Samizdata, August 2002
SADDAM, LET’S THINK outside the box for a change.
We know you don’t really give two shits about the Palestinians, and you sure as hell don’t give a rat’s ass about Islam, either. And we know you’re a practical kind of man. So here’s a little suggestion that might meet both of our needs.
Policy Review, February 2005
ATHEISM, AS THEOLOGIAN Alister McGrath understands the term, is not merely the asseveration that no God exists. It is a distinct movement in intellectual, cultural, and political history and may be mapped to particular historic events — the arc of its rise and decline demarcated at either end by two tumbling edifices, the Bastille and the Berlin Wall. This movement, curiously, has behaved much like a religion: It has produced gurus and proselytizers; it has been appropriated to serve political ends; and, ultimately, it has been embraced not for its compelling internal logic but on faith — or at gunpoint.
Arabies Trends, January 2002
THE UNITED NATIONS Economic And Social Commission For Western Asia (ESCWA) has released its preliminary overview of economic developments in the ESCWA region in 2001. The news is no cause for celebration. According to the report, which contains an annex treating the economic and social consequences of the United Nations sanctions on Iraq, economic growth in the ESCWA region – Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen – slowed to a crawl last year.
Policy Review, October 2004
I MET JUDITH WRUBEL in 1991 at Oxford University, where we were both graduate students in international relations. We became friends walking back to Balliol College each week, along the leafy Banbury Road, from a seminar at St. Antony’s College on the international relations of the Middle East. Both secular American Jews — the only ones in the class — we found in one another a measure of intellectual and ethnic solidarity against our classmates, who tended to view the region through the prism fashionable in academia: The violence and misery of the Middle East devolve from Israeli territorial expansionism and its abuse of the Palestinians.
The New York Sun, July 2004
IN THE COMING election, an unusually talented politician is likely to unseat his rival, restore international respect for a great nation that in recent years has seen its reputation stained, and rebuild America’s relationship with its European allies.
Fortunately for us all, that election is not the American election and that politician is not Senator Kerry. The election is the November contest for the leadership of France’s Union for a Popular Movement, or UMP, and the politician is Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s agile, conservative finance minister.
Azure, September 2004
BORN IN MARSEILLE in 1924, French philosopher and essayist Jean-Francois Revel has led a quintessentially French intellectual life: A graduate of the Ecole Normale and a member of the Resistance, he began his career in the French cabinet, serving in the undersecretary’s Department of Arts and Letters. Thereafter he became a distinguished professor and lecturer at a series of elite French universities, abandoning teaching in the 1960s to edit the influential weekly L’Express. After a prolific writing career attacking sterile academism and defending Western democracies — his books include the best-selling The Totalitarian Temptation (1977) and How Democracies Perish (1984) — he was elected in 1997 to the French Academy. He is one of France’s best-known pundits, with a schedule of travel and television appearances that would exhaust a younger man.
Weekly Standard, January 27, 2003
ON DECEMBER 16, 2002, as a routine meeting of the Conseil d’Administration of Paris VI University drew to a close, a rump contingent of the administrative counsel seized the rare opportunity afforded them by the absence of their colleagues, most of whom had already departed for the holidays. The group — computer scientists and medical researchers, mostly — was suddenly and mysteriously seized with a desire to dabble in foreign policy.
The Weekly Standard, February 2003
WIM DUISENBERG, THE president of the European Central Bank, is the most powerful man in Europe, at least among men without troops. His decisions determine the economic future of three hundred million Europeans; twenty percent of the world’s goods and services are produced in the currency zone over which he presides. He is responsible for the success or failure of Europe’s monetary union, a project that is at once the essence and the emblem of Europe’s renunciation of fratricide and reinvention as a continent united in peaceful cooperation. A pillar of the European establishment, he is the public face of the Euro and, by virtue of this role, the public face of Europe. His nickname, in fact, is Mr. Euro.
The Washington Post, June 2005
MOVE FROM AUSTERE Paris to this anarchic city as I have done this summer, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the idea of integrating Turkey into the European Union is and always has been ludicrous. Turkey is not Europe, and it is certainly not France.
I do not say this merely because the phones, electricity, hot water and front door lock have failed on me, serially, since my arrival, along with the Internet, refrigerator and stove.
Azure, January 2005
THE COMMENCEMENT OF the second Palestinian Intifada, in late 2000, ignited the most extensive outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in France since the Holocaust. It continues to this day. The crimes have been perpetrated almost entirely by the beur — Arab immigrants. The political alliances forged between Jewish and Arab leaders during the rise of the right-wing National Front have broken down.