by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The war against jihadism has been chronically misunderstood because of our failure to acknowledge the religious motives of Muslim jihadists. This failure began in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Trapped in our Western secularist paradigms, we interpreted the uprising against the Shah as an anti-colonial revolt against a […]
Nothing to Do With Islam Read More »
Thornton reviews the book Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations, by Mary Beard. New York: Liverwright, 2013, 320 pp., $28.95 hardbound. by Bruce S. Thornton // NAS This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of Academic Questions (Volume 27, Number 3). Once the heart of liberal education, the study of Greek and Latin languages and literatures has unfortunately
SMALL LATIN, AND LESS GREEK Read More »
by Bruce S. Thorton // FrontPage Magazine President Obama has been rightly chastised for his proposed cuts to our military budget. Critics have gone after his Quadrennial Defense Review and its plan to shrink the armed forces, not to mention the clumsy optics of issuing pink slips to thousands of officers still serving in Afghanistan.
Democracies Like Military Cuts Read More »
by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas The European Union has long excited American progressives, who want the United States to model itself after the European body. As each year passes, it has become difficult to understand this admiration. These days the E.U. acts more and more like a bloated bureaucracy staffed with elites armed
The Failure of the E.U. Read More »
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Barack Obama has managed to push American foreign policy into an alternate universe in which everything the human race has learned over the past 2500 years about human nature, aggression, and its deterrence has been stood on its head. He is not solely to blame for this. For 150
Obama and the U.N.’s Alternate Universe Read More »
by Bruce S. Thorton // FrontPage Magazine Israel’s military operation to degrade Hamas’ ability to rain rockets down on Israeli cities has stirred up the usual noisy and nasty protests in Europe. We need not dwell on demonstrations by Muslim immigrants, whose genocidal Jew-hatred has been an Islamic tradition for 14 centuries. More revealing is
The Incoherent Excuses for Hating Israel Read More »
by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The fundamental incoherence of multiculturalism comes from its cultural relativism that posits no one way of life is better than another, but then singles out the West as a uniquely oppressive global villain. Even more contradictory, at the same time that multiculturalists slander the West for its alleged crimes,
Inventing Freedom. How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World Read More »
by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Scenes all too familiar from the Arab conflict with Israel have followed the murder last Wednesday of a 16-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Mourners at his funeral chanting the Muslim war-cry “Allahu Akbar” as they carry the boy’s open coffin, the crowd shouting slogans like “Intifada rise up” and “America and
Moral Equivalence, Moral Idiocy Read More »
by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Independence Day is a good time to revisit the foundations of our political order, especially given the long record of Barack Obama and the Democrats’ disregard for the Constitution. The members of the Continental Congress who met in Philadelphia in July 1776 sought their independence from England in order
The Progressive Assault on the Legacy of Independence Day Read More »
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Long before 1984 gave us the adjective “Orwellian” to describe the political corruption of language and thought, Thucydides observed how factional struggles for power make words their first victims. Describing the horrors of civil war on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “Words had to change
The Language of Despotism Read More »