Roundup: Media's Take

David Hirst: Gaddafi cruelly resists, but this Arab democratic revolution is far from over

[David Hirst, a former Middle East correspondent for the Guardian, was a reporter at the paper from 1963 to 1997.] The world has yet to settle on an agreed term for the great events unfolding across the Middle East. I was in the depths of the French countryside – out of touch, and with a BBC World Service that could only fade in and out of hearing late at night and early morning – during their latest, awe-inspiring Egypt phase. But I was soon persuaded that the designation which, in

Courtland Milloy: Revisionists Having a Ball with Civil War Anniversary

[Courtland Milloy is a metro columnist for the WaPo.] Put on your hoop skirts, little ladies; top hats and spats for you Southern gents. Blacks, to the kitchen. It's the sesquicentennial of the "War Between the States," and we're going to have us a "Secession Ball." Forget somber commemoration. Celebrate a victory more important than any fought on a battlefield: a triumphant revising of Civil War history by Confederate sympathizers. &quo

Ellen Bork: The Trouble With Tibet

[Ellen Bork, director of democracy and human rights at the Foreign Policy Initiative, writes frequently about U.S. policy toward Tibet and China.] Dharamsala, India—Flying from Delhi to Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile in northern India, takes about 90 minutes. The plane lands in the valley below the Dhauladar range of the Himalayas, a massive barrier between India and Tibet. From the airport, the road leads up to the former British hill station that Prime Min

Laurence Pope: The Second Arab Awakening

[Laurence Pope is a retired U.S. diplomat and former political advisor at the U.S Central Command.] PORTLAND, MAINE — In 1938, George Antonius, a Lebanese-Egyptian writer and diplomat, wrote a seminal book titled “The Arab Awakening,” tracing the spread of Western ideas in the Arab world and the origins of a new pan-Arab consciousness to institutions such as the American University of Beirut and Robert College in Istanbul. In the postwar years, this hopeful vision was r

Adam Paul Laxalt: Recovering the Spirit of ’49

[Adam Paul Laxalt is an attorney and former lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, Judge Advocate General’s Corps, who served on active duty from 2005 until 2010.] Think back to the 19th-century Gold Rush of the American Far West. Towns emptied, schools closed, churches went quiet, houses were shuttered. People rushed from all over the world to take a chance at striking it rich and making a better life. People individually endowed by their Creator with creativity, talent, and grit risked eve

Jonah Goldberg: Liberty, 21st Century–Style

[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute] Finally, the national conversation about democracy is relatively mature and serious. Save for some TV-news anchors, just about everyone seems to understand that democracy is a tricky thing. That skepticism was hard-earned. The last decade provided painful lessons for everyone, on both sides of the ideological aisle. Liberals, who were once naïvely opt

Joseph S. Nye, Jr.: New World Order

[Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School.] Beyond the euphoria and uncertainties of the moment, the revolt in Egypt has sparked a debate about how much technology and information matter in a revolutionary context. Some commentators, particularly in TV coverage, have claimed that Twitter, Facebook, and blogs largely drove events in Egypt. This has provoked a strong intellectual backlash—an argument that more traditional forces are

Rabbi Marvin Hier: Anti-Semitic Hall of Shame

[Rabbi Marvin Hier is the founder and ean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance.] Sadly, there was no shortage of contenders in 2010 for the "Top 10 Anti-Semitic Slurs" list we put out at the Simon Wiesenthal Center each year. Taken together, the comments suggest that a bold new kind of anti-Semitism is emerging around the world. Our list of offenders includes a journalist, government leaders, a historian, a banker and even a prominent Hol

Danny Heitman: How can Obama save our economy and our democracy? Humanities education

[Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.”] Calling America’s present economic challenges “our generation’s Sputnik moment,” President Obama used his State of the Union address last month to call for more federal spending on math and science education. One might have wondered, while listening to the president’s speech, just how many of his fellow Americans knew what Sputnik was – an

Charles Krauthammer: Obama's Louis XV Budget

[Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the WaPo.] Five days before his inauguration, President-elect Obama told The Post that entitlement reform could no longer be kicked down the road. He then spent the next two years kicking - racking up $3 trillion in new debt along the way - on the grounds that massive temporary deficit spending was necessary to prevent another Great Depression. To prove his bona fides, he later appointed a deficit reduction commission. It made its

