by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
We live in an age of falsity, in which words have lost their meanings and concepts are reinvented as the situation demands. The United States is in a jobless recovery — even if that phrase largely disappeared from the American lexicon about 2004. Good news somehow must follow from a rising unemployment rate, which itself underrepresents the actual percentage of Americans long out of work. Continue reading “The New Age of Falsity”
by Bruce Thronton
Frontpage Magazine
In a story describing President Obama’s six conversations with Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi that led to the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the New York Times summarized Obama’s estimation of Morsi. Obama told his aides “he was impressed with the Egyptian leader’s pragmatic confidence. Continue reading “The Ghosts of 1938 Still Haunt Our Foreign Policy”
by Bruce Thornton
FrontPage Magazine
The murder of four Americans in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, and the subsequent attempts by the Obama administration to blame the attacks on a YouTube video critical of Islam, exposed the delusional assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy. This notion that Western bad behavior — whether colonialism, support for Israel, or insults to Islam and Muhammad — is responsible for jihadist violence, however, has vitiated our approach to Islamist terrorism for over a decade now. Continue reading “The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism”
by Bruce Thornton
FrontPage Magazine
Foreign policy, the topic of tonight’s debate, was suddenly thrust into the voters’ consciousness by the murder of 4 Americans, including our ambassador, in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11. Intensifying the fallout of this event has been the Obama administration’s incoherent, clumsy, duplicitous, and rapidly unraveling attempt to blame the terrorist murders on a YouTube movie trailer lampooning Mohammed, in order to downplay the strength of the heavily armed jihadist outfits, some connected to al Qaeda, now swarming in Libya as a result of our overthrow of Muammar Gadhafi. Continue reading “The Stakes in Tonight’s Foreign Policy Debate”
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
The American Left used to champion free expression. We were lectured — correctly — that the price of being repulsed by occasional crude talk and art was worth paying. Only that way could Americans ensure our daily right to criticize those with greater power and influence whom we found wrong and objectionable. Continue reading “The First Amendment vs. Multiculturalism”
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Let us confess it: Many of the things that are bothersome in the world today originate in the Middle East. Billions of air passengers each year take off their belts and shoes at the airport, not because of fears of terrorism from the slums of Johannesburg or because the grandsons of displaced East Prussians are blowing up Polish diplomats. Continue reading “The Neurotic Middle East”
by Bruce Thronton
Frontpage Magazine
The most depressing thing about the Obama administration’s foreign policy debacle unfolding in the Middle East is that for sixty years we’ve repeatedly experienced the same Islamist game plan for defeating us that is being employed today. There is no tactic currently being used by the Muslim Brothers and other jihadist groups that wasn’t perfected by the Palestinian Arabs in their fight to destroy Israel. Continue reading “The Palestinian Playbook”
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
Last week, Muslim mobs took to the streets to murder the American ambassador in Libya and three of his staffers. American embassies were attacked from Egypt to Yemen. Continue reading “Middle East Madness”
by Victor Davis Hanson
PJ Media
The Premodern Middle East and Postmodern West Don’t Mix, Mr. President
Globalization certainly did not bring the premodern world of the Middle East closer together with the postmodern West — despite Barack Obama’s 2007 narcissistic vows that his own intellect and background could bridge such a gap. Continue reading “Obama’s Middle East Delusions”
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner
We Seem to Have Learned Nothing from 9/11
I thought we had learned long ago on 9/11 that radical Islam hates the West not because of troops in Saudi Arabia, or Danish cartoons or Mr. Rushdie, or even, as Dr. Zawahiri and bin Laden once wrote, global warming and an absence of campaign-finance reform — or, this week, a low-rent, do-it-yourself crackpot video — but out of a deep sense of its own inferiority in a globalized world, whose causes run throughout traditional Middle Eastern society Continue reading “Thoughts on Cario and Benghazi”