Category: Web

  Jihadophilia (/d??’h??do’f?lj?/) is a mental disorder affecting members of the Western (West European, North American and Anglo-Antipodean) elite class, mostly politicians, journalists, academics and civil servants. J. is characterized by a breakdown of the ability to name Muslims as perpetrators of the acts of Islamic terrorism, by the tendency to systematically ignore Islam as a factor in terrorist attacks...

  If we lived in a real (not to say free) country, then we would be reading something like the following exchanges:   Congressman Issa:  So, Ms Lerner, how and when exactly did you learn that your department was illegally targeting conservative and pro-life groups. Lerner:  Congressman Issa, on the advice of my attorney, I...

  Dominique Venner, prominent French author and much-decorated Algerian war veteran who shot himself before the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on May 21, was a determined foe of homosexual “marriage”—which was legalized in France last weekend—and the threat of Islam to the French society. In Venner’s view, both issues were equally “disastrous” for...

  Last week I traveled to Budapest to attend a conference on the thorny issue of EU-Ukraine relations. The visit prompted me to explore an apparent paradox. Here is a decent little country in the heart of Europe—good food, safe streets, rich soil—which could be a Pannonian version of Holland, but it is not a happy place....

  Obama administration officials have convenient ways of evading responsibility.  Hilary made her getaway before some of the truth about Benghazi began to ooze out from the cracks, and Holder not only has recused himself from the investigation of the AP story but he blames subordinates for all his woes.  Best of all, perhaps, is...

  It remains to be seen who will be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. After this week’s congressional hearings on Benghazi it is certain that Hillary Clinton—the worst Secretary of State in American history—will not be that person. If this country’s political system has some spark left, the Libyan scandal will also come to...

  Three weeks after the bombings it is possible to make some firm and a few tentative conclusions. The most important fact is that the outrage was an act of Islamic terrorism. The attackers were Muslims, but the U.S. elite class—by ignoring that fact or denying its relevance—makes a comprehensive anti-jihadist strategy less likely than...

  Let me second Tom Piatak.  I think the best way to start appreciating Ella is by getting (off iTunes, for example) the various songbooks she recorded–Cole Porter, Gershwin, Rogers and Hart.  In these she sings mainly straight without a lot of jazzing around.  My wife generally dislikes most jazz (except George Shearing and a...

  The national celebration of sodomy continues thanks to Sports Illustrated’s new cover story featuring the first “major sport” athlete to come out of the closet while still an active player.  Jason Collins, a seven-foot-tall black man, writes his own “coming out” story in the current number of SI, along with several other pieces by writers who see...

Google often gets grief over the events and people it chooses to honor.  Much of this criticism is justified.  But sometimes Google gets one right, as it did today, when it honored Ella Fitzgerald.  Here is Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine, recorded in 1956.  Popular music does not get any better than this–the finest vocal...

  America has a severe educational problem: It is full of people, many of them in prominent positions, who have been educated beyond their intelligence. In fact, such people are more prominent as leaders in most American institutions  than people of knowledge and character. Another educational problem: several million people who have been made unemployable...

  Last night’s shoot-out in Boston must have brought as much joy to the Kremlin as it has dampened the spirits of  the White House.  Thrilled with the announcement that the primary suspects in the Boston Marathon Massacre were white, anti-American leftists were hoping for the big score, another Tim McVeigh to prove that Tea...

  Until a week ago it appeared that the government in Belgrade would give up the last vestiges of its claim to Kosovo for the sake of some indeterminate date in the future when Serbia may join the European Union. A series of unreciprocated concessions over the past few months have encouraged the KLA regime’s...

  Several commenters have decried the lack of media coverage of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia.  Gosnell is charged with the deaths of one pregnant woman and seven children who were born after botched abortions; those children were killed by having their spinal cords severed.  Witnesses have testified that many more babies were also...

  The American Conservative has had dozens of articles and posts on gay marriage.  The general tenor has ranged from arguing that gay marriage is inevitable to criticizing opponents of gay marriage to arguing that support for gay marriage is the conservative position.  What has largely been absent is any opposition to gay marriage. There is, of course, nothing conservative about support...

  On April 4 the Pentagon announced that it was sending a mobile missile defense system to Guam as a “precautionary move” to protect the island from the potential threat from North Korea. The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) comprises ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California, as well as naval vessels capable of shooting down...

