Bethlehem, Palestine - Church of the Nativity

All-Conquering Israel

This is my last week in the Bagel and things are looking up. For some of us, that is; for others it’s despair time. No use beating around the bush: Israel has won big-time, Iran has lost big, and the Palestinians are back to ground zero, with nothing to look forward to except more deaths, more land grabs by Israeli settlers, and more crushing and brutal retaliation by Israel at the slightest indication of civil disobedience. A two-state solution is now a mirage of a Thousand and One Nights. Let’s take it one at a time: Tehran gambled and lost. Its proxy armies of Hamas and Hezbollah have ...

Benjamin Netanyahu

Netanyahoos

“We are entering an autocratic, or at least authoritarian, American future.” So wrote some bald-faced phonies in The New York Times, but they would, wouldn’t they? I find ...

Do the Hokey Pokey

Funny how the Brits are always falling behind the Yanks, as they pejoratively call them. No sooner had the Americans woken up and voted Trump to power, those in Britain wielding ...

Defeat of the Elite

The good news is that the mendacious columnists at The New York Times have committed collective suicide. The bad news is that I just made this up. Portentous phonies like ...

The Plan for Uncle Sam

This will fall on deaf ears in the White House, no matter who the new resident will be next year, but here goes anyway: Chinese and Russian analysts are taking note of the United ...

Notes on the Vote

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the main American media includes many homely, bitter, left-leaning women and numerous bald, left-wing, and equally unattractive men. No ...

Mickey Mantle

Take Me Back to the Old Game

At the time I came to this country in 1948, baseball was unrivaled by other sports, and it seemed to my 11-year-old self to be at the very center of American life. I remember it ...

Are We That Civilized?

If outrage, grief, and concern were the civilized world’s reaction to the killing of 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, total indifference by the same types seems to be the ...

Sean Combs

Party Lines

Was it the wrath of grapes, or just another New York Times fake news story? The full-page article was written by two mugs, a man and a woman, who even had the audacity to allow ...

To the Victor

I don’t mean to sound like a sore loser, but while Netanyahu is prancing around the ring with arms raised high à la Rocky, it was an ultimatum from the IDF’s high command ...

Paris, France

Downwardly Mobile

Let’s not mince words or use hyperbole. I’ve just attended the best, most glamorous ball since the ’50s, and two weeks later the best party ever, and this from a man who has ...

Angela Merkel

Minority Report

“Wir schaffen das”—we’ll manage—will go down in history as true a prediction as the one by the Führer of a 1,000-year Reich. For any of you unaware of “Mutti’s” ...

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, 1828

The Modern Mephistopheles

Magic, the Devil, and of course our Lord Jesus were big some 400 years ago. The woods were believed to be full of spirits, many of them evil; the churches were packed with the ...

Vincent Astor

Astor Words

The August issue of Quest magazine, a New York glossy, featured one Vincent Astor on its cover. Were he still around, Astor would not have been pleased, because the cover story by ...


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