It was a cold, rainy and miserable day--either late 1951 or early 52. I was unemployed but had taken part-time work to help do a piece of market research for a friend’s firm. With my little clipboard, I was importuning what we thought would be an … [Read more...] about Why a Possible Demise of Pax Americana?
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Weekly Briefing, February 8-13, 2015
Deterring ISIL is Not Enough - Rachel Ehrenfeld - "Muslims need to change the religious discourse and remove from it things that have led to violence and extremism.”... President Obama’s requested Congressional authorization to indefinitely use U.S. … [Read more...] about Weekly Briefing, February 8-13, 2015
Deterring ISIL is Not Enough
"Muslims need to change the religious discourse and remove from it things that have led to violence and extremism.” Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 22, 2015 President Obama’s requested Congressional authorization … [Read more...] about Deterring ISIL is Not Enough
Bad Iran Deal in the Offing
(Left) Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif underlined on Tuesday (Feb.9) that the nuclear talks between Tehran and the world powers will end in a final agreement if the western powers stop seeking excuses and reciprocate Iran's goodwill … [Read more...] about Bad Iran Deal in the Offing
The History of History*
Historians cheat. Mostly, they reconstruct the story of our past as a straightforward narrative with a beginning, middle, and sometimes even an end. What they don’t usually tell us is that a great deal more was going on than that single narrative of … [Read more...] about The History of History*
Dumping Riyadh For Tehran
Left: Zacarias Moussaoui The Oscar worth direction of Iran’s image-laundering campaign is drowning, as hoped by the Obama administration and Tehran, in media headlines about the “new” evidence of Saudi funding of al Qaeda. Documentation of the … [Read more...] about Dumping Riyadh For Tehran
Southeast Asian Islam, gentle and ungentle
A “rage against history”: a bewildered and at times visceral sense, a disquiet in the soul and gut, that “history has gone wrong”, departed from its divinely ordained path. Religious “supersessionism”: or, underlying that sense of historical … [Read more...] about Southeast Asian Islam, gentle and ungentle
Christians in China
In 1979 I spent some months prowling the State Department library in search of material for a study on the history of The United States’ concern with the narcotics trade in China. The final result, some 50,000 words, was submitted to Mathea Falco, … [Read more...] about Christians in China
Weekly Briefing – February 1-6, 2015
Hell on Earth - Dr. Mordecai Kedar@Arutz7 - Burning alive a human being is a method of eliminating enemies that is well known and documented in early Islamic sources, and based on a deductive legal principle of Sharia law… Anyone who attacks Islamic … [Read more...] about Weekly Briefing – February 1-6, 2015
Beware of the Ides of March
March 2015 is looking like it is going to be a very "interesting" month, to quote the well-known Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times". First Prime Minister Netanyahu will address the joint houses of Congress while he is in Washington to … [Read more...] about Beware of the Ides of March