David P. Goldman

Suzanne Klingenstein of MIT reports on a new cache of Leo Strauss letters today in the Weekly Standard website. They confirm what I always have assumed, that Strauss’ work on Maimonides was intended to prove that the great Jewish legal scholar and commentator was a secret atheist. She . . . . Continue Reading »

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is at once the brightest and least ideologically driven of world leaders. The daughter of an East German Lutheran pastor, she came of age when Protestant churches were the focal point of opposition. She earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry, and rose to leadership in Germany’s Christian Democratic Union through brains and grit, much like Lady Thatcher in England a generation earlier… . Continue Reading »

A friend points out that the rate of attrition of American Jews is much higher than the standard estimates suggest. After a million Russian Jewish immigrants and perhaps half that number of Israelis, the numbers of American Jews remain static — which implies that a comparable number of . . . . Continue Reading »

The former CIA agent turned pundit, Reuel Marc Gerecht, offers a rambling defense of Sharia (sort of) in the New Republic website. He doesn’t like what his conservative colleagues say about Sharia (which he keeps calling “The Holy Law”), but he doesn’t say what it is. Kant . . . . Continue Reading »

My friends at The Tablet, a Jewish-interest webzine, are running a week-long series on Turkey’s ominous shift to Islamism. The editors write:The transformation of Turkey from close military and strategic ally to bitter public enemy may be the most consequential blow Israel has sustained in the . . . . Continue Reading »

 Extracts from today’s Spengler essay at Asia Times Online:http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LJ19Ak01.htmlWhy call not it a ‘Petraeus Village’?By Spengler“May his name be blotted out!” declares the most terrible Hebrew curse. History has devised a curse more . . . . Continue Reading »

The short answer is: Pelt Israel with unguided missiles from southern Lebanon. In today’s Spengler essay at Asia Times Online, I evaluate Iran’s susceptibility to cyberwar. The Islamic Republic pirates virtually all its software and almost all of its competent software engineers have . . . . Continue Reading »

Sandro Magister, the authoritative Vatican watcher at La Repubblica, last week noted one of the most significant and under-reported facts about Christian life in the Middle East: Christian numbers are growing in only one country in the region, namely the State of Israel. Elsewhere, Muslim hostility is smothering Christian life… . Continue Reading »

The purpose of organizations and associations is to protect insiders from the consequences of incompetence, which is why socialism is worse than big business, and the one-party system is worse than the two-party system. One of the drawbacks of the two-party system, though, is that once one of the . . . . Continue Reading »

The most practical man of business is usually the slave of a defunct economist, John Maynard Keynes observed seventy-five years ago, in reference to the theories he proposed to overthrow; and this judgment applies with force to his continuing grip on the minds of the world’s policy makers. Public . . . . Continue Reading »