President Obama is not the first chief executive who has had to deal with rumors about his ancestry. In the 1930s, there were stories that President Franklin Roosevelt was Jewish.

On March 7, 1935, FDR wrote to Philip Slomovitz, the editor of The Detroit Jewish Chronicle:

I am grateful to you for your interesting letter of March 4th. I have no idea as to the source of the story which you say came from my old friend, Chase Osborn. All I know about the origin of the Roosevelt family in this country is that all branches bearing the name are apparently descended from Claes Martenssen Van Roosevelt, who came from Holland sometime before 1648—even the year is uncertain. Where he came from in Holland I do not know, nor do I know who his parents were. There was a family of the same name on one of the Dutch Islands and some of the same name living in Holland as lately as thirty or forty years ago, but, frankly, I have never had either the time or the inclination to try to establish the line on the other side of the ocean before they came over here, nearly three hundred years ago.

In the dim distant past they may have been Jews or Catholics or Protestants. What I am more interested in is whether they were good citizens and believers in God. I hope they were both.

On March 15, The New York Times reported on the exchange:

Mr. Slomovitz's letter to Mr. Roosevelt quoted an article from "Civic Echo," which in turn quoted an interview in an unnamed newspaper in St. Petersburg, Fla., in which Chase Osborn, former Governor of Michigan, was said to have sketched a supposed version of the President's ancestry as Jewish.

Why did it matter? Anti-Semitism was far more widespread in the 1930s than today. In 1937, Gallup asked this question: "If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be Jewish, would you vote for that person?" Only 46 percent said yes, compared with 47 percent who said no.

Ibrahim Al-Marashi is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at IE University in Madrid, Spain. He is co-author of Iraq's Armed Forces: An Analytical History (Routledge, 2008).

After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Syria and Libya became the two strongest mukhabarat or 'secret police' states. The longevity of the Al-Asad and Qaddafi regimes could be attributed to the ability of state security forces to project fear into the populace and quell anti-state protests whenever they emerged. Damascus used force to crush an uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood in the town of Hama in 1982 and Tripoli did the same to crush a Libyan Islamist insurgency in the 1990s.

Both Syria and Libya (and Saddam's Iraq) did not rule on fear alone. These states also depended on networks of patronage, a way of communicating to these 'in-groups' that if the regime would fall, so would their privileged socio-economic status. Defending this status could explain the tenacious resistance of military units around Qaddafi and Al-Asad.

While patronage can only benefit a few, the masses were seduced by their leadership with rhetorical campaigns to cement loyalty between the regime and public. As these besieged regimes defend their positions of power with armed force, they have also fallen back on systems of truth telling and conspiracy theories to legitimize their rule. Speeches delivered during the ongoing crises reveal how these leaders view themselves and the struggles that they are uniquely qualified to fight. If they were to fall, so would their struggles. Thus, using force against opponents is justified in the name of defending the regime engaged in struggles greater than the state itself. Syrian President Bashar Al-Asad's speech from the People's Assembly on 31 March provided a window into these dynamics.

Unlike the other countries facing domestic revolts, Syria is the only country that can tap into a 'resistance' discourse. It is the only frontline state (excluding Lebanon) that has not signed a peace treaty with Israel, and its support for Hizbullah allows Damascus to burnish its credentials for continuing this fight. From this perspective, any domestic disturbances can be blamed on foreign plans to undermine this national and pan-Arab struggle.

According to this reasoning, in March Al-Asad declared that Syria faced 'a great conspiracy, the webs of which spread from far away countries and close countries, and some of whose strings reach inside the country.' Al-Asad only mentioned Israel as a threat and placed the rest of the blame on unspecified 'satellite channels' and 'foreign conspiracies.' These enemies were 'smart' in choosing satellite television and text messaging to infiltrate the country but Syrians 'note their stupidity in that they chose the wrong country and people, as this kind of conspiracy does not work here.'

