David P. Goldman

(Updated June 22) Last week’s demonstrations do not appear to have shaken the resolve of Ayatollah Khameini and the Iranian establishment, much less overthrown the Islamic Republic. Those who hoped for a Persian Spring probably will go home disappointed. In the excitement of the mass . . . . Continue Reading »

It’s hard to see through the dust clouds and make sense of the present turmoil inside Iran, but a number of data points are worth considering. This is NOT an incipient color revolution, a democrats vs. dictators, moderates vs. neanderthals, good guys vs. bad guys contest. It is a nasty fight . . . . Continue Reading »

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a posthumous but vivid presence at this publication through his friendship with Fr. Richard Neuhaus, once was importuned by a congregant who complained that the service did not seem relevant to her. The point, he thundered back, is rather for you to be relevant to the . . . . Continue Reading »

The mystery about the Iranian elections, writes my old friend Daniel Pipes, is why the religious authorities who run the country decided to declare a massive victory for the crude and brutal Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, rather than advance the slick and deceptive Hossein Moussavi. One could read this as a . . . . Continue Reading »

In the aftermath of the pope’s visit to Israel in May, this report came right out of the blue:Tel Aviv (AsiaNews) -  The Chief Tax Collector at Israel’s Finance Ministry, Yehezkel Abrahamoff, has notified institutions of the Catholic Church in Israel that he has . . . . Continue Reading »

In the course of criticizing the Obama speech in Cairo, Father Khalil Samir SJ, a Vatican Islamologist quoted frequently and favorably on this blog, threw a bomb in Israel’s direction:Another ambiguous element [in the Obama Cairo speech] concerns his placing on the same scale the legitimate . . . . Continue Reading »

Between the election of Barack Obama and the afternoon of June 10, the yield doubled to 4% from 2% for 10-year Treasury notes, the benchmark for long-term yields in the U.S. economy. Part of the sharp rise in yield was a snapback from levels that reflected fear of a deflationary breakdown of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Under the cover of continuity, President Obama has effected a revolution in American foreign policy. As a result, America’s position as a world superpower well may have peaked in 2008, and its long-term decline to a status better resembling Britain. But unlike Britain’s misery, America’s decline will be a willful withdrawal from a leading position in world affairs, an act without obvious precedent in world history. Were this to occur”and that is the present trajectory”Obama will have had a decisive role in bringing it to pass. What motivates the president? The answer, I believe, should be sought in the tragic circumstances of the Muslim nations.

What a master of the hot button, though, this president is. Jews invest a great deal of their emotional energy in the Holocaust, and he pressed their button at Buchenwald. Jewish voters, almost eighty percent of whom supported Obama last November, are more susceptible to the sucker punch than other denizens of a cynical world, and Obama is its master practitioner… . Continue Reading »

Obama’s failure to mention the historic tie of the Jewish people to the land of Israel elicited outraged comment from Jewish sources, for example this one from this morning’s editorial in the Jerusalem Post:In his Cairo address the day before to the Muslim and Arab worlds, the president . . . . Continue Reading »

On May 12, I posted an article entitled, “The Torture Debate Shows Our Vulnerability to Radical Evil.”  My conclusion:Nearly two hundred thousand Americans, military and civilian personnel, were exposed to Iraqi terrorist organizations that routinely employed suicide bombings in . . . . Continue Reading »