Blog

Obama’s belated anti-ISIS/ISIL Coalition is being called a “coalition of the unwilling,” compared to George W. Bush’s against Saddam Hussein which actually evoked authentic if narrow enthusiasm. It also has aspects of an arranged marriage forced upon unwilling parties. Anyway, this may be the indigenous rationale that Secretary of State Kerry is using to try […]

The Nineteenth Century—Darwin’s Century—was The Age of Evolution. The Twenty-First Century may turn out to be The Age of Devolution. Take the Scots—you can have them! Once the model of British industriousness, their aging population now enjoys among Europe’s highest dependency rates, keeping their standard of living afloat with subsidies from the hated South which […]

1940’s “Phoney War” bears some resemblance to 2014’s “Phantom War.” True, today there is no Hitler around planning to Blitzkrieg France in six months. But the Mideast is not lacking in “mini-me” Hitlers. Some argue that the threat posed by ISIS/ISIL is being overblown. Maybe that “Islamic State”—with 31,000 soldiers and billions in oil revenues—remains […]

“Nazism has disappeared, but [not] the obsession it represents for the contemporary imagination. . . . Is such attention fixed on the past only a gratuitous reverie, the attraction of spectacle, exorcism, or the result of a need to understand; or is it again and still, an expression of profound fears and, on the part […]

We will fight ISIS/ISIL with bloodless drones and other people’s boot’s on the ground until hell freezes over—or Islam, that quintessential “religion of peace,” embraces the Sermon on the Mount. As has been said elsewhere, reentering the Syria-Iraq fray, we require the leadership of a Michael Corleone. Instead, we have his feckless brother, Fredo, at […]

This afternoon, the Brandeis Center commended the European Sociological Association (ESA)Network 31, after the Network passed the first pro-active anti-boycott resolution by a professional European academic association late last week.

In a politically suspicious expulsion, an Israeli citizen, Rabbi Asher Krichevsky, his wife, and their six children were told they 15 days to leave Russia. His punishment comes after Krichevsky was fined 2,000 rubles, or about $50, for selling kosher wine from the Chabad House without a liquor license. Optimists in the Obama State Department […]

Earlier today, fifteen national organizations urged Chancellor Dirks of the University of California at Berkeley to monitor the behavior of Students for Justice for Palestine (SJP) and other student organizations involved in the so-called September 23 “Day of Action.”