Free Republic

In October, Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes spoke at my school, Tufts University. A strong supporter of Israel and an equally strong opponent of radical Islam, he is one of the few people in the United States academically qualified to speak about the rise of radical Islam and certainly well worth listening to whether or not one agrees with his conclusions. I assumed students would protest, and they did. But it was disturbing, indeed shocking, to discover that the protest against Pipes was cosponsored by Tufts Hillel. Why did Hillel join in a protest against a speaker who came to...

Politicians grabbing Barack Obama’s coattails should take note: In the Georgia democratic Senatorial primary runoff held yesterday, Jim Martin defeated Vernon Jones by a 60% to 40%. Martin will now face the Republican senior Senator from Georgia, Saxby Chambliss, in November’s election. This doesn’t seem to bode well for Obama’s presidential quest. Jones’s campaign hoped to emulate Obama’s impressive primary victory in Georgia (he defeated Senator Hillary Clinton in Georgia, 66.4% to 31.1%), but now he’s failed to even make it to November’s ballot. In fact, Jones distributed campaign paraphernalia consisting of a picture of himself and Obama, with the...

While Senator Barack Obama was on his world tour, Senator John McCain should have been busy—neither planning to speak at an Gulf Coast oil rig, visiting with the Dalai Lama, nor whining about his coverage in the press. Instead, McCain should have paid a visit to the Rio Grande Valley. There, of course, fifteen counties have just been declared federal disaster areas, thousands are still without power, and an assessed $750 million dollar clean-up task awaits. All this as a result of Hurricane Dolly. The two contrasting images of the presidential candidates would have been staggering. Imagine: Obama assuring hordes...

Soon after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi assumed office, she claimed one of her first victories. At last, low income wage earners were rescued with the passage of an amended Fair Labor Standards Act (or the Fair Pay Act of 2007). Instead of making, at minimum, $5.15 an hour, earners across the nation had to be paid at least $5.85 an hour. Soon to come, however, on July 24, 2008, American wage earners will have to earn no less than $6.55 per hour of labor (and again, on July 24, 2009, the minimum will be raised to $7.25 an...

The 218th Presbyterian General Assembly, held from June 21-28 in San Jose, offered both good and bad news for opponents of the anti-Israel campaigns that have roiled mainline churches and disrupted Jewish-Christian relations. First, the good news. The Assembly soundly defeated a divestment resolution (called Overtures), reinforcing its 2006 decision to move away from the anti-Israel positions that had characterized the divestment measure it passed at its 2004 Assembly. The Presbyterians had been the first mainline American church to get on the divestment bandwagon, and its second step away from extremism is hopefully a bellwether for the path other denominations...

The majority party in congress is pulling out all the stops to assist Barack Obama’s presidential bid. According to the AP, the Dems have juggled the legislative agenda to reflect Obama’s political platform: Between now and Election Day, Democrats say they will use Congress to showcase the kinds of change promised by their presidential candidate, Barack Obama. Of course, this is old politics — not the shiny new brand Obama likes to trumpet. Whatever legislation Democrats offer, it will have been vetted for the benefit of the Obama campaign as is traditional between the congressional majority and its presidential candidate....

Out of over 20 debates that Barack Obama has heretofore participated in, he has yet to come away with a decisive victory. John McCain, aiming to capitalize on his political foes weakness, recently challenged Obama to participate in 10 town halls this summer. Fred Barnes argues on The Weekly Standard’s The Blog that Obama’s political cowardice prevents him from accepting McCain’s proposal town hall proposal. Barnes has a point: McCain’s best when he’s spontaneous, while Obama has struggled in such situations...

[snip] And that brings us at last to the real question raised by this transfixing episode in our national life, which is not whether Jeremiah Wright is pernicious and hateful in his views. Anyone who is not in thrall to an ideological loathing of America can see that plainly enough. It is whether Obama is right when he asserts that Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ embody “the black community in its entirety.” If he is right, then there is a central flaw in the declared premise underlying his campaign for President—the premise that his election offers a...

Much of Barack Obama’s foreign policy doctrine hinges on the notion that he will be able to “repair” the image other nations now have of America. This line, which his supporters continue to iterate, is that a “new face“–one that looks different, and behind which sits a brain with a great understanding of others–will allow America to fix its PR problems abroad. However, if recent newspaper articles from outside the U.S. are any indication, Obama’s platform on trade signals that his presidency might not successfully accomplish this much-vaunted task.

