The American, August 8, 2008

ISTANBUL—Last week, Turkey’s Constitutional Court achieved what many here, including me, thought impossible. Since March, when the chief prosecutor launched a case to ban the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for undermining Turkish secularism, Turkey appeared to be possessed by a collective national will to achieve total political self-immolation. The Court’s verdict stopped the juggernaut, leaving the country rubbing its eyes in wonderment and gratitude.

Pajamas Media, July 29, 2008

On Sunday night, two consecutive explosions in the Güngören district of Istanbul--a poor, crowded, conservative slum near the Atatürk International Airport--killed 17 people, among them five children. The death toll may yet rise. Some 150 more were injured and maimed. It is still unclear who placed the bombs. No one has claimed responsibility. But the terrorist Kurdish organization--the PKK--is the chief suspect.

THE AMERICAN
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Is the ruling party of Prime Minister Erdoğan a threat to Turkish democracy? Five experts share their thoughts.

New York Sun, March 21, 2008
A Review of Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

In suggesting that Islamic extremism may be, if not a spent force in the Middle East, no longer the most dynamic or important one, Robin Wright has more credibility than most. In 1983, Ms. Wright surveyed the wreckage of the United States Embassy in Beirut. Beneath it lay the remains of her friends. Two years later, Ms. Wright wrote “Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam.” The title is self-explanatory and its thesis, unfortunately, has hardly passed into obscurity."

The New York Sun, January, 2008

A review of The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France.

During the German occupation of France in World War II, Suzanne Desseigne, a French woman with fascist sympathies, initiated contact with the Nazis. She became the mistress of a German soldier who recruited her to conduct espionage missions against the collaborationist Vichy regime in Southern France and French North Africa. Her mother described the Nazi spy as "a young French girl who, from the age of fifteen, while her peers were playing without a care in the world, felt the danger of Bolshevism and of the Jewish conspiracy." She remained, even after her arrest and imprisonment, a devout traitor, assaulting other inmates who did not share her commitment to the Nazi cause.

The Globe and Mail, December, 2007

A review of Other Colors: Essays and a Story.

The novels of Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's most celebrated and controversial man of letters, have been translated into some 20 languages. His novels Snow and My Name is Red are widely considered world-class achievements. The themes of Pamuk's oeuvre include the conflict between the East and the West, the tension between Islam and modernity, and the intense melancholia of his native Istanbul. Admirers find his style complex, multilayered and allegorical; detractors find him faddish and incomprehensible.

The Sunday Times, February, 2006
by Maurice Chittenden

White Teeth was a whitewash, says Muslim who inspired prizewinning novel's central character

WHITE TEETH, the novel that made Britain feel good about the state of its race relations, has been accused of whitewashing the truth by the real-life model for one of its characters.

The New York Sun, July 2007

A review of The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent.

Last month, en route to the British Library, I strolled past the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Piccadilly. I was on foot because it was a beautiful day and because there is a distinctly creepy mood, these days, on London's tubes and busses. Signs everywhere remind passengers that they are on CCTV. The police presence is heavy and visible. To be sure, the odds of any one bus blowing up are tiny, but the ubiquitous security prompts the unwelcome thought that there are people about who seek to better those odds. Days later, I flew out of Heathrow airport, where the mood was creepier still. Lines snaked for hours through claustrophobic security screening pens, and passengers stared balefully at the earnest sniffer dogs, wondering how much confidence to place in that goofy spaniel's nose.

The New York Sun,September 2007

In 1995, having read Olivier Roy's The Failure of Political Islam (1992), Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes asked, "How can someone who knows so much be so completely wrong?" Mr. Roy's latest work, Secularism Confronts Islam, prompts the very same question. It is a remarkable book: articulate, original, lucid, without a paragraph that fails to contain an interesting thought. It is clearly the product of a wide-ranging intelligence in possession of a refined analytic sensibility, a first-rate historical education and a generous spirit. And one wonders how someone who knows so much could have written it.

The New York Sun, November 2007

A review of: A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.

In the wake of the First World War, leaders of the Western powers — Britain, France, Italy, and America — assembled in Paris to redraw the maps of the world. From the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, they meatballed together Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia; they invented Iraq and Jordan ex nihilo. They ignored Indochina. They knew little about the religions, ethnic loyalties, and national aspirations of the people affected by their decisions. Had they devoted a tenth the mental energy to understanding these issues that they did to their vigorous carnal exertions, argues David A. Andelman in A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (John Wiley and Sons, 326 pages, $25.95), the world today would be a safer place.