History News Network

Roundup: Historian's Take

This is where we place excerpts by historians writing about the news. On occasion this page also includes political scientists, economists, and law professors who write about history. We may from time to time even include English profs.

Mary L. Dudziak: Obama’s Nixonian Precedent

Fouad Ajami: Ten Years Ago, an Honorable War Began With Wide Support

Chauncey DeVega: No, Jesus Wasn't White

Michael Lind: Private Sector Parasites

Victor Davis Hanson: America’s Big Fat Advantage

Conrad Black: Pope Francis, Say Yes to the Pill

Victor Davis Hanson: Who Will Bell America?

David Woolner: FDR -- Minimum Wage Critics "Hopelessly Reactionary"

Jonathan Zimmerman: What’s Not Being Taught About the Iraq War

Rashid Khalidi: Is Any Hope Left for Mideast Peace?

Richard V. Reeves: Shame Is Not a Four-Letter Word

Laurie Edwards: The Gender Gap in Pain

Robert Elias: A Lost Hero of the Civil Rights Era

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite: The Iraq War -- How Our Nation Lost Its Soul

David Priestland: The Sun Sets on the Modern Merchant Class

Nicole Hemmer: Guarding the Right's Flank

Gil Troy: An Ahistorical Tantrum In The Times

David M. Perry: What the Name 'Francis' Means for the Modern Church

Jon Wiener: For-Profit Fiasco: California Public Colleges Turn to Web Courses

Victor Davis Hanson: The New Affirmative Action

Mary L. Dudziak: Obama’s Nixonian Precedent

SOURCE: NYT (3-22-13)

Mary L. Dudziak, a professor of law and director of the Project on War and Security in Law, Culture and Society at Emory University, is the author of “War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences.”

ON March 17, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon began a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, sending B-52 bombers over the border from South Vietnam. This episode, largely buried in history, resurfaced recently in an unexpected place: the Obama administration’s “white paper” justifying targeted killings of Americans suspected of involvement in terrorism.

President Obama is reportedly considering moving control of the drone program from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Defense Department, as questions about the program’s legality continue to be asked. But this shift would do nothing to confer legitimacy to the drone strikes. The legitimacy problem comes from the secrecy itself — not which entity secretly does the killing. Secrecy has been used to hide presidential overreach — as the Cambodia example shows.

On Page 4 of the unclassified 16-page “white paper,” Justice Department lawyers tried to refute the argument that international law does not support extending armed conflict outside a battlefield. They cited as historical authority a speech given May 28, 1970, by John R. Stevenson, then the top lawyer for the State Department, following the United States’ invasion of Cambodia....

Posted on: Friday, March 22, 2013 - 12:32

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Fouad Ajami: Ten Years Ago, an Honorable War Began With Wide Support

SOURCE: WSJ (3-18-13)

Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of "The Syrian Rebellion" (Hoover Press, 2012).

Nowadays, few people step forth to speak well of the Iraq War, to own up to the support they gave that American campaign in the Arab world. Yet Operation Iraqi Freedom, launched 10 years ago this week, was once a popular war. We had struck into Afghanistan in 2001 to rout al Qaeda and the terrorists' Taliban hosts—but the 9/11 killers who brought ruin onto American soil were not Afghan. They were young Arabs, forged in the crucible of Arab society, in the dictators' prisons and torture chambers. Arab financiers and preachers gave them the means and the warrant for their horrific deeds.

America's previous venture into Iraq, a dozen years earlier, had been a lightning strike: The Iraqi dictator was evicted from Kuwait and then spared. Saddam Hussein's military machine was all rust and decay by 2003, but he swaggered and let the world believe that he had in his possession a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. The Arab redeemer, as he had styled himself, lacked the guile that might have saved him. A great military expedition was being readied against him in London and Washington, but he gambled to the bitter end that George W. Bush would not pull the trigger....

