The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a major U.N. arms control verification body, suppressed evidence so as to excuse an act of war by the USA, Britain, and France. Continue Reading »
Cohen declares, “No outcome in Syria could be worse than the current one.” He seems to have a high degree of confidence that if the United States had bombed the Assad regime, it would have produced a more peaceful Syria. Maybe it would have. Or maybe bombing—or perhaps better to say, merely bombing—the Assad forces would have produced only a different kind of hell. Continue Reading »
The day after the brutal terrorist attacks in France by ISIS, French President Hollande gave his country’s immediate response:My dear compatriots. What happened last night in Paris, and in Saint Denis by the Stade de France, is an act of war. . . because it was attacked cowardly, shamelessly, . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1975 I decided I was going to get me a refugee, and I did. A lot of them it turned out, two related families, ten people altogether, not counting the 11-year-old boy I got later who became my son. Saigon fell in April and the U.S. evacuated upwards of 136,000 South Vietnamese to the United . . . . Continue Reading »
In a year replete with devastating news, the June 22 death of Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami hit especially hard. For decades, Fouad, a man of genius I was honored to call a friend, was an invaluable mentor in matters involving the Arab world and its often-lethal discontents. It was a cauldron of self-destructive passions he knew well, this Lebanese Shiite who came to the United States because he found here a model of the civility and tolerance he wished for his people. Continue Reading »
Recently, an Islamist group in the Syrian opposition, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), captured the town of Raqqa and imposed on its Christian inhabitants the dhimma, the notional contract that governs relations with Christians in classical Islamic law. The dhimma allows Christian communities to reside in Muslim society in exchange for payment of a poll tax called the jizya and submission to social and legal restrictions. In Raqqa, for example, Christians have “agreed,” among other things, to pay ISIL a tax of $500 per person twice a year—poorer Christians can pay less—and to forgo public religious displays. Continue Reading »
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