U.S. air strikes since Friday have opened a corridor through which tens of thousands of Yazidis, trapped and starving on a mountain in Iraq, have escaped to safety in Kurdistan. The Kurds, whose peshmerga fighters were sent reeling by the Islamic State last week, bolstered now by the arrival of U.S. air power, recaptured two [...]
It takes courage to speak out against the threatening presence of Islam in today’s world. And it takes courage to defend those who have the courage to speak out. Eight years ago, after Benedict XVI gave his controversial Regensburg address, most European commentators were shamefully timid in their response. Most refused to raise their heads [...]
Western reporting on Iran is an example of our fascinating but increasingly tenuous connection to reality. Overall, media coverage is now so ritualized, restricted by convention and laden with hidden assumptions that it increasingly resembles Japanese classical drama or Balinese shadow-puppetry. A century from now, when scholars sift through the ashes of our civilization, they’re [...]
“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, “Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.” Thus did Kipling, the Poet of Empire, caution the British about the Eastern world the Victorians and Edwardians believed to be theirs. And with that world so inflamed against us, [...]
Is it not long past time to do a cost-benefit analysis of our involvement in the Middle and Near East? In this brief century alone, we have fought the two longest wars in our history there, put our full moral authority behind an “Arab Spring” that brought down allies in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, and [...]
Apart from political maps of mankind, there are natural maps of mankind. …One of the first laws of political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines of the natural map of mankind. So wrote H.G. Wells in “What Is Coming: A Forecast of Things to Come After the War” in the year [...]
In its modern sense, the concept of human rights could be said to be alien to the Islamic tradition. That is because the modern doctrine of rights is an invention of the European Enlightenment. It was an attempt to base the humane social order on reason rather than revelation. Unfortunately the secular foundations of the [...]
Last Tuesday evening, I saw ‘Of Gods and Men’ at the only theater in Cincinnati showing the excellent French film, based on a 1995 true story. There were only three other people in the theater with me, and none of them cried like I did during the latter half of the movie. The monks’ triumphs [...]
Julie Baldwin The Wall Street Journal reported that “A frenzied mob incensed by a Qu’ran-burning ceremony in Florida overran the United Nations office in northern Afghanistan’s largest city on Friday, killing at least seven foreigners and several Afghans, U.N. and Afghan officials said. The attack was the most deadly for the U.N. in Afghanistan. [...]
While North African and Middle Eastern Christians have long suffered at the hands of Muslims, the last six or so months seem to have been especially brutal. Does anyone else see the irony in the fact that Obama unilaterally decided (from Brazil of all places) to take sides in the Libyan Civil War, but he’s [...]
Robert Reilly Modern America’s closest approximation to the dapper Ronald Coleman, Bob Reilly is familiar to many Imaginative Conservatives: I have enjoyed knowing him for 35 years. This respected academic, Pentagon advisor, and former director of the Voice of America has written a clear and fascinating book on Islam that connects an early [...]