The global media characterized his statements as a delusional conspiracy theory. However the notion of a conspiracy theory is subjective. One person's conspiracy theory is another person's truth. What Al-Asad was explaining to a Syrian audience, and a global one at that, was the Ba'athist/Syrian interpretative schemata or framework for understanding its role in the Middle East.

The Syrian state could retort, 'Who are the foreign media to question our version of the truth?' As long as the Al-Asad and the Baath believe what he says is the truth, then it is the 'truth.' Has any state provided him with any evidence to counter his argument? Of course I do not argue that Al-Asad's speech should be taken at face value. Rather the speech should be analyzed by what it says and what it did not say at the same time.

Al-Asad declared that the protests were part of a plot 'to weaken Syria, for Syria to crumble ...' It followed a similar pattern throughout this season of revolts of blaming foreign powers for seeking to undermine incumbent regimes. The speeches made by leaders who are threatened by domestic uprisings from Benghazi to Damascus play upon a victimhood psychosis.

One of the legacies of European imperialism in the region is this self-victimization narrative, where the British, French, and Russian empires were seen as hidden hands manipulating the region in the 19th and early 20th centuries. After the Second World War, America, the Soviet Union, and Israel emerged as the source of these 'conspiracies,' theories of which abounded among Middle East publics, and in the 1970s was the subject of a popular book in Iran, My Uncle Napoleon, dealing with foreign intrigues in Teheran during the Second World War.

Foreign intrigue was a theme of a speech by Buythana Sha'aban, the de-facto spokeswoman of the Syrian state, to a Ba'ath Party conference in March. 'The second thing that is being targeted in Syria is the beautiful co-existence in this country. As you have seen, this region is targeted to make it a sectarian, parochial, and ethnic-based region, ' she said. Her fears express a sentiment that probably harks back to the French colonial era where exacerbating sectarian differences in Syria followed the colonial pattern of divide-and-rule. The Syrian mandate was carved up into mini-statelets for the Druze and Alawite communities, but this tactic did little to mollify anti-French sentiment among the Syrians.

This harking back to the past was also evident in Al-Asad's 31 March speech, when he reiterated the state's support for 'pan-Arab rights and independence, and supporting Arab resistance movements when there is occupation.' This statement is replete with nostalgia for Syria in the pan-Arab framework of the 1960s and for his father Hafez al-Asad's continued resistance to Israel following Egyptian President Sadat's bilateral peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Then, giving up personal freedoms seemed justified when Damascus was technically at war with Israel. That 'cold war' with Israel allowed Hafez to perpetuate the Emergency Law, the revocation of which being one of the key demands of protestors today.

Foreign plots. Antagonism towards Israel. Syria as the vanguard of Arabism. Those are the Syrian state's truths. What about the truths that Al-Asad failed to acknowledge?

In March Al-Asad deflected the issue of reforms arguing that these 'there are no obstacles [to reform], there is only procrastination, and there are no opponents - the opponents are those with personal interests and the corrupt, and as you know, this was a small group of people who are no longer around.'

However, in the eyes of critics this 'small group' of people remains. Systems of patronage have become one of the crucial pillars of regime survival in the region. Since the creation of the Arab states in the 1920s, ruling elites have sought to consolidate their powers by showering the largesse of the state on a narrow segment of society, whether military officers, a privileged tribe, or family relatives. The current season of revolutions is primarily provoked by and targeted against patronage.

Granting monopolies or state tenders to the regime's favoured groups transformed the state and its beneficiaries into villains and created resentment among publics across the Arab world. The revolts were not only directed at heads of state but numerous targets including the kleptocratic Tunisian Trabelsi clan (the in-laws of ousted President Zein al-Abidin), Qaddafi's sons and their extravagant lifestyles, and the pro-Mubarak supporters loyal to the National Democratic Party who amassed huge fortunes. A target of Syrian protestors in the southern town of Dera were the monopolies operated by Rami Makhluf, a cousin of Bashar.

