Roundup: Media's Take

Alexander Zaitchik: A Kremlin-Flavored Anti-Defamation League

[Alexander Zaitchik, a writer living in Brooklyn, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.] On a jetlagged June morning in downtown Kiev, I briefly but completely lost my mind. Three hundred of us had been flown in for the founding conference of a new Moscow-based watchdog organization, World Without Nazism. For the event’s kick-off, conference participants gathered in a sun-dappled Vichnoyi Slavy Park, home to the city’s Monument of E

Peter Ludlow: WikiLeaks and Hacktivist Culture

[Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, is the editor of Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias.] In recent months there has been considerable discussion about the WikiLeaks phenomenon, and understandably so, given the volume and sensitivity of the documents the website has released. What this discussion has revealed, however, is that the media and government agencies believe there is a single protagonist to be concerned with—something of a Jame

Tristan McConnell: Rwanda's Other Genocide

[Tristan McConnell, a journalist based in Nairobi, covers east and Horn of Africa as a correspondent for the Times of London and GlobalPost.] Paul Kagame, the country’s de facto leader since marching into Rwanda at the head of a Tutsi rebel army in the summer of 1994, calls himself a Rwandan. The words “Tutsi” and “Hutu” have been erased from identity cards and excised from open conversation. But still, everyone knows. There are laws against “divisionism” and “genocide

Josh Burek: Political Activism for the Rest of Us?

[Josh Burek writes for the CS Monitor.] It was refreshing to hear about Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity. Mr. Stewart's rally is ambitious, to say the least: He wants busy, non-extremists to put their lives on hold and join him in an effort to "take it down a notch for America."... Stewart has promised to feature special guests who will presumably address the problem posed by extreme factions in American politics. Too bad one of them couldn't be James Mad

Josef Joffe: Why Palestine Won’t Remake the Middle East

[Josef Joffe is editor of Die Zeit and a senior fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and an Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford. This article ran in the September 23, 2010 issue of the magazine.] The most durable myth in the Middle East is: "It's Palestine, stupid." It lies at the heart of Barack Obama's Middle East diplomacy, which is why the president has been pummeling the Israelis and pushing the Palestinians to resume talks. Accordin

Stephen Kinzer: Learn From Vietnam ... Dump Karzai

[Stephen Kinzer is a veteran foreign correspondent and the author of Bitter Fruit and Overthrow, among other works. His newest book is Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future.] How much bad luck can we Americans have? We face a spot of trouble in a faraway country, so we install a fine-looking, English-speaking fellow as president. He turns out to be corrupt and repressive. We can live with that. But it gets worse: He won't even fight our war correctly! He steals our money. His s

Nikolas K. Gvosdev: Tea Party Will Have Jacksonian Foreign Policy

[Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the former editor of the National Interest, and a frequent foreign policy commentator in both the print and broadcast media. He is currently on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of the Navy or the U.S. government.] A great deal of ink has been spilled on the domestic trajectory of the "Tea Party" movement, which is demonstrating its growing clout within the ranks of the Republican part

Roger Scruton: The Idea of a University

[Roger Scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life (Continuum).] The pope is about to visit England, and is expected during the visit to announce the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, the scholar, priest, and poet, who left the Anglican for the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, and who was to become the most important Catholic intellectual of his time. From 1854, for a period of five years, Newman was rector of the

Gregory Feifer and Brian Whitmore: The Velvet Surrender

[Gregory Feifer is a senior correspondent for Radio Free Europe in Prague. His book The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan was released in paperback this year. Brian Whitmore is the Europe editor at Radio Free Europe and co-author of The Power Vertical, a Russian-affairs blog. This article ran in the September 23, 2010 issue of the magazine.] Václav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, is legendary for his lack of manners. When his country assumed the rotating presid

Austen Ivereigh: The Pope was Right to Say "Remember Britain's Spiritual History"

[The writer is co-ordinator of Catholic Voices.] Pope Benedict could not have been clearer about why he is here. May Britain "always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate," he said, before reminding the nation of "the Christian foundation that underpins its freedoms," citing William Wilberforce and Florence Nightingale, and Britain's sacrifice in standin

