In Sartre’s grim play No Exit, a man and two women are in Hell, which, in this case, is a brightly lit drawing room furnished in the style of deuxième empire.  At one point, the man, Garcin, famously quips that “hell is other people” (“l’enfer, c’est les autres”).  One of the women, Inès, eventually responds...

Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who faced the death penalty in his native country for converting from Islam to Christianity, was granted political asylum in Italy and arrived in Rome on March 29.  His release came after several weeks of intense pressure by the United States and other Western governments on Kabul to spare his life...

For the past two-and-a-half millennia, our civilization has cultivated tragedy as an art form that articulates some of the key problems of our existence.  Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III—these works speak timeless truths in an ever-contemporary language. In the case of Serbia’s former president Slobodan Milosevic, reality has proved equal to inspired imagination.  His life, which...

The U.S. State Department has effectively sided with militant Islam by condemning the decision of newspapers in Denmark, Norway, and elsewhere in Europe to publish cartoon drawings depicting Muhammad, the founder of Islam. On February 3, State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus told reporters, “Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable....

Gary S. Becker, a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a 1992 Nobel Prize winner, cannot be accused of “racism.”  After all, he supports liberalizing immigration laws for educated professionals from around the world, especially India and China.  But his warning, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last December, that...

A year ago, the prospects for peace in Israel-Palestine appeared more promising than at any other time after Bill Clinton’s failed Camp David initiative in 2000.  Arafat’s death in November 2004 had removed a major cause of Palestinian corruption and incoherence, as well as the justification for Israel’s refusal to accept direct talks.  Mahmoud Abbas’...

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on October 26 that “Israel must be wiped off the map.”  Invoking the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, he told an audience of 4,000 cheering students that a new conflict in Palestine would soon remove “this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world.” The statement, made in the midst...

Almost 80 years ago, Julien Benda published his tirade against the intellectual corruption of his time, La Trahison des Clercs. The “scribes” in question are those who traffic in words and ideas. For generations before the 20th century, Benda wrote, members of the Western intellectual elite made sure that “humanity did evil, but honored good.”...

August 29, 2005, the day when hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, may have marked the beginning of the end of the American Empire.  Four years after the horrors in New York and Washington, D.C., showed the nation’s vulnerability to external attack, the Hobbesian free-for-all in New Orleans demonstrated just how fragile it is internally....

Having devoted a major part of my working life over the past four years to researching and writing about terrorism, I am alert to the possibility that there are a few people around me who would like to shut me up—for good, if at all possible.  The tragic end of Theo van Gogh, slaughtered in...

In early 1980, the Soviet Union appeared to be more powerful than ever before.  Its hold over Eastern Europe had been sealed in Helsinki five years previously.  Its presence or influence in the Third World was rising, while that of the United States was diminishing.  The notion of its eventual demise was dear to a...

The challenge that the rise of China presents to the United States is more pressing than any other global issue except for the ever-present threat of jihad.  Beijing is rapidly becoming a regional power of the first order, the Asian hegemon that will need to be contained, confronted, or, in some way, appeased.  Its ruling...

In last month’s American Proscenium, I focused on the news that Washington is reaching out to various Islamist activists opposed to the secularist regime of Bashir Assad, and notably to the supposedly “moderate” elements of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.  The editorial, entitled “Aid and Comfort to the Enemy,” concluded that such policies reflect either...

Mahmoud Abbas’s convincing victory in the Palestinian presidential election on January 9 provided a piece of good news in an otherwise somber Middle Eastern landscape.  Often described as an old Fatah apparatchik with little charisma and popularity, Abbas managed to win 62 percent of the 775,000 votes cast in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and...

Having provided advice to a number of influential Balkan figures in my time, I know the sense of frustration when sound counsel is overruled in favor of proposals based on error or mendacity.  I have been proved right, but only when it was too late: Crown Prince Alexander Kara-djordjevic would have been better off had...

The announcement of President George W. Bush’s victory last November 3 was immediately followed by an outpouring of vitriol by a legion of European editorialists and op-ed columnists.  The Michael Moore wannabes ranted and raved while the “analysts” whined and wailed.  The tone of the former was set by a Fleet Street tabloid, the Daily...

Contrary to numerous optimistic assurances from high places, three years after September 11, the reach and operational capability of Islamic terror cells remain strong.  They are present in areas previously closed to the recruiters of future “martyrs”—notably in Iraq—and in countries where, only a decade ago, they did not have a significant presence (e.g.,  Indonesia). ...

It is hardly possible to envisage an orgy of terrorist savagery more depraved than that staged by Chechen jihadists and their foreign cohorts, who butchered, tortured, and raped hundreds of Russian children in the town of Beslan last September.  The bloodbath at School No. 1 came at the end of a week in which two...

Many Central Europeans who are now in their late middle age or older have fond memories of American soldiers in their midst.  In France in 1944, nylon stockings and chocolates were the tools of seduction, resented by men and welcomed by ladies.  In Germany in early 1945, the G.I. came to be seen as liberator,...

The European Union underwent a major transformation last May.  It was enlarged to 25 states when eight former communist countries—Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, and three Baltic republics—were formally admitted, as well as Malta and Cyprus.  The union is now a political and economic giant of 450 million people, the largest single market...

The Soviet Communist Party used to devote a lot of attention to the problem of inefficient agriculture.  The party’s Agrarian Policy Commission debated endlessly, throughout the final quarter-century of the Soviet state’s existence, how to improve the system.  Should the state farm (sovkhoz) be made self-financing?  Should the collective farm (kolkhoz) have its own heavy...

If, as appears certain, Islamic terrorists planted the bombs that killed over 200 commuters and wounded 1,400 others on Madrid’s trains on March 11, the operation was singularly successful in achieving its political objectives. Until that morning, the Popular Party (PP) government of the former prime minister José Maria Aznar looked poised to win the...

In a speech at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., on February 11, President Bush warned against the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and suggested measures to dismantle a growing black market in nuclear fuel and technology.  He called the possibility of a sudden attack by weapons of mass destruction “the greatest...