Roundup: Historians' Take

Joshua Spivak: Recalling the Mayor of Spokane for Various Offenses

SPOKANE voters have the chance to join a growing number of cities throughout the country in a newly invigorated tradition — ousting an elected leader by recall. While it is a first for this city, there has been an expanding trend of both threatening and using the recall against local officials. Mayor James West could survive Tuesday's ballot count, but judging by how other voters from across the nation weigh in on recalls, he probably should start making other plans for his career..

Gil Troy: Middle East terrorists in suits and ties

[Gil Troy teaches history at McGill University.] What happens when a terrorist organization decides to enter the political arena? Does it automatically become legitimate? If Osama bin Laden flew home to Saudi Arabia, triggered a much-needed movement for democratic reform in that dictatorial monarchy and was elected to a new, powerful, fully functional Saudi parliament, would that wipe out his previous crimes? These are trick questions. They play into the ce

Daniel Pipes: Ariel Sharon, Escapist

Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.Ariel Sharon overturned Israel politics on Nov. 21 when he announced his departure from the very Likud Par

Michael Oren: Ariel Sharon's Bid for Greatness Might Just Succeed

Speaking before a closed audience, Henry Kissinger once suggested that Ariel Sharon might be a Great Man. He did not elaborate but his audience nevertheless understood that Kissinger was placing Israel's prime minister in a category together with a very short list of historic leaders, topped by Winston Churchill. Like Churchill, Sharon had overcome early failures--Lebanon, his Gallipoli--to return to politics and eventually regain prominence. He had changed direction several times in the course

Victor Davis Hanson: Democrat Lies About the War

"The president misled us." "Still no WMDs." "If I had only known then what I do now…" This is the intellectual level of Democratic wartime criticism about the Bush administration as we near the third Iraqi election — the one that will finally give faces to the first truly elected parliamentary government in the Arab world. So what is behind this crying game at home — when we are so close to achieving our goals abroad? Bad polls

Larry Schweikart: Murtha Will Hurt Dems

Pay no attention to what the MSM says about this [House] vote ("Fox and Friends" mindless twitterers were already saying, "Well, of course we can't just pull out now," which, of course is exactly what Murtha recommended and what the Dems want to do). This was a huge vote, a potentially landscape-altering vote. The GOP forced the Dems to choose between the general election next year and the primaries, and the Dems chose the general election. The result will be th

Daniel Pipes: Anti-Muslim Racism?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] My talks at university campuses sometimes occasion protests featuring Leftists and Islamists who call me names. A favorite of theirs is"racist." This year, for example, a"

Jim Sleeper: Behind the Deluge of Porn, a Conservative Sea-Change

... [Don't blame our problem with pornography on "liberal permissiveness."] American liberals such as Tipper Gore and Bill Bradley protested years ago that by feeding kids like Jessica “a menu of violence without context and sex without attachment,” as Bradley put it, Americans who are letting corporate investment drive our public culture are abusing “the all-important role of storytelling which is essential to the formation of moral education that sustains a civil society.” That prot

Tom Engelhardt: An American Tipping Point?

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has just come out in paperback.] ... Polls are, it might be said, what's left of American democracy. Privately run, often for profit or advantage, they nonetheless are as close as we come these

James C. Cobb: Katrina demystified the good and the bad of the New South

IN 1964, when the blood and terror of Freedom Summer prompted many Americans to condemn the South as backward and bigoted, the historian Howard Zinn struck a nerve with his suggestion that "the nation reacts emotionally to the South precisely because it sees itself there." Now, as Americans rebuild from the wreckage and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, they see another portrait in time, one that tells us much about what has and hasn't changed in the South in recent years, as well as abo

Gavan McCormack: Okinawa and the Revamped US-Japan Alliance

George and Junichiro, two great buddies (if the Japanese media is to be believed) meet again, on 15 and 16 November, in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto. Since Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro is one of the dwindling band of ever-faithful Bush supporters, and since officials on both sides have been working hard to clear away all possible obstacles from the negotiating table between them, the mood may be expected to be warm: Japanese troops will remain in Iraq till September 2006; the ba

Daniel Pipes: Palestinians Taste a Dose of Their Own Medicine

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] A suicide bombing in Hadera, Israel, on October 26 that killed five people inspired the usual Palestinian joy: some 3,000 people took to the streets in celebration, chanting Allahu Akbar, calling for more suicide attacks against Israelis, and congratulating the "mar

Mark LeVine: Assimilate or Die

[Mark LeVine, professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture, and Islamic studies at the University of California at Irvine, is the author of a new book, Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld Publications, 2005). His website is www.culturejamming.org.] About 130 years ago, Josiah Strong, celebrated evangelical preacher and a chief ideologue of American empire, offered a stark choice to the "inferi

Thomas J. Sugrue: Sacramento gets it wrong at Detroit's expense

It was a shameful moment in Sacramento's Arco Arena on Tuesday night, when the Pistons walked onto the floor as the scoreboard flashed scenes of abandoned buildings and torched cars. At a moment when pro basketball is trying to bolster its image, such high-tech high jinks set all of us back. Detroit, for sure, has had more than its share of problems. Since 1950, it has lost half of its population. It is the most racially segregated metropolitan area in the United States -- but not m

Francis Fukuyama: Remaking the Middle East May in the Short Run Create More Radicals

... We profoundly misunderstand contemporary Islamist ideology when we see it as an assertion of traditional Muslim values or culture. In a traditional Muslim country, your religious identity is not a matter of choice; you receive it, along with your social status, customs and habits, even your future marriage partner, from your social environment. In such a society there is no confusion as to who you are, since your identity is given to you and sanctioned by all of the society's institutions, f

Juan Cole: What's Wrong with the Media Coverage of the French Riots

Readers have asked me for comment about the riots in France that have now provoked emergency laws and a curfew. What I would rather comment on, however, is the myths that have governed many rightwing American comments on the tragic events. Actually, I can only think that the disturbances must produce a huge ice cream headache for the dittoheads. French of European heritage pitted against French of African and North African heritage? How could they ever pick a side? I should begin by

Ian Coller: Paris Unrest (A doctoral student's perspective from the trenches of banlieue research)

[Ian Coller is completing a doctorate on the history of the Arabic populations in Paris during the nineteenth century, at the University of Melbourne, Australia.] Having lived for a year in the middle of a medium-cost housing estate in the Paris banlieue, and having many close friends among Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian students in Paris, I have been watching the riots unfolding with distress over the last week. I was in Paris researching the history of the Arabic population, whic

Daniel Pipes: Reflections on the Revolution in France

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] The rioting by Muslim youth that began October 27 in France to calls of"Allahu Akbar" may be a turning point in European history.What started

George Frederickson: Affirmative Action Blues

.. Two very different arguments have been advanced for affirmative action. One claims that it is just compensation for historical injustices and disadvantages. In the case of claims by African- Americans the emphasis is usually on the wounds inflicted by centuries of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. President Lyndon Johnson made one of the most elegant and influential statements of this position in his Howard University speech of 1965, which is quoted by Ira Katznelson in When Affirmati

Alexander Keyssar: Why We Shouldn't Be Surprised that Katrina Poverty Hasn't Sparked Reform

... As a historian — and one who has taught and written about the history of poverty in the United States — I should not have been surprised [that the interest in poverty petered out weeks after Katrina struck] ... (although I was). With the immediate crisis over, and many of the victims of Katrina and Rita scattered around the region and beyond, it was entirely foreseeable that the spotlight of public attention would shift to other issues and locales. Those whose homes and jobs disappeared inev