In her new book, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History, the brilliant intellectual historian Susan Jacoby describes the Hiss case of the early post-World War II period as a kind of political Rorschach test. If you‟re a liberal, she writes, you believe that Hiss, a former top State Department official in the 1940s who …
Continue reading “Charles Freeman, America’s Next Political Rorschach Test”
Welcome to “Israeli Apartheid Week,” the fifth such global event, which runs this year from March 1 to 8 and is designed, its organizers say, to “educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system.” With activities in over 40 cities from Berkeley to Johannesburg, this yearly event is designed to build support …
As President Obama focuses the nation’s attention on the prospect of huge, long-term federal budget deficits, some experts in Congress and elsewhere will try to build momentum to create a “budget commission” that would draft a deficit-cutting plan on which Congress would then vote. The idea is borne of frustration with soaring deficits and with …
Continue reading “Budget Commission? Bad Idea; Responsible Budgeting is Congress’s Job”
Facing growing threats to free speech across the West from what’s called “libel tourism,” lawmakers in Washington and London are beginning to awaken to propose legislative remedies. Their response is long overdue. Libel tourism is the practice by which the subjects of critical books or articles – such as Arab billionaires who allegedly finance terrorism …
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You might not know it, but the country lost a great man the other day, the kind of man that Americans say they want to see more of in Washington. His name was Donald C. Alexander, though any friend or acquaintance called him Don. He was Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service from May 1973 …
Something is stirring in the world’s most populous nation, and it could eventually mark a watershed event in the march for human rights. That something is called “Charter 08,” a manifesto that more than 300 Chinese scholars, writers and activists issued online in December, that more than 8,000 Chinese of all vocations have since signed, …
Continue reading “China’s Human Rights Movement Could Soon Test Obama”
A controversial Dutch parliamentarian faces trial for violating hate speech laws in a case that presents a huge new threat to Western norms of free speech, free debate and critical inquiry. On January 21, the Amsterdam Court of Appeals ordered the criminal prosecution of Geert Wilders, who produced the 2008 film Fitna which argues that …
Continue reading “Dutch Debacle: Orwell Lives in Geert Wilders Free Speech Case”