Posted on: Thursday, March 21, 2013 - 16:34

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Chauncey DeVega: No, Jesus Wasn't White

SOURCE: Alternet via Salon (3-19-13)

Chauncey DeVega is editor and founder of the blog We Are Respectable Negroes, which has been featured by the NY Times, the Utne Reader, and The Atlantic Monthly. Writing under a pseudonym, Chauncey DeVega's essays on race, popular culture, and politics have appeared in various books, as well as on such sites as the Washington Post's The Root and PopMatters.

The History Channel miniseries “The Bible” is one of the most popular TV shows in recent memory. “The greatest story ever told” seems to have much life left in it....

“The Bible” is not a “true” or “accurate” depiction of events. Like other TV shows and films, the final product is the result of the many decisions made by producers, actors, directors, writers, and editors. However, that does not mean that we should avoid asking some basic questions about the accuracy of the miniseries. For some, what follows is an uncomfortable truth.

The historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth was not “white. He was not European. Based on the scholarly consensus, the historical Jesus would be a Middle Eastern Jew of medium, if not dark, complexion. He was certainly dark enough to have spent time in the Middle East and elsewhere, and not to have had his skin tone commented upon or noted.

This Jesus would be hounded and harassed by the TSA, looked at as a de facto “suspicious” person in post-9/11 America, and be racially profiled by the national security state. The historical Jesus would likely be subject to stop-and-frisk policies by the New York police and others. If it were too late at night, and the historical Jesus was trying to get a cab–especially if he were not attired “professionally”–he would be left standing curbside because brown folks in their 20s and 30s who look like him are presumed to be criminals....

If a Christian is a true believer why would they have difficulty reconciling their faith with such a superficial thing as changing the historical lie that is white Jesus into one that is more accurate, a man of color, whose message would be unchanged? Would it really be that hard for some white Christians (and others) to kneel before a black or brown Jesus Christ? Are the psychic wages of whiteness so great as to distort a person’s image of God?...

Posted on: Thursday, March 21, 2013 - 12:14

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Michael Lind: Private Sector Parasites

SOURCE: Salon (3-21-13)

Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation.

You don’t have to be a Tea Party conservative to believe that the economy is threatened when there are too many “takers” and not enough “makers.” The “takers” who threaten the dynamism and fairness of industrial capitalism the most in the twenty-first century are not the welfare-dependent poor—the villains of Tea Party propaganda—but the rent-extracting, unproductive rich.

The term “rent” in this context refers to more than payments to your landlords. As Mike Konczal and many others have argued, profits should be distinguished from rents. “Profits” from the sale of goods or services in a free market are different from “rents” extracted from the public by monopolists in various kinds. Unlike profits, rents tend to be based on recurrent fees rather than sales to ever-changing consumers. While productive capitalists — “industrialists,” to use the old-fashioned term — need to be active and entrepreneurial in order to keep ahead of the competition, “rentiers” (the term for people whose income comes from rents, rather than profits) can enjoy a perpetual stream of income even if they are completely passive.

Rents come in as many kinds as there are rentier interests. Land or apartment or rental-house rents flow to landlords. Royalty payments for energy or mineral extraction flow to landowners. Interest payments on loans flow to bankers and other lenders. Royalty payments on patents and copyrights flow to inventors. Professions and guilds and unions can also extract rents from the rest of society, by creating artificial labor cartels to raise wages or professional fees. Tolls are rents paid to the owners of necessary transportation and communications infrastructure. Last but not least, taxes are rents paid to territorial governments for essential public services, including military and police protection....

Posted on: Thursday, March 21, 2013 - 10:36

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Victor Davis Hanson: America’s Big Fat Advantage

SOURCE: National Review (3-21-13)

For all the Obama-era talk of decline, there is at least one reason why America probably won’t, at least not quite yet.

“Peak oil” and our “oil addiction” were supposed to have ensured that we ran out of either gas or the money to buy it. Now, suddenly, we have more gas and oil than ever before. But the key question is: Why do we?

The oil-and-gas renaissance was brought on by horizontal drilling and fracking that opened up vast new reserves that were previously either unknown or considered unrecoverable. Both technological breakthroughs were American discoveries, largely brought on by entrepreneurial mavericks and engineers exploring on mostly private lands. Couldn’t the Saudi, Venezuelan, or Nigerian oil industry have discovered these new methods of resource recovery, given their nations’ reliance on petroleum exportation?

