Obama Offends 1.5 Billion Muslims

Writing at the San Francisco Chronicle, George Bisharat charges that Barack Obama unnecessarily offended the world's Muslims by pandering to the Israel lobby. On his first day as the presumptive Democratic candidate for president earlier this month, Barack Obama committed a serious foreign policy blunder. Reciting a litany of pro-Israeli positions at the annual meeting of the American Israel Public ...

Fulbright Scholarships Restored for Gaza Students

A bureaucratic SNAFU almost cost seven Palestinian students their ability to study abroad on prestigious Fulbright scholarships. The U.S. has reinstated the Fulbright scholarships of seven Gaza Strip students blocked by Israel from leaving the Hamas-ruled territory, the State Department said Monday. The students were informed Thursday that their scholarships for the upcoming academic year would be deferred because ...

Rachael Ray, Donut Terrorist

Dunkin' Donuts has pulled an ad spot featuring Rachael Ray wearing a scarf around her neck because some thought it was a subtle nod of support to Palestinians. Does Dunkin’ Donuts really think its customers could mistake Rachael Ray for a terrorist sympathizer? The Canton-based company has abruptly canceled an ad in which the domestic diva wears a scarf that ...

Obama