This picture, from a Swedish protest against the Israeli Davis Cup team at Malmo, Sweden (which went on to defeat the Swedish team), gets at one of the more pernicious elements in the way anti-Israel criticism operates. Israel came under significant criticism for its use of White Phosphorus in the G...

Discussing the flare up over possible National Intelligence Council chair Chas Freeman, M.J. Rosenberg writes something that deserves some parsing: Now Jonathan Chait of the New Republic is an interesting case. He's liberal on every single issue but Israel (on which he is pure neocon), not only libe...

Icon of St. Francis of Assisi, a wonderful example of An Obedient Son of the Church & a Successful Reformer Discourse of Father Abbot Antoine Forgeot of Fontgombault abbey to the families in the neighborhood of Clear Creek, March 19, 2006. [We thank our fellow DFF apologist Bro. Carlos Antonio P...

Ha'aretz reports on a story that Paul Horwitz had previously picked up on: namely, the decision by two Canadian universities (Carleton University -- no relation to my alma mater -- and University of Ottawa) to ban certain allegedly inflammatory posters advertising "Israel Apartheid Week". The poster...

It's dangerous in this hood. Jeffrey Goldberg and Glenn Greenwald are having what has to be an hall of fame candidate in the field of unproductive exchanges. It started with Goldberg quoting a writer saying "however much the extreme left and the extreme right might disagree, the one common ground up...

In the field of criminal law, there are two main philosophical schools on how society is allowed to punish offenders. The first is the retributive school -- basically arguing that we can punish people solely based on how much they "deserve" to be punished, no more and no less. Punishment is seen as ...

Jon Henke is an awesome writer and I recall his work on QandO but sometimes he seems less cynical than what is required in political advocacy. His recent post on Republican rhetoric illustrates my point: [BEST] Reform: “We abused the power we were given, and we should not be trusted with the m...

Reading so much of eighties and nineties Academic discourse, one is struck by the constant need to leave the question open. Queer Theory was supposed to be open ended and eternally defining itself, deconstruction never stops, linguistics are lost in translation. These frequent extensions of an ideas...

Harry's Place is comparing the situation in Israel with that of Sri Lanka, and wondering why the former gets so, so much more attention than the latter. The parallels do strike me (and they did before I read this post), but I will freely admit that my knowledge of the conflict there is limited (thou...

In South Africa, government officials openly join in on rampant anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering. In Venezuela, the government is barely slightly less overt, but the results have been far worse. Armed men forced their way into a Caracas synagogue, defacing its administrative offices with anti-Semit...