Posted on: Thursday, March 21, 2013 - 10:28

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Conrad Black: Pope Francis, Say Yes to the Pill

SOURCE: National Review (3-21-13)

Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and the recently published A Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

The new pope was scarcely installed, with a clear mandate to clean up whatever remains of the sex-abuse crisis, when the snipers who always surround the Holy See opened skirmishing on the subject of Pope Francis’s conduct 35 years ago when Argentina was governed by the heavy-handed military junta that evicted Juan Perón’s politically inept widow, a former nightclub dancer, in 1976. (The junta was sent packing by Margaret Thatcher when she evicted them from the Falkland Islands in 1979.) The sex-abuse crisis has been a horrible and shaming problem, but Catholicism’s enemies have amplified and exploited it to incite the inference that most of the Roman clergy are deviates compounding superstition with perversion. The most frequent and wishful version of these events is as a mighty coruscation before the great Christian scam expires in a Wagnerian inferno, an inadvertent Waco. It took the most antagonistic pundits, in their uncomprehending skepticism of the viability of what they regard as a medieval flimflam factory anyway, only one day to assimilate the election of a man none of them had mentioned, in their omniscience, as a contender, before pronouncing his papacy dead on arrival at the Sistine Chapel.

No one really has any idea what this new pope is going to do, but there seems no doubt that he has a mandate to impose a draconian screening and evaluation process to clear out sex offenders, prevent the admission of potential future offenders, and give everyone except the most rabid anti-papists a comfort level that this ghastly affair, which simmered and bubbled for centuries, has been finally lanced and ended and that the weaknesses that gave rise to it and tolerated it have been excised. Sensing that the Church may survive this wicked and psychotic conduct by 1 or 2 percent of its ordained personnel, the Church’s enemies have already moved on to Francis’s supposed lack of rebellious fervor toward the Argentinean military 35 years ago. It is reminiscent of the tempest in a thimble over Pope Benedict’s conscription as an “air-force child soldier” in an inactive German anti-aircraft battery in 1943. (He deserted at the first opportunity to do so without being executed.)...

Posted on: Thursday, March 21, 2013 - 10:19

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Victor Davis Hanson: Who Will Bell America?

SOURCE: National Review (3-19-13)

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in the spring from Bloomsbury Books.

Remember the medieval fable about the mice that wanted their dangerous enemy, the cat, belled, but each preferred not to be the one to attempt the dangerous deed? Likewise, the world’s bad actors have long wanted America belled, but, like the mice, so far they have not been stupid or daring enough to test America’s teeth and claws — that is, until now.

In 2008 Barack Obama campaigned on the general principle that the entire Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols were either superfluous or illegal. That opportunistic posturing resonated with a world audience eager for confessions of American wrongdoing. It probably helped to undermine U.S. influence abroad.

But no matter, all was forgotten at home the following year, when President Obama embraced or indeed expanded all the protocols he had once demagogued. Soon, as Predator-in-Chief, he increased the drone-assassination tally by a factor of ten. Other nations watched this about-face and took note of such opportunism for future reference.

“Reset” with Russia was predicated on the notion that George Bush, not the Russian autocracy, was responsible for the deterioration in Russian-American relations. Under reset, Barack Obama was more critical of his predecessor than he was of Vladimir Putin. The Russians were not naïve, and today they assume that the United States surely should blame itself, not Russia, when the two nations are at odds. If anything, Russia has become more autocratic at home and more bellicose abroad....

Posted on: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - 15:42

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David Woolner: FDR -- Minimum Wage Critics "Hopelessly Reactionary"

SOURCE: New Deal 2.0 via Salon (3-19-13)

David Woolner is Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian at the Roosevelt Institute, and Associate Professor of History at Marist College

Our Nation so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied working men and women a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers’ wages or stretching workers’ hours.