Michael Tomasky: The Republicans Have Created a Frankenstein Monster

[Michael Tomasky is editor-in-chief of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.] ...[T]he larger question is where the Tea Party is going and how profound its long-term impact will be. The optimistic answer is that if it gets mixed results in the midterms this November, the economy improves, and Barack Obama's approval numbers go back up above 50% while Sarah Palin's act starts wearing thin, then 2010 will prove to be the Tea Party's zenith. At the other extreme, the most worriso

Andrew Brown: Pope Benedict XVI was Talking About the Nazis, Not Richard Dawkins

[Andrew Brown is the editor of Cif belief. His most recent book is Fishing in Utopia, which won the 2009 Orwell prize] We're not used to Germans coming here to talk about the war, so many people have jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion about Pope Benedict's attack on atheist extremism. He didn't mean us. He didn't even mean Richard Dawkins. He was talking about the Nazis, who, he said "wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially t

Reza Aslan: Turkey's Democratic Push

[Reza Aslan is the author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam." Follow him on Twitter @AslanMedia.] A political party espousing a commitment to what it calls "Islamic moral values" has brought Turkey closer to a full-fledged democracy than it has ever been. On Sunday, 30 years after a military coup overturned the democratically elected government of Suleyman Demirel, Turks voted overwhelmingly for constitutional changes pu

Francine Kiefer: Turkey Needs a New Ataturk

[Francine Kiefer is a columnist for the Christian Science Monitor.] Secularists in mostly Muslim Turkey are disheartened. The judiciary and military – two pillars that have strongly supported the separation of mosque and state in this strategically important country – are toppling. That's a worry to those who treasure Turkish secularism, a principle of modern Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. While their concern is understandable, their view is skewe

Hamza Yusuf Hanson: Amid Mosque Dispute, Muslims Can Look to Irish Catholics for Hope

[Hamza Yusuf Hanson is an American Muslim scholar and cofounder of Zaytuna College, which opened last month in Berkeley, Calif.] The controversy over the planned mosque near ground zero has devolved into an uncivil war between sense and sensibility. It’s a definitive dialectic between reason and emotion. Sense says: “Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda believe in a Manichean world of good versus evil, Islam versus America, but we know better. To repudiate that view we must assert that aspe

Paul Goldman: Has Sarah Palin Saved the GOP?

[The writer is a political strategist and a former chairman of Virginia's Democratic Party.] ...There has been a lot of carping about Republicans' prospects for November since Palin-backed candidate Christine O'Donnell defeated longtime Delaware officeholder Mike Castle for the Republican Senate nomination Tuesday. But contrary to conventional wisdom, the 2008 vice presidential nominee has kept the party strong. How? She has kept the Tea Party faithful inside the GOP tent. Had she i

Valerie Jarrett: Closing the Wage Gap: It's a Matter of Survival for Working Families

[The writer is senior adviser and assistant to President Obama for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement, and chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls.] America first put an equal-pay law on the books in 1963, when women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by a man. While this legislation was landmark at the time, its core provisions require updating if it is to fulfill its promise. Nearly 50 years later, the wage gap has narrowed by only 18 ce

Roger Cohen: A Pope in a Schismatic Isle

[Roger Cohen is a columnist for the NYT.] ...Freud might have questioned the wisdom of young Henry wedding a dead sibling’s spouse six years his senior. But the match had dynastic merits. It endured through several infant deaths and stillborn children — including the male heirs Henry craved — before the king sought a divorce from Pope Clement VII, was denied, and, in 1534, severed relations with the Roman Catholic Church. This was a divorce row that did not blow over.

Peter Dreier: The Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century

[Peter Dreier is professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College. He is co-author of The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (University of California Press, 2005) and Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century (2nd edition, University Press of Kansas, 2005) and co-editor of Up Against the Sprawl.]A hundred years ago, any soapbox orator who called for women's suffrage, laws protecting the environment, an end to

Laura Seay: Newt Gingrich Dissertation on Congo Sheds Light On His Jab that Obama is 'Anticolonial'

[Laura Seay is an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College in Atlanta, who blogs at Texas in Africa.]Newt Gingrich is in the news again, this time for picking up on Dinesh D'Souza's comment in a Forbes article about President Obama having inherited his father's"anti-colonial"