Editorial/Leader [Wall Street Journal] — A day after CIA Director John Brennan testified that ISIS now boasts far more fighters than al Qaeda had at its peak, there’s more disagreement in the Obama ranks. Fifty-one State Department diplomats have signed a letter that assails President Obama’s Syria policy…

Two decades ago the world stood by as thousands of Bosnian Muslims were rounded up and killed in Srebrenica. Aleppo is President Obama’s Srebrenica—not that a fawning press corps has noticed. Continue reading “‘Aleppo is President Obama’s Srebrenica…’” »

By ROGER KIMBALL [Real Clear Politics] – You can’t set foot on a college campus these days without encountering incessant chatter about “diversity.” It doesn’t take long to realize that by “diversity” most colleges really mean “strict intellectual and moral conformity about any contentious issue.”  Indeed, most colleges and universities are one-party states, purveying, at enormous cost, a species of ideological indoctrination while their charges enjoy a four-year holiday from the responsibilities of adult life masquerading as a liberal education.  Their parents are happy, or at least reconciled to the expense and the indoctrination, because said college provides their child with the all-important stamp of societal approval in the form of a meal ticket called a “diploma.”  What have they actually learned? What skills have they mastered? What is their character?  Those are questions that no one, having just spent  (in many cases) $250,000, wants to ask. Continue reading “A unique American college becomes just another State U.” »

By JAMES POULOS [Orange County Register] — President Obama has studiously ignored the obvious – year upon year upon year – when it comes to France’s critical role in staving off disaster in Europe. To be sure, the White House is well aware that sometimes the most important work in foreign policy takes place all but silently, behind the scenes. But, repeating a pattern that has all but demolished its credibility in the realm of leadership, the administration has simply opted out of shaping public and elite opinion around the centrality of U.S.-French relations to a clear, coherent and now more than urgent mission: to defeat international jihad and ensure European peace and security. Continue reading “Aprés France, le déluge.” »

By BEN VOTH [American Thinker] — Even President Barack Obama recently lamented the declining state of affairs on America’s college campuses. Essentially, a doctrinaire sense of victimology has descended upon campuses such that free speech, critical thinking, and debate are all but abolished in favor of “Safe spaces.” The complaints are extensive and well-founded. Allan Bloom’s concern in the 1980s about the “Closing of the American Mind” is profound, real, and upon us at today’s university campuses. What is not often discussed is what should be done to reverse this crisis and to begin anew the opening of the American mind. Continue reading “The closed minds of American academics.” »

First we burn her alive, then we steal her jewelry. Wait until ‘Women’s Hour’ hears about this.

By MARTIN BAILEY [Art Newspaper] —The French buyer of the Joan of Arc ring is defying the UK authorities, saying that he did not need an export licence. “The ring has returned to France and here it will stay,” declared Philippe de Villiers, the founder of the Puy du Fou historical theme park, speaking at a ceremony to mark the return of the relic at Puy du Fou, near Nantes, on 20 March. Continue reading “The new Lord of the Ring is, appropriately, French.” »

By ANTHONY HOWELL.

As for our enemies, shouldn’t we restrict
Their freedom of expression, scandalised
When they advocate violence that costs them
Their lives since it flies in the teeth
Of the violence we mete out from some
Invulnerable height?

—From a poem by the author.

IT OCCURS TO ME that there is a paradigmatic relationship between drones and suicide bombers. In his chapter on “Lordship and Bondage” in The Phenomenology of Spirit, Georg Hegel wrote:

… it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential consciousness is not (just) being, not the immediate form in which it appears, nor its emergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that is pure being-for-self. The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognised as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.

For Hegel, writing in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, the master is one who is prepared to die for his cause, while the one who is not prepared to take this risk, whose consciousness accepts bondage rather than loss of life, will inevitably become enslaved. Continue reading “The mastery of the suicide bomber.” »

By SAMUEL GREGG [Public Discourse] — In our time, three phenomena tend to come to mind when considering Europe’s contemporary problems. One is the economic difficulties troubling not only small European nations, such as Greece and Portugal, but also large countries, such as Italy and France. The second is the influx of migrants likely to continue sweeping across Europe’s borders over the next few years. As the Paris atrocities have demonstrated, no amount of political correctness can disguise the fact that the migration issue cannot be separated from the problem of Islamist terrorism. And that raises a third matter, which is on everyone’s mind but which few European leaders seem willing to address in any comprehensive way: is the Islamic religion, taken on its own terms, compatible with the values and institutions of Western culture? Continue reading “Can Islam be Westernized?” »