Claude Guéant, the French interior minister, sparked a firestorm last month when he praised Western values as “superior” to the oppressive ones found elsewhere, namely the Islamic world. Yet the controversy did more to spotlight an area in which the West clearly trails its rivals: self-confidence. If a government official cannot extol the unique virtues […]
They say what goes around comes around, or to paraphrase the Good Book, you reap what you sow. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in recent global data on abortion. For years, feminists have maintained that women will not be truly free or equal unless they are free to abort their unborn children. They have sought […]
Negotiations for a final document at the UN Commission on the Status of Women were supposed to end more than a week ago. However, they dragged on for another several days and resulted in a stinging defeat for the Obama administration and anger on the part of the developing world. The US was trying to […]
The United States burned diplomatic bridges during this year’s UN Commission on the Status of Women by using force and deception to pass an unpopular resolution calling for international access to contraception. Countries accused the US of manipulating the negotiations process from start to finish through proposing the initial text of the resolution on maternal […]
Half of Iraq’s indigenous Christians are gone due to the unleashed forces of jihad, many of them fleeing to nearby Syria; yet, as the Assad regime comes under attack by al-Qaeda and others, the jihad now seeps into Syria, where Christians are experiencing a level of persecution unprecedented in the nation’s modern history. Likewise, some […]
In recent years, American liberals’ love-affair with all things contemporary Western European (sans Margaret Thatcher and Benedict XVI) has acquired an increasingly desperate edge. As evidence for the European social model’s severe dysfunctionality continues to mount before our eyes, the American left is acutely aware how much it discredits its decades-old effort to take America down […]
America’s immigration debate will never be adequately addressed until we think clearly about the economic incentives that encourage Mexican citizens to risk their lives to cross the border. In fact, if we care about human dignity we must think comprehensively about the conditions for human flourishing so that the effective policies promote the common good. […]
Because it is now almost axiomatic for American school textbooks to whitewash all things Islamic (see here for example), it may be useful to examine one of those aspects that are regularly distorted: the Muslim conquests. Few events of history are so well documented and attested to as are these conquests, which commenced soon after […]
Some thoughts on U.S. policy toward Syria on the occasion of the just-ended “Friends of Syria” meeting in Tunisia: Since the end of the cold war, many Americans have a sense of being so strong, they don’t need to think about their own security but can afford to focus on the immediate humanitarian concerns of […]
From Damascus to Tehran, a test for world leadership is underway. Daily, the Syrian military—well-armed, highly trained thugs whose current mission is to keep dictator Bashar Assad in power—kills up to 200 or more of its own citizens. Protests from Washington, the withdrawal of the U.S. ambassador, and an effort to condemn Syria in the […]
If Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor were the naïfs who foisted the United Nations on the world, George H. W. Bush was responsible for its revival as a political force. From about 1950 to 1990, the United Nations Security Council was essentially toothless, as the Soviet and U.S. governments disagreed on issue after […]