In recent decades, the public profile of Easter in the United States has diminished.  Americans now spend more on Halloween than on Easter, and the public attention Easter receives is largely negative.  Google observed Easter Sunday by celebrating Cesar Chavez’s birthday, and public references to Easter are often excised, just as “Christmas” is often replaced...

  A great deal of ink is being spilled on the two Supreme Court cases taking up same-sex marriage, but the effect is rather like the ink released by a cuttlefish to cloud the vision of its enemies.  To anticipate my conclusion, let me go on record as saying that family-values conservatives have done vastly...

  Arrayed against the Earps in Tombstone was a loose and constantly shifting set of alliances known as “The Cowboys.”  Eastern journalists, looking for sensational material, followed the Cowboys’ enemies and rivals in describing them as an organized gang, but no one could quite figure out who the gang’s leader was—Ike Clanton, Bill Brocius, or...

On Saturday night, my wife and I were guests of our friends Jim and Betsy  Easton, at a performance of Handel’s Messiah.  The concert was a joint production of the Rockford Symphony Orchestra and the Mendelssohn Club chorus.  The four professional soloists from out of town sang beautifully, but it was the orchestra and chorus that made  greatest...

  Just when I was beginning to think the neoconservatives had reached the nadir of ignorance with people like Jonah Goldberg and David Frum, along comes Harvard grad Bill Kristol to flaunt his ignorance.  Bill was so thrilled that someone had put up these mock lyrics to a Harvard Fight song:  Illegitimum non carborundum that...

  One variant of a well-known law of bureaucracy says that the amount of time spent discussing a budgetary decision is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the budget in question. Judging by what I witnessed on March 20 at the European Parliament—at the Committee on Budgets’ hearing on the “Financing of the Eastern Partnership”—the...

  Here is poor David Frum pretending to have second thoughts about the Iraq War for which he shilled.  Obviously, the only people who are capable of having  second thoughts had to have first thoughts, and there is no sign that Frum has ever done anything but pound a keyboard and recycle other people’s lies....

  Ten years ago today, U.S. air, sea and land forces attacked Iraq. And the great goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom? Destroy the chemical and biological weapons Saddam Hussein had amassed to use on us or transfer to al-Qaida for use against the U.S. homeland. Exact retribution for Saddam’s complicity in 9/11 after we learned...

  Wyatt Earp, saloonkeeper, professional gambler, profligate, and alleged procurer of women, was for all his faults a great American hero. Earp was born in Monmouth, Illinois, home of Monmouth College, the  alma mater of our friend and colleague, the late James Stockdale.  Living in Iowa he was repeatedly in trouble, principally for keeping a...

  Contrary to popular belief, Brussels is not the only major European capital which is away from the seacoast as well as devoid of a river. The Senne is a far cry from the similar-sounding Seine further south, however: it is a nasty, brutish, mercifully short waterway. By the mid-1800’s it had become so putrid and unstable that the city elders decided to cover...

  Many of us non-RC traditionalist all over the world had awaited the news from Rome with some trepidation. In the end it turned out to be rather good. Pope Francis, the first non-European Bishop of Rome since Gregory III (d. 741), is universally described as “modest” and “moderate”—which is much preferred to the dreaded...

  Last Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul rose on the Senate floor to declare a filibuster and pledge he would not sit down until either he could speak no longer or got an answer to his question about Barack Obama’s war powers. Does the president, Paul demanded to know, in the absence of an imminent threat,...

  Two years after the beginning of the Syrian insurgency, three facts are clear: The rebels are unable to bring down the government of President Bashar al-Assad, foreign political support and military supplies notwithstanding; Bashar’s forces are unable to defeat the rebels and reestablish control over the entire country; and continued third-party advocacy of either...

  That stalwart set at National Review known as “The Editors” has done what it always does to a genuinely conservative display in the halls of power.  Far from a radical denunciation, which may invite a more thoughtful reading of events and sentences, they’ve taken to light pooh-poohing.  Rand Paul is providing “great entertainment,” and “We salute his...

  Morally responsible people sacrifice in the present to invest in the future.  Irresponsible people impoverish the future to enjoy more of the present.  Which describes the United States today? Voting decides nothing.  It does not prove that the people rule.  It merely makes a selection of which politicians will get the opportunity to pursue...

  I said at the beginning that man is a mammalian species.  From this one simple fact flow many important consequences for the human race.  As the word “mammal” indicates, our females nurse their young, which requires diversification of the roles played by males and females, but even those words males and females tell us...

