Free Republic

Walter Duranty, famous 70 years ago as a distinguished reporter for The New York Times, has slowly turned into a symbol of the wilfully deceptive reporting on the Soviet Union that misled the West about the nature of Stalinism for many years. This week Duranty appeared in the news again when the Pulitzer Prize board announced its decision not to strip him posthumously of the award he won in 1932 for persistently dishonest reporting from Moscow. Duranty served as Moscow correspondent from 1921 to 1934, wrote several books on Soviet politics and won an admiring public in America. Meanwhile, he...

Like bureaucrats everywhere, the people running the UN believe above all in the growth of their power. This winter, undeterred by their failures in peacekeeping, AIDS prevention and women's rights, they are focusing on a new target of opportunity: the Internet. The rest of us may consider the Internet one of the great inventions of modern times, but it affronts the rigid conservatives staffing the UN. They are astonished that no one planned this global enterprise, and they can hardly believe that no one runs it. They yearn to regulate it, and they are working hard, at great expense, to...

Paul Johnson, the British journalist and historian, recently delivered some harsh words on anti-Americanism as embodied in the culture of Europe. He called it crude, childish, self-defeating and nonsensical. "It is based," he said, "on the powerful but irrational impulse of envy -- an envy of American wealth, power, success and determination." Most Americans would probably consider his opinion exaggerated. Surely it can't be that bad? But a Canadian, living in a country where anti-Americanism is the air we breathe, may decide that Johnson has it about right. For Canadians, cultural anti-Americanism provides, among other things, a way to avoid...

Yasir Arafat ended his speech to the UN General Assembly on Nov. 13, 1974 with the words, "I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand." It was an obnoxious child's insolent threat. Arafat was saying that the adults (the West, the UN, etc.) were responsible for his actions, however murderous they might turn out to be. He himself could go either way. Certainly he was innocent. All Palestinians were victims of imperialist aggression, which meant they couldn't be called terrorists and were not responsible for what they did....

Azar Nafisi reveals the decadence of studying literature in Tehran In a house in Tehran in the 1990s eight women were talking about literature. Someone was thinking of Jane Austen and the famous opening of Pride and Prejudice, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Since the Iranian authorities had decreed that girls could be married off at the age of nine, one of the women in the group proposed a local variation: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless...

Saudi Arabia, rich theocratic monarchy and shaky friend of Washington, ranks last among all nations in civil liberties -- or, if not exactly last, then tied for last. That was clear this week in the annual survey from Freedom House, an American research foundation. Saudi Arabia appeared on Freedom House's "worst of the worst" list, scraping along the bottom beside Burma, North Korea and Syria. It's surprising, given this now-well-known reality, that the Saudi ambassador to the United States gets his propaganda published on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and Washington Post. It's even more surprising that...

JERUSALEM - Palestinians never liked calling their front-line terrorists "suicide bombers," because the Koran frowns on suicide. No problem. They just substituted the word "martyr," which quickly became theologically appropriate. Some pesky imams remained unhappy, but they soon fell silent, and in no time "martyrdom" became desirable and admirable. Proud parents spoke of "My son the martyr," and funerals for 20-year-olds turned into celebrations. This is the way language functions in the Middle East. It's a Lewis Carroll universe, where (as Humpty Dumpty put it) words mean what people choose they should mean, no more and no less. That may...

ZIPPOREN BORDER POST, North Israel - On Sunday afternoons, for a family outing, people in Beirut sometimes load the kids into the car and drive an hour or so south to throw stones across the border at Israeli soldiers. In this way the children can enjoy themselves while vividly expressing their patriotism, which in this case takes the form of hating Israel. It's a pastime that combines real-life horror and Middle East politics with unsettling elements of Disneyland. On this border region in the Galilee, the struggle of Israel with its neighbours stops being rhetorical and turns highly graphic. Everything...

JERUSALEM - The most recent moves on the chessboard of Middle East politics have had the surprising effect of increasing the potency of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement. At least for the moment, those religious-terrorists-on-the-run have reinvented themselves as statesmen possessing something that looks a lot like power. While Hamas has always been viciously hostile to Israel, this week it holds Israel's fragile peace in its hands. As Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas pose side by side for the cameras, Hamas hovers unseen in the background, confident that it made this event possible and can easily...

For the sake of form and morale, political rhetoric always contains necessary lies that no one can believe but many feel they must state. Last year, as the Israelis began fighting Palestinian murders by attacking the terrorist managers in their hiding places, The Jerusalem Post published the words of Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's chief of staff. "This," he said, "is a conflict we must win, so the Palestinians will understand that they cannot gain through terror." How the world's leaders love to say that! Terrorism doesn't work and should never be rewarded, they explain. Ya'alon speaks with the authority of...

