Roundup: Historians' Take

David Nirenberg: What Benedict really said

[David Nirenberg is a historian and professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and the author of Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press).] ... It is the rare homily, and certainly the rare academic talk, that triggers firebombs and comparisons to Hitler. So what did the pope actually say? At the center of the storm are a few lines of his remarks, quoted from the "dialogue with a Muslim&qu

Tom Engelhardt: George Bush's Iraq in 21 Questions

[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, The Last Days of Publishing, a n

Jonathan Zimmerman: How U.S. goes wrong in education

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century," which will be released next month.] More than two decades ago, I graduated from college and joined the Peace Corps. I was sent to Nepal, where I would do the only thing I knew how to do: teach. In truth, though, I had no idea what I was doing. Neither did most members of my volunteer group. There were 15 of us, and exact

Jon Wiener: The John Lennon Case Shows What Can Happen If the FBI and CIA Cooperate in the Wrong Way

Today everyone agrees that cooperation between the CIA and FBI is a key to preventing future terrorist attacks. But what if CIA-FBI intelligence sharing isn't about terrorist threats? What if the CIA is telling the FBI about people who criticize the president and speak out against an unpopular war?That's precisely what we found in the John Lennon FBI files, released in 1997 under the Free

Juan Cole: Why not publish the whole National Intelligence Estimate?

Bush became indignant on Tuesday during his news conference with Afghan President Karzai over the leaking of passages from the National Intelligence Estimate on trends in terrorism to the press. He said that in response he was going to have some of its key judgments declassified.I want to make 4 basic points about this controversy, and also provide the declassified text in HTML at the end.1) The real scandal is that the NIE was classified at all. This is the best judgme

Eric Alterman: The facts behind the Fox interview with Bill Clinton

Clinton recommended to Chris Wallace that he go back and check his facts. I don't expect anyone at Fox to be interested in that kind of boring stuff, but perhaps I can help. This is from [my book] The Book on Bush, and there's plenty more. After all, this is just a blog, that's a book. People need to read books. Following the Cole bombing, Clinton counterterrorism forces started working on an aggressive plan to retaliate against al Qaeda. Their plan to strike back reache

Daniel Pipes: Intimidating the West, from Rushdie to Benedict

[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 violence by Muslims responding to comments by the pope fit a pattern that has been building and accelerating since 1989. Six times since then, Westerners did or said something that triggered death threats and violence in the Muslim world. Looking at them in the aggregate

Tom Engelhardt: 9/11 in a Movie-Made World

[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.] We knew it was coming. Not, as conspiracy theorists imagine, just a few top officials among us, but all of us--and not for weeks or months, but for more than half a century before September

Tom Engelhardt: Mini-Gulags, Hired Guns, Lobbyists, and a Reality Built on Fear

[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.] This August, a site of shame, shared by Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush, was emptied. Abu Ghraib prison is the place where Saddam's functionaries tortured (and sometimes killed) many en

Juan Cole: Chavez and the Devil (Chickens Coming Home to Roost)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez referred to US President George W. Bush as "the devil" in his speech before the UN general assembly on Wednesday, complaining that the stench of sulphur still hung in the air at the podium. Chavez crossed himself at the mention of Bush, a folk Catholic way of fending off Satan. Bush himself opened the way for these sorts of comments with his 2002 State of the Union address, where he mysteriously allowed the Neoconservative lightweight David

Steve Conn: Iraq Isn't Vietnam ... It's Cambodia

[Steve Conn is an associate professor in the history department at Ohio State University.] I saw a bumper sticker recently that read: Iraq is Arabic fo Vietnam It is easy enough to make the analogy between the tragic folly in Vietnam and the chaotic disaster unfolding now in Iraq. Both were wars of choice, not of national necessity, and both were begun under a cloak of deception and misinformation. And in the future, both will serve as the dictionary definition of the word &

Tony Judt: The Strange Death of Liberal America

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

Walid Phares: Intercepting Radicalization at the Indoctrination Stage

[Dr. Phares is Senior Fellow, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Director, of the Future Terrorism Project. He is the author of Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America.] Chairman Simmons and Members of the Committee, It is a privilege and an honor to appear before you today to discuss the theme “The Homeland Security implications of radicalization.” My contribution is titled: “Intercepting radicalization at the indoctrination stage.”

Karen Armstrong: We cannot afford to maintain these ancient prejudices against Islam

[ Karen Armstrong is the author of Islam: A Short History.] In the 12th century, Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, initiated a dialogue with the Islamic world. "I approach you not with arms, but with words," he wrote to the Muslims whom he imagined reading his book, "not with force, but with reason, not with hatred, but with love." Yet his treatise was entitled Summary of the Whole Heresy of the Diabolical Sect of the Saracens and segued repeatedly into splutt

Martin Kramer: Islamism and Fascism ... Dare to Compare

[Martin Kramer is the Wexler-Fromer Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center's Institute for International and Middle Eastern Studies in Jerusalem.] On Tuesday of last week, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) entered the fray over the Bush Administration's description of the enemy as"Islamic fascism." (Bush first

Mike Davis: Have You Noticed the Other Migration ... FROM America TO Mexico?

[Mike Davis is the author, most recently, of Planet of Slums (Verso 2006), and, with Justin Chacon Akers, No One is Illegal (Haymarket 2006). His history of the car bomb -- Buda Wagon's -- which grew out of a two-part Tomdispatch article, will be published by Verso early next year.] The visitor crossing from Tijuana to San Diego these days is immediately slapped in the face by a huge billboard screaming, "Stop the Border Invasion!" Sponsored by the rabidly anti-immigrant vigilante g

Daniel Pipes: Pope Benedict Criticizes Islam

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."These words, expressed six centuries ago by a Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, in dialogue

Martin E. Marty: The Pope and Islam

Pope Benedict XVI has had a free ride so far. Back when there were still Protestant anti-Catholics, some would have found much fault with him, but most appreciated his encyclical on divine and human love, and said so. Many Catholics and non-Catholics whose friends suffered under him as Cardinal Ratzinger now empathically choose to help the wounded nurse their bruises. Some among the Catholic right even think he should be more of a hardliner. For all those reasons, it is regrettab

Philip Zelikow: The terrorists are like ... anarchists of old, with one big but

First there’s al-Qaeda: its affiliates, its adherents. What’s notable about it—the ideology is familiar, the president has given a speech recounting at some length the kind of ideas al-Qaeda espouses—is to step back and notice that these ideas are basically fantasist and the organization and its operation has been significantly broken by our efforts since 9/11 and now is largely atomized, though still quite dangerous for that. It is reminiscent in some respects, speaking as a one-time

Philip Zelikow: US needs to take active role in settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

... The significance of the Arab-Israeli dispute across these problems is, I think, obvious to all of you. What I would want to emphasize is if you see the threats in a way something like the way I’ve just described them, think then about what is the coalition you need to amass in order to combat those threats. Who are the key members of that coalition? You can imagine the United States, key European allies, the state of Israel and the Arab moderates—Arabs who seek a peaceful future. Y