Enlightened business is learning that competition ought not to cause bad social consequences which inevitably react upon the profits of business itself. All but the hopelessly reactionary will agree that to conserve our primary resources of man power, government must have some control over maximum hours, minimum wages, the evil of child labor and the exploitation of unorganized labor. –FDR, May 1937

In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to increase the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour and to link the future minimum wage rate to inflation. In doing so, the president took note of the fact that at today’s minimum wage, a family with two children that works full time sill lives below the poverty line. This, he insisted, is unacceptable, as “in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.” Higher wages, the president insisted, “could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank; rent or eviction; scraping by or finally getting ahead.” And for businesses across the country, it would mean “customers with more money in their pockets,” which translates into the simple fact that “our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages.”...

Posted on: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - 15:24

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Jonathan Zimmerman: What’s Not Being Taught About the Iraq War

SOURCE: Salon (3-19-13)

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at New York University. He is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory and three other books.

Upon the 10th anniversary of America’s war in Iraq, a critical question with serious ramifications has been little explored: What are our children being taught in schools about the conflict, as it passes from “current events” into history?

To answer this question, one obvious place to start is school textbooks. I looked at several of them, and was happily surprised. The books present a fairly complex and balanced view of the war in Iraq, avoiding the falsehoods and sugarcoating that has so often marred American history instruction. But textbooks only tell part of the story.

Just as important is what is actually emphasized in the classrooms, and the ability of teachers to engage in real inquiry. Unfortunately, a combination of school policies and judicial decisions have made it so that many kids learn little or nothing about what we have done in Iraq, or why we have done it.

I’m a professor of education and history, and wrote a book examining conflicts over history in American public schools. But for me, this probe is more than theoretical: My daughter is an 11th grader in a suburban public high school, where she takes Advanced Placement U.S. History.

Her textbook, “The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People,” has a 2009 edition that carefully examines the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It includes lengthy passages about controversial issues, including prisoner abuse overseas and domestic surveillance at home. Ditto for the 2009 edition of another textbook, “Out of Many: A History of the American People,” co-authored by Yale’s John Mack Faragher, which is also used in many high schools around the country. Its new section on the Iraq War leads off with a picture of George W. Bush’s now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” photo op in May of 2003, when Bush declared that “the United States and our allies have prevailed.” But they hadn’t, of course, and the book pulls no punches about that. Parts of Iraq “plunged into chaos” after the U.S. invasion, which “strengthened a new generation of terror networks now drawn to do battle with American forces,” the book declares....

Posted on: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - 09:41

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Rashid Khalidi: Is Any Hope Left for Mideast Peace?

SOURCE: NYT (3-13-13)

Rashid Khalidi, a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of “Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East.”

WHAT should Barack Obama, who is to visit Israel next Wednesday for the first time in his presidency, do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

First, he must abandon the stale conventional wisdom offered by the New York-Washington foreign-policy establishment, which clings to the crumbling remnants of a so-called peace process that, in the 34 years since the Camp David accords, has actually helped make peace less attainable than ever.

When the most recent iteration of this process began with high hopes at the Madrid peace conference in 1991, which led to the Oslo accords two years later, there were 200,000 Israelis illegally settled in the occupied Palestinian territories: today, there are more than twice as many.

During this time, under four successive presidents, the United States, purportedly acting as an honest broker, did nothing to prevent Israel from gradually gobbling up the very land the two-state solution was to be based on....

Posted on: Monday, March 18, 2013 - 14:02

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Richard V. Reeves: Shame Is Not a Four-Letter Word

SOURCE: NYT (3-16-13)

Richard V. Reeves, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of “John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand.”

NEW YORK is deploying a powerful weapon to reduce teen pregnancy: shame. New advertisements around the city dramatize the truncated life chances of children born to teenagers; in one, a tear-stained toddler stares out, declaring: “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen.”

Nobody is arguing the facts. But plenty of people are furious at the decision to highlight them. “Hurting and shaming communities is not what’s going to bring teen pregnancy rates down,” declared Haydee Morales, the vice president for education and training at Planned Parenthood of New York City.

This is the allegedly “liberal” response. But liberals should think twice: shame is an essential ingredient of a healthy society, particularly a liberal one. It acts as a form of moral regulation, or social “nudge,” encouraging good behavior while guarding individual freedom....

