Month: January 2016

Home 2016 January
Drafting Our Daughters
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Drafting Our Daughters

The leftist regime, incarnate in bold and belligerent Democrats and tepid, me-too Republicans, hates women, the same way it hates black people.  The way you can tell is that you often hear them screaming (or sobbing) exactly the opposite, as justification for the passage of unprecedented social-engineering laws.  Yet judging by the effects of both...

Tommy Flanagan
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Tommy Flanagan

Early one evening in the mid-1980’s, jazz pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., who in 1951-52 had performed and recorded with star bebop alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, was having a bad first set at Bradley’s, New York City’s premier jazz piano bar.  Bishop’s sense of time was off, he was missing notes, and he even seemed disoriented...

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R.I.P., Mr. Chairman

David A. Hartman passed from this life on November 24, at the age of 79.  Though it has been some time since his writing appeared in these pages, Mr. Hartman’s influence will be felt as long as Chronicles remains in print.  As his close friend, collaborator, and fellow board member Tom Pauken rightly noted in...

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Bernardino and Islam

Unlike Osama bin Laden, who chose to launch his attack on the United States on September 11, 2001, as a symbolic reversal of the Ottoman defeat at the Battle of Vienna on that date in 1683, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, prosecuted their jihad in San Bernardino because that is where they lived...

Thoroughly Modern Muslims
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Thoroughly Modern Muslims

Allah (ta’ala) said, {They thought that their fortresses would protect them from Allah but Allah came upon them from where they had not expected, and He cast terror into their hearts so they destroyed their houses by their own hands and the hands of the believers.  So take warning, O people of vision} [Al-Hashr:2]. In...

Flame of Hope
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Flame of Hope

The 21st century has not so far been a happy time for American conservatives.  It began with an appalling terrorist attack whose key perpetrators had taken advantage of our government’s insouciance toward mass immigration from the Third World.  Instead of reversing the trend toward demographic transformation, the authorities doubled down on it: We now accept...

Religion Is Always There
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Religion Is Always There

The varied and complex relations between religion and power can be understood only by means of extensive comparisons, between nations and across time.  Who better to demonstrate this than Prof. David Martin, the doyen of the comparative sociology of religion? Martin’s first achievement is to refute “the general theory of secularisation,” which has enjoyed so...

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Outside In

Immediately following the jihadist bombings in Paris, President François Hollande announced that he was declaring a three-month national state of emergency, closing the French borders, and treating the attacks as “an act of war.”  Two nights later French planes began attacking ISIS in Syria, and two days after that Hollande and Vladimir Putin agreed to...

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National Review at 60

National Review celebrated its 60th anniversary last November.  Its founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., would have been days away from turning 90.  He is all over the anniversary issue, in a somewhat exploitive way—many photographs and reminders of his celebrity status, including an image of the brand of peanut butter he endorsed.  Indeed, just as...

Of Paradigms and Penectomies
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Of Paradigms and Penectomies

“Conservatives engage in rebellions, not revolutions.”  How true, and what a way to begin a book. The Conservative Rebellion is part memoir, part intellectual and political history by a scholar who came of age in the revolutionary 1960’s, when fashionable people viewed rebels as Parliament viewed the Boston Minutemen.  (King George III, however, considered George...

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Trump Said What?

The nation held its breath in mid-December when GOP candidate Donald Trump dared to suggest that, in the wake of an ISIS/ISIL/IS/Caliphate/Daesh-related terrorist attack on U.S. soil, all Muslim immigration should be halted, until “Congress can figure out what the hell is going on.” When the press finally exhaled, it started screaming and hollering, pausing...