Roundup: Media's Take

Catrina Stewart: The decline of Israel’s left

[Catrina Stewart is a journalist.] One night eight years ago in Ramallah, on the West Bank, a group of Israeli peace activists gathered at Yasser Arafat's home to stage a sit-in. Ariel Sharon, Israel's hardline prime minister, was suspected of having despatched a team to kill the Palestinian leader, and the activists saw their plan as the only way to deter the assassins. Through the night, they talked with Arafat's bodyguards, trying to think about anything but the important things.

Graham Allison: Obama's Nuclear Mistake

[Graham Allison is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the author of Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe.] To paraphrase Vice President Joe Biden, this was a “bleeping big deal.” With all the immediate challenges demanding President Obama’s attention today, his choice to invest so much of his own mind-share and political capital in an issue seemingly so remote is remarkable.

Boris Tadic: An Apology for Srebrenica

[Mr. Tadic is the president of the Republic of Serbia.] The massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica in July 1995 constituted one of the most tragic chapters of the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s. In order to show that Serbia mourns for all the victims, I traveled to Srebrenica a year after I was first elected president of Serbia to stand with the survivors and bow to victims on the 10th anniversary of that terrible atrocity. This opened up

Christopher Caldwell: Amnesties help bring dictators to heel

[Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.] This week, labour leaders, university professors and the film director Pedro Almodóvar congregated outside the Audiencia Nacional, Spain’s national court. They were chanting their support for their country’s – possibly the world’s – most famous judge. Baltasar Garzón, the radical and ambitious investigative magistrate, made his name in Spain by revealing the tactics of Spanish counter-terrorism officials in the 1990s.

Wiktor Osiatynski: President Lech Kaczynski and the Katyn Mystique

[Wiktor Osiatynski is a professor at the Central European University in Budapest and the author of “Human Rights and Their Limits.”] MOMENTS after a plane carrying President Lech Kaczynski of Poland and 95 others crashed near Smolensk, Russia, on Saturday, killing all on board, hundreds of Poles were already in front of the presidential palace, lighting candles. Soon after the National Assembly gathered to honor the dead last week, the Archbishop of Krakow announced tha

Olga Tokarczuk: Where History’s March Is a Funeral Procession

[Olga Tokarczuk is the author of the novel “Primeval and Other Times.” This article was translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones from the Polish.] IT is hard to come to terms with the deaths of so many people, including the Polish president, from the plane crash last Saturday. And it is hard to believe the uncanny coincidence that the plane went down near the Katyn forest in Russia, the site of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers in 1940. When we heard, everything went quiet. Then peopl

Judy Dempsey: Tragedy as Harbinger of Change

[Judy Dempsey writes for the International Herald Tribune.] On Sunday evening, with Poles mourning the death of President Lech Kaczynski, who was killed the previous day in a plane crash en route to Katyn to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the murder of thousands of Polish officers, Russian state television broadcast “Katyn,” the award-winning movie made by the veteran Polish film director Andrzej Wajda. This was the second time in a matter of days that the movie wa

Amy Wilentz: Renew Haiti from the Ground Up

[Wilentz is the author of "The Rainy Season: Haiti Then and Now," which is being reissued with a new postearthquake introduction.] Everyone was talking about reimagining Haiti at the UN donors' conference two weeks ago. Haitian representatives and Haiti's friends, as they are called - including the U.S., France, Brazil, Canada, the UN and the Red Cross, as well as the two global development banks - got together to decide what to contribute and how those funds should be app

Jennifer Rubin: Why the Western Sahara Matters

[Jennifer Rubin writes for Commentary Magazine.] Most Americans know little or nothing about the conflict over the western Sahara or the self-styled “liberation” group the Polisario Front (originally backed by the former Soviet bloc). The Obama administration and Congress are focused on other problems in the Middle East. But the conflict that has ensnared Morocco, Algeria, and tens of thousands of Sahrawi (natives of the disputed territory) refugees warehoused in camps in Algeria po

