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In the U.S., “anarchist” was once a dirty word. Following the 1886 Haymarket Bombing in Chicago, in which 11 including seven policemen were killed by anonymous bombers, cartoons appeared nationwide of wild-eyed, suggestively Germanic anarchists blowing America to hell. Historians for a hundred years repeated the conventional wisdom that this was an exercise in pure […]

Violence to change or impact the existing order may be as old as humankind. In terms of collective violence—let’s use the term “mob” for a phenomenon that may start small but can even morph into a revolution—it has had varied political, economic, and religious-ethnic motives over the course of the last thousand years in western […]

Controversy has been raging for some time about whether white Harvard undergrads–including grandchildren of Holocaust survivors– should “turn in their privilege” and, because of historic (and historical) racial injustice in America, agree to accept second place in the admissions pecking order to African Americans. Even if one accepts this argument, it’s hard to see how […]

Actually, nearby St. Louis.

Recently, UCLA Students organized to protest the decision by the UC Regents to hike tuition, but mostly ignored an insidious behind-the-scenes spectacle. The UCLA Student government voted 8-2-2 to urge UC to divest from companies accused to doing business in the West Bank. Eerily, the vote occurred vituually at the same time that—half a world […]

I understand—given many prior posts in which I have criticized the Mideast (not domestic) policies of the Obama Administration—that some, maybe many readers, of this blog may think my prior post was a call to impeach President Obama. When I intend to be critical, I don’t hide it. The post hardly mentioned Obama and did […]

When a president usurps power and subverts the Constitution, the U.S. Constitution provides a remedy: impeachment and removal from office. Hyperbolic language calling a president a “tyrant” or “despot” by politicians who lack the courage to impeach because it’s politically inconvenient is demagogic and dangerous. Outside of our constitutional system, in the whirlpool of political […]

and getting your head cut off. Read an adulatory account of the self-martyrdom at the hands of the Islamic State of Peter “Abdul-Rahman” Kassig: http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2014/10/12/becoming-abdul-rahman-peter-kassigs-family-inspired-journey-syria/17054647/

There are critics who claim that Arabs have never contributed anything much to intellectual progress, arguing that–despite a few astronomers and mathematicians–the achievements of the so-called “Islamic Renaissance” of the Middle Ages was generally the handiwork of a handful of Jews and Coptic and Nestorian Christians who often published using Arabic names. Yesterday with an […]