Free Republic

Those of us who enjoy political freedom often take it for granted, considering it a sort of natural resource that can be simply handed over to those peoples who lack it. But such freedom had to be invented in a particular time and place, and then tended, nurtured, and argued, fought and died for. In order to flourish, political freedom demands certain kinds of values, certain ways of looking at the world and regarding human beings, that have not existed in all times at all places, and so must be borrowed, learned, practiced, and reinforced. For though the desire for...

How a beleaguered, tiny Israel has been turned into a pariah state is a fascinating historical question. The answer lies in the many cultural pathologies of the Western democracies—anti-Semitism, sentimental Third-Worldism, Marxist anti-colonialism, and anti-Americanism are just a few of the irrational prejudices, bankrupt ideologies, and moral idiocies that have rendered the Middle East's only full-fledged democracy and free society into an international villain, the gnat the U.N. and the international left obsessively strain even as they swallow an endless number of murderous totalitarian camels. Of the many transmitters of these pathologies, the Western electronic and print media have been...

The post-Arafat age has begun, and the conventional wisdom about what might or should happen in the Israeli-Arab conflict is quickly hardening into a soothing mantra. What we're hearing goes something like this: since the U.S. and Israel both rejected Arafat as a legitimate negotiating partner, now that he is dead the major obstacle to restarting the "road map" peace process has been removed. All it takes for a final resolution of the conflict is for the U.S. to compel Israel to show some "flexibility" and make some "concessions" to strengthen the "moderates" like newly elected PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas....

The 2004 Friend of Israel Award Republican Jewish Coalition of Central California Awardee: Bruce Thornton, PhD (introduced by Victor Davis Hanson, PhD) The night of October 17, 2004, was an inspiration and an impossibility. How could a room full of Jewish Republicans invite Evangelical Christians to honor a couple of Democrats? And what were those liberal Jews doing, laughing and enjoying themselves as honored guests of their conservative tribesman? There was a United States Congressman in attendance, with talented staffers Darren Rose and Debbie Hurley. He seemed to have a great time, sandwiched between an unlikely pair. On the Congressman's...

… create a costly smokescreen. The brutal slaughter of children in Russia is yet another wake-up call we are not heeding. We keep hearing that we are at war, but no one wants to identify the real enemy — an Islamic civilization that sanctions such murder as the justified means for establishing the religious and political dominance of Islam in fulfillment of the will of God. Nor are those actively killing in the service of this vision some sort of neurotic deformers of Islam created by conditions peculiar to the 20th century. From its birth in the seventh century Islam...

Two weeks ago, when we had over a hundred people (thanks to the Riverdale Assembly of God) at our weekly Fresno Support our Troops Rally, one of our members called in to the Bill Manders Show. Bill was very impressed with our efforts and with the enthusiastic (very loud) support of the Fresno motorists passing by. Bill and his producer, our very own Maccabee-AJB, called me yesterday to ask me to appear on their show. I warned them that I was the world's worst radio personality, but they asked me on anyway. Now, I didn't have much to say,...