There’s an old Booth New Yorker cartoon showing an old man sitting in an armchair cackling while reading the newspaper, and back over his shoulder his wife says to a visitor something to the effect, “George has always enjoyed reading the morning paper, but lately it seems to be frequently accompanied by a graveyard laugh”—or […]

In recent weeks I have twice written in this space of the Obama Administration’s efforts to cover up its politically motivated spinelessness over Syria with efforts to make it seem like it’s doing something constructive. Using the New York Times as its very willing channel, it first tried to crow over its closer cooperation with […]

It used to be, I think, that the vast majority of strategists and statesmen played chess, or in non-Western cultures some comparably complex game that required players to anticipate what their opponents might do in an extended sequence of moves. This was good training for the real world. If you read in the history of […]

One of the several reasons that every civilization, even every culture short of the august status of a civilization, has something like a religion is that it defines the boundaries between who is in the group and who is outside of it.

The news from Syria in recent days is more of the same—bad—except for when it is worse than bad. On Saturday a suicide bombing in Deir ez-Zour, apparently aimed at a regime target, killed 9 people and wounded more than eight dozen others. Coming after the suicide bombings in Damascus on May 10, these kinds […]

I have before me a little eight-sheet brochure called “Guide To Jewish TV Programs.” It is advertising something called “The Jewish Channel”, abbreviated TJC, with a little Star of David above the “J”—very cute. Inside, the brochure refers to TJC as “A Jewish HBO”, quoting, apparently, the New York Times. From the brochure, one can […]

There is a particularly interesting article in today’s Washington Post on the situation in Syria. It is closer to news analysis than it is to a straight news article, which explains the sharp discrepancy between today’s Post coverage and that in the New York Times.The latter reports specifically on a group of UN-sponsored observers, in […]

I’m really happy to announce that my latest book, Political Writing: A Guide to the Essentials, is being published today by M.E. Sharpe.Before anyone gets too excited about this (yes, that’s a joke….) let me note that this book is not like Telltale Hearts (1995) or Jewcentricity (2009). It is more of a “how to” book: […]

In my most recent post on Syria, I wrote that one “likely result” of a salafi Sunni political surge in Syria would be “a new [Lebanese] civil war, with a beginning epicenter most like in and around Tripoli.” I didn’t realize how soon this would become apparent.Apparently, according to the Associated Press, battles broke out Saturday […]

Yesterday’s massive bombings in Damascus portend a new stage of the Syrian crisis. The apparent involvement of al-Qaeda in Iraq in these bombings, and other evidence of the increased jihadi radicalization of the opposition movement, puts an end most likely to any prospect of an organized external military intervention in Syria.That intervention was unlikely anyway, […]