by Ankur Betageri (February 2016)

And it poured and poured

as I held my umbrella and stood under the awning

of the bookstore  more>>>

by Sutapa Chaudhuri (February 2016)

Lies inform

the leftover caresses.  more>>>

by Dilip Mohapatra (February 2016)

In these bizarre times our own nightmares can seem a refuge

by Evelyn Hooven (February 2016)

     A SUMMARY

It does recur, yes often—

The voices intimate, stern,

Say over and over  more>>>

by David P. Gontar (February 2016)

There was once a successful financier of Scarsdale who had accumulated a sizable fortune in the commodities market. As his health was good and he’d avoided the pitfalls that led to degeneracy and scandal he was, despite the stresses of business, among the most contented of fellows, and would have enjoyed a rare felicity had it not been for his wife, a congenital spendthrift.  more>>>

by A. Human Being (February 2016)

September 13, 2013: Arkham, Massachusetts, USA

If Western scholars must bury the fact that Muhammad was a mass-murderer, then something is deeply wrong with their thinking in following their convictions. If we were talking about Hitler or Stalin it would be a no-brainer.  more>>>

by Sam Bluefarb (February 2015)

“There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the face of doom, which invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given color to their lifetime. . . .”
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter 

She was one of the brightest, most perceptive students who had taken his Modern British Lit.--Doris Lessing was a favorite of hers--and in some ways, the most mature. She thought of herself as a "moderate feminist," posessing a wonderful sense of humor that probably tempered what she called her "darker side"-- said with a smile.  more>>>

by Ankur Betageri (February 2016)
 

Poverty and the effect it has on the psyche of man is a central theme in Shudraka’s play Mrichchhakatika. Poverty forces the characters to explore three main life-paths: of being oriented towards this world, where everything is mediated through power and money; towards the other world, where the spirit reigns supreme; and towards another world that can emerge out of this world, through love and politics.  more>>>

by James Como (February 2016)

These days the American reading and theatre-going public pays little attention to Thornton Wilder, and that sporadically at best, as when David Cromer’s marvelous production of Our Town broke Off Broadway in 2012. This neglect is unfortunate for three reasons. First, Wilder may be our greatest Person of Letters (for example, he is the only writer to win Pulitzer’s for both his plays and his fiction, and his criticism and scholarship are often dispositive).  more>>>

by Esmerelda Weatherwax (February 2016)

The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest – Grassroots Activism in the English Defence League.
By Joel Busher
Routledge (November 19, 2015)
196 pp.,  $119.79,  £90.00.

I am reviewing this book as a general reader, mindful that it is a university research study in a field that is not my own. But it has much to commend it.  more>>>

Peace Will Come, Anne Frank Insists, You Will See
by Thomas Ország-Land (February 2016)

Bernard Kops, the doyen of Anglo-Jewish letters, has responded to a global resurgence of violent anti-Semitism by issuing a new collection of verse called Anne Frank’s Fragments from Nowhere. This is his second major work exploring the legacy of the teenage diarist. Anne was murdered in Bergen-Belsen after hiding with her family for two exhausting years in a secret annex at the back of an Amsterdam building.  more>>>

by Norman Berdichevsky (February 2016)

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain
By Dario Fernandez-Morera,  ISI Books, Wilmington Delaware.
Advance Uncorrected Proof – Publication Date, February, 2016

I was fortunate to receive this book in advance of publication and am grateful to ISI, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and author Dario Fernandez-Morera.  more>>>

by Lorna Salzman (February 2016)

TO: Donald Trump
FROM: Pres. Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee
SUBJECT: in appreciation for your racist rants

Dear Donald:

We are really liking the way you strut your stuff! It isn’t our style but when did we ever have style? When we nominated Al Gore, the liberal bore? Actually maybe when we nominated Bill Clinton (before his trespasses of course). But things are different today.  more>>>

by G. Murphy Donovan (February 2016)

“If I hadn’t started painting, I would have raised chickens.” – Grandma Moses  

It all began as a bit of an experiment. Three neighbors discussing the virtues of fresh eggs. My wife eats eggs like a ferret. We all like breakfast and baked goods too. So why not get a modest flock of chickens, thought we all. So the women made plans and the men built a coop; a natty cedar affair with a fenced run, a ramp, a roost, windows, doors, and two nesting boxes.  more>>>

by Richard Kostelanetz (February 2016)

Allan H. Ryskind’s Hollywood Traitors (Regnery) reminds me that literary blacklisting is a tricky subject attracting a wealth of insufficient criticism. The most publicized blacklist excluded certain sometime Communist writers prominent in the 1940s from further work in Hollywood movie-making, at least in the following decade.  more>>>

a discussion with Dan Diker and Shoshana Bryen
by Jerry Gordon and Mike Bates (February 2016)

In the waning months of the Obama Administration, its lack of effective leadership in the war against the Islamic State and the civil war in Syria created a potentially dangerous power vacuum. The White House was pre-occupied with concluding a UN-endorsed pact, hoping to rein in Iran’s quest for a nuclear capability - a capability that a number of analysts have concluded it may already have. Purported cooperative development may have been behind North Korea’s fourth nuclear test since 2006 on January 6, 2016. While official propaganda from Pyongyang suggested that the test involved elements of a possible fusion or hydrogen bomb, a few astute observers suggested it might have been a so-called boosted fission weapon.  more>>>

by Norman Berdichevsky (February 2016)

Switzerland represents a remarkable set of opposite circumstances. It is a country with diverse peoples, languages and religions. Yet it has united all its citizens to create a unified country. Those willing to concede that the Swiss have formed a stable community and independent state for more than 700 years are usually reluctant to concede the somewhat more exalted term of a “nation” to them precisely because the country is divided into multiple ethnic and linguistic groups.  more>>>

From the Sunday Times and brought from before the paywall by the Mail on Sunday

This is thought to refer to a doomsday prophesy in the Koran.