Krzysztof Bobinski: Poland’s Second Katyń: Out of the Ashes

[Krzysztof Bobinski is the president of Unia & Polska, a pro-European think-tank in Warsaw. He was the Financial Times Warsaw correspondent (1976-2000) and later published Unia & Polska magazine.] Everyone tries to behave well when confronted by tragedy. Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, is proving no exception. He and the Russian authorities have behaved with notable compassion in the aftermath of the Polish plane-crash near the city of Smoleńsk on the mo

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Ghost of Bobby Lee

[Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.\ Ken Burns' Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until--in all honesty--some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me per

Joel McCleary and Mark Medish: A History of American Assassination Programs

[Joel McCleary and Mark Medish served as advisers respectively to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.] State-sponsored assassinations are back in season. Targeted snuff jobs of state enemies are on the rise from Dubai to Dagestan, from Yemen to Waziristan. Even the United States has returned to the practice: American military drones and special operations have been pushing the limits of President Ford’s 1976 executive ban against assassinations.... The last era of

Douglas Rogers: Zimbabwe’s Accidental Triumph

[Douglas Rogers is the author of “The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe.”] IN the midst of a wave of post-election political violence in Zimbabwe in 2008, Brian James, a white farmer who had been evicted from his property years earlier during President Robert Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned lands, found himself surrounded by a throng of black Zimbabweans in downtown Mutare, my hometown. The 50-strong crowd danced, sang and chanted political slogans for more than 20 minutes before Mr

Stephen Schwartz: American Labor Unions and How They Got That Way

[Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.] Labor unions in the United States were not always tied to the Democratic party and to a leftist ideological agenda. Once upon a time, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) stood at odds with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); the former resisted statist labor law changes and leftist union policies beginning in the 1930s and the latter supported them. The AFL and the CIO united in 1955, bu

C.E.S. Franks: Should the Governor-General be Canada's Head of State?

[C.E.S. Franks is Professor Emeritus of Politics at Queen's University in Kingston, ON.] In October, 2009, Canada’s Governor-General, Michaëlle Jean, said in a speech in Paris, “I, a francophone from the Americas, born in Haiti, who carries in her the history of the slave trade and the emancipation of blacks, at once Québécoise and Canadian, and today before you, Canada's head of state, proudly represent the promises and possibilities of that ideal of society.” This seemingly innocu

Ben Macintyre: In Dark Times Poland Needs the Sunlight of Truth

[Ben Macintyre writes for the Times (UK).] In 1943 Poland’s wartime leader accused Moscow of ordering the Katyn massacre, the systematic murder of 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals. A few months later he was dead, the victim of an air crash. Was it murder? Almost certainly not, but Poland’s painful past, combined with official secrecy, created precisely the muggy and mysterious conditions in which conspiracy theory thrives. In 2010 another Polish leader, Presiden

Norman J. Ornstein: A Pragmatic Moderate Faces the 'Socialist' Smear

[The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] In the 1950s, Democratic senators from the solidly Democratic South uniformly supported segregation and opposed civil rights and voting rights bills. They dutifully spent long hours on the Senate floor filibustering such efforts. Legend has it that during one marathon filibuster, after Olin Johnston of South Carolina, a populist liberal on economic matters, handed off the baton to Strom Thurmond, Johnston went

Andrew B. Wilson: Saved by the Bomb

[Andrew B. Wilson, a former Business Week bureau chief in Dallas and London, is a freelance writer living in St. Louis, Missouri.] In looking for superlatives to describe the two-day Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it "the largest (such) conference (hosted by the United States) since the one that came together (in San Francisco) around the founding of the United Nations in 1945." There is some irony

Paul B. Henze and S. Enders Wimbush: Russia's Encounter With Islam

[Mr. Henze was a member of President Carter's National Security Council and spent 20 years as a resident consultant at RAND. He is the author of "The Plot to Kill the Pope" (Holiday House, 1985). Mr. Wimbush is senior vice president of the Hudson Institute and a former director of Radio Liberty.] When bombs killed 40 people in Moscow's metro in late March, Russians received another poignant reminder of an increasingly likely future. These bombings were preceded by at least

Bret Stephens: The Fog Over Katyn Forest

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] 'The struggle of people against power," Milan Kundera famously observed, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Is there any place that better captures that truth than the Katyn Forest, or any metaphor more apt for Katyn's place in our historical memory than fog? It was, of course, a very mundane kind of fog that (along with some apparently reckless piloting) b