On Thursday, February 24, I was denied entry to Canada. After six hours’ detention and sporadic interrogation at Vancouver airport I was escorted to the next flight to Seattle. It turns out I am “inadmissible on grounds of violating human or international rights for being a proscribed senior official in the service of a government...

  Robert E. Holloway is a high school teacher in suburban Northern Virginia. He is probably considered a decent man by his neighbors, a competent educator by his peers, and a figure of some authority by his students. He is the embodiment of much that is wrong with this country’s education system, however: a bigot,...

  Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman has announced that President Hosni Mubarak was stepping down from the office of president of the republic “and has charged the high council of the armed forces to administer the affairs of the country.” In other words, the Army has taken over. This is the least bad outcome on...

  It is essential to take William (“Bill”) Kristol seriously. He has been so utterly wrong on so many things (America’s ability to run the world, NATO, Turkey, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Sarah Palin, Russia, Iran, Georgia, John McCain, missile defense . . . ) that his pronouncements merit respect. Being consistently wrong—in the fleeting...

  The image of the “democratic revolution” in Egypt, as constructed by the mainstream media in North America and Europe over the past two weeks, evokes the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The BBC World Service, NPR and other Western media outlets bring us young, articulate, lightly-accented demonstrators who talk of democracy,...

  President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union Address was almost entirely focused on domestic issues. This was appropriate considering the magnitude of social, economic and moral problems America is facing, and the attendant absurdity of pursuing grand global themes for as long as those problems remain unresolved. The clichés and the rhetoric were...

  Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Al Gore’s vice-presidential candidate in 2000 who subsequently broke away from the Democratic Party and won reelection as an independent in 2006, has announced that he will not seek reelection when his fourth term expires next year. Lieberman’s departure will not make much difference to the political scene in...

  The murder of 21 Christians in a New Year’s Day bomb attack in Alexandria will accelerate the ongoing exodus of the Coptic community from Egypt. Its members know that they are second-class citizens. After some three-dozen attacks over the past three decades, resulting in three hundred Christian deaths, they know that the government is both unable and unwilling...

  Alexander Lukashenko has won the fourth presidential election in Belarus, taking 79 percent of votes cast in the turnout of over 90 percent, according to official figures. The opposition staged a protest rally in the central square in Minsk after polling stations had closed on Sunday, claiming that the election was stolen. Some protestors...

  The details of an elaborate KLA-run human organ harvesting ring, broadly known for years, have been confirmed by a Council of Europe report published on January 15. The report, “Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking of human organs in Kosovo” identifies the province’s recently re-elected “prime minister” Hashim Thaçi as the boss of a “mafia-like” Albanian group specialized in smuggling weapons,...

  A few hours before Richard Holbrooke’s death last Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a group of America’s top diplomats gathered at the State Department for a Christmas party that he was “practically synonymous with American foreign policy.” Her assessment is correct: Richard Holbrooke’s career embodies some of the least attractive traits of...

  WikiLeaks documents reveal that Russian operatives may have been tracking the assassins of rogue intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko well before he was poisoned in London in November 2006. The agents apparently wanted to prevent his murder not because they cared for him, which they did not, but because they knew that Moscow would be blamed for the deed....

  An interesting batch of WikiLeaks documents—probably the most disquieting to date—was published by the Guardian earlier this week. Some concern the decision, made by NATO’s Military Committee less than a year ago, “to expand the NATO Contingency Plan for Poland, Eagle Guardian, to include the defense and reinforcement of the Baltic States.” Others indicate that the Administration...

  Over two thousand four hundred American sailors, soldiers and airmen were killed in Pearl Harbor 69 years ago today. Had we had an equivalent of WikiLeaks back in 1941, however, the course of history could have been very different. FDR would have found it much more difficult to maneuvre the country into being attacked...

  Occupying some two thirds of the old czarist province of Bessarabia, with the rivers Dniester to the east and Prut to the west, the Republic of Moldova is a small, poor, landlocked state. Its parliamentary election, held on November 28, should have been irrelevant to anyone except the faraway country’s three and a half million people, of whom we know...

