The New Republic

Will the rich save the world? This has not been their traditional service to humankind; but in contemporary America you may be forgiven for believing in the messianic power of personal wealth. We are still enjoying the economicist fantasy that was inaugurated by technology in the Clinton years and consolidated by ideology in the Bush years. Could it be that the rich did not previously save the world because they were not rich enough? But they are rich enough now, right? I do not mean to be too clever. READ MORE >>

FORGIVE MY TARDINESS, BUT last month The New York Times published an article that compared liberals unfavorably to fundamentalist mobs. The piece appeared on the paper’s fun op-ed page, on the occasion of the “cartoon riots” that were provoked by the publication in a conservative Danish newspaper of scornful images of the Prophet—no, that’s not accurate. The riots were provoked by Muslim politicians and diplomats for whom the Western blasphemy was an Allah-sent opportunity to divert the attention of various Muslim societies from what ails them. READ MORE >>

In the spring of 1978, when the euphoria of doves who were exhilarated by Sadat's journey to Jerusalem was giving way to the euphoria of hawks who were exhilarated by Begin's refusal to allow that magnificent event to annul the geographical dreams of Jewish chauvinism, I spent an afternoon in Samaria with Ariel Sharon. Sharon was the minister of agriculture in the Likud government, and the chairman of the ministerial committee for settlement affairs. There were no Samaritans in Samaria, though political violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank was still a few years away. READ MORE >>

Even faced with the idea of Greater Palestine, it is impossible not to rejoice in the defeat of the idea of Greater Israel. It was always a foul idea, morally and strategically. It promoted the immediate ecstasy of the few above the eventual safety of the many; it introduced the toxins of messianism and mysticism into the politics of a great modern democracy; it preferred chosenness to human rights; it subordinated laws to visions, and the Jewish state to the Jewish millennium; it worshiped soil in a primitive, almost unJewish way. READ MORE >>

“THANK YOU, MOSES.” When I heard those words outside the marshal’s office at the Supreme Court the other day, I trembled for my country. I had come to hear the oral arguments in the Ten Commandments cases, and was prepared for a morning’s appreciation of what Moses brought down from the mountain; but in the courtroom, not in the corridor. My liberal’s back went up. Thou shalt not mistake the Torah for the Constitution. READ MORE >>

IF I HAD known that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I would not have supported this war. I am not embarrassed by my assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed the sort of arsenal that made him a clear and present danger: The alarming intelligence estimates were shared by many Western governments, so that the debate in the months preceding the war concerned the methods for disarming Iraq, not the reasons for disarming it. And to my certainty of Saddam's capability I added my certainty of his depravity. READ MORE >>

This is wartime, which is no time to be soft. The terrorists are tough, and so we must be tough. I am feeling tough, and toughly I feel also that too many children are being killed by the right side in this war, by my side, by Americans and by Israelis, in whose actions I am differently and willingly implicated. It is not all the same war, of course, unless one accepts the Bush administration's reduction of all our enemies into one enemy, a simplification better suited to sermons than strategies. READ MORE >>

A few years ago, Edward Said was invited to give a lecture at the Freud Society in Vienna, at Berggasse 19 no less, on the subject of "Freud and the Non-European." Then he chose to enact his vocation as an intellectual by gayly throwing a rock at an Israeli guardhouse across the Lebanese border, and the Freud Society withdrew its invitation. "Freud was hounded out of Vienna because he was a Jew," Said explained to The New York Times. "Now I'm hounded out because I'm a Palestinian." It was one of the more extreme expressions of Said's compassion for himself. It put me in mind of an autobiogr READ MORE >>

Perceptions, perceptions. The great debate about the war in Iraq-- does anybody imagine that the United States has dispatched 180,000 troops to the Gulf not to send them into battle?--has dissolved into another debate about debates, another collision of perspectives, Washington, Paris, Berlin, New York, Brussels, Vilnius, Riyadh, the streets, the halls of power, as if there were no real threats that must be met, no conclusive answers that can be given to some of the urgent questions, and all that is needed now is a tolerance for other people's opinions. READ MORE >>

I have been reading collections of writings about September 11, and they are wearying: so many bruises so feebly expressed, so many people searching for a poem to protect them. Dickinson #341, perhaps? Literariness is a kind of sedative, I suppose, and in this way it differs from literature. There are circumstances, of course, in which unoriginality of feeling or form is not a shortcoming, in which the really advanced statement is the modest expression of a common sentiment, in which banality is a guarantee of decency. READ MORE >>