Most versions of the Saint George legend tell us that when the great Christian slew the dragon, he went home. Task accomplished, deed done, dragon's blood dry on his lance, and king's daughter rescued, George rushed to the family hearth in Lydda, Palestine, to savor his triumph. Washington's dragon ...
There were two huge stories last week in American mythmaking: The United States has slain Public Enemy Number One, and Superman is renouncing his American citizenship. Barack Obama may exult in the first, but he should beware the second. The Man of Steel's renunciation of his adopted homeland may ...
This is not a good time to be running the Middle East desk at the State Department. If you happen to be him or her, take my advice: Do nothing. Especially in Syria. Let all the think tanks and lobbyists submit their recommendations. Ask the CIA for the usual analysis. Tell the Israelis, which you ...
When journalists die in some foreign field, they die for you. Without them, your knowledge of the world in which you live would come from government spokesmen, corporate flacks, and pundits who don"t leave their television studios or think tanks. Two frontline photographers, Tim Hetherington ...
Barack Obama campaigned for president on a promise to end the war in Iraq and "finish the job against al Qaeda in Afghanistan." More than two years after he took the oath of office, American forces remain in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead of eliminating two wars, he has lunged into a third ...
It takes courage to confront Israel on the battlefield. Egypt, Syria, and Jordan's puffed-up armies learned that lesson in June 1967, when six days of combat forced them to throw in the towel. Courage is also necessary to take on Israel in the court of public opinion, something the once-respected ...
(with apologies to James Agee, author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941) In Paris at the Shakespeare and Company bookshop the other night, a ninety-three-year old man delivered a lecture on resistance. Reflecting on his near-death in a German concentration camp, he told us that he wrote down a ...
Dear Dr. Gates, Your cautious appraisal of a proposed American military intervention in Libya is an important warning from a public servant unafraid to speak unpopular truths. While all liberty-loving people abhor the Libyan regime's cruelty and repression, I agree with your observation to a House ...
Evidence is mounting that Rupert Murdoch's British media empire conspired illegally with private investigators to tap telephones and hack into computers. A recent murder trial disclosed that Murdoch's editors paid $150,000 a year to private investigator Jonathan Rees, previously convicted of ...
One of Israel's finest journalists, Gideon Levy, wrote in the daily Haaretz, "Just as there is no such thing as a partial pregnancy, there is no such thing as a partial democracy, either." Despite how Israel pats its own back for being the Middle East's only democracy, it is not a democracy ...
