We are bombarded by a constant stream of news concerning supposed mistreatment of and microagression against popular minorities, but little is said about the very real persecution of Christians. On June 22, a suicide bomber attacked the Greek Orthodox Church of the Prophet Elias in the Damascus suburb of Dweila, killing 25 members of the congregation. [...]
The present bombing of Armenia and Artsakh is meant to fulfill the Young Turk dream of building an Empire. That dream is alive and well in Turkey’s government today. By honoring and listening to historian Bernard Lewis, we have become accomplices of that dream, that nightmare. It is time to wake up and hold fast [...]
One hundred and forty-two years after the Congress of Berlin, the same nightmarish scenario is playing out again: Turkish forces are killing Armenians. And like the Europeans of times past, we just don’t seem to get it. How many Armenians have to die before we understand that life and culture are precious and must be [...]
Two months ago, crowds were in the streets of Iran cursing that regime for squandering the nation’s resources on imperial adventures in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen. Things were going America’s way. Now it is the Americans who are the targets of protests. Fifteen years after the U.S. invaded Iraq to turn Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship into a [...]
National Security Advisor John Bolton has thus far failed to maneuver the world into yet another Made-in-America Middle East conflict. Yet he might soon have the justification he wants. In the American lexicon there is never any such thing as wars of aggression. We prefer calling them wars of liberation. This has not been a [...]
The history of Sri Lanka through the Fifties to the present time is a sobering reminder to those who fail to see that unrestrained democracy can lead to the tyranny of the majority and that robust diversity is as often a cause of friction and strife as it is a strength to be celebrated. If [...]
President Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, if it holds, is one of the few genuinely courageous acts of his presidency… My first thought when I heard that President Trump was finally taking our troops out of the quagmire called Syria was that he was not really serious. Given how frequently and unpredictably [...]
We have all seen the scene at least once, although some of us have savored it perhaps dozens of times. The handsome, dynamic, misunderstood, modernizing young king, with his slender physique, slender beard, and even more slender morals, strutting about the banquet hall knocking the plates and goblets off the table in a drunken frenzy. [...]
Abrogating the agreement will not enable Iran to build nuclear weapons; rather, abrogating the agreement will help the United States justify a military response once Iran is provoked into walking away from the agreement... Hassan Rouhani The only thing surprising about President Trump’s decision to decertify Iran on October 14 is that it [...]
Our real culture wars are not being waged between “God and country” conservatism on the one side and multicultural secular liberalism on the other. It now seems to me that our real culture wars are waged between Civil Religion on the one side and Christian orthodoxy on the other. At our 2009 annual meeting, the [...]
What ideology ever threatened America more than Islamic extremism? And yet might Islam, which once helped save and preserve Western thought and culture a thousand years ago, do something similar this century, helping to bring us back to a more spiritual, less materialistic, epoch?… 1938. The world is on the threshold of the most devastating war [...]
We can only hope that our current president will not now, in his efforts to make the world safe from terrorism, instead make the world safe for Wahhabism, the last remaining totalitarianism of our time... There have been more than a dozen Islamic terrorist attacks perpetrated in the United States. They mostly fall within the [...]
Wars, it is said, are the death of republics. And we now seem to be caught up in an endless war... Saturday, three Islamic terrorists committed "suicide-by-cop," using a van to run down pedestrians on London Bridge, and then slashing and stabbing patrons of pubs and diners in the nearby Borough Market. By all accounts, [...]
The fact that some Americans once considered Catholicism a menace is now used as an argument against critics of Muslim immigration. But what if all the things that were once falsely charged against Catholicism are actually true of Islam?… “In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country [...]