Free Republic

The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, has emerged over the past tumultuous week as one of the West’s most vocal foes of Islamism, though he’s actually been talking about the threat it poses for a long while. During the course of an interview conducted before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he told me—he went out of his way to tell me, in fact—that he refuses to use the term “Islamophobia” to describe the phenomenon of anti-Muslim prejudice, because, he says, the accusation of Islamophobia is often used as a weapon by Islamism's apologists to silence their critics. Most of my...

One of the most extraordinary episodes in the intellectual history of the twentieth century—if, indeed, something that lasted half a century or more can properly be called an episode—is the moral and sometimes material support given by much of the western intelligentsia to the Soviet tyranny, a tyranny that made all previous tyrannies seem relaxed, liberal, and almost amateurish by comparison. Men who found the slightest circumscription of their own freedom intolerable raised hosannas to the most systematic and concerted abrogation of personal liberty yet attempted; many were those who strained at gnats to swallow a camel.No doubt the explanation...

The collapse of reason By Cathy Young  |  May 29, 2006 AT A TIME when conservatives dominate all three branches of government and hold an increasingly large share of the Fourth Estate, the academy remains the last liberal stronghold. You would think, then, that liberal intellectuals would offer some thoughtful and productive critiques of conservative policies. But instead, argues one leading liberal intellectual, the academic left is making itself irrelevant by embracing ideological extremism and trying to purge its ranks of those who are not politically correct.

In todays society it not an easy task to raise two daughters. The influences from the secularist culture pose a war that most people lack the enthusiasm to fight. Tolerance were told is the key to liberal utopia, and this of course is the only right way to think. Basically, all of us Jesus freaks who are too stupid to understand how the world really works, should turn a blind eye to the departing virtue of logic, and moral values. The idea that the left holds a monopoly on logic and moral values used to make me laugh. But in...

Nearly all Islamic intellectuals and leaders advocate terrorism, asserts an Arab columnist. Khaled Kishtainy, writing in the London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, says talk of "love and peace in Islam" is just a cover for violence, reports the Middle East Media Research InstituteThe columnist, of Iraqi origin, says Islamic terrorism has "many roots and causes, and much has already been written about this. But I have personal input on this matter." "I place on the Islamic intellectuals and leaders of Islamic organizations part of the responsibility for [this phenomenon] of Islamic terrorism, as nearly all of them advocate violence, and...

Don’t Buy the BookSinger's Plague Calling Peter Singer controversial is of course, an understatement. Be that as it may, the controversial Princeton University professor of ethics packed a downtown D.C. bookstore Friday hawking his new book, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush (Dutton, 288 pages, $24.95). If the ethicist's reaction was any indicator, the event was less than a rousing success. This heavily Democrat crowd, weaned on the argumentation of Molly Ivins and Michael Moore, must have become so accustomed to any sentence with Bush's name in it ending with a punch line that,...