Below is a list of essays, published recently online. I have selected a few, which I believe are among the most eloquent, trenchant and potentially influential, that have appeared in the most widely read sites. In each case the title of the author’s essay is a link that will take you to the cited piece. If the author has a web site, clicking on the author’s name will take you there.
New: May 2020: Charles C.W. Cooke: Our Technological Renaissance. An optimistic and uplifting discussion of how the technological advances of the last generation represent a monumentally positive achievement of humanity, and how they portend incredibly positive developments for our future.
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Ron Prosor: J’accuse. Israel’s ambassador to the UN, delivers an impassioned speech on moral equivalence and moral clarity in the world’s treatment of the “Palestine” question.
William Voegeli: The Case Against Liberal Compassion. A brilliant essay in which this senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books explains that liberal compassion is not really about the sympathetic desire to help the less fortunate, but more about the “satisfaction of pious preening.” (The above link may not work after 11/30/14; in that case go here, and search in the Archives for the Oct 2014 issue.)
Jim Simpson: Ebola Pandemic: Risks and Realities. A comprehensive, and very scary, report on the Ebola outbreak, the way that America is handling it and the dangers to our society.
Jeffrey H. Anderson: The Second Obamacare Election. An article by the Executive Director of The 2017 Project in the Oct 27, 2014 edition of The Weekly Standard. Anderson explains why the election (in a few days) will be a second major electoral repudiation of Obamacare. We shall see next week if he is correct.
Matti Friedman: An insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth. An essay by the former AP correspondent, which went viral in August 2014, concerning the double standard that the world’s journalists and editors apply to Israel.
Brigitte Gabriel: Tolerating Hate Is Not an Option. Text of her speech to a United Nations Symposium on Anti-Semitism — which is a supreme irony since the former is a major sponsor of the latter.
Yair Lapid: Platform 17 Speech in Berlin in Memory of Holocaust Victims. Transcript of an extraordinarily powerful speech by the Israeli Minister of Finance connecting the actions of the participants in the recent Israel-Hamas War to those caught up in the Holocaust.
Michael Oren: In Defense of Zionism. Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, gives a spirited and inspired defense of Zionism — particularly poignant and relevant in light of the Israel-Hamas War and the attendant unpleasantness in Europe, the UN and even the United States.
Caroline Glick: Israel, Hamas and Obama’s Foreign Policy. Another brilliant article by Ms. Glick; this time outlining the betrayal of Israel by Obama and Kerry when they sought to enforce a “solution” to the Israel-Hamas clash completely on Hamas’ terms.
Robert Oscar Lopez: It’s Personal: Confronting the Academy’s Leftism. Lopez writes about a favorite topic of mine — namely, the difficult professional life of a conservative professor in academia. In a deeply personal testimonial, Lopez describes the hell such a person encounters if he does not “play ball” by paying homage to the idiotic (yet dangerous) ideas and machinations of the campuses dominant leftist professors and administrators. For a similar personal story told by yours truly, click here.
Caroline Glick: The Disappearance of US Will. According to Glick, “There is a direct correlation between the US elite’s preoccupation with social issues running the narrow and solipsistic gamut from gay marriage to transgender bathrooms to a phony war against women, and America’s inability to recognize the growing threats to the global order or understand why Americans should care about the world at all.
And there is a similarly direct correlation between the growing aggression of US foes and Obama’s decision to slash defense spending while allowing the US nuclear arsenal to become all but obsolete.
America’s spurned allies will take the actions they need to take to protect themselves. Some will persevere, others will likely be overrun.
But with Americans across the ideological spectrum pretending that failure is success and defeat is victory, while turning their backs on the growing storm, how will America protect itself?”
Glick castigates Obama, and by extension the America people, for a feckless retreat from world affairs, which, she argues, will lead — as has such maneuvers in the past — to calamitous events that will redound to the harm of the people of the United Staes, indeed to all the peoples of the world.
Reuel Gerecht: A Baleful Peace Process. Gerecht excoriates the US foreign policy establishment for unending devotion to its woebegone, decades-old, misconceived Arab-Israeli “peace process.” According to him, “To be outrageously iconoclastic among the Washington foreign-policy crowd is easy: Just suggest that the Israeli-Arab peace process is not merely pointless but actually damaging to America’s position in the Middle East and bad for both Israelis and Palestinians.” Gerecht goes on to explain precisely why the policy is pointless, hopeless and dangerous to all concerned parties. In this regard, the reader is referred to Caroline Glick’s new book, The One State Solution.
Caroline Glick: The Truth Hurts. From Glick’s comments on Kerry’s “messianic” obsession with a peace agreement between Israel and the PLO, “As the US’s strongest ally, and also as a country that has depended for decades on US support, Israel is a passenger in the back seat of the car. On the one hand, we are happy for the ride. On the other hand, the administration’s driving is endangering our survival. It is only because our leaders are grateful to the US for its support that the government is going along with Kerry’s ridiculous peace-processing. More important, what is gratitude, exactly? Is it shutting up and watching your closest friend drive both of you over a cliff? Of course not. To be a good ally – and a grateful one – requires you to warn your ally when his actions are ill-advised and dangerous. And that is precisely what Israel has done. Israel’s behavior is the definition of proper behavior. Aside from being dead wrong, the anti-Semitic undertones of the administration’s castigation of the Jewish state as ungrateful are hard to miss…”
David Solway: What Will It Take?. Solway writes to justify two sentiments that appear early in his piece — namely, “Americans still seem willing to give a pass to the disaster in the White House” and “Barack Hussein Obama is a willful, indoctrinated child of the Left with strong Islamic sympathies who is not fit to govern.”
Paul Kengor: The Cold War We Lost. Kengor explains how, even though we won the Cold War internationally a generation ago, since then the US has been losing (if we have not already lost) the war domestically against the same collectivist enemy.
Daniel Greenfield: The American Iron Curtain. Greenfield recalls Churchill’s famous 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri in which Sir Winston coined the phrase “Iron Curtain ” to describe the tyranny that the Soviets had imposed on Eastern Europe. Greenfield rues the “Paper Curtain” that the Progressives have dropped over the US and predicts a commensurate loss of freedom by the American people that might approach the level suffered by the Europeans.
Jay Cost: Killing Obamacare. Cost explains why Obamacare is even more dangerous to American society than most conservatives imagine, and that if it is not stopped soon, it might well prove impossible to do so in 2016 — even if the GOP takes control of the government then.
Daniel Greenfield: The Sun Sets on Washington, D.C. Greenfield examines the government shutdown in the context of the behemoth into which the federal government has metastasized.
Victor Davis Hanson: The Late, Great Middle Class. Hanson analyzes how, despite Obama’s never-ending claim that he is intent on helping the middle class, his administration’s policies are wreaking havoc with the job market upon which the people of the middle class so desperately depend.
Jim Yardley: So Life is Unfair, Is It? Yardley debunks Obama’s repetitious and malicious use of the word unfair.
Charles Krauthammer: The Real Navy Yard Scandal. Krauthammer explains how the abandonment of the mental health practices for dealing with schizophrenic and other mentally ill individuals, so prevalent in past generations, has played a significant role in the mass shootings that have plagued our society recently.