Adam Kirsch: The Trouble with Anger

[Adam Kirsch is a senior editor for The New Republic.] In the brief national soul-searching that followed the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, many observers, including President Obama, reflected on the troubling excess of anger and moral indignation in our political discourse—the kind of indignation that turns opponents into enemies, and campaigns into crusades. Yet, even as responsible figures on the right and the left in America are urging their fellow-citizens (in Roger Ailes’s s

Tina Rosenberg: What Egypt Learned from the Students Who Overthrew Milosevic

[Tina Rosenberg is the author of the forthcoming Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World, from which parts of this article are adapted.] Early in 2008, workers at a government-owned textile factory in the Egyptian mill town of El-Mahalla el-Kubra announced that they were going on strike on the first Sunday in April to protest high food prices and low wages. They caught the attention of a group of tech-savvy young people an hour's drive to the south in the capital ci

James Purnell: Why the west is losing the battle for Arab hearts and minds

[James Purnell is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Stalybridge and Hyde from 2001 to 2010. He is currently the Head of the Open Left project at the left leaning think tank Demos.] The crowds in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia should be holding up replica Statues of Liberty. Instead, the west is losing the battle for Arab hearts and minds at the very moment they are winning their battle for democracy and freedom. I blame Donald Rumsfeld and Dick C

Donald J. Kochan: Reading Adam Smith in Arabic ... The region needs 'The Wealth of Nations' now more than ever

[Mr. Kochan is an associate professor of law at Chapman University.] At this time of unrest and transition in the Arab world, the United States's capacity to communicate core values of democracy and individual liberty is a priority. Our capability to translate them into Arabic is a necessity. We need to expose the Arab world to the fundamental texts of Western political and philosophical thought. Indeed, the export of ideas may be the most valuable commodity we have to offer.

Andrew Cohen: The Supreme Court: An 'Irresponsible House of Lords'?

[Andrew Cohen has served as chief legal analyst and legal editor for CBS News and won a Murrow Award as one of the nation's leading legal analysts and commentators.] I am belatedly reading Edmund Morris' Colonel Roosevelt, an absorbing book about the later years of one of the nation's greatest presidents, a dynamo of a man who roamed the Earth and the American political landscape one hundred years ago. Theodore Roosevelt was a "progressive Republican," which today seems mo

Steven Plaut: The Grand 'End Of Conflict' Delusion

[Steven Plaut, a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press, is a professor at the University of Haifa. His book "The Scout" is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.] For the past twenty years the quest for a Middle East peace and for resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict has rested largely upon one specific strategy. We'll call it the "End of Conflict Proclamation." The k

Nathaniel Zelinsky: The Peace Sign in the Middle East

[Nathaniel Zelinsky is a member of the Yale College Class of 2013. At Yale, he studies political science and economics. Nathaniel is interested in (and writes about) politics, modern conservatism, public service, and the V for Victory symbol. Besides blogging for the Huffington Post, Nathaniel frequently writes opinion pieces for the Yale Daily News and has appeared on National Review Online.]Last week, I wrote a short piece

Brian Goldsmith: What Palin (and Other GOP Leaders) Doesn't Get About Ronald Reagan

[Brian Goldsmith is a contributor to TheAtlantic.com. A former political producer for the CBS Evening News, he is now a student at Stanford Law School.] Earlier this month, the media world suspended its cynicism to celebrate -- and not just to recognize -- the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. Republican leaders went further: Newt Gingrich said the former president was "a beacon of light whose faith in the American people will continue to inspire." Republican Nat

Michael Freund: This is not 1776 ... Jeffersonian-style democracy isn’t about to flourish throughout the region

[Michael Freund writes a syndicated column for the Jerusalem Post.] As the revolt against tyranny spreads across the Middle East, shaking the very foundations of the Arab political order, it appears as if we are at the doorstep of a new and uncharted world. Old certainties, like the sands of Arabia, are rapidly being swept away, leaving Israel and the West peering into a potential vacuum of insecurity and doubt. The thought of the Muslim Brotherhood rising

Dani Rodrik: The Poverty of Dictatorship

[Dani Rodrik is professor of political economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and author of “One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth.”] Perhaps the most striking finding in the United Nations’ recent 20th anniversary “Human Development Report” is the outstanding performance of the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Here was Tunisia, ranked sixth among 135 countries in terms of improvement in its H