On an Internet site called American Rhetoric, one can hear the famous State of the Union oration delivered by President Roosevelt on 6 January 1941 and known as “The Four Freedoms” speech.  A cynically minded pacifist might argue that the actual point of the speaker’s exertions, veiled though it is in patriotic badinage, is to persuade the Congress that “sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes.”  I would argue that the President’s address is a good illustration of Remy de Gourmont’s mot to the effect that the mind of a civilised man is a museum of mutually contradictory fictions. … 
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William Buckley writes this week in his syndicated column about the ghosts of Vietnam watching us in Iraq. They sure are. Everyone in Europe seems to be writing about the 1967 Six-Day War, where Israel wiped out the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies in six quick days of mayhem. Only a brave few, on the other hand, have mentioned the U.S.S. Liberty, the American spy ship that was rocketed and strafed by the Israelis while it was in neutral waters, with great loss of American lives. LBJ quashed all inquiries following the unprovoked attack, and the Israeli lobby took care of … 
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Things are looking up in Iraq, according to some, that is. We are talking to the insurgents, which is obviously a good thing, but if one believes what they have to say, one is obviously an idiot—or else, one believed Bill Clinton when he told us he never had sex with that woman. Here’s why we cannot trust the Iraqis: Baghdad is lawless because the kidnapping and murdering is done by the very Iraqi police and military we are training to keep the peace. It is as simple as that. We are training those who place the bombs and kill our … 
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TEHRAN: Having spent seven years living and writing about the Arab World, where foreigners are generally handled as rare and privileged species, I approached reports of Iranian unilateralism towards Westerners with suspicion. Surely it was just another case of anti-Iranian Western propaganda? The steady stream of reports coming out of Iran about Westerners being arrested, summarily tried and jailed on spying accusations did make me wonder, however. Iran is the only country in the region where this is a regular occurrence. This doesn’t mean that Arab countries don’t suspect that foreign spies operate within them; just that the Islamic Republic is … 
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The region of France with the oldest claim to civilization is Provence, whose Mediterranean coast was honeycombed with Greek colonies as early as 600 B.C., of which the most important was Massalia (later Marseilles). The Hellenes brought with them the written alphabet, diverse and (ahem!) innovative sexual practices, philosophical discourse, and the art of making wine. Since these are precisely the cultural attributes about which Frenchmen still boast today, it behooves us as residents of the Hellenic colony of Astoria, NewYork, to remind the Frogs where they learned it all—from the Greeks. It was Grecian colonists who introduced the rude, blue-painted … 
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The mother of my children rang me from Deauville and for probably the first time in her life asked me to retract something I had written. It was about Pal Sarkozy’s wife, Christine de Ganay, whom I described last week as the worst of a bad bunch. Well, I’m not exactly pussy-whipped, but Alexandra does have a point. I mixed up the cad’s wives. The poor de Ganey woman was left penniless with two young children by our pal Pal - and he is still very much with us as I saw a picture of him when his son was crowned … 
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The New York Times’ firing of Judith Miller, allegedly for bad reporting, served the same purpose as the paper’s daily “Corrections” column: It suggested that everything else in the newspaper of record is pretty bloody good. It isn’t of course. Manufacture of news, faithful service on behalf of powerful interests, editorializing masquerading as reporting, mischievous misinterpretations and double standards pepper the pages much as they did when Judith Miller was on board. A classic case of the Times molding the news to make it fit to print was its recent coverage of the International Court of Justice’s ruling on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s suit … 
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A recent exchange held on WDAY’s Hot Talk with Scott Hennan between Serb journalist and author of Sword of the Prophet, Srdja Trifkovic and best-selling neocon celebrity Dinesh D’Souza underscores the silliness of what today passes for high-toned political discussion. In a widely discussed book, The Enemy Within (Doubleday, January 2007), D’Souza, a John M. Olin Scholar at American Enterprise Institute,” contends that orthodox Islam and “American conservatism” (whatever that may mean at the present moment) are eminently compatible. Traditional Muslims, we are told, object not to Christianity or to traditional Western values but to American pop culture. Complicating this situation … 
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Let me tell you a sad tale of Russian politics. In July, 1990 I attended a conference in Prague on the emerging democracies in the former Soviet orbit. Most of the speakers told the audience that the Soviet Union would live forever; but that it would lose Eastern Europe. When I got up to speak, having been there since 1989 and by this time having been to a number of the Soviet States, I said that what the audience was hearing was a bunch of nonsense. I said I believed that the Soviet Union was falling apart and soon there would … 
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The Feast of Pentecost is one of the most important to Christians, for a number of reasons. First, it marks the birthday of the Church, the day when the Holy Spirit came down on the Apostles and Mary, and gave everyone the nerve they needed to preach the risen Christ to a hostile mob.   Pentecost also reverses the story of the Tower of Babel—the Old Testament tale of a king so ambitious he wanted to reach heaven through technological means. God tweaked him by inventing that bane of American schoolchildren over the millennia: foreign languages. In what we might call … 
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