  Does the Left-Wing Christian really exist?  I think not, if we mean someone who equates leftism with Christianity.  People like Garry Wills are not now and probably have never been Christian in any meaningful sense of the term. They simply put a veneer of Christian imagery on the banalities they have picked up from...

  I have been arguing for decades that any conservative point of view, to be usable or even defensible, has to be grounded in an understanding of human nature derived from observation of man’s nature and history.  In an age where a Church may dictate morality, this understanding may be less necessary, though it must...

  Americans seem to think that they are citizens of a self-governing democracy.  Actually, democratic self-government is not possible in a regime where immense wealth and influence are concentrated in a few hands an unelected, irresponsible, and heavily biased mass media control public discourse the political process is dominated by advertising men the population is...

There has been considerable discussion lately about the  federal government’s potential use of the U.S. Army against American citizen civilians.  It might be worth a moment to pause and remember February 17, 1865.  On that winter day, the U.S. Army, with malice aforethought,  robbed, raped, and burned out the white and black people of the...

  Last week I testified, for the third time in a decade, before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague. I appeared as a defense witness in the trial of Radovan Karadzic. Just like on the occasion of my previous testimony, the prosecutor paid scant attention to the substance of my statements. He...

“To govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.” With those brave, wise, simple words,...

I have not had the time or the inclination to wade through the commentary on Pope Benedict’s unexpected resignation, but I assume that much of it is angry, vituperative, and dismissive, because such commentary is one of the hallmarks of our degraded age.  I wanted instead to offer a brief note of gratitude for Benedict’s service as...

Dubious ideas that are taken for granted as true in American public discourse: Government and Big Business are enemies. The U.S. practices a free-trade policy. Wars are bad except those carried out by the U.S. because our intentions are always benevolent. It is good that our daughters now have equality with our sons in the...

Eighty years ago today, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Germany’s Chancellor. The old Marshal, a Junker through and through, did so unwillingly. He disliked “that Austrian corporal”—he seldom uttered Hitler’s name—from the moment they first met, in October 1931. The antipathy was mutual, with Hitler often referring to Hindenburg—in private—as “that old fool.”...

  Probably all societies work better with a certain quantity of comfortable delusions, but America seems to operate with nothing but delusions.  Large policies have been and continue to be based on an imaginary view of the world which trumps common sense: • You can have a First World economy and military with a Third...

  Last week’s attack on the Algerian gas facility at In Amenas was the most elaborate jihadist assault ever conducted on African soil. It was also the most spectacular action of its kind since November 2008, when Islamic terrorists carried out a series of coordinated shooting and bombing attacks in Bombay (aka “Mumbai”), India’s largest...

Yesterday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the Pentagon was largely eliminating restrictions on women serving in combat units.  This is perfectly consistent with the egalitarian ideology to which the Obama Administration is committed.   However, it ignores the reasons why Western armies have never included women in combat units, apart from a few exceptional circumstances. ...

  On January 16 Islamic militants staged an audacious attack on a major natural gas complex in southeastern Algeria, 800 miles southeast from the capital. A jihadist group calling itself the Masked Brigade—led by Moktar Belmoktar, the fierce one-eyed veteran of the Afghan war and a senior commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)—claimed responsibility...

  What is the alternative to respect for responsible authority?  If we assume that all foods, recreations, forms of music, and manners of life are equal, then Liberals are right to demand social, political, and tax neutrality on traditional sauerkraut and on every other issue that might involve government control, including same-sex marriage, abortion, and...

  I’ve just returned from Albania, almost 22 years after visiting that country for the first time. In July 1991 I went there on an assignment with U.S. News & World Report, only weeks after the country’s borders were finally opened to foreigners after 45 years of hermetic isolation. I have visited many countries over the years,...

  The most important foreign event in the final days of 2012 was the ramming through of Egypt’s new, Sharia-based constitution by President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood allies. The cultural, demographic and geographic center of the Arab world is now set to become an Islamic Republic. Egypt’s transformation, after 60 years of secularist...

  Peter Brimelow has written a discussion of the War on Christmas for VDARE.com that is well worth reading.  In it, Peter puts me in the unusual role of optimist.  There are still many people in this country who want to suppress the public celebration of  Christmas, and the situation in the schools, where culture is formed...

  I met Judge Robert Bork once, in the summer of 1989, when I was interning at Accuracy in Media. I was working on a feature story for the Washington Inquirer, AIM’s weekly newspaper, about the Smithsonian Institution’s use of tax dollars to fund the performance of Santeria and Palo Mayombe rituals on the Mall in...