Roundup: Historians' Take

Interview with Michael Radu: What the British Need to Do Now

Michael Radu, interviewed by Jamie Glazov, managing editor of frontpagemag.com (7-8-05):[Michael Radu is Senior Fellow and Co-Chair at the Center on Terrorism and Counterterrorism at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.]Jamie Glazov

Warren Goldstein: Remembering that Liberal Protestants Matter

Warren Goldstein, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (7-8-05): [Warren Goldstein is a professor and chairman of history at the University of Hartford. He is the author of William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience (Yale University Press, 2004).]... A few months ago, a UCC [United Church of Christ] church near where I live was sponsoring a Lenten lecture on liberal Protestantism. My wife, a UCC minister who

Juan Cole Interview: The London Bombings

Juan Cole, in an interview with Deborah Caldwell at Beliefnet (7-8-05):What was the aim of this particular terrorist attack?"The Al Qaeda ideology believes that the Muslim world is weak and oppressed and dominated by the wealthy capitalist West. And that this West uses things like the establishment of Israel or the setting of Muslim against Muslim in Iraq or Afghanistan as

Juan Cole: The Time of Revenge Has Come

Juan Cole, at Salon.com (7-8-05): [Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com/.] Credit for the horrific bombings of the London Underground and a double-decker bus on Thursday morning was immediately taken on a radical Muslim Web site by a "secret group" of Q

Daniel Pipes: Why the London Attack Was Not Unexpected

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (7-8-05): [Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Terrorism usually comes like a bolt from the blue, but not so the four explosions yesterday in London, killing at least 37. Some British Islamist leaders have been warning for months that such violence was imminent.

Max Boot: Why Throwing Money at Africa Won't Work

Max Boot, in the LAT (7-7-05):Anyone who has visited a shantytown in Africa can applaud the impulse behind Live 8 and the Make Poverty History campaign. It would be swell if, as we are repeatedly told, "for the price of a Big Mac" we could save 20,000 people a day who die from extreme poverty. But there is little reason to think that aging pop stars have

Murray Polner: What's Needed Are Nuremberg Trials for Terrorists

Murray Polner, at LewRockwell.com (7-6-05):I once edited and wrote the introduction to William Graham Sumner’s sadly forgotten book, The Conquest of the United States by Spain and Other Essays (Regnery/Gateway). Sumner was an irascible and biting Social Darwinist and classical nineteenth century supporter of laissez faire. What attracted me to him was not his economics but his utter contempt for Ameri

Daniel Pipes: Palestinians Who Cling to Israel

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (7-6-05): [Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Israel's interior minister recently declared that after their release from long jail sentences, four Palestinian Arabs convicted of helping with suicide bombings in 2002, killing 35, will be expelled from Israel. They would,

Stephanie Coontz: It Was Straights Who Undermined Marriage, Not Gays

Stephanie Coontz, in the NYT (7-5-05): [Stephanie Coontz, the director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, is the author of "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage."]THE last week has been tough for opponents of same-sex marriage. First Canadian and then Spanish legislators voted to legalize the practice, prompting

Gil Troy: It's Time to Remember What Canada and the US Have in Common

Gil Troy, in the Montreal Gazette (7-4-05): As we mark the happy coincidence of the close proximity of Canada Day on July 1 and American Independence Day today, headlines are more likely to emphasize tensions dividing the two sister democracies than the many ties that bind.Parliament's decision legalizing same-sex marriage triggered predictable warnin

Richard Labunski: Congress Should Call Conventions for Flag Amendment

Richard Labunski, in the Lexington Herald-Leader (7-4-05): [Mr. Labunski, a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky, is the author of The Second Constitutional Convention (2000).]If the U.S. Senate follows the House and approves a constitutional amendment to allow laws punishing the burning of the American flag, it would be the first time in the nation’s history that Congress has proposed an amendment to curtail First Amend

Juan Cole: Evaluating Bush's Big Speech

Juan Cole, at his blog (6-29-05):Re: Bush's SpeechBushThe terrorists who attacked us and the terrorists we face murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance and despises all dissent. "Terrorists" are not a cohesive ideological category li

Chris Bray: Concerning the War Historian Who Knows Nothing About the Military

Chris Bray, at Histori-blogography (6-28-05):In the National Review this week, Victor Davis Hanson dismisses claims that the U.S. Army is facing a critical personnel shortage."Our current debate," he writes,"is not properly a military one, since the American a

Timothy Naftali: What Bush Could Learn from LBJ

Timothy Naftali, at the Huffington Post (6-29-05):The Vietnam analogy, like all historical analogies, has its limits as a source of insight on the Iraq war. There are significant differences between the struggles, not least of which is that with the passage of 30 years military technology and advanced military medicine have reduced significantly the US death toll and the

Tom Engelhardt: The Immoral Relativism of the Bush Administration

Tom Engelhardt, at tomdispatch.com (6-28-05):[ Mr. Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture and co-editor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.]"At a breakfast meeting with reporters, Wolfowitz said he h

Daniel Pipes: Is Allah God?

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (6-28-05): [Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Asked if Muslims worship the same Almighty as Jews and Christians, President Bush replied some months ago,"I believe we worship the same God."

Neve Gordon: Sharon's Plan Is Never to Negotiate

Neve Gordon, in In These Times (June 2005): [Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights, and can be reached at nevegordon@gmail.com.] Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is a man of deeds rather than words. So on those rare occasions when he does disclose his political goals it is important to pay close attention and carefully consider every word. &

Joshua Brown: Bush's Big Speech (Illustration)

Max Boot: Torture at Gitmo? Ask the Mau Mau

Max Boot, in the LAT (6-30-05):By now it hardly needs saying that, contrary to the animadversions of Dick Durbin and Amnesty International, Guantanamo Bay bears no resemblance to Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags or Khmer Rouge killing fields. Millions of people were murdered in those places. The sum total of those killed at Gitmo is … zero. B

Moshe Ma'oz: Bush Needs to Reach Out tyo Syria Like His Father Did

Moshe Ma'oz, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (7-1-05): [Moshe Ma'oz is a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and a professor emeritus of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published several books and many articles on Syrian modern history and politics, including Syria and Israel From War to Peacemaking (Clarendon Press, 1995).]... [Flynt] Leveret