Free Republic

The sickening specter of a monster like Samir Kuntar being welcomed home in Lebanon as a conquering hero should turn the stomachs of all who repose faith in humanity. Even for a generation neutered to horror stories, his crimes stand out. In April, 1979, after killing a police officer and then shooting Danny Haran at close range in the back in front of his four-year-old-daughter Einat, Kuntar proceeded to smash the head of the little girl on beach rocks and then crushed her skull with the butt of his rifle. The coup-de-grace was when, in an attempt to hide her...

Dr. Laura Schlesinger has a penchant for inane and knee-jerk moralizing. But last week even she outdid herself, as she blamed Elliot Spitzer's long-suffering wife, Silda, for her husband's unfaithfulness with a prostitute. Speaking on the Today show, Dr. Laura opined: "When the wife does not focus in on the needs and the feelings sexually, personally, to make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a success, to make him feel like our hero, he's very susceptible to the charm of some other woman making him feel what he needs. These days, women don't spend a lot...

America is talking about teen pregnancy. Britney Spears's baby sister Jamie Lynn, all of 16, is pregnant. The father, her 19-year-old boyfriend Casey Alridge, who may or may not face statutory rape charges for having sex with a minor, is someone she met at church. Then there is Juno, a satirical comedy about a tortured but well-meaning 16-year-old who gets pregnant and decides to give her baby to a childless couple who later want to divorce. It has been fascinating to watch the debate sparked by these two moms-to-be, with the principal question in each scenario being, "Why didn't she...

 The next president of the United States will need to address the crumbling social fabric of this great nation. America is richer than ever, but its families have never been so impoverished. Presidential contenders, from left; Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).Photo: Office of John McCain, US Senate, City of NY, AP The main problems are: first and foremost, the 50-percent divorce rate; second, children who do not interact with their parents; third, a shallow and degenerate culture that especially degrades and exploits women;...

The invitation by Columbia University to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran beggars belief and brings one of America's foremost institutions of higher learning into disrepute. Columbia's distinguished president, Lee Bollinger, defended the invitation as being in keeping with "Columbia's long-standing tradition of serving as a major forum of robust debate." Of course, that is nonsense. Does anyone seriously believe that Columbia would invite a politician or scholar who denied that American slavery took place, or alleged that its effects on African-Americans was benign or exaggerated? Would Columbia host a Grand Wizard of the KKK who called for African nations to...

Christopher Hitchens's rancorous attack against religion, God Is Not Great, is the number-one book in America. Three years ago he and I debated religion in New York City (the debate is available on my Web site). I looked forward to the debate because I had always admired Hitchens's iconoclastic mind and barbed pen. In our debate, he did not disappoint. He began with a typically acerbic attack against religion, saying that Stephen Hawking had more wisdom in his tiny little finger than all the pages of the Bible combined. When my turn came, I responded that the great, wheelchair-bound physicist...

Dear friends, This past week, I was invited to take part with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in a dialogue /interview on a radio show run by Roseanne Barr and someone her producer kept calling "her boyfriend Johnny." The producer kept repeating that while Rabbi Boteach was very right-wing, Roseanne was very left-wing and it would be an interesting conversation. I sent him a few questions I thought would be interesting to pursue — the role of religion in general and Judaism in particular in dealing with wars like Iraq, wih the danger of global scorching, and with sexual ethics. The producer...

A particularly troubling aspect of the news coverage of the gruesome massacre at Virginia Tech is the fact that no one seems to hate the killer, Cheo Seung-Hui. Indeed, he is not even referred to as a killer or a murderer. Cheo is invariably described as a gunman or a shooter. A gunman implies someone who goes to a local gun range a few times a month, and a shooter connotes someone who pops off a couple of rounds in the woods with friends. It conveys nothing of the monstrous nature of Cheo's crimes, the cold-blooded and deliberate slaughter of...

I grew up in the US during the 1970s, the one decade universally acknowledged to have truly sucked. In 1970s America we danced to disco music, wore leisure suits and watched the Brady Bunch. But if that wasn't torture enough, we had Jimmy Carter as our president. I can still recall how depressing it was to watch his taciturn face on TV announcing one catastrophe after another, from the skyrocketing misery index, to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to the capture of our hostages in Iran, to the tragically-botched rescue attempt to free them. Jimmy Carter was arguably the most...

The Talmud famously says that a man is known in three ways. What he says when he is drunk, what he says when he is angry, and what he spends his money on. On all three counts, it appears that Mel Gibson has sadly shown his true colours. Upon getting arrested for drunk driving, in his inebriated state, he allegedly said something to the effect that "f---ing Jews are responsible for all the world's wars." In his anger, he asked the arresting deputy if he himself was Jewish. And, of course, he spent $25 million (U.S.) of his own money...

