Roundup: Historians' Take

Daniel Pipes: Telephoning the Enemy

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] North America's leading Islamist organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, enjoyed a seeming endorsement last week when it hosted the FBI on a television show. But if America's

Gil Troy: The Quest for Values at Universities

[Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University.] Lighten up, last Monday's Gazette editorial counselled. So what if Playboy magazine declared McGill University "North America's 10th-best party school"? Yet after the fall football hazing scandal, with another elite institution Duke University roiled by rape allegations against its lacrosse players, McGill's distress is understandable and laudable. This is not a PR problem. This issue gets to the essence of McGill's

Tom Engelhardt: History Ambushes the Bush Administration

[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.] You can count on one thing. All over Washington, Republicans are at least as capable as I am of watching and interpreting the polling version of the smash-up of the Bush administration. With

Jonathan Zimmerman: Recruiting is also a scandal at Duke

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of the forthcoming "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] Let's imagine three high school kids with identical academic records who are applying to the same elite private university. The first is African-American; the second is a "legacy," a white guy whose father attended the university, and the third is also white, but he's an all-state athlete.

Howard Zinn: Until We Face Up to Our Nation's Historic Sins and Arrogance We Will Always Follow Foolish Leaders Down the Path to Foolish Wars

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust George Bush and his administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled? The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans -- members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen -- rushed to declare

Mike Davis: A History of the Car Bomb (Part 2)

[Mike Davis is the author most recently of The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) and Planet of Slums (Verso). He lives in San Diego.] The CIA's Car Bomb University (the 1980s)"The CIA officers that Yousef worked with closely impressed upon him one rule: never use the terms sabotage o

Craig Steven Wilder: Why I Joined La Raza!

[Craig Steven Wilder is a Professor of History at Dartmouth College.] The attempt to change the political climate in Washington by escalating the immigration debate has backfired. Instead of swamping the airwaves and virtual world with news that emphasized their policy strengths, Republicans on Capitol Hill have unwittingly catalyzed massive civil rights demonstrations. Part of the problem, of course, is their reckless cafeteria-style rhetoric, which vulgarly seeks its audi

Martin Kramer: Israel and the Iraq War

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt includes a section entitled"Israel and the Iraq War" (pp. 30-31). There they seek to establish that Israel's leaders, intelligence agencies, and public opinion enthusiastically supported a war to remove Saddam. Israel exerted"pressure" on the United States, fed Washington"alarming reports" on Iraq's WMD capabilities, and beat the

Mike Davis: A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)

[Mike Davis is the author most recently of The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) and Planet of Slums (Verso). He lives in San Diego.]Buda's Wagon (1920)"You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you! -- Anarchist warning (1919) On a w

Ruth Rosen: Taxes ... And what progressives need to do about them

[Ruth Rosen is Visiting Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, U.C. Berkeley.] I don’t need to remind anyone that it’s time to pay your taxes. But when will progressive politicians, intellectuals and activists learn to counter the Right's mantra that we get nothing for our hard-earned tax dollars? What we all need to do, however, is to figure out how to explain to ordinary Americans why, in fact, we do pay taxes. The Repu

Jeffrey Herf: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective

The current (vol. 25, no. 1, March 2006) issue of The Journal of Israeli History isa special issue devoted to the theme:"Convergence and Divergence: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective."  Viewing abstracts of the articles or ordering the issue can be done at the website of Taylor and Francis publishers. The collection includes essays on Germany, as well as the United States, England, France, Poland, Israel and Iran. . The Taylor and Francis website URL i

Caleb Carr: Let Them Have Their Civil War

[Caleb Carr is the author of "The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians" (Random House). He teaches military studies at Bard College.] As the violence in Iraq has expanded, analysts have been asking: Are we witnessing the beginning of a formal Iraqi civil war? But far more important when we consider what role our troops might play in the extended fighting is the question: Does the United States have any right to forcibly stop such a war, when and if it

Garry Wills: Christ Among the Partisans

[Garry Wills is professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of"What Jesus Meant."] THERE is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. Jesus told Pilate: "My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here" (John 18:36). Jesus brought no political message or p

Gary Leupp: “Ideologies of Hatred”? What Does Condi Mean?

[Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.] On NBC’s Meet the

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: Misreading China ... It's time to move beyond old stereotypes

Three-quarters of a century ago, Americans often viewed China through one of two distorting lenses, both of which can be linked to famous works of popular culture of the 1930s. One was a patronizing lens that can be associated with the 1931 Pearl Buck novel "The Good Earth," and the popular 1937 film it inspired. The other was a demonizing lens that can be associated with a 1932 horror film, "The Mask of Fu Manchu." China today, of course, is a very different place. A

Garry Wills: Iraq & Vietnam

[Editor's Note: The following excerpt is drawn from Garry Wills's review of Taylor Branch's biography of Martin Luther King.] ... Of course, Branch had all but completed At Canaan's Edge before the war in Iraq began. But no one read-ing his account now can fail to see resemblances between King's protest against the war and those now criticizing ("almost traitorous") what is going on in the Middle East. Even more striking are the defenses made for the present war and what w

Juan Cole: Exit Plan

Senator John Kerry argues that the United States should set a May 15 deadline for the formation of a national unity government in Iraq, and then set a December 31, 2006 deadline for US withdrawal. Kerry seems to be under the impression that the US is fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq, which is generally not true. It is fighting Sunni Arab Iraqis, whether nationalists or religious Salafi revivalists or tribesmen or good old boys. But he is right that the US military should stop doing search a

Daniel Pipes: How Israel Can Win

Since I argued in a column last week that Israel can and must defeat the Palestinian Arabs, a barrage of responses have contested this thesis. Some were trivial (Ha'aretz published an article challenging my right to opine on such matters because I do not live in Israel) but most raised serious issues that deserve an answer. The ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu observed that in war, "Let your great object be victory," and he was echoed by the 17th-century Austrian war thi

Michael Honey: In Grim Times Like These Remembering Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King Is Helpful

[Michael Honey teaches American history at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and recently held the Harry Bridges endowed chair in labor studies at the UW. He has published two previous award-winning histories of labor and civil rights in the South, and his book on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Memphis sanitation strike is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.] In recent months, southern freedom fighters Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, and most recently, Anne Braden, a less-well known

Jackson Lears: The Fate of Our Republic

[Jackson Lears is editor of Raritan and the author, most recently, of Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Viking/Penguin).] To anyone who cares about the fate of our republic, these are troubling times. Yet seldom has our public discourse seemed so inadequate to the seriousness of the situation. George W. Bush's administration has pushed us into moral and constitutional crisis, but the media remain committed to business as usual--trivializing criticism of the president as partis