Posted on: Monday, March 18, 2013 - 14:00

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Laurie Edwards: The Gender Gap in Pain

SOURCE: NYT (3-17-13)

Laurie Edwards is the author of the forthcoming book “In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America” and a writing teacher at Northeastern University.

TO the list of differences between men and women, we can add one more: the drug-dose gender gap. Doctors and researchers increasingly understand that there can be striking variations in the way men and women respond to drugs, many of which are tested almost exclusively on males. Early this year, for instance, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it was cutting in half the prescribed dose of Ambien for women, who remained drowsy for longer than men after taking the drug.

Women have hormonal cycles, smaller organs, higher body fat composition — all of which are thought to play a role in how drugs affect our bodies. We also have basic differences in gene expression, which can make differences in the way we metabolize drugs. For example, men metabolize caffeine more quickly, while women metabolize certain antibiotics and anxiety medications more quickly. In some cases, drugs work less effectively depending on sex; women are less responsive to anesthesia and ibuprofen for instance. In other cases, women are at more risk for adverse — even lethal — side effects.

These differences are particularly important for the millions of women living with chronic pain. An estimated 25 percent of Americans experience chronic pain, and a disproportionate number of them are women. A review published in the Journal of Pain in 2009 found that women faced a substantially greater risk of developing pain conditions. They are twice as likely to have multiple sclerosis, two to three times more likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis and four times more likely to have chronic fatigue syndrome than men. As a whole, autoimmune diseases, which often include debilitating pain, strike women three times more frequently than men....

Posted on: Monday, March 18, 2013 - 13:58

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Robert Elias: A Lost Hero of the Civil Rights Era

SOURCE: WaPo (3-15-13)

Robert Elias is a professor of law and politics at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of the forthcoming book “At What Price Equality? The Heroic Court Battle and Mysterious Disappearance of Lloyd Gaines.”

Lloyd Gaines had just become a civil rights pioneer. Denied admission to the University of Missouri’s Law School in 1935 because he was African American, Gaines sued, without much hope of winning in Jim Crow America. Yet after the U.S. Supreme Court finally heard his case in 1938, the justices ruled that unless Missouri created a black law school overnight, it would have to admit Gaines to the all-white law school. This was astonishing news for a black boy born dirt-poor in rural Mississippi who had watched racism follow his family’s migration north to St. Louis.

In the spring of 1939 it appeared, remarkably, that Gaines would enter the Missouri Law School later that year as the first African American ever enrolled there. On the cold, rainy evening of March 19, Gaines told a housemate he was going to buy stamps. He went out . . . and was never seen again.

What happened to Lloyd Gaines? Did he vanish because he and his family were threatened? Was he bribed to abandon his plans? Was he overwhelmed by the pressures of fighting his case? Was he so traumatized that he committed suicide? Was he murdered by racists? Did he leave the country?...

Posted on: Monday, March 18, 2013 - 13:50

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Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite: The Iraq War -- How Our Nation Lost Its Soul

SOURCE: WaPo (3-14-13)

Former president of Chicago Theological Seminary (1998-2008), Thistlethwaite is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The Iraq war was not a Just War. It has been a moral, fiscal and geopolitical disaster for the United States. Ten years after the attack on Iraq, it is critical to understand all that we have lost in engaging in this war. The true legacy of the Iraq war is a loss of our moral compass on engaging in war.

The Iraq war has first of all been a moral disaster because we broke the rules of war by ignoring them or so completely “re-defining” them that they lost their meaning.

Nothing so typifies this moral breakdown as much as the attempt to redefine torture as “enhanced interrogation,” and claim, despite the evidence of the horrible photos and videos of the systematic abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, for example, that such torture is not torture.

This is how we as a nation really started to “lose our soul.” In May of 2004, when this evidence of torture first appeared, I asked, “Can a Nation Lose Its Soul?” and I answered “yes.”...

Posted on: Monday, March 18, 2013 - 13:36

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David Priestland: The Sun Sets on the Modern Merchant Class

SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed. (3-18-13)

David Priestland teaches modern history at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A History of the World in Three Castes, new from the Penguin Press, as well as The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World (Penguin, 2009).