  North Korea’s artillery attack on a South Korean island on Tuesday was the latest in a series of Pyongyang’s aggressive moves over the past year and a half. They started with ballistic missile tests in April of last year, soon followed by a nuclear test in May. Kim Jong Il, who may be mad,...

  On November 21 Ireland formally applied for a rescue package worth $90 billion, having failed to control its financial crisis with austerity measures and strict budgetary planning. European Union officials quickly agreed to the request, which follows an agreement negotiated last week in Dublin by a joint EU and IMF team. They hope that the Irish rescue will...

  Alarming newspaper headlines greeted me at London’s Heathrow Airport on my arrival from the Balkans yesterday. The Daily Mail led with the EU President’s warning that “Ireland’s debt crisis could kill the European Union stone-dead.” The Independent’s front page (“Ghost estates and broken lives: the human cost of the Irish crash”) was accompanied by a photo that could have...

  According to a seasoned observer of Moscow’s political scene, the Russian political class cringed last Wednesday morning on learning that Obama had suffered a humiliating political defeat. The Russian leaders don’t think much of Obama personally, but they are worried over what the Republican control of the House might mean for the fledgling “reset”...

  Excerpts from a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club, Baltimore, October 23, 2010 Two weeks ago the first “gay pride parade” was staged in Belgrade. Serbia’s “pro-European” government had been promoting the event as yet another proof that Serbia is fit to join the European Union, that is has overcome the legacy of its...

  Excerpts from a speech at Providence College given on Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010. Two sets of fallacies have dominated the mainstream debate about the Ground Zero mosque—and before we go any further, let’s get this straight: it is a mosque, frantic insistence by the Qusling elite to use one euphemistic misnomer or another notwithstanding....

  The news just in that Dutch prosecutors have changed their mind about prosecuting Geert Wilders for the Orwellian crime of “discriminating against Muslims” and “inciting hatred” is prima facie a victory for free speech and all that. In fact it is not nearly as good as it may seem. The establishment is scared of continuing to hound the...

  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton started her two-day Balkan tour in Sarajevo on Tuesday by issuing a fresh call for Bosnia’s centralization. She urged “reforms that would improve key services, attract more foreign investment, and make the government more functional and accountable.” Hatreds have eased, she went on, “but nationalism persists. Meanwhile the promise of...

  In the last week of September the House of Representatives passed legislation aimed at imposing trade sanctions against China unless it lets its currency appreciate, thereby reducing its export advantage. In a subsequent speech clearly aimed at China, Japan and Brazil, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner attacked currency policies likely to result in “short-term distortions...

  On October 5, 2000, in an almost bloodless coup by the security forces staged against the backdrop of massive street protests, Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in Serbia. Ten years later, many of those who cheered his downfall then (this author included) have nothing to celebrate. In the run-up to “Peti oktobar” they...

  I met Joe Sobran in early 1997 at a conference near Chicago on the American intervention in the Balkans. It was not his area of primary interest, but he understood all of the key issues because he understood U.S. foreign policy and its domestic roots. His diagnosis, which applied then, in Bill Clinton’s second...

  In recent weeks the proponents of an American war against Iran have been getting impatient with President Obama’s apparent unwillingness to get with the program. Joe Lieberman, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman, and Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now press the President to impose a short time limit on the...

  Former President Bill Clinton declared his strong support for the Ground Zero mosque in an interview broadcast on September 12. He also suggested a clever new spin to the promoters of the project. Much or even most of the controversy, he said, “could have been avoided, and perhaps still can be, if the people who want...

  “Conservative” Joseph DioGuardi’s “sensational” election as the GOP Senate candidate in New York has shaken up the Republican Party, gloats the Tropoja-based Albanian Minerals President M. Mujaj in the Wall Street Journal Blog. “The American people have spoken,” this self-styled compatriot of ours is telling us. “The American way of life needs to be rebalanced. Households...