Новости за 31.10.2016

Bashar al-Assad’s regime has pulled off a grotesque PR coup by corralling a number of prominent American journalists from outlets like The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker to participate in a conference designed to legitimize the rule of Syria’s genocidal head of state. The conference held Sunday and Monday in Damascus, was organized by the British Syrian Society, a “foundation” chaired by Assad’s father-in-law, the London-based physician Fawaz Ahkras. Читать дальше...

This presidential campaign season has drawn attention to the grim persistence of anti-Semitism in the American political discourse. As bracing as it’s been to see what Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy has meant for the nation’s most vocal Jew-haters, the settlement of a lawsuit pitting developers and Jewish community figures against local government in upstate New York is a timely reminder that there are more instrumental and more insidious forms of anti-Semitism still active in certain corners of American life. Читать дальше...

I have long observed that my brother is a Cubs fan the way I’m a Jew, and that I’m a Cubs fan the way he’s a Jew.

Jan Karski was one of the great moral heroes of the 20th century. A Polish diplomat who narrowly escaped the Katyn massacre and then joined the anti-Nazi underground, Karski famously risked his life to sneak into the Warsaw ghetto, gathering information to warn the world about the impending destruction of Europe’s Jews. In November 1942, Karski delivered a report on his findings to the London-headquartered Polish government-in-exile, and then traveled onward to the United States, where he met with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Читать дальше...

Five years ago, I stepped out of my car onto a Jerusalem street and felt an unfamiliar lightness, followed by a panicked feeling of something valuable forgotten or missing.

Few public figures have seen their reputations change as quickly and dramatically as Alan Greenspan. When he stepped down as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in 2006, Greenspan was widely regarded as, in the words of one team of admiring economists, “the greatest central banker who ever lived.” He was the man who had guided the nation’s financial system through two decades of prosperity, managing to deliver a seemingly impossible combination of low inflation, low interest rates, and low unemployment. Читать дальше...

Late last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which became deservedly famous in the 1980s for combating violent white-power hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, published a list of 15 individuals it labels as particularly threatening anti-Muslim extremists. It is sad but telling that the SPLC’s so-called field guide to Muslim-haters is not a list of violent extremists—who certainly do exist—but is instead a blacklist of prominent writers whose opinions on a range of cultural and political issues are offensive to the SPLC. Читать дальше...