Dick Morris: Andrew Jackson Creates a Democracy.

Andrew Jackson Creates a Democracy. Video. By Dick Morris. DickMorris.com, February 2, 2013. Also find it here.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy and Femen Protest Against Morsi in Stockholm.

Nude Egyptian Protests Morsi. The Red Eye Portal, December 20, 2012.

Free to Act. By Aliaa Magda Elmahdy. A Rebel’s Diary, December 16, 2012.

Protest Against Constitution in Front of Egyptian Embassy in Stockholm. By Aliaa Magda Elmahdy. A Rebel’s Diary, December 21, 2012.

Apocalypse of Muhammad. Femen.org, December 20, 2012.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy (center) with Inna Shevchenko (right) in Femen protest outside the Egyptian embassy in Stockholm, Sweden.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, Egypt Activist, Poses Naked, Sparks Outrage. By Maggie Michael. AP. The Huffington Post, November 17, 2011.

Nude Blogger Riles Egyptians of All Stripes. By Liam Stack and David D. Kirkpatrick. New York Times, November 17, 2011.

Egyptian Blogger Aliaa Elmahdy: Why I Posed Naked. By Mohamed Fadel Fahmy. CNN, November 19, 2011.

Egyptian nudist in new secularism stunt. Gulf News, December 20, 2012.

Egypt activist who protested nude says she wants to make change, differently. By Mustapha Ajbaili. Al Arabiya, December 21, 2012.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, Egypt’s Naked Blogger, Joins Femen Protest against Mursi Constitution. By Gianlucca Mezzofiore. International Business Times, December 20, 2012.

Naked Blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy Was Kidnapped in Egypt in 2011, Claims Femen. By Gianluca Mezzofiore. International Business Times, December 21, 2012.

Aliaa Elmahdy and Femen Protesting Against Egyptian Constitution by Morsi. Video. YouTube, December 20, 2012. Also find it here.

Femen: Ukraine’s Topless Warriors. By Jeffrey Tayler.

Femen, Ukraine’s Topless Warriors. By Jeffrey Tayler. The Atlantic, November 28, 2012.

Why the group that inspired Pussy Riot’s infamous “punk prayer” could be tough to stop.

Femen.org website.

Femen in Paris: Ukraine’s Topless Warriors Move West. By Jeffrey Tayler. The Atlantic, January 2, 2013.

Inna Shevchenko, leader of Femen, makes a statement in Paris, September 18, 2012. Reuters.

Femen Topless Protest In Davos: Feminist Activists Demonstrate Outside World Economic Forum. By Sara Gates. The Huffington Post, January 28, 2013.

Davos took the shirt off Femen’s back (VIDEO, PHOTOS). Russia Today, January 28, 2012.

Meet Femen’s Topless Feminist Activists. Video. The Atlantic, January 2, 2013.




Femen “Topless Warriors” Documentary w/English subtitles. Video. YouTube, December 10, 2011.




Femen Topless Protest Video: “Gangsta Party in Davos.” Russia Today, January 28, 2013. YouTube. Also find it here.






Police detain activist Inna Shevchenko from women’s rights group Femen as she protests in front of the Olympic stadium in Kiev on July 1st, 2012. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)

The Sexual Healers Next Door. By Tracy Clark-Flory.

The Sexual Healers Next Door. By Tracy Clark-Flory. Salon, January 27, 2013.

Is the Russia Prison System Working Pussy Riot Member to Death? By Steven Hsieh.

Is the Russia Prison System Working Pussy Riot Member to Death? By Steven Hsieh. AlterNet, February 1, 2013.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Imprisoned Pussy Riot Member, Hospitalized. By Vladimir Isachenkov. AP. The Huffington Post, February 1, 2013.

Interview with Pussy Riot Leader: “I Love Russia, But I Hate Putin.” Spiegel Online, September 3, 2012.

In a SPIEGEL interview, Pussy Riot leader Nadezhda Tolokonnikova discusses her feminist punk group’s political aims, why she believes there are limits to Vladimir Putin’s power and how the “fight for our ideas and values will continue.” She says it’s “not me, but the authorities who must be afraid.”

What Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” Really Said. By Jeffrey Tayler. The Atlantic, November 8, 2012.

