Roundup: Historians' Take

Neve Gordon: Kadima's political vision actually puts the peace process into reverse

[Mr. Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and is currently a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights and Middle East Centers. He is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights.] Israelis went to the polls this week with the hope of resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict once and for all. The new political party Kadima, which means "forward" in Hebrew, promised as much and therefore

Daniel Pipes: The Palestinian-Israeli War ... Where It Came From, and How to End It

The following is an edited transcript of a speech given by Daniel Pipes at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, November 16, 2005, followed by an extensive question-and-answer period. The transcript was edited by The Commonwealth Club.A Palestinian-Israeli war probably is not the way most of you think of it. In the definition of the problem lies both an understanding of the Arab-Israeli theater and its potential solution. The consensus view is that this is not a war. This is diploma

Michael Parenti: Right-Wing Judicial Activism

[Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights), The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press), all available in paperback; also visit: www.michaelparenti.org.] Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee as nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts assured the senators that he would not be one of those noisome activist judges who inject their p

Mark Naison: When Inner City Neighborhoods Produced Strong Black Men

As someone who heads a research project- the Bronx African American History Project- that has benefited from the guidance and leadership of strong black men, I read the article in today's NY Times "Black Men Falling Further Behind" with a heavy heart. The communities described in this article, filled with fatherless families, male unemployment rates of over 65 %, and young men who see prison as an inevitability and a rite of passage, would have been unimaginab

Mark Naison: If the Academy Wanted to Honor Hip Hop, Is This the Right Group and the Right Song?

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] I agree that people from the Civil Rights Generation must try to reach out to young people and try to understand their music and the experiences that music reflects, even when it makes us uncomfortable. I also agree that it is entirely appropriate for a major cultural institution like the Screen Actors Guild to honor the hip hop tradition in its song of the year category. But as a historian

Joshua Brown: Who Could Have Foreseen This? (Illustration)

 

Neve Gordon: Why Hamas Won

[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and can be reached at nevegordon@gmail.com.] Although it is still unclear what the future holds for Israelis and Palestinians, a few things can be said about the processes that enabled Hamas to win a landslide victory in the January 25 democratic elections and how the organization's triumph will likely affect the local political arena. Founded in Gaza at the beginning of th

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

David C. Hendrickson & Robert W. Tucker: How Far Bush Has Strayed in Foreign Policy from the Founders'

[David C. Hendrickson is a professor of political science at Colorado College, and Robert W. Tucker, a professor emeritus of U.S. foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University.] ...In Bush's first term, the "Bush Doctrine" meant above all the avowal that the United States would not sit on its hands and await the development of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of tyrants but was prepared, on the contrary, to take the offensive against them. Now it is the "bein

Christine Stansell: Torment and Justice in Cambodia

[Christine Stansell is a professor of history at Princeton. She traveled to Cambodia this May in the context of her teaching and writing about the aftermath of catastrophic violence.] "Something terrible happened here. And I don’t know what it is,” Bill Herod remembers thinking in his first days in Phnom Penh in 1980. He was with Church World Service, one of a group of aid workers allowed into the country after the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge in January 1979 and put an

Gerard W. Gawalt: America and the Barbary Pirates ... An International Battle Against an Unconventional Foe

[Gerard W. Gawalt is the manuscript specialist for early American history in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.] Ruthless, unconventional foes are not new to the United States of America. More than two hundred years ago the newly established United States made its first attempt to fight an overseas battle to protect its private citizens by building an international coalition against an unconventional enemy. Then the enemies were pirates and piracy. The focus of the United

Andrew Roberts: We Shouldn't Be Alarmed by "Batman's" Invasion of the Palace

Andrew Roberts, in the Guardian (Sept. 17, 2004): ... How predictable and absurd has been the knee-jerk outrage expressed over Ferry's schoolboyish prank. Once linked to the rather less stylish Fathers4Justice stunt at Buckingham Palace, the media, police and politicians have vied with one another to shed any sense of proportion in their analysis of what is really going on. "The most serious attack on the Houses of Parliament in living memory," intoned Sky TV, overl

Gavan McCormack: Why Japan Is Following the Bush Administration Line on Iraq

[Gavan McCormack, author of the just-published Target North Korea (Nation Books), in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (March 16, 2004)]One week before UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's visit to Japan this February, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi declared it crucial for Japan to show the United States what a"trustworthy al