NEW YORK: What possessed the young French Muslim Mohammed Merah to murder three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi, and three soldiers, two of them fellow Muslims? What possessed another man, Anders Breivik, to gun down more than 60 teenagers in a (...)
NEW YORK: The eccentric Bengali intellectual Nirad C. Chaudhuri once explained the end of the British Raj in India as a case of “funk,” or loss of nerve. The British had stopped believing in their own empire. They simply lost the will, in Rudyard (...)
HO CHI MINH CITY: Can an entire people go mad? Sometimes it certainly seems so.
Images of North Koreans in their hundreds of thousands howling with grief over Kim Jong-il's death suggest something very disturbing. But what? An exercise in mass (...)
NEW YORK: Many would say that Col. Muammar El-Qaddafi got what he deserved. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
The Libyan tyrant happily allowed his opponents, or anyone who annoyed him, to be tortured or killed. So it seems only right that he (...)
NEW YORK: On a rare foray outside his native Texas, Governor Rick Perry accused US President Barack Obama of “appeasement” towards the Palestinians. Former New York City Mayor Edward Koch supported a Catholic Republican congressional candidate (...)
NEW YORK: Many people still believe that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were not just acts of political terrorism, but part of a cultural war, a clash of civilizations. The two things that get people most excited in cultural conflicts are (...)
AMSTERDAM: Most European citizens (for example, more than 60 percent in France and Germany) believe that Turkey should not become part of the European Union. There are various reasons for this opposition — some valid, some based on prejudice: Turkey (...)
NEW YORK: Does monarchy — constitutional monarchy, that is, not the despotic kind — have any redeeming features left? The arguments against maintaining kings and queens are mostly quite rational. It is unreasonable in this democratic age to pay (...)
NEW YORK: Rarely — indeed, perhaps not since World War II — have the Japanese had such good press abroad. Even South Korean newspapers have been full of praise for the self-discipline of ordinary Japanese in dire circumstances. And coming from (...)
NEW YORK: US President Barack Obama has been much criticized for the way he has handled revolutionary changes in North Africa and the Middle East. Actually, he has not handled them very much, at least not in public.
That is precisely the problem (...)
NEW YORK: Sometime in the 1980's, when the communist regime in Poland was facing serious challenges from disaffected masses, the regime's official spokesman, Jerzy Urban, remarked to a foreign journalist that there were only two choices in Poland: (...)
JERUSALEM: Israel has been welcoming some rather peculiar visitors of late. The Dutch populist, Geert Wilders, is a frequent caller, telling sympathetic audiences that Israel is on the front line of the Western war against Islam. And, in December, a (...)
JERUSALEM: Every Friday afternoon for more than a year, hundreds of Israeli Jews have gathered on a dusty little square in the middle of Arab East Jerusalem. There are some Palestinians there, too, including a couple of boys selling fresh orange (...)
NEW YORK: It must be galling for the Chinese government to keep seeing Nobel Prizes go to the wrong Chinese.
The first wrong Chinese was Gao Xingjian, a critical playwright, artist, and novelist, who received the Nobel Prize for literature in (...)
AMSTERDAM: Whatever happened to the good Europeans, those nice folks in small northern countries who liked to think of themselves as the world champions of liberty and tolerance?
Of course, many liberal Europeans are still alive and well. But (...)
NEW YORK: Who were those flag-waving, cheering, hollering, singing, and praying Americans who gathered in Washington DC on the last Saturday in August at a rally to “restore the honor” of the United States? This tax-free jamboree of patriotism was (...)
TOKYO: Revolutions, it is often claimed, do not happen when people are desperate. They occur in times of rising expectations. Perhaps this is why they so often end in disappointment. Expectations, usually set too high to begin with, fail to be met, (...)
NEW YORK: The flags are already flying, from Holland to Argentina, from Cameroon to Japan. Soon the drums will be beating, the trumpets blowing. Colors will be unfurled, and battle cries will sound. It's that time again: the World Cup is upon (...)
NEW YORK: Elites are under siege in every corner of the world. “Tea Party” activists in exurban America rant and rage against the so-called liberal elites of New York, Washington, and Hollywood. In Europe, populist demagogues, such as Geert Wilders (...)
NEW YORK: In his remarkable apology to the Catholics of Ireland (most of that country's population), Pope Benedict XVI explained why he thought sinful priests were tempted to commit sexual acts with children. It was because of “new and serious (...)
AMSTERDAM: The Dutch army has been operating as part of NATO in a remote and unruly part of Afghanistan since 2006. Fighting against the Taliban has been heavy at times. Twenty-one Dutch lives have been lost, out of about 1,800 men and women.
The (...)
NEW YORK: First the Swiss ban minarets. Now the French parliament wants to ban Muslim women from wearing the burqa - the full, face-covering garment worn in orthodox Arab countries, and now adopted by some orthodox non-Arabs - in public places. The (...)
TOKYO: 2009 was a good year for China. The Chinese economy still roared ahead in the midst of a worldwide recession. American President Barack Obama visited China, more in the spirit of a supplicant to an imperial court than the leader of the (...)
NEW YORK: Switzerland has four mosques with minarets and a population of 350,000 nominal Muslims, mostly Europeans from Bosnia and Kosovo, of which about 13 percent regularly go to prayer. Not a huge problem, one might have thought. Yet 57.5 percent (...)
NEW YORK: Twenty years ago, when the Berlin Wall was breached and the Soviet empire was collapsing, only die-hard believers in a communist utopia felt unhappy. A few people, of course, clung to the possibility of what was once called "actually (...)