Howard Kurtz on Hillary Clinton: a backhanded compliment?

Hillary Clinton is incredibly popular right now in part because she's had diplomatic immunity for the past four years. Except for the af...

Peter Beinart on Chuck Hagel: deterrence and involvement

The article by Peter Beinart on the brand new secretary of defense only confirmed for me the two things I already knew: that I admire Peter...

Ben Zygier affair and a lonely voice of sanity

Gil Troy on the scandal - in The Daily Beast , no less. Enjoy.

Guardian - confirming the obsession

Verb: Confirm Establish or strengthen as with new evidence or facts I was just making sure (establishing) that I understand the meaning of t...

Air Force confirms Russian jets near Guam? Nah...

The general info in the Fox article is, most probably true: The Air Force confirms that two Russian bombers on Tuesday circled the U.S. isl...

What Jonathan Freedland doesn’t get

I've stumbled on a (new to me) appearance of Jonathan Freedland under the auspices of Open Zion section of the Daily Beast, edited by Pe...

Le miracle du président de Hollande

Now, now, please keep you undies untangled. It is Google Translate, of course, and for all I know it skewed the meaning. The single word in ...

Oz blogger takes aim at Jeremy Bowen - and hits plumb center!

I have decided that Daphne Anson of Australia is my new best friend on the blogosphere! She's just posted this item, a list of New Year ...

Muslim Brotherhood needs to understand...

The article The Schoolmarms Tell the Terrorists to Play Nice by prof Barry Rubin is written with unusual for him harsh overtones. I can eas...

Fatwa against Christmas and Facebook

In a normal course of events I would have skipped this blighted subject: verbal shenanigans of a certain imam or pastor or rabbi are interes...

Speaking (or pressing 'send') too soon

I should have know that I spoke too soon. No sooner had I pressed "send" on the previous item (that and this one via The Elder of ...

The Guardian report on Christmas in Bethlehem

Another year, another Christmas. The survivors of the Mayan end of the days are blearily opening their eyes looking forward to some hearty c...

The most turgid headline I've seen

And it belongs to a BBC article: GM sprouts 'could blow away flatulence'

One for the "If only..." column

Here's a short item from The Times of Israel , to be filed in the "If only..." column. Typical quote (just about sums the thre...

The phantoms of ceasefire, proportionality and other Middle East myths - Part II

Farmer Jones and farmer Smith, or Parable of Proportionality . Wild West circa 18.. It was a warm and sunny April morning. Farmer Jones was ...

Why the Palestinians Will Never Win

This headline is copied from The Daily Beast article , penned by Michael Tomasky, once a Guardian reporter, now an editor of Democracy: A Jo...

The phantoms of ceasefire, proportionality and other Middle East myths - Part I

As usual, every flare-up of local conflict causes the usual buzzwords applied to it to be taken out of the drawer, dusted and presented via ...

We are all Muslims. Indignant ones, too.

According to new anthropological discovery by CNN : Protests against the "Innocence of Muslims" film erupted in September in many ...

Commentator editor shoots himself in the (ideological and possibly intellectual) foot

I know that certain types of professional are prone to a degree of certainty that the evidence doesn't allow,especially outside their sp...

Did Tzipi Livni have sex with Arabs when working for Mossad?

You can imagine I had me some laughs on account of this story . A leading Egyptian daily falsely claimed that former foreign minister Tzipi ...