University men in the Western world view going to college as an arena for the fulfillment of their unbridled lust, and it is these intellectual crossroads wherein one finds, ironically, the greatest contempt for women. Sadly, unless it leads to some terrible tragedy, like rape, nobody cares.

A funny thing happened to me the other day when my wife and I had, thank God, another baby (a boy). Many of my friends didn’t seem all that happy for me. Sure, they went through the motions of smiles and congratulations. But it was evident that many thought me insane. Why would a young man and his wife ruin their lives with eight children? Who could afford the day-school bills? Didn’t we want to live life a little, and not just be burdened with kids? It got downright surreal when a European film company pressed me, while my wife...

While serving as rabbi at Oxford University, I befriended a young African-American Rhodes scholar by the name of Cory Booker who became like a brother to me. Because of Cory’s immense popularity within our student organization, the Oxford L’Chaim Society, he was voted in as co-president 1992, serving as leader of an organization of more than 4,000 student members. Many in the Anglo-Jewish community were puzzled at a non-Jew serving at the head of a Jewish organization, especially when pictures of Cory, with a yarmulke on his head introducing our speaker Mikhail Gorbachev, appeared throughout the UK press. But to...

It was puzzling for the mostly African-American guests at Camp Williams – who had been evacuated from a destroyed New Orleans to Utah – to suddenly see a rabbi with a yarmulke about to address them in their temporary military home. It was even stranger for them to suddenly recognize that that rabbi was the radio host whom the Utah papers had been reporting all week had lost his radio show after using his program to stage an event that would assist the evacuees to find permanent homes in the white, middle-class neighborhoods that Mormon Utah is famous for. And...

Just a little over a month ago I visited the Gulf Coast states of Mississippi and Louisiana on a radio road trip across America's Deep South. When I arrived on Bourbon Street in the French quarter of New Orleans, with its sex shops and year-round Mardi Gras drunkenness, I told my listeners, jokingly, that no doubt the Big Easy (as New Orleans is known) would one day be swallowed by the earth in some awesome display of the divine wrath. The joke became all too real in the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that devastated the Gulf Coast, leaving New...

Do not use my tax dollars for disengagement By SHMULEY BOTEACH Ariel Sharon prides himself on being a pioneer, Israel's human bulldozer, the man who is always out in front, who achieves the impossible, who breaks through all barriers. Well, chalk up yet another first to this stubbornly audacious man, for Sharon is the first Israeli prime minister to have caused Israel's staunchest allies, America's evangelical Christians, to come out against the Israeli government.

Ariel Sharon prides himself on being a pioneer, Israel's human bulldozer, the man who is always out in front, who achieves the impossible, who breaks through all barriers. Well, chalk up yet another first to this stubbornly audacious man, for Sharon is the first Israeli prime minister to have caused Israel's staunchest allies, America's evangelical Christians, to come out against the Israeli government. It is indeed a singular achievement to take your greatest friends and make them into enemies. Sharon has now done this twice. First, with the settler community, who were hoodwinked into believing that Sharon was their ally....

Let us say for a moment that we who oppose the withdrawal from Gaza were to belatedly and begrudgingly accept the calculus of disengagement. Imagine for a moment that Prime Minister Sharon is right. Eight-thousand Jews living in the midst of 1.3 million Palestinians have no future. The military commitment of protecting the settlers is just too expensive and the potential loss of life too costly. It's time to pull out. It's painful, but logical. There are other places in Israel for the settlers to live, and these brave pioneers dare not allow themselves to become obstacles to peace. There...

In May 1995, Christopher Reeve was taking part in a cross-country equestrian event when a fall caused his skull to literally become separated from his spinal cord. He was totally paralyzed. Of that moment he later said, "It dawned on me I was going to be a huge burden to everybody, that I had ruined my life and everybody else's. Not fair to anybody. The best thing to do would be to slip away." When his wife, Dana, came into his room he looked at her and mouthed the words, "Maybe we should let me go." His wife started crying...

I never believed that I would live in a country that would, in effect, execute a brain-damaged woman who never hurt anyone in her life. The story of Terri Schiavo should outrage every decent American. While our soldiers valiantly fight and die across the sea so complete strangers can enjoy human rights, here at home an American woman who suffered severe brain damage 15 years ago is being subjected to death by dehydration and starvation by order of a judge. Today, her feeding tube was removed. The humanity of every society is determined first and foremost by how it treats...