Turkey
Muhammed Gives the Met the Jitters
The State of the Opposition is Strong
The Foreign Policy Awards
Leave The Pope Alone
On September 3, 2000, Pope John Paul II, the Vicar of Christ beloved even by Jews, beatified Pius IX, one of his predecessors who reigned from 1846-1878. He was a nasty anti-Semite who re-established the ghetto in Rome and was instrumental in the kidnapping of a six-year old Jew boy who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism and whom the church itself kept in the Vatican away from his parents. These are not the least of his sins; nor are they the worst. But they contribute richly to his biography as a Jew-hater. READ MORE >>
Men Do The Silliest Things
Ian Buruma's New Yorker piece on the attempts of Dutch liberals to manage Muslim immigration in the Netherlands has one particularly interesting nugget. The piece is not online but Buruma--while narrating some history--notes that relations were relatively smooth until Muslim women began to arrive (previously, men from places like Morocco and Turkey came to work without their families). This, in turn, necessitated more visible signs of Muslim and immigrant communal life, which led to friction between the new arrivals and native Dutch communities. READ MORE >>
Missile Man
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon By Neil Sheehan (Random House, 534 pp., $35) READ MORE >>
What Dubai Means for the U.S.
Losing the Democracies: Obama's Heart is With the Hooligans
At least, that's what many of our old and deeply democratic friends seem to feel. Now, it's hard to accept that the president of the United States would actually make that choice. He probably feels--but how do I really know? I actually don't--that the hooligans and especially the hooligans who produce our oil and the hooligans who buy our products are the folk we need court more than our historic allies. After all, what else can they do but stick with us? Tough darts! READ MORE >>
