French President Nicolas Sarkozy's statements Tuesday in support of stiffer sanctions against Iran for its pursuit of nuclear weapons were justifiably heartening to many. Sarkozy's remarks, like his Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner's trip to Iraq last week, marked a refreshing departure from his predecessor Jacques Chirac's knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Yet while Sarkozy's open support for sanctions serves to distinguish him…
On August 25, two heavily armed terrorists wearing Israeli army uniforms climbed over the fence separating Israel from Gaza undetected in the early morning fog. Disguised in IDF uniforms, armed with guns and explosives and wearing bulletproof vests, the men were only discovered after they opened fire on unsuspecting IDF forces at short range, lightly wounding one soldier. Both were…
The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency Director Muhammad ElBaradei is a man of dubious integrity. In 2005 he was vaunted to the heights of the international stratosphere when he received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee extolled him for his "efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes." Yet the facts indicate that the…
As the cliché goes, "A conservative is a liberal whos has been mugged by reality." Like most clichés, this one exposes a larger truth. Namely, people often base their views on their fantasies of how the world should be, rather than on the reality of how the world actually is. Following this line, the September 11, 2001 attacks can be…
Education Minister Yuli Tamir has been much in the news. Two weeks ago she went on a well-publicized visit to authoritarian Singapore to learn the secret of its school system's success. Tamir summed up her visit in an interview with Yediot Aharonot, saying, "What most entranced me about [Singaporean schoolchildren] was that while there is discipline, it doesn't look…
Sometimes terror doesn't have to pay. Reports last week that Fatah Prime Minister Salaam Fayad had paid the annual salaries of members of Hamas's army in Gaza caused US Congressman Eric Cantor to shoot off a livid letter to Fayad. Cantor, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, had just returned from leading a Republican Congressional delegation to…
According to a spate of recent media reports, Iran's economy is on the skids. It works out that aside from being a messianic, genocidal killer, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also an economic dunce. Ahmadinejad entered office two years ago after running a populist campaign pledging to share Iran's oil and gas revenues with the Iranian people. As his…
Building and maintaining coalitions is one of the most difficult tasks of a nation at war. On the one hand, a state must ensure that its coalition partners share enough common goals and interests to ensure that their cooperation is effective. On the other hand, a state must constantly weigh the political and diplomatic benefits of maintaining its coalition against…
Compare and contrast two separate actions taken last month by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Last month, after a five-year campaign by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies which culminated in the publication of a petition signed by some 100 Holocaust scholars, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum decided to add…
This week last year, Israel was in the midst of a terrible war which its government refused to acknowledge. As rockets and missiles rained down on northern Israel, the Olmert government refused to call up IDF reservists or launch a ground campaign in Lebanon. Ignoring reality, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stood before the graduating class of the IDF's National Security…