RSSArchive for May, 2006
Is Condi Rice Finally Growing Up?
Here’s to Condi…
After five years of impotent hawkish posturing has done nothing to restrain North Korea’s nuclear program, the Bush Administration is finally showing the maturity to admit defeat — by its actions, if not in as many words. It was reported this week that the Administration is planning to offer North Korea direct negotiations [...]
How Jewish is Israel?
Israel is still largely shaped by the unresolved trauma of its birth
My favorite Israeli newspaper Haaretz (the best paper in the Middle East, along with Lebanon’s Daily Star) asked me to contribute to a debate in their pages on the question of Jewish identity, sparked by the author A.B. Yehoshua’s recent ruffling of [...]
Bend it Like Mahmoud?
Ahmedinajad trains with Iran’s World Cup Squad
Having failed so far to get any traction on efforts to impose sanctions on Iran, frustration is creeping in among some of its foes as they seek new, innovative ways to punish Tehran. And with Iran due to join 31 other teams at the World Cup in Germany in [...]
U.S. and Gadhafi: Oil is Forgiven
If President Bush’s immigration speech was an attempt to divert attention from his failures in Iraq, then Condi Rice’s announcement this week that the U.S. would restore diplomatic ties with Libya — and that Iran and North Korea should take note — may have been a useful distraction of attention from the fact that in [...]
Hamba Kahle, Ace Ntsoelengoe
If you were a white boy in the suburbs of Cape Town during the heyday of apartheid in the early 1970s, you didn’t know any black people. Not only socially, but even as public figures. That was the whole idea: Apartheid laws meant your school was all white, your suburb was all white (and any [...]
Behind Ahmedinajad’s Letter
You don’t see much of this man in the Western media, but Hassan Rohani speaks for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the man who actually rules Iran. Rohani is promoting a negotiating agenda quite different from Ahmedinajad’s — and he has the blessing of his boss
As we’ve been saying for a while now, President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad does [...]
Iran’s Girls of Summer
Iranian women recently cheering on their women’s national soccer team in a match against Germany
President Mahmoud Ahmindenajad may be a hardline hawk and who spends much of his time constructing political messages that challenge Iran’s ruling Mullahs from the nationalist right, but he also clearly has a populist’s touch rather than the heavy hand of [...]
Roasting Bush, Shaming the Media
Colbert: Dirty work, but somebody has to do it
The media furor over whether Comedy Central’s conservative talking head-impersonator Stephen Colbert’s sharp-elbowed humor roasting President Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner (video link here) was funny or not seems to miss the point. And as my colleague Jim Poniewozik points out, much of it [...]
Why Jack Straw Lost his Job
Plainly, the Tony Party is in deep, deep trouble. Labour not only got thumped in local elections all over Britain, it actually finished third. Hardly surprising, really, given the shambles that Blair’s cabinet had become, with John Prescott gefuffling with his secretary, Charles Clarke inadvertantly losing a thousand convicts eligible for deportation, and so on. [...]
From Zarqawi’s Cutting Room Floor…
In the director’s cut, Zarqawi looks every inch the rambo figure as he busts loose with a heavy machine gun. The outtakes show he needed some help to fire the thing
Yuck. You don’t really want to use the “cutting room floor” metaphor in reference to a man who became a visceral presence in America’s collective [...]
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Guest Columns
How I Overcame My Jewish-Evangelical Upbringing and Learned to Love Christmas, Anyway
Guest Column: Gavin Evans Back in the day, when Gavin and I were young activists trying to change the world, the doorbell rang at our Observatory student house. I opened it to see a tall and handsome man in the silky purple shirt and dog collar of an Anglican Bishop. "You must be Tony," said Bis...Featured Analysis
Does Obama Have a Mideast Plan B?
It's hardly surprising that President Barack Obama chose to schedule a White House visit by Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the dead of night on Monday, because right now Obama has little to show for his 10-month effort to revive a Middle East peace process. The Israeli leader's refu...Unholy War
Who Lost Fatah?
‘Who lost China?” was the battle cry of a witch-hunt conducted in the US State Department following the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong’s communists. The department’s “China hands”, critics charged, had been woefully ignorant of the dynamics at work on the ground in China after the Second W...A Skeptical Read
More Iran Hysteria from the NY Times
The surest sign that another neocon bill of goods is being hawked in respect of the Iran "nuclear peril" is the revival of Rumsfeld-esque "unknowable unknowns", a la Iraq WMD panic circa late 2002. In the real world, of course, solid progress is being made towards a plausible diplomatic deal to ...99c Blogging
The 'Metrics' of Obama's Vietnam
Why is the Administration conducting a "test run" for its metrics of success in Afghanistan? Because the metrics used will be those that provide the desired verdictHear! Hear!
Helena Cobban Explains FatahIf I Was a Blogger...
More Dennis Ross Dissembling
Obama's Iran point man can't seem to get his head around the reasons for Israeli emigrationA Wondering Jew
Obama, Foxman and Israel's Purpose
Having spent decades drumming home the idea that Israel is rooted squarely in the Holocaust experience, and should be viewed by the world as the state of the survivors, Israelis and some of their most fervent backers in the U.S. are suddenly insisting that this is a misleading, even hostile idea.Glancing Headers
The Shebab, the Shahids and the Champion's League Final
The Shebab gunman on the left appears to be a Gunner, i.e. an Arsenal fan... In honor of today's Champion's League final, I republish my op ed that ran in the National a year ago. What was most fascinating about the photograph of the Somali gunman who was part of the crowd dragging the body...Annals of Globalization
The Shebab, the Shahids and the Champion's League Final
The Shebab gunman on the left appears to be a Gunner, i.e. an Arsenal fan... In honor of today's Champion's League final, I republish my op ed that ran in the National a year ago. What was most fascinating about the photograph of the Somali gunman who was part of the crowd dragging the body...The Whole World's Africa
Congo's Not Africa's WWI, It's Worse Than That
If there is a European analogy to be applied in the Congo, it would be the brutal Thirty Year War in Germany that ended in 1648Shameless Cronyism
Embedded with the Jihadis
My crazy friend Nir Rosen goes on embed with the Taliban, and finds out just why the U.S. can't win in AfghanistanRebellion Into Money
Why Joe Strummer Was a Socialist
Hint: It had nothing to do with bailing out banksCould Die Laughing
Whatever Became of that Nice Mr. Blair...
The problem with a global conversation between Muslims and Christians refereed by Tony Blair? Two words: Tony Blair.The 51st State
A Teachable Moment in Basra
It should come as no surprise that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's disastrous offensive against the Mahdi Army of Moqtada Sadr in Basra has had the exact opposite effect of that intended -- strengthening rather than weakening Sadr, and making clear that he, and the Iranians, have far greater in...Futures Market
Will Russia Partition Kosovo?
Why my tea-leaf reading suggests that Moscow has a nasty surprise in store for Washington in the BalkansCuisine
Yummy yummy Umami
Why a leftover lamb bone turned a bean stew into an ecstatic eventHousekeeping
'Lost' Entries on Rootless Cosmopolitan
Previous entries that now register as "not available" are ones that got left behind in a server migration. We're working on retrieving themNew York Moments
The Debka Made ‘Em Do ItFrom Tony's Archive
A Playground Lesson for Bush
How a spontaneous alliance of jocks, do-gooders and lesser bullies against the biggest bully at the school changed the balance of power at Milnerton Primary
