Our Truest Lies
If the truth doesn’t deserve social justice — well, tell a noble lie. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online At the end of John Ford’s classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the editor of the local paper decides not to print the truth about who really killed the murderous Valance. “When the legend […]
What Would the Founders Think of Defunding Obamacare?
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine A few days ago CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin, speaking about the Republican House bill defunding Obamacare, commented, “Certainly not the way the Founding Fathers maybe drew this thing up.” It’s certainly a surprise to hear an anchor on CNN, an organization biased in favor of progressives, appealing to the […]
Russian Patriarch to Obama: Syria’s Christians Nearing ‘Extermination’
The leader of Russia’s 150 million Orthodox Christians begs the president not to give aid to Syrian jihadis. by Raymond Ibrahim // PJ Media While many were fixated on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent letter to the American people, another letter from another Russian leader—this one directly addressed to the U.S. president—was missed. On September 10, […]
Goodbye Syria, On to Iran!
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, this is the way Syria ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper. We are back where we started — lots of people dying — as the crisis recedes with a high five and a sigh, rather than with America blowing some stuff up.
President Rouhani and Peace Studies
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner There is a long history of foreign authoritarians channeling left-wing talking points when they appeal to an American audience, apparently on the theory that they score points against the American establishment.
“The End of Sparta” — A Review
A classicist’s exemplary historical novel. by Albert Louis Zambone // BooksandCulture.com Classicists should infuriate other humanists, in the way that the handsome scholar-athlete who volunteers to help dyslexic children and is a genuinely nice guy should infuriate the guy who just made it onto the football team and has a hard time keeping up his […]
VDH UltraAngry Reader #9 — A Facebook Comment
“I will concede that you are almost always right (no joke). However, I don’t agree that a year from now the “American public will have a vague idea that about a year earlier something happened sometime to someone in Syria, but what and when and where and why they are not quite sure.”
Mideast Nuclear Holocaust
by Raymond Ibrahim // FrontPage Magazine A Review of The Last Israelis by Noah Beck After constant exposure to critically important news, it begins to lose all meaning and sense of urgency. Hearing the same warnings over and over again—especially when the status quo seems static—can cause a certain desensitization, a resigned apathy that ignores the warnings in […]
Syria Postmortem
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner I think the so-called Syrian crisis is working out as most anticipated: 1) In about a year or so Assad and Putin will announce that they “think” they might have in theory rounded up a lot of the WMD, and will soon make plans to turn it over […]
The Decline of College
by Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services For the last 70 years, American higher education was assumed to be the pathway to upper-mobility and a rich shared-learning experience. Young Americans for four years took a common core of classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete knowledge to make informed arguments […]
Muslim Husbands Must Hate Non-Muslim Wives
by Raymond Ibrahim // CBN News Often translated as “Loyalty and Enmity,” the little-known Islamic doctrine of wala’ wa bara’commands Muslims never to befriend or be loyal to non-Muslims, while being clean of, disavowing and ultimately hating them. During a question-and-answer session at an Islamic conference, the full extent of this divisive doctrine was given full expression […]
Vote for Me Or Else: Patterns between Egypt and Pakistan
by Raymond Ibrahim // Gatestone Institute In what seems to be a pattern in many Muslim nations of finding new pretexts to justify anti-Christian—and “anti-Other”—behavior, Egypt’s Christians and their churches are under attack, ostensibly because Christians joined the June 30 Revolution, which led to the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood. Lesser known is that, even before […]
Obama’s Box Canyon
Our Hamlet-in-cheif wanted simultaneously to act and not act. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The Syrian fiasco arose from two mutually contradictory desires. Barack Obama sincerely wanted Bashar Assad to stop killing his own people. Barack Obama also really was not willing to use force to ensure that Assad would stop killing his […]
The Charade Can Go On — and On and On . . .
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner So far in the Syrian charade, Bashar Assad has won de facto permission to be a legitimate ruler negotiating with superpowers, while promising to kill thousands more by blowing them up, shelling them, and shooting them without “obscene” chemical weapons. Vladimir Putin controls the tempo of the crisis. […]
Syria in the Age of Myth
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Myth I. Conservatives opposed to bombing Syria are isolationists. Hardly. It would be better to call conservative skepticism a new Jacksonianism that is not wedded to any Pavlovian support for intervention or particular political party.
Syria in a Nutshell
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner We are contemplating going to war in Syria to help the opposition a lot and to hurt Assad some, or to help the opposition some and hurt Assad a lot, or to hurt Assad some and help the opposition some, or to force Assad to stop or to […]
Populism Lives at NRO
We depend on thousands of small contributors. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online National Review Online imposes no litmus test on its contributors. The result each day — to take the most recent hot-button issue — is that columnists both support and oppose the proposed Syrian intervention, though usually from a shared conservative perspective. NRO […]
Muslim Persecution of Christians: June, 2013
by Raymond Ibrahim // Gatestone Institute The degradation of Christian women living in the Islamic world continued in the month of June. In Syria, after the al-Qaeda linked rebel group conquered Qusair, a city of the governate of Homs, 15-year-old Mariam was kidnapped, repeatedly gang raped according to a fatwa legitimizing the rape of non-Sunni women by any […]
Watching the Middle East Implode
Only when we recognize the fundamental role Islam plays in the region can we begin to craft sensible policies that put U.S. interests first. by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas The revolutions against dictators in the Middle East dubbed the Arab Spring have degenerated into a complex, bloody mélange of coups and counter-coups, as have […]