Has there ever been such an embarrassing moment for the craft of reporting? Bookstores are about to start selling The Fabulist, a novel in which Stephen Glass, who disgraced the New Republic five years ago by falsifying some 27 magazine articles, depicts a young man, also named Stephen, who re-enacts Glass's mischief at a weekly much like the New Republic. Now the revival of that scandal has been overshadowed by the discovery that a 27-year-old staff reporter on The New York Times, Jayson Blair, manufactured at least three dozen fake stories, even though several of his superiors knew he was...

Last Sunday, on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio news broadcast, a reporter from Jerusalem described Hamas as "the Islamic resistance movement" -- and nothing else. In another organization, an editor might have asked the reporter to acknowledge that while some call Hamas a resistance movement, others consider it a band of vicious killers. But at the CBC, this piece of flagrant disinformation went floating out, unchallenged, through the innocent Canadian air. It was not the result of carelessness. It was acceptable CBC practice, in the style familiar to students of Middle East warfare who follow the CBC. It stands as...

Friday » April 11 » 2003 Baghdad falls The new American era of peace through power Robert Fulford National Post National Post columnist Robert Fulford explains how the war in Iraq marks a turning point in world history. - - - A monstrous bronze version of Saddam Hussein, its elephantine arm outstretched, towered above Paradise Square in the core of Baghdad, one of the hundreds of self-glorifying symbols that he installed in his capital and across the country to tell the world that he was omnipresent as well as all-powerful, the only man of consequence in the Republic of Iraq....

National Post columnist Robert Fulford explains how the war in Iraq marks a turning point in world history. - - - A monstrous bronze version of Saddam Hussein, its elephantine arm outstretched, towered above Paradise Square in the core of Baghdad, one of the hundreds of self-glorifying symbols that he installed in his capital and across the country to tell the world that he was omnipresent as well as all-powerful, the only man of consequence in the Republic of Iraq. It stood there until late yesterday. Then, with Saddam himself still nowhere in sight, the citizens and their liberators, the...

In recent times the newspapers have rarely mentioned Herbert Aptheker, but half a century ago he was among the most articulate American defenders of Stalinist terror. An academic historian from Brooklyn, he was a leading theorist of American communism and an editor of Masses & Mainstream, the magazine equivalent of the Daily Worker. He considered Lenin, "the greatest figure in the whole galaxy of world revolutionary leaders." Anyone acquainted with his work knew all of this and much more. No one denied it, least of all Aptheker. But when he died last week at the age of 87, the obituaries...

Young people find this hard to imagine, but Israel once looked to the leftists of the world for support -- and the leftists of the world considered Israel a progressive nation. Modern Israel began its life in 1948 with strong socialist credentials. The words "Labour" and "Zionist" went together naturally, and socialists of every kind took a friendly interest; the kibbutz experiment, for example, was watched with admiration and curiosity wherever egalitarian idealists dreamt of new social forms. Young Gentiles who considered themselves progressive often went to Israel to work as volunteers. Harry Truman, an American president now revered by...

For two astonishing hours on Wednesday night, the PBS network in the U.S. broadcast a new film devoted entirely to religious propaganda, Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet. Innocent viewers received no warning. The listings implied that we were to see a documentary, which usually means a mixture of fact and argument, the sort of thing PBS broadcasts on Iraq, Benjamin Franklin, or for that matter, Jesus Christ. But most of those who sat through Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet must have realized eventually that this was no documentary. It was an Islamic sermon on film. PBS documentaries often display grievous...

Saturday, September 21, 2002 In Canada and the United States, the political left is always dying (even leftists say so), but somehow it never goes away. We keep it alive by worrying about it, and giving it advice. Every former sympathizer knows precisely how the left can regain legitimacy. In decades past I voted NDP, not always but often. My father voted for the CCF, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation -- a dumb and unattractive name, as its slow-witted organizers realized after about two decades. It seemed natural for me to vote for the CCF and, after 1961, for its successor,...

Over dinner on Sunday night at a Japanese restaurant off the much-bombed Jaffa Street in Jerusalem, Ofira Henig mentioned that she was leaving the next day for Berlin, Paris, and New York, in search of theatre companies to perform at next year's Israel Festival. When I said that sounded like pleasant work, she corrected me. She was dreading it. She knew that everywhere she went, people would pounce on her and demand that she explain why Ariel Sharon's government had re-occupied the Palestinian territories. Insults from ignorant foreigners are not the heaviest of the burdens Israelis carry this year, but...