As we struggle to emerge from the 2008 financial crisis, we may now have enough distance to understand its real significance.

Immediate judgments were often very flawed. For example, then-president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, brandished a copy of Das Kapital before the press to show his deep, structural understanding of the catastrophic events in the international markets. The implied message: Capitalism is doomed, as anyone can see. But there was no Marxist revival, and capitalism has not collapsed. Indeed, in the global East it is positively flourishing. Capitalism seems to have an assured future, at least in the medium term.

More influential than Sarkozy's structural explanation is a moral one. This has been a short-term crisis caused, the argument goes, by greed and recklessness—whether of bankers or borrowers, depending on your political outlook. And yet in some ways, Sarkozy has a point that the moralists ignore. Our recent model of capitalism has involved spiraling inequality and unsustainable trade and financial imbalances. Debt, it is clear, was simply obscuring deep problems within the world economy, giving the lie to the laissez-faire belief that ever more open markets are the high road to stability....

Posted on: Monday, March 18, 2013 - 12:04

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Nicole Hemmer: Guarding the Right's Flank

SOURCE: LA Times (3-13-13)

Nicole Hemmer, a research associate at the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney, also teaches history at the University of Miami.

To understand what is wrong with today's political right, look no further than the American Conservative Union. The ACU made headlines last month when it snubbed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. A source told National Review that Christie hadn't been invited to the ACU's annual Conservative Political Action Conference, which begins Thursday, because of his "limited future" in the Republican Party.

To put that in perspective: The ACU found ample room at CPAC for Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.

Nor did it stop at Christie. For the second year in a row, the ACU gave the cold shoulder to GOProud, a conservative gay rights group that had participated in previous years. It also excluded Pamela Geller, a past CPAC attendee and vocal critic of Islam.

In preparation for this year's conference, the ACU drew arbitrary dividing lines all over the conservative map. If the group has its way, the realm of "true conservatism" will be a minuscule state with irregular boundaries, constant border skirmishes and ever-diminishing hopes of producing a national leader....

Posted on: Thursday, March 14, 2013 - 17:34

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Gil Troy: An Ahistorical Tantrum In The Times

SOURCE: The Daily Beast (3-13-13)

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and a Shalom Hartman Intstitute Engaging Israel Research Fellow in Jerusalem. His next book, “Moynihan’s Moment: America's Fight against Zionism as Racism,” will be published by Oxford University Press this fall.

Yes, Israel can be a Jewish, democratic and legitimate state.

Something about Israel’s place in the international community makes it like Charlie Brown’s friend Pig Pen. If anyone is slinging any mud intellectually, ideologically, politically, diplomatically, it usually ends up on Israel. If one form of nationalism in the U.N., a forum of nationalisms, is going to be singled out as supposedly “racist,” it will be Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement that established Israel. And if intellectuals are going to disdain one ethno-nationalist state, of all the world’s ethno-national states, it ends up being Israel, too.

I can dodge the intellectual trap Joseph Levine tries setting in his recent New York Times blogpost, “On Questioning the Jewish State,” and avoid calling him anti-Semitic for questioning Israel’s legitimacy. But just because he is a philosopher, and just because the Times published his screed, I need not accept his facile, distorted, slanted arguments, which single out the Jewish State for special contempt. Levine targets Israel with a shocking disregard for the complexity of most countries’ characters—and total ignorance of the history of nineteenth-century European romantic nationalism. His caricature of Israel as a state that necessarily oppresses non-Jews because it is a Jewish State overlooks Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the complex status of Israel’s Arab minority, and Israel’s noble track record compared to most of its neighbors and most other countries...

Posted on: Thursday, March 14, 2013 - 17:30

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David M. Perry: What the Name 'Francis' Means for the Modern Church

SOURCE: The Atlantic (3-14-13)

David M. Perry is an associate professor of history and director of the Catholic studies minor at Dominican University in Illinois.

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: Habemus Papam ... Qui sibi nomen imposuit Franciscum. "I announce to you with great joy: We have a pope. ... Who has taken for himself the name Francis!"

