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Rule by Assassination
“Justice has been done,” chortles President Obama and his spokespeople. ”Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, good bye,” chanted the proles on the streets of New York. There are already T-shirts on sale saying “Obama got Osama.” I am surprised not to have heard of a procession of little people in...
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The Coming Bin Laden Conspiracy Theory
The killing of OBL is a significant event politically and psychologically. It will not have any detrimental impact on the operations of Al-Qa’eda, however, because that amorphous group does not need a leader and has not had a centralized command-and-control structure for a decade. We should not expect a single retaliatory terrorist assault by...
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The Coming Bin Laden Conspiracy Theory
The killing of OBL is a significant event politically and psychologically. It will not have any detrimental impact on the operations of Al-Qa’eda, however, because that amorphous group does not need a leader and has not had a centralized command-and-control structure for a decade. We should not expect a single retaliatory terrorist assault by “Al-Qa’eda.”...
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Riding the Minotaur
The townhouse at 18 Belgrave Square consisted of 74 living rooms, salons, corridors, servants’ pantries, staircases, anterooms, and closets, and in 1866 it was deemed suitable to become the new London residence of the Austrian ambassador. The commodious townhouse had gone up early in the century as part of Thomas Cubitt’s development of Belgrave Square,...
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Who Cares Who’s Number One?
President Obama, in his State of the Union Address last January, called upon American students, teachers, scientists, and business executives to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” We are living, the President announced, in a “Sputnik moment.” As polls show the majority of the country considers the United States to be rather...
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The Death Wish of the West
Speculation about the possible decline of the West has been going on for the better part of a century, if it may be considered as originating in Spengler’s or Valery’s famous reflections. Obviously, the fratricidal nature of World War I triggered pessimism, but I think the very nature of our societies constitutes a reason for...
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Cathedral or Mosque-Cathedral?
On March 10, 2010, a group of tourists, reputedly “students from Austria,” entered the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption in Córdoba and started a Muslim prayer. Private guards and, later, police arrested them. One of the students apologized, saying they had “no intention to offend.” The students’ organization in Austria apologized as well,...
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Three From the Past
Unknown Produced by Studio Canal Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra Screenplay by Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell Distributed by Warner Bros. Adjustment Bureau Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed and written by George Nolfi, adapted from “Adjustment Team,” a story by Philip K. Dick Limitless Produced and distributed by Relativity Media Directed by Neil Burger...
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The Whale in Times Square
It is the contention of William McGowan that the once august New York Times, our “newspaper of record” (for lack of an alternative), has become a politically correct sheet. He blames the nepotistic reign of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who inherited the publishing mantle in 1991 upon the retirement of his legendary father, Arthur O. “Punch”...
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Facts Are Stubborn Things
It took only 22 years after he left the White House for conservatives to turn Ronald Reagan into a totem. The celebrations surrounding his 100th birthday on February 6 made George Washington look like a back-bench legislator. Conservatives hailed Reagan as the apotheosis of political wisdom and prudent action. Liberals conceded that he had done...
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Truth in Memory
In 2003, Carlos Eire, the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, published a memoir of his Cuban boyhood, Waiting for Snow in Havana. In a review of this book that appeared in The American Conservative, I suggested comparison with The Last Grove, the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti’s autobiography, or...
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Obama’s Fatal Mistake
Never underestimate the stupidity of our rulers. When Judge Andrew Napolitano of Freedom Watch asked me if I thought President Obama would intervene in Libya, I said, “No, he’s too smart for that.” I attribute my misreading of events to my reading of the President’s general demeanor. Obama projects the aura of a disinterested scientist,...
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Mohammedans in France
It has been about five years since the young, mostly Berber proletariat of the dingy Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles suburbs took to burning its proletarian neighbors’ cars, and there is a looming feeling among French Catholics that something is still not quite right in the woods. There are indications that both French- and Church-government officials...
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The Lost Secret of Kells
When I tell you that I was recently shocked by the treatment of history in a children’s cartoon, you may wonder what kind of pompous buffoon I might be. (“I cannot begin to list the fundamental errors in marine biology that The Little Mermaid parades before our vulnerable children . . . ”) Yet watching...
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A Southern Foison
In the Introduction to the first of these two volumes, Clyde Wilson allows, after a few paragraphs of justified complaint against the wholesale academic and political assault on Southern identity as well as Southern culture, that it was not always thus. “Southerners were seen as different and perhaps a little quaint, but tolerated as Americans.”...
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Our Alien Victims
If only Roger Barnett had known the courts would lynch him for defending himself. Or maybe he did know and still decided to stand his ground. Either way, the owner of the Cross Rail Ranch in Douglas, Arizona, on the U.S. border with Mexico, may soon be $87,000 poorer. The left-wing Ninth U.S. Circuit Court...
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Suicide by (Legal) Immigration
I was fortunate to grow up before the Immigration Act of 1965 began an incremental and insidious change in the ethnic composition of America. I had friends whose parents were immigrants. I thought nothing much of it because the parents had all come from countries in Northern or Western Europe and almost immediately became indistinguishable...
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Slip-Slidin’ Away
“Census data: Rockford may lose spot as Illinois’ 3rd biggest city” warned the headline in the online edition of the February 16 issue of the Rockford Register Star, announcing the initial release of data from the 2010 Census. Ten years ago, when the data from the last census was released, Rockford, with a population of...
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The Libyan War
In the aftermath of September 11, President George W. Bush launched the War on Terror. It was the first war in U.S. history—declared or undeclared—against a phenomenon, a method, or an emotion, rather than against a state (or a subgroup such as the Barbary pirates or the Viet Cong). The concept evoked Xerxes’ War on...
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Road to Damascus
Unrest in Syria has discomforted rather than shaken the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. It is an even bet that he will survive, which is preferable to any likely alternative. There are several reasons he will not end up like Ben Ali or Mubarak. Bashar is popular with a large segment of the population, especially among...
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The Education of W
It sounds presumptuous, but I wish I had written this column in October 2002, and some eagle-eyed George W. Bush assistant would have noticed it and shown it to his moron boss. Let’s just play the What If game for a minute. Had the moron read it and taken what I’m about to write into...
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The Unentitled
“There’s something almost un-American about etiquette. . . . For a lot of Americans the idea that there are rules out there about the proper way to behave, rules more elaborate than just common sense, seems pretentious, European, like one more thing we fought the British to be free of.” —Nancy Updike, This American Life,...