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Because the government is sensitive to world opinion, it lets its incarcerated child offenders live until they are 18. Then it executes them as adults by Geoffrey Clarfield Mahboubeh Mofidi's memorial service, Nowshahr, Iran, 2018 On Jan. 30, 2018, a young woman, Mahboubeh Mofidi, was executed ...Read More...

Michael Doran writes in First Things: On matters of foreign policy, Americans are divided into two hidden camps. Not Republicans versus Democrats, nor liberals versus conservatives, nor rival schools of foreign policy you read about in college courses. The divide is primarily religious in nature—or ...Read More...

by Geoffrey Clarfield In George Orwell’s dystopia, written during WWII he imagines a totalitarian future where history is inverted and language is perverted. This is what we now mean by “politically correct speech.” And so we must draw inspiration from someone, who in 1984, took on the false ...Read More...

Opinion from the Economist LAST weekend China stepped from autocracy into dictatorship. That was when Xi Jinping, already the world’s most powerful man, let it be known that he will change China’s constitution so that he can rule as president for as long as he chooses—and conceivably for life. ...Read More...

A report from Jews Down Under: A conference is a great way to meet people interested in what you are interested in, to hear speakers talk about what you are interested in and to have the opportunity to ask questions of those who know more than you do. There are people who come to conferences ...Read More...

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (source: Medium.com)             The anachronism shown. The Phyla and Waves Models used by Semiticists is not very scientific. Note that areal diffusion makes transmission arrows very fuzzy. The only right way to proceed is by PCA, which explain why as ...Read More...

by Geoffrey Clarfield Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech is a short book with four themes. The first is that the ethnographic evidence provided by anthropologist and linguist Daniel L. Everett, based on decades of participant observation and a thorough, analytic, experience-based documentation ...Read More...

Ken White writes in National Review Online: At six in the morning, a man is startled awake by an insistent pounding on his front door. He opens it to find armed government agents. One group of them begins to ransack the man’s home. Two others take him outside and put him into the back seat of ...Read More...

Here is a quote: One heroic-cum-tragic exception was Malcolm Caldwell, a communist lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies who was such a fan of Pol Pot and his murderous regime that he went over to see it in person. He had a private interview with Pol Pot himself and was murdered ...Read More...

See their website here. IAM supports the universal tradition of academic freedom that is an indispensable characteristic of higher education in Israel. At the same time, it is concerned by the activities of a small group of academics--sometimes described as revisionist historians or post-Zionists, ...Read More...

Tiana Lowe writes in NRO: In 1999, the Evergreen State College of Washington featured convicted cop-killer and Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal as its commencement speaker via a recording. Abu-Jamal was on death row and could not attend, yet the college eagerly gave him a platform to speak. Eighteen ...Read More...

Tarek Fatah writes:   “Your throat will be slit." Glaring at me across the TV monitor, the red-bearded Mullah smirked as he delivered a death threat on India’s most-watched national news network, Zee News. The remark stunned the host and the panel who were discussing a ‘fatwa’ against Prime ...Read More...

by Geoffrey Clarfield Millennials are enamoured by the United Nations. Consider the young undergrad, Antonio Soriano who is the UNESCO Delegate for the Harvard National Model United Nations of 2017. He writes: “Dear Delegates, Welcome to Harvard National Model United Nations 2017! My name ...Read More...

Michael Totten's review of Arab Fall By Eric Trager in Commentary: Almost everyone got the Arab Spring wrong. At a casual glance, the Middle East and North Africa appeared to be sprouting political liberals like daisies at the tail end of 2010, when a nonviolent revolution in Tunisia spread to ...Read More...

Scott Johnson writes at Powerline: In a delicious coda to the defeat of Lady Clinton in the election on Tuesday, Minneapolis Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison has emerged as a leading contender to take the helm of the Democratic National Committee. He hasn’t yet announced his bid, but he has won ...Read More...

Mudar Zahran writes in the Jewish Press: Many Western and Israeli journalists paint a rosy picture of a Jordan’s “peaceful regime” and “stable throne.” As you will see in the next few lines, those descriptions are very far from the truth. Even worse, some journalists, do claim “authority” on Jordan’s ...Read More...

Robert Minto writes in Open Letters Monthly The Philosopher: A History in Six Types By J.E.H. Smith Princeton University Press: 2016 In 2012 the philosophy professor Justin Smith was hired to teach in Paris, but he discovered quickly that he would have difficulty living in the City of Light ...Read More...

Anna Bikont wrties in The Tablet: We Poles had our presidential race last year. In a televised debate—the most important debate of the race—the two main candidates asked each other questions. The first round of these questions, posed by candidate Andrzej Duda, did not deal with the state of the Polish ...Read More...

Malcolm Dash writes in the Jerusalem Post. When Egypt’s then-president Mohamed Morsi said in June 2013 that “all options” including military intervention were on the table if Ethiopia continued to develop dams on the Nile River, many dismissed it as posturing. But experts claim Cairo is deadly ...Read More...

Ethan Dor-Shav writes in Azure: A first visit to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem can be overwhelming. The museum’s renowned Judaica collection, the sculpture garden, the Shrine of the Book, and the astonishing collection of archeological finds reaching back to the dawn of Jewish collective memory ...Read More...

Dacid Goldman writes in the Asia Times: As a matter of arithmetic, Iran is flat broke at the prevailing price of hydrocarbons. Under the P5+1 nuclear deal, Iran will recoup somewhere between $55 and $150 billion of frozen assets, depending on whether one believes the Secretary of the US Treasury ...Read More...

From The Tablet: On Monday California Assemblyman Travis Allen (R-Huntington Beach) introduced a bill (AB-1552) that, if adopted, would prohibit state-run government entities from doing business with companies that engage in boycotts with a “person or entity…based on the race, color, religion, gender, ...Read More...

Max Samarov & Amanda Botfeld write in The Tower: Education is important. What shapes our youth shapes the future, and so we need to craft our school curricula carefully. So it is worth carefully deconstructing the troubling new K-12 curriculum, Reframing Israel, produced by Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman. ...Read More...

Matthew J. Franck writes in First Things: Next autumn will mark forty years since I arrived on a college campus as a freshman. I’ve never left the academy since then. I have been student or teacher at many types of institutions: the small liberal-arts college, the “Research I” state university that ...Read More...