There are two immediate messages to take away from the election of Francis. First, this quick vote reflects a clear unity of purpose among the cardinals. Second, his selection of the name Francis speaks volumes about his potential approach to the coming papacy.

First, while the median number of ballots cast since 1830 is only 6.5, and this time it only took 5, I and many others had the sense this time it might take longer. Pope Benedict's resignation was so unexpected and the scandals plaguing the church so acute, that here seemed a moment for a radical shift in direction. But history tells us that a conclave has to drag on for awhile so that the two (or more) camps reach an impasse and choose a radical new direction. That did not happen here. By report, Bergoglio was the runner-up at the last conclave and considered a "papabile" this time around, if perhaps a little old for a church seeking new energy and a change in direction. And that's exactly right. This is not a change in direction.

So why Bergoglio? He is a first-generation Argentinian, of Italian descent, who has been in Italy and involved in the governance of the Church for many years. He must have excellent relations with his fellow cardinals. He can simultaneously serve as a symbol for Catholicism in the global south and assuage any concerns of the Italian cardinals that they are losing control over the papacy with a third consecutive non-Italian pope. He is relatively old, but now that Benedict has set an example of voluntary retirement, Pope Francis can choose to follow his predecessor's path as needed. Whatever one thinks of Benedict's reign as Pope, part of his legacy will be that he enabled his successors to resign without drama....

Posted on: Thursday, March 14, 2013 - 17:25

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Jon Wiener: For-Profit Fiasco: California Public Colleges Turn to Web Courses

SOURCE: The Nation (3-14-13)

Jon Wiener is an historian who teaches at UC Irvine, and a contributing editor to The Nation.

Here’s how California treats its public colleges and universities: first, cut public funds, and thus classes; then wait for over-enrollment, as students are unable to get the classes they need to graduate; finally, shift classes online, for profit. That’s the way Laila Lalami, UC Riverside creative writing professor, explained it in a recent tweet, and that’s pretty much the whole story behind the bill introduced this week by the Democratic leader of the state senate, Darrell Steinberg. His bill requires California’s community colleges, along with the 23 Cal State schools and the ten-campus university, to allow students to substitute online courses for required courses taught by faculty members. The key to the proposal: the online courses will be offered by profit-making companies.

Steinberg argues, correctly, that the state’s colleges and universities have an obligation to offer the courses they require for graduation. Right now hundreds of thousands of students are prevented from graduating on schedule because they can’t get into required lower division courses. That’s shameful, and intolerable. But it’s a crisis created by the legislature, when it cut hundreds of millions from the state’s higher education budget over the last few years.

Advocates of the new plan downplay the for-profit aspect and emphasize instead that they want to “mobilize technology” to “help students achieve their dreams.” But the National Review Online rightly emphasized the key element of the plan (while providing their own ideological spin): the proposal will “break the higher education cartel” by bringing in profit-making corporations with a different “business model.”...

Posted on: Thursday, March 14, 2013 - 17:07

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Victor Davis Hanson: The New Affirmative Action

SOURCE: National Review (3-14-13)

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in the spring from Bloomsbury Books.

Sometime in the first years of the new millennium, “global warming” evolved into “climate change.” Amid growing controversies over the planet’s past temperatures, Al Gore and other activists understood that human-induced “climate change” could explain almost any weather extremity — droughts or floods, temperatures too hot or too cold, hurricanes and tornadoes — better than “global warming” could.

Similar verbal gymnastics have gradually turned “affirmative action” into “diversity” — a word ambiguous enough to avoid the innate contradictions of a liberal society affirming the illiberal granting of racial preferences.

In an increasingly multiracial society, it has grown hard to determine the racial ancestry of millions of Americans. Is someone who is ostensibly one-half Native American or African-American classified as a minority eligible for special consideration in hiring or college admissions, while someone one-quarter or one-eighth is not? How exactly does affirmative action adjudicate our precise ethnic identities these days? These are not illiberal questions — given, for example, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s past claims of being Native American to gain advantage in her academic career....

Posted on: Thursday, March 14, 2013 - 16:20

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