Maybe the Obama-inspired tremor that began in Chris Matthews’ leg has traveled up to his head and done some damage. Last night on Hardball, Matthews was discussing–what else?–President Bush’s unconscionable Obama attack in the Knesset. The conversation with conservative radio host Kevin James wended round to the career of Neville Chamberlain, and Matthews began to excoriate James for being ignorant of history. Things got very heated, and James fired back, recounting recent historical examples of America’s failure to counter terrorist acts against the U.S. When James mentioned Bill Clinton’s lackadaisical response to the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in...

Avi Lewis is a Canadian television host and the husband of Naomi Klein, author and columnist for the Nation and herald of the anti-American, proto-socialist, “anti-globalization” movement. (Klein is infamous for a 2004 column she wrote the week of the Republican National Convention in New York City entitled, “Bring Najaf to New York.”) Klein and Lewis make, as you might imagine, a politically pugnacious couple. Recently, for his show “On the Map,” Lewis interviewed the prominent ex-Muslim critic of fundamentalist Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who, next to Burmese democracy activist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, qualifies as perhaps the most...

On Monday evening at Tufts University, I attended a long, grueling show trial -- the kind of show trial that doubtless will be repeated at campuses across the United States. This show trial was convened with the sole purpose of punishing The Primary Source, Tufts' lone conservative periodical. What was The Source's sin? On December 6, 2006, The Source printed a tasteless parody carol entitled "O Come, All Ye Black Folk." The carol was written from the perspective of an admissions officer, admitting students solely based on racially discriminatory stereotypes: "All come! Blacks, we need you, / Born into the...

CAMPUS ALERT-FREE speech is on trial today at Tufts University in Massachusetts. This afternoon, the editors of "The Primary Source," a conservative student publication, will go before the school's student judiciary panel to answer charges leveled against the paper by other students. The charges at the disciplinary hearing include "harassment" and "breach of community standards." The actual "crimes"? Satirical articles published in TPS in the past few months - specifically, a Christmas carol parody lampooning race-based admissions policies ("O Come All Ye Black Folk") and an Islamic Awareness Week article focusing on the religion's fundamentalist fringe ("The seven nations in...

Aceh is a tropical paradise that attracted thousands of tourists per year until a devastating tsunami struck Indonesia on Dec. 26, 2004. The concomitant death and destruction is well known. Also well documented in the world press has been the slow pace of the clean up operation, which affects the recovery of the tourist industry - the mainstay of the province's economy. A dramatic change of a very different sort, however, may have rendered Aceh permanently unrecognizable to those who enjoyed its sybaritic pleasures. Aceh has been governed by Sharia, the strict Islamic law that Islamic militants have sought to...

During the immediate aftermath of the massacre at Virginia Tech one week ago, the University President, Charles Steger, quickly mobilized a campaign to save his career. Within hours, shock and mourning were quickly replaced with a full-scale public relations stint. Unfortunately, President Steger was not the only one aiming to capitalize from mass murder: bloggers and commentators across the nation began advocating for a change in gun control policy - either fewer restrictions or tighter control. Wounds cannot be healed if they are not felt. The administrators at Virginia Tech played down the destruction for their personal gain and at...

On March 23, 15 British sailors and marines were taken hostage by Iran. Accused of entering the territorial waters of the Iranian regime, the hostages were paraded and humiliated on Iranian television and have since been released. Americans, as well as the British, watched with apprehension, as the fate of these brave men and woman was uncertain. For Americans, an Iranian hostage crisis is a familiar occurrence. After all, it has been less than 40 years since the hostile takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran by Iranian militants on November 4, 1979. President Jimmy Carter's ineffective approach to the...

Last week marked the four-year anniversary of America's liberation of Iraq. In response to the longevity of the project, protests were held throughout the nation denouncing the war. From sea to shining sea, the protesters wielded signs with pictures of Che Guevara and anti-American slogans while disingenuously demanding that our troops be brought home immediately. The national coordinator of ANSWER, the coalition to Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, Brian Becker, told me in a phone interview that the protests were held as "an effort to reach the people of this county and as they have become more...

Last week marked the four-year anniversary of America's liberation of Iraq. In response to the longevity of the project, protests were held throughout the nation denouncing the war. From sea to shining sea, the protesters wielded signs with pictures of Che Guevara and anti-American slogans while disingenuously demanding that our troops be brought home immediately. The national coordinator of ANSWER, the coalition to Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, Brian Becker, told me in a phone interview that the protests were held as "an effort to reach the people of this county and as they have become more...

When I asked two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof about his guiding moral doctrine, he hummed, hawed and ahhed for a few seconds before he offered this line: "I don't think I have any sort of, you know, particularly unusual or even sophisticated moral doctrine. I think it is more a matter that I try to push people to care equally about injustices that are a long way away versus those that are next door." Many deem Kristof to be an intellectual figure looked to for moral insight and guidance. Readers see him as...