The terror group has warned the UK will suffer 'the lion's share' of the slaughter it intends to wield in Europe, according to its Arabic language newspaper, al-Naba.

However, in a video released on Saturday, the millitants suggest it is Spain which will come under the strongest attack as the West is forced to 'pay dearly' for having crushed Muslim rule in Andalusia - more than 500 years ago. 

...the video released at the weekend features a long-haired jihadi, who appears to be white, who warns ISIS is going to carry out atrocities which will make the West forget the September 11 attacks against the United States, or the Paris massacre in November.  

Despite being Francophone, his wrath is turned particularly towards Spain, which he says will 'pay dearly' for having crushed Muslim rule in ancient Andalusia, the southern Spanish region where the Moors ruled from 711 AD to 1492.  He speaks of Cordoba and Toledo and says the ancient land of Andalusia is Muslim and has not been forgotten. 

At the end of the almost eight-minute video, the French-speaker and other IS fighters shoot dead five kneeling men in orange jumpsuits. The 'execution' appears to take place in the ruins of a building which destroyed in an air strike.

Isis released a separate video last week that featured nine of the Paris attackers, including the ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud, preparing in Syria for their French mission. The 17-minute film, seen in full by The Sunday Times, contains a section that strongly indicates Britain will be next. Abaaoud, 28, is believed to have travelled to London ahead of the Paris attacks. Images of landmarks in Birmingham were also found on his phone after he was killed in a shootout with French police.

By examining the montage frame by frame The Sunday Times has identified a string of potential targets, including Buckingham Palace, the National Gallery and Covent Garden. British jihadists had plotted to attack the Queen at an event to commemorate the 70th anniversary of VJ Day last year and have boasted about flying the black flag of Isis above Buckingham Palace.

A palace spokeswoman said: “We never comment on security matters.” 

by Bradford Tuckfield (February 2016)

I recently read an interview with a musician I admire who described a time in his youth when he had been a devout Christian. He is no longer religious at all, or as he described it, he “grew out of religious ideas.” Upon hearing this, I thought of the other things that people often describe growing out of – old clothes, for example, for which one becomes physically too large during childhood, or youthful bad manners, for which one’s nature becomes too civil during early adulthood. Is religiosity or belief in God something that becomes too “small” for us, like the clothes we wore as children? Is it a feature of immaturity or ignorance that we should progress past?  more>>>

by Robert Henderson (February 2016)

1. What is patriotism?

By patriotism I mean the sense of belonging to a people, of owning a land, of instinctively favouring your own country’s men and women, of knowing that the interest of the “tribe” must come before everything else. By this definition patriotism is something which the vast majority of human beings can understand, – the only people who may be genuinely immune to such comprehension are the severely mentally retarded or those with a personality disorder such as  autism which reduces their ability to understand social contexts.  more>>>

by Ibn Warraq (February 2016)

In the last fifteen years, there has been a spate of books, published in the West, by Muslims who have converted to Christianity, and many anthologies of testimonies of former Muslims, and even former Muslim terrorists.[1] The internet, of course, is full of Christian sites with the testimonies of former Muslims. These personal journeys, some moving and some very sentimental, are of considerable interest but do not help us to establish the number of true conversions to Christianity in the Islamic world. Large claims are made by various Christian evengelical groups giving suspect statistics.  more>>>

by Jerry Gordon, Lisa Benson and Richard Cutting (February 2016)

The New Year marks the 14th year in the conflict in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan with the Taliban. Following 9/11, a victory against the Salafist Taliban was achieved in less than six months with special operators of the US and cadres of Afghan war lords. Fast forward to the fall of 2015, the Taliban has undertaken stunning attacks against NATO-ISAF forces. There was the brief Taliban takeover of the northern regional capital of Kunduz in September 2015 culminating with the mistaken USAF bombing of a Medicins sans Frontiere hospital with 26 dead.  more>>>

(About Benghazi)
by G. Murphy Donovan (February 2016)

Clandestine Intelligence agents meet with the press for one of three reasons: to betray, to leak in support of policy, or spin the narrative when policy fails. Hard to know what was in play the other day when the former CIA Benghazi station chief, cover name “Bob,” met with two Washington Post reporters, Adam Goldman and Greg Miller. When an administration yarn needs to be spun on the front page, there’s no better venue than the Washington Post.  more>>>

by Nidra Poller (February 2016)

Yusuf, the young Turkish-Kurd who tried to kill a Jew in Marseille recently, was a baby when the al Dura blood libel triggered the plague of genocidal Jew hatred that besets us to this day. Back then they were avenging the “cold-blooded murder of a Palestinian youth by Israeli soldiers.” Today, fifteen years later, Yusuf X. proudly explains he saw that Palestinians were stabbing Jews in Israel and decided to follow suit in Marseille.  more>>>