Russia’s Culture Wars, or Россия диве дается. By Eliot Borenstein. Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University, December 13, 2012.

Pussy Riot Member Talks About Detention Conditions. Video. Ria Novosti, April 24, 2012. YouTube.

Pussy Riot Has Orgy in a Museum. Video. RT. YouTube, August 7, 2012.

Pussy Riot, “Punk Prayer.” Video. YouTube, March 10, 2012.




The Closing Statemment from Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in Trial, August 8, 2012. Free Pussy Riot English. YouTube.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

The Riddle of the Gun. By Sam Harris.

The Riddle of the Gun. By Sam Harris. SamHarris.org, January 2, 2013.

Harris:

Like most gun owners, I understand the ethical importance of guns and cannot honestly wish for a world without them. I suspect that sentiment will shock many readers. Wouldn’t any decent person wish for a world without guns? In my view, only someone who doesn’t understand violence could wish for such a world. A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want. It is a world in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a woman in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene. There have been cases of prison guards (who generally do not carry guns) helplessly standing by as one of their own was stabbed to death by a lone prisoner armed with an improvised blade. The hesitation of bystanders in these situations makes perfect sense—and “diffusion of responsibility” has little to do with it. The fantasies of many martial artists aside, to go unarmed against a person with a knife is to put oneself in very real peril, regardless of one’s training. The same can be said of attacks involving multiple assailants. A world without guns is a world in which no man, not even a member of Seal Team Six, can reasonably expect to prevail over more than one determined attacker at a time. A world without guns, therefore, is one in which the advantages of youth, size, strength, aggression, and sheer numbers are almost always decisive. Who could be nostalgic for such a world?

FAQ on Violence. By Sam Harris. SamHarris.org, January 7, 2013.

Why does anyone take Sam Harris seriously? By Ian Murphy. Salon, January 10, 2013. Also find it here.

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals. By Sam Harris.

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals. By Sam Harris. SamHarris.org, September 18, 2006.

Harris:

TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, “The End of Faith.” In it, I argued that the world’s major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.

 

This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political persuasions react when religion is criticized. I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.

 

This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.

 

Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I’d like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.

 

But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

 

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

 

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.

 

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a “war on terror.” We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

 

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

 

Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

 

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

 

At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government “assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;” 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.

 

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world’s Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

 

Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration — especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.

 

Recent condemnations of the Bush administration’s use of the phrase “Islamic fascism” are a case in point. There is no question that the phrase is imprecise — Islamists are not technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists — but it is by no means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been repeatedly alleged by liberals.

 

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

 

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

 

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

 

Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.

 

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren’t.

 

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

 

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

Learning the Wrong Lessons from Ike. By Alexander Joffe.

Learning the Wrong Lessons from Ike. By Alexander Joffe. The National Interest, February 1, 2013.

The Rise of Secondary States in the Iron Age Levant. By Alexander H. Joffe. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2002.

Welcome to the New Arab World — Where No One Really Cares Much About Israel. By Jonathan Kay.

Welcome to the new Arab world — where no one really cares much about Israel. By Jonathan Kay. National Post, January 29, 2013.

Is Mali Part of the Middle East? By Marc Lynch.

Is Mali part of the Middle East? By Marc Lynch. Foreign Policy, January 29, 2013.

The Jihad Will Be Televised. By Mitchell Prothero.

Live from Beirut . . .: Watching TV with Hezbollah. By Mitchell Prothero. Foreign Policy, January 31, 2013.

Slave States vs. Free States, 2012. By Michael Lind.

Slave states vs. free states, 2012. By Michael Lind. Salon, October 10, 2012.

A century and a half later, we’ve come full circle: The red-blue state divide falls along Confederate-Union lines.

The Economist’s phony “progressivism.” By Michael Lind. Salon, October 15, 2012.

E Pluribus Duo: Blue States are from Scandinavia, Red States are from Guatemala. By Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, October 25, 2012.

Has the American Empire Struck Out? By Michael Young.

Has the American empire struck out? By Michael Young. The Daily Star [Lebanon], January 17, 2013.

How The South Will Rise To Power Again. By Joel Kotkin.

How The South Will Rise To Power Again. By Joel Kotkin. NewGeography, January 31, 2013. Also find it here and here.

Blue States are from Scandinavia, Red States are from Guatemala: A theory of a divided nation. The New Republic, October 5, 2012. Also find it here.

Mark Levin: “The Muslim Brotherhood Has Infiltrated Our Government, It’s Called Barack Obama.”

Mark Levin: “The Muslim Brotherhood Has Infiltrated Our Government, It’s Called Barack Obama.” Real Clear Politics, January 31, 2013.

Mark Levin: “The Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated our government – it’s called Barack Obama!” The Right Scoop, January 31, 2013.

Also find it at: Fox Nation; Mediaite; Breitbart; and YouTube.

Why Are Feminists So Angry? By Jessica Valenti.

Why Are Feminists So Angry? By Jessica Valenti. The Nation, January 30, 2013. Find video here.

Peace Process Sputters at Starting Line. By Walter Russell Mead.

Peace Process Sputters at Starting Line. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, January 31, 2013.

Mead:

And so we are back to square one. The Palestinians are bitterly divided. One camp would like to sign an agreement with Israel but is too weak to enforce it and too divided, probably, to accept any agreement that Israel, even with its arms being twisted by the United States, would accept. The other group remains committed to the “one state, no Jews” formula for abolishing Israel, expelling almost all the Jews, and re-establishing Palestine in all its glory.

Israelis who don’t want a two state solution (at least not with a viable Palestinian state) can use the resulting stalemate to press for their own goals of more Israeli settlements. The substantial majority of Israelis who want a two state solution (with some caveats) don’t have much of an agenda to push in the absence of of a strong Palestinian partner who is both willing to accept and able to deliver a compromise peace.

And so it goes. As best we can tell, peace is not at hand.

Hope or Despair? The Future of Culture. By Wilfred M. McClay.

Hope or Despair? Roger Kimball and the Future of Culture. By Wilfred M. McClay. The University Bookman, Winter 2013.

Review of The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia. By Roger Kimball. St. Augustine’s Press, 2012. Hardcover, 360 pp.

Interview: Roger Kimball on The Fortunes of Permanence. By Ed Driscoll. PJ Media, July 12, 2012. Also find it here.

Nearly Half Of American Households Are 1 Emergency Away From Financial Disaster, Report Finds.

Nearly Half Of American Households Are 1 Emergency Away From Financial Disaster, Report Finds. By Jillian Berman. The Huffington Post, January 30, 2013.

Life After Blue: The Middle Class Will Beat The Seven Trolls. By Walter Russell Mead.

The Middle Class Will Beat The Seven Trolls. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, January 30, 2013. Also here.

Also see:

Another Road: The Blue Elites Are Wrong. By Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia, January 28, 2013.

Futuristic Blues. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, January 23, 2013.

The Hidden Prosperity of the Poor. By Thomas B. Edsall.

The Hidden Prosperity of the Poor. By Thomas B. Edsall. New York Times, January 30, 2013.

The Myth of a Stagnant Middle Class. By Donald J. Boudreaux and Mark J. Perry. Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2013.

Consumption and the Myths of Inequality. By Kevin A. Hassett and Aparna Mathur. Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2012.

Inequality Is Holding Back the Recovery. By Joseph E. Stiglitz. New York Times, January 19, 2013.

Climate change and poverty have not gone away. By Joseph E Stiglitz. Project Syndicate, January 7, 2013. Also find it here.

Arab Spring’s Hits and Misses. By Fareed Zakaria.

Arab Spring’s hits and misses. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, January 30, 2013.

Zakaria:

The chaos at the second anniversary of the Tahrir Square uprising is only the latest and most vivid illustration that Egypt’s revolution is going off the rails. It has revived talk about the failure of the Arab Spring and even some nostalgia for the old order. But Arab dictators such as Hosni Mubarak could not have held onto power without even greater troubles; look at Syria. Events in the Middle East the past two years underscore that constitutions are as vital as elections and that good leadership is crucial in these transitions.

Compare the differences between Egypt and Jordan. At the start of the Arab Spring, it appeared that Egypt had responded to the will of its people, had made a clean break with its tyrannical past and was ushering in a new birth of freedom. Jordan, by contrast, responded with a few personnel changes, some promises to study the situation and talk of reform.

But then Egypt started going down the wrong path, and Jordan made a set of wise choices.

Put simply, Egypt chose democratization before liberalization. Elections became the most important element of the new order, used in legitimizing the new government, electing a president and ratifying the new constitution. As a result, the best organized force in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, swept into power, even though, on the first ballot, only 25 percent of voters chose its presidential nominee, Mohamed Morsi. The Brotherhood was also able to dominate the drafting of the constitution. The document had many defects, including its failure to explicitly protect women’s rights — only four of the constitutional assembly’s 85 members were women — and language that seems to enshrine the traditional “character” of the Egyptian family. It also weakens protections for religious minorities such as the Bahais, who already face persecution.

Some of its provisions ban blasphemy and insult and allow for media censorship in the name of national security. These are all ways to give the government unlimited powers, which the Muslim Brotherhood has used. More journalists have been persecuted for insulting Morsi in his six-month presidency than during the nearly 30-year reign of Mubarak. In November, Morsi declared that his presidential decrees were above judicial review.

In Jordan, by contrast, the king did not rush to hold elections (and was widely criticized for his deliberate pace). Instead, he appointed a council to propose changes to the constitution. The members consulted many people in Jordan and in the West to determine how to make the country’s political system more democratic and inclusive. A series of important changes were approved in September 2011. They transferred some of the king’s powers to parliament and established an independent commission to administer elections and a court to oversee the constitutionality of legislation.

The commission recently got its first use. The election was boycotted by Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood on the grounds that the changes were too small and that power still resided with the king. But 70 percent of eligible voters registered, and 56 percent turned out at the polls, the highest turnout in the region. Many critics of the king and government were elected; 12 percent of the winners were opposition Islamist candidates. Thanks to a quota the commission set, 12 percent of the new parliament’s members are female. King Abdullah II retains ultimate authority, but the new system is clearly a step in the transition to a constitutional monarchy.

Morocco has taken the same route as Jordan. It enacted constitutional reforms in 2011. In the elections that followed, Morocco’s Islamist Party won 107 of the 395 seats in parliament and formed a government. The head of this government, Abdelilah Benkirane, while a feisty critic of the West, has also spoken firmly about protecting the rights of minorities, explicitly including Jews, who he noted have lived in Morocco for centuries and are an integral part of the country.

The Arab world’s two largest experiments in democracy, Iraq and Egypt, have, unfortunately, poor choices in common. Both placed elections ahead of constitutions and popular participation ahead of individual rights. Both have had as their first elected leaders strongmen with Islamist backgrounds who have no real dedication to liberal democracy. The results have been the establishment of “illiberal democracy” in Iraq and the danger of a similar system in Egypt.

The best role models for the region might well be two small monarchies. Jordan and Morocco have gone the opposite route, making measured reforms and liberalizing their existing systems. The monarchies have chosen evolution over revolution. So far, it seems the better course.

A Mother’s Case for Gun Rights. By Anna Rittgers.

A mother’s case for gun rights. By Anna Rittgers. FoxNews.com, January 15, 2013.

Shut Up, They Explained. By Anna Rittgers. Independent Women’s Forum, January 31, 2013.

This November, cling to your gun rights. By Gayle Trotter. The Daily Caller, September 26, 2012.

Gun control regulations disarm women. By Gayle Trotter. Washington Times, January 17, 2013.

Gayle Trotter Testimony Captivates Senate Cun Control Hearings. By Christina Wilkie. The Huffington Post, January 30, 2013.

Gayle Trotter’s Ideas Will Not Keep Women Safe. By Andrea Marcotte. Slate, January 30, 2013.

Gayle Trotter to Sen. Whitehouse: “Cannot understand” as a man. Video. Washington Post, January 30, 2013. Also find it here.

About Last Week’s Israeli Elections. By Caroline Glick.

About last week’s elections. By Caroline Glick. CarolineGlick.com, January 30, 2013.

Should Jews Leave Britain? By Douglas Murray.

Should Jews Leave Britain? By Douglas Murray. The Spectator, January 29, 2013.

Bye-bye London. By Caroline Glick. CarolineGlick.com, January 21, 2013.