“A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.” – Arthur Miller, from Death of a Salesman Writing of America’s relationship with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s Iran, Efraim Karsh recounts that, “So entrenched had the idea of this Iranian-American symbiosis become that successive US administrations came to view Iranian interests as indistinguishable […]
Necessary Lies
“That lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of life.” –Nietzsche I couldn’t help but notice how the major media outlets avoided articulating into print what much of thinking humanity suspected after hearing the horrible news of Germanwings pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately flying his plane into […]
A Varied and Inextricable Tangle
“I do not accept the mendacity of the so-called Moderate Islam. I do not believe that a Good Islam and a Bad Islam exist. Only Islam exists. And Islam is the Koran. And the Koran says what it says.” –Oriana Fallaci, 2006 I can sympathize with the atheists. With what is going on in the […]
At Our Expense and Without Our Consent
“The most ominously crucial question now hanging over this country’s future is: what will our universities teach at our expense and without our consent? What ideas will be propagated or excluded?” –Ayn Rand, 1972 American and Canadian Jewish students (and faculty) now must avoid wearing a kippa or any jewelry signifying their Jewish identity for […]
A Cow In the Garden
“A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.” — Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784 The problem with writing about the religion of Islam is that one cannot hope to sound anything but repetitive, and this because Islam keeps making the news, whether it be reports of violence […]
The History of Every Country
“So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds.” -Lucretius, 99-55 B.C. In his recent op-ed in the New York Times, ISIS Heads to Rome, Thomas Friedman writes, “The U.S. keeps repeating the same mistake in the Middle East: overestimating the power of religious ideology and underappreciating the impact of misgovernance.” He goes on to […]
To Hell With Silence
“Not every truth is the better for showing it face undisguised; and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed.” -Pindar 518-438 B.C. My first inclination that something was disconcertingly portentous about Islam were my discoveries of all the grandiloquent anti-Jewish texts in the Quran, how they sounded so much like something […]
The Best Revenge
“To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.” –Marcus Aurelius I would never attempt to explain the fact that all religions are not equal, precisely because there have been so many—too many—before me explain this reality already, but to a predominantly insouciant populace. Those who believe that all religions are equal and, consequently, that all […]