Roundup

Empowering Jihad: The Deadly Myth of a 'Root Cause'

by Phyllis Chesler

Blaming Islamist horrors on poverty only obscures the true problem: Jihadists are driven by an ideology — one that yearns to "restore" a mythical caliphate, one governed by the most austere version of Sharia law.

Putin’s war of words, decoded

by Elizabeth Wood

The current Russian mythologizing of World War II contains a number of outright falsifications and dangerous tendencies.

Roundup Top 10!

This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editors of HNN.

The Warmongering Record of Hillary Clinton

by Gary Leupp

Clinton’s record of her tenure in the State Department is entitled Hard Choices, but it has never been hard for Hillary to choose brute force in the service of U.S. imperialism and its controlling 1%.

Haunted by Vietnam

by Staughton Lynd

How the Vietnam War Shattered the American Identity

Syria's Civil War Could Stabilize Its Region

by Daniel Pipes

Amid tragedy and horror, as populations adapt to the brutal imperatives of modern nationalism, all four countries are becoming a bit more stable.

The Great Game in the Holy Land

by Michael Schwartz

How Gazan Natural Gas Became the Epicenter of An International Power Struggle

Can teaching patriotism protect France?

by Robert Zaretsky

After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a country recommits to promoting national values in schools—a tradition that has flagged in the United States

Fidel Castro and Apartheid

by Matt Peppe

Cuba’s intervention in Angola managed to change the course of that country and reverberate throughout Africa.

What The Invention Of Clocks Did To Change Humanity

Adam Westbrook delves into the story of the clock, and discovers that when we learned to mechanize time, we accidentally mechanized something else.

“He got intimidated by the right”: Orlando Patterson on President Obama, race & black culture

by Ian Blair

50 years after the Moynihan report, renowned Harvard sociologist talks Ferguson, respectability politics and Cosby

Sticks, Stones, and American Exceptionalism

by R. B. Bernstein

How are we to take polemicists’ rhetoric seriously, when it celebrates a past and a nation that never was?

The Hero Europe Needed

by Michael Ignatieff

A quarter century after the Velvet Revolution, Václav Havel's legacy is in disarray. His life illuminates a dissident generation's dreams and the revenge that history has taken on them.

The Troubled History of the Foreskin

by Jessica Wapner

Why Americans adopted circumcision and when.

One Standard, Not Two, for Christianity and Islam

by Jeffrey Herf

The President spoke the truth recently when he said “terrible deeds” have been committed in the name of Christianity. We should be equally frank in saying that terrible deeds are now being committed in the name of Islam.

Slate’s Michael Kinsley fell for the false claim that Israelis massacred Palestinians in Lydda in 1948

by Martin Kramer

To read his account you would think that the Yiftah Brigade of the Palmah conducted itself like a gang of roving génocidaires.

The Real American Exceptionalism

by Alfred W. McCoy

From Torture to Drone Assassination, How Washington Gave Itself a Global Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

Boomtown, USA: An Historical Look at Fracking

by Henry Wiencek

What boom towns need to do to protect themselves from the inevitable busts.

What Ike Can Teach Obama

by Scott McConnell

In the 1956 Suez Crisis, Eisenhower recognized that America's interests did not lie with blind and unconditional support of an ally.

The harrowing story of Masako Shinjo Summers Robbins

by Masako Shinjo Summers Robinson

How a child born in Osaka, sold by her father into slavery, ended up in America