The picture is is not pretty. Israel finally has a new government in place, and we now know who its ruling triumvirate is. Most importantly, Benjamin Netanyahu will appoint a staunch hawk, Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, to replace retiring Defense Minister Ehud Barak. We would do well to consider this selection. (More…)
No TAV. Even if you live in faraway Berlin, for most Europeans, the slogan (and graffiti) is inescapable. The acronym for a high-speed train line between Lyon and Turin, the project has become a cause celebre for the Italian left, and, increasingly, European critics of a continent-wide high speed rail network. (More…)
Thirty years into the Islamic Republic, Tehran was transformed by an explosion of youth, and a demand for higher education. Globalization hadn’t only affected the economic and political strategies of the government. It had affected the structure of Iranian society. New communication technologies arrived, and the country was opened to global culture, defining a new generation. (More…)
Americans spend an inordinate amount of time on the road. In places like the Los Angeles, Houston and the Washington D.C. metropolitan areas, commuters may spend more time studying the cars ahead of them during stop-and-go traffic than they do their own spouses and children upon finally arriving home. That’s why bumper stickers are such an effective means of declaring one’s allegiances. (More…)
I remember the Iraq War like a terminal disease. It took over my life, causing me to feel completely at its mercy. I recall the American media gleefully covering their own tanks and Humvees storming through the southern deserts. I awaited the moment when Saddam Hussein’s Arab (by which I thought Muslim) neighbors would come to his defense. It never came. (More…)
Modern Zionism is characterised by, among other things, an enormous capacity for nationalist chauvinism. The policies of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians are brutal, and totally unjustifiable. Yet, by reducing the words ‘fascist’ or ‘fascism’ to a stock slur aimed at Zionists or Israelis, we obscure the grim reality of authentic fascism and cheapen the meaning of the term itself. (More…)
It may not have produced any results. However, few electoral races were as predicted to be as inconsequential as those held in Italy two weeks ago. Left or right victory, the results would be the same, Italians feared. That is, unless you cast your vote for the so-called ‘populist’ party, the 5 Star Movement, led by ex-TV comedian Beppe Grillo. (More…)
Modern politics is so often the preserve of spin, of carefully shaped, focus group-tested utterances, that it can be shocking when someone says what they mean. So it was, when Peer Steinbrück, a leading German socialist politician, and his party’s presumptive nominee for Federal Chancellor in the fall elections, spoke with frankness about the results of the recent parliamentary elections in Italy. (More…)
While leftists in Germany today often focus on the plight of immigrants, particularly from the Middle East and North Africa — and the corollary concerns in the homelands of those immigrants — attention is also directed at the self-righteous superpower whose long shadow still falls over Europe: the United States of America. (More…)
Photographer Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York project, which has spawned “Humans of” pages in many other locales – Dublin, Mumbai, Jerusalem and the Fiji Islands to name a few – began in 2010. Stanton had just left a career in the Chicago financial industry to move to New York, where he began walking around the city, taking street portraits. (More…)
Israel is a country without a government. The coalition impasse is of little interest abroad, as it mostly centers on changing the rules allowing the ultra-orthodox to forego military service, the economy, and the inability of Israelis to get along with each other – particularly the politicians. And yet, out of this discord, a new kind of Israeli unity is emerging. (More…)
Usually, the music is Turkish. Arabesque, as it is called, featuring Middle Eastern- sounding instrumental motifs, but still, Turkish. Blasting out of cars idling at the stoplight on Karl-Marx-Straße, I often find myself trying to make out the details of the songs. “Was that an Om Khaltoum sample, or an actual orchestra?” I never get it right. (More…)