Category Archives: Arab Middle East

Ockham’s Razor

The simplest explanation for a phenomenon, ceteris paribus, is to be preferred. Here is my candidate for understanding current American policy regarding Iran:  Barack Obama wants Iran to acquire a a nuclear weapon, indeed several or even many nuclear weapons.  Why?  To teach Israel a lesson and put the fear of God into Israelis.  The President [...]

Barack Obama Isn’t the President, but He Plays One on TV

I frankly can’t remember at this point whether this ever happened to me personally, but one of the supposed quintessential moments of an American childhood education is having a report due at school and creating a terrific cover to compensate for the absence of serious content. I know Barack Obama was reputedly a whiz in [...]

Obama Isn’t a President but He Plays One

Barack Obama has planned to hold another strategy session with his senior military advisers on Wednesday. This comes exactly one week after he held a strategy session in the White House Situation Room that included a video conference with head of Afghanistan operations Gen. Stanley McChrystal — which, in turn, came an inexplicably lengthy several [...]

A great speech

Netanyahu at the UN, telling it like it is:

Mutt and Jeff Address the U.N. Mahmoud, Too.

What a day yesterday was. The East Side of Manhattan, ordinarily choked with traffic on a business day, was completely shut down. The cause was a triple feature playing at the United Nations in midtown. The show may as well have featured the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers to round out the laugh riot [...]

Zbigniew: Polish for “Jimmy Carter’s Viagra”

I bet after Jimmah got his dose of the Daily Beast (via Weekly Standard,) Rosalynn finally got a little action from Sweaterboy.  “American jets taking down Israeli bombers… ooh ahh… exploding fireballs and bitty jet pieces all over Mesopotamia… pant pant…”
The problem is, I don’t think the other Arab countries would object to Israel bombing [...]

Gevalt!

The Times of London reports:
Libya is set to flaunt the Lockerbie bomber’s release at the climax of today’s celebrations marking Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s 40 years in power.
The Times gained access last night to the dress rehearsal of a spectacular two-hour show which extols Colonel Qaddafi for reviving his country and restoring Arab pride. As [...]

Death Watch Day 8 – No, Make That 130

When Scotland slipped convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi onto the Compassionate-Release Slide to Freedom in Libya last week, I never considered the possibility that the prognosis offered, namely three months or less to live, was not based on solid clinical evidence. In a case this important, surely the Scots had not acted on [...]

Dan Froomkin — Always Good for a Laugh (at His Expense, of Course)

The film critic Judith Crist once wrote an article that was kind of a primer on how to use a critic effectively. She wrote, find someone whose opinion you agree with 100 percent of the time or disagree with 100 percent of the time, and you’ll never go wrong.
Sage advice. I’ve followed it religiously over [...]

Death Watch Day 2 – No, Make That 124

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi has been in Libya two days now, two precious days off the 90 or so it’s claimed the poor man has left before shuffling off the mortal coil. I’m skeptical, let me admit that right now, but my skepticism grew measurably when I read Power Line quoting a letter they’d received from former [...]

Hero’s welcome for the Lockerbie bomber

I think I’m going to be sick.

She’s Baaaack

Who can turn the world on with a smile?
Cindy Sheehan, the woman who won the hearts and minds of Bush-haters everywhere when she set up camp outside the former president’s Crawford, Texas, ranch as a form of protest, is planning a special comeback. She will be joining Barack Obama and his family at their vacation [...]

Inspiring news

I always said a smart Jewish boy can become anything he wants to.

Yale and the Case of the Missing Cartoons

Since it’s not often that the AAUP and I agree on anything, I’ve decided to mark the occasion by linking to this piece on the omission of the Mohammed cartoons from a book on — the Mohammed cartoons. (Just typing those words is weird. Try it if you don’t believe me.)

Alternate Contention of the Day

The West Bank’s economic improvements contrast with the lack of diplomatic progress on the creation of a Palestinian state. Negotiators focus on the “top down” issues, grappling with legal and territorial problems. But the West Bank’s population is building sovereignty from the bottom-up, forging the law-enforcement, civil, and financial institutions that form the underpinnings of [...]

  • Blogs & Aggregators

    This random selection changes each time the page is refreshed.

  • Reading

  • Image of 1938: Hitler's Gamble

  • Image of The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays

  • Image of The Blessed Human Race: Essays on Reconsideration"Jochnowitz, throughout the essays, is animated by the cool precision of logic.... scintillating, amusing, and provocative."
    —February 2009, Midstream
  • Categories

  • Blog Authors

  • This link kills spam

    Video Links Enhanced by VideoSurf