What Al-Asad failed to acknowledge in March was that Syria is a mukhabarat state. The people behind the increasing number of demonstrators' deaths recently are members of the dizzying array of security apparatuses that maintain the regime. No amount of rhetoric or deflection could hide this.

A heavy-handed police state. Corruption and patronage among elites. Those are the pillars of state security and the truths for many Syrians. Addressing those truths would given Al-Asad more legitimacy than the jaded strategy of deflecting local problems on foreign enemies.

Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest.

The long-brewing crisis in Syria has entered a critical phase and it is changing the rules of the Middle East.  If the people keep marching and the regime keeps shooting, the Obama administration could face its toughest Middle East choices yet.  Will Samantha Power bomb yet another country in the region, or will she try to sleep nights with the blood of thousands of Syrians on her hands?

The bloody-minded and repressive Syrian regime — after Saddam Hussein, the slave-trading Sudanese and the gay-murdering and woman-stoning Iranians, the worst bunch of thugs in a nasty neighborhood — has ripped off the mask.  An estimated 80 plus protesters were killed Friday; at least 6 more when relatives tried to bury Friday’s dead.  The violence can easily escalate.

The outside world, preoccupied by the dramatic events unfolding across northern Africa and in Yemen, had not paid much attention to Syria until the last 36 hours.  But now the scale of the protests and the brutal response have caught the world’s attention.  Britain, France and the US have all condemned the latest violence, with the White House using some of its sharpest language yet.

This crisis could have legs.  Although Syria is not an oil exporter, every moral and political argument that led to the intervention in Libya applies more strongly to Damascus.  And while the political, national interest rationale for regime change in Libya is a little sketchy, the case for regime change in Damascus is close to ironclad....

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

The security forces of Bashar Assad — a thug whom Hillary Clinton deemed a “reformer,” and with whom Barack Obama was determined to restore diplomatic relations — are slaughtering hundreds in the streets of Syria’s major cities. I know that the Turkish government will express no outrage. It will not help to sponsor a flotilla of private ships to sail into the port of Latakia to protest the government-sponsored barbarity. European “human rights” activists will not fly into any Arab city to board a freighter, Gaza-style, that would bring humanitarian assistance by sea to those being blown apart by the Assad regime. I know that.

Recently, Palestinian teenagers, in service to a Palestinian terrorist organization, massacred — in the literal sense of the word — the Fogel family of Israel, a savagery replete with the throat-slitting of toddlers and infants. The Palestinian police authority — U.S. trained and equipped — just shot down Jewish worshippers at Jacob’s Tomb. This comes amid the Palestinian Authority’s commemoration of the 2002 Passover Massacre of 30 Israeli civilians, apparently a national moment of honorific reflection on the West Bank. Yet I know that no one in Europe and few in America will protest to the Palestinian Authority, which the West subsidizes, that it seems to commemorate butchery in its midst....

We are living in another Soviet, a 21st-century sort in which we nod to official pieties and mouth politically correct banalities while in our private lives, for our safety, well-being — and sanity — we conduct ourselves according to altogether different premises. In the Soviet Union, the anonymous masses turned out to hear boilerplate praise for socialist comradeship, while those of them who were lucky enough to have a car took off the windshield wipers when they parked it — accepting both that their utopian state could not supply affordable replacement auto parts and that their comrades would steal almost anything they could from other suffering subjects.

In our version of the Soviet, we know that Israel is supposed to be culpable and that we are asked to praise the “aspirations” of the Palestinians, but if we were to go to the Middle East we most certainly would not stay in Gaza or the West Bank or visit unescorted a Christian shrine. We would wish to dine with people like the Fogels, but not their killers or the people who ordered them to kill. We are also to understand that the Arab and Turkish worlds abhor Israeli violence, and so we nod our assent; but privately we know that the issue is really Jews, not savagery per se, and that an Arab dictator can murder 1.000 Arabs with less worry about Western condemnation than an Israeli soldier can shoot one Arab on the West Bank in self-defense. Publicly we accept that tiny Israel, a country of 7 million, is an overdog, the foreign-policy equivalent of the demonized “them” here in America, the people who make over $200,000 a year — too successful, too Western, too unquestioning of their culture. Privately, we sort of admire Israel’s courage and understand that anti-Semitism, oil, fear of terrorism, and demographic calculus construct Arabs as sympathetic victims and Israelis as neo-colonialists....

Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and co-editor of Dissent. His next book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, will be published in August (Knopf).

No group in American politics gets more respect than independent voters. Pundits and reporters probe what these allegedly moderate citizens think about this issue and that candidate, major party strategists seek the golden mean of messaging that will attract independents to their camp and/or alienate them from the opposing one. Presidential nominees and aides struggle to come up with phrases and settings that will soothe or excite them. But what if millions of independents are really just a confused and clueless horde, whose interest in politics veers between the episodic and the non-existent?

That is certainly the impression one gets from dipping into the finer details of a mid-April survey of 1,000 likely, registered voters conducted by Democracy Corps, the outfit run by Stan Greenberg and James Carville. Beyond the usual questions about Obama’s job approval and that of House Republicans, this poll performed the valuable service of reading out each party’s talking points about the current budget debate and then asking respondents which ones they found convincing.

The results are mildly hilarious. By a margin of over 20 points, voters agree with these GOP lines: “Both Democrats and Republicans have run up deficits, but now they are out of control under President Obama and threatening our economy”; Paul Ryan’s plan “changes the reckless path of over-spending and borrowing”; and, “Over-regulation and high taxes punish companies for success.” At the same time, by slightly higher percentages, they also agree with the Democrats that Ryan’s budget would “eliminate guaranteed Medicare and Medicaid coverage”; “force seniors to negotiate with private insurance companies, which are free to raise rates and deny coverage”; and “decrease taxes for CEOs and big corporations, giving millionaires another huge tax break.”...

Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter," published by Times Books, and editor of a book assessing former President George W. Bush's administration, published by Princeton University Press

Princeton, New Jersey (CNN) -- On a recent trip to England, I found that it was impossible to avoid seeing coasters, posters, books and other paraphernalia being sold to mark the royal wedding on April 29.

As you might expect, the wedding is drawing great interest among the British. But some Americans are following this wedding closely, too. Our fascination with royalty is not much different from our national obsession with Hollywood romances and peccadilloes.

The royal wedding also offers Americans an opportunity to revel in the glamour of leaders in a way that has been largely impossible in the post-Watergate era, in which cynicism and distrust have characterized the national outlook toward Washington.

Although there was a moment when Barack and Michelle Obama seemed to bring some of the appeal of Camelot back into the White House, that moment ended quickly as the media and political opponents sank their teeth into this president.

Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is co-chair of the Hoover Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.

It was inevitable that the caravan of Arab freedom would make its appearance in Syria. It was there, three decades ago, that official terror hatched a monstrous state—and where practically everything Arabs would come to see in their politics in future decades was foreshadowed.

Hama was one of the principal cities of the Syrian plains. With a history of tumult and disputation, this Muslim Sunni stronghold rose against the military rule of Hafez Assad in 1982. The regime was at stake, and the drab, merciless ruler at its helm fought back and threw everything he had into the fight.

A good deal of the center of the inner city was demolished, no quarter was given. There are estimates that 20,000 people were killed.

After Hama, Hafez Assad would rule uncontested for two more decades. Prior to his ascendancy, 14 rulers came and went in a quarter-century. Many perished in prison or exile or fell to assassins. Not so with that man of stealth. He died in 2000, and in a most astonishing twist, he bequeathed power to his son Bashar, a young man not yet 35 years of age and an ophthalmologist at that....