The mainstream media propaganda machine for the Obama Administration has shifted into high gear. The New York Times, which used to be a newspaper, has announced a new age of peace and goodwill in international relations. Such gushing suggests that the discipline of “optimistic autosuggestion,” invented by the French philosopher Emile Coue, has swept the Times. Fortuitously, this new age in foreign relations has arrived just in time for the U.S. presidential election campaign. In a recent series of foreign affairs articles run by the Times, the danger of conflict …
The past week has been a bloody one for Nigeria. Attacks in the capital city of Abuja and across the north have strongly implicated the Islamist insurgent group Boko Haram. Yesterday, a suicide bomber targeted the police commissioner of Jalingo’s motorcade. Although the attacker missed the motorcade, 11 people were reportedly killed when the bomber exploded near a roadside market. Over the weekend, gunmen attacked a church service at Bayero University in Kano. The AFP reported that the attacks targeted Christian worshipers as they attended two services within the campus. …
The former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency made news yesterday by blasting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu’s government for exaggerating the effectiveness of a possible military strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Yuval Diskin, who retired last year after Netanyahu failed to renew his term in office, cast doubt on Netanyahu’s leadership: “I fear very much that these are not the people I’d want at the wheel.” What to make of this bitter political attack? First of all, it is a symptom of Israel’s increasingly polarized political environment in …
In what the Associated Press and the Washington Post Online are calling a “shocking” revelation, the British Ministry of Defense was considering emplacing a surface-to-air missile system on the top of a civilian apartment complex as part of its defensive measures for the pending summer Olympics. One of the residents interviewed was quite put out that no one had even consulted him, let alone gotten his permission. Was this shocking overreach by paranoid security types? Hardly. First of all, this sort of measure is in fact, quite commonplace in major …
Vice President Joe Biden’s speech in New York last week reflected the fact that the Obama Administration’s foreign policy record and the Obama Doctrine is so weak that it does not offer much material to run on in an election year. Three and a half years ago, when President Obama and I took office, our nation had been engaged in two wars for the better part of a decade. Al Qaeda was resurgent, and Osama bin Laden was at large. Our alliances were dangerously frayed. And our economy—the foundation of …
Internet censorship is rampant in the Middle East. Now, the Palestinian Authority is accused of trying to silence government opponents on the Web. There is irony in this, as the Palestinians portray themselves to the international community as victims of Israel. But when it comes to internal politics, their leaders have shown that they can be as undemocratic and as tough as any in the Middle East. This week, the Palestinian minister for communications, Mashour Abu Daqa, resigned after accusing senior officials of shutting down opposition websites over the past …
Somebody hacked a Taliban website. Big surprise. Actually, no surprise. No surprise that the Taliban and other terrorists groups are online. When the issues of terrorism and the Internet are joined in one conversation, most people talk about the threat of cyberterrorism. But the reality is that terrorists mostly use the Web just like the rest of us—to get things done. Terrorists use the Internet for recruiting, propaganda, fundraising, planning, and coordinating. Some have even used it to do reconnaissance for terrorist attack. The terrorists who attacked Mumbai in 2008 …
The United States and Japan released a revised deployment plan for U.S. Marine Corps forces in the Pacific. It is an improvement over the 2006 Guam Agreement, but it still sacrifices alliance military capabilities for political expediency. The new plan is more flexible and operationally focused, since it maintains Marine Air Ground Task Forces rather than dividing Marine combat, command, and logistics components. But moving Marine units further from potential conflict and humanitarian disaster zones only makes them more vulnerable to the tyranny of distance endemic in the Pacific theater. …
Both The Washington Post and the Financial Times have more front-page stories today on the seemingly endless saga of the fall of senior Chinese Communist Party official Bo Xilai. These particular two stories claim that Bo’s ouster has boosted China’s economic reformers, led by Premier Wen Jiabao. This is a horribly misleading view of what to expect from China on economic policy. It is true that Bo represented a camp that can be described as leftist populism—fighting income inequality and corruption (never mind Bo’s own corruption) through a kind of …
Deep inside the darkness of North Korea—a totalitarian state from which little news escapes—as many as 200,000 citizens are suffering in the regime’s forced labor camps, living each day with no hope and no expectation of a better life ahead. One man, however, has escaped to tell his life story, helping to shed some light on this horrifying abyss of death. His name is Shin Dong-hyuk. Born and raised in North Korea’s labor camps, he successfully fled the oppression after 23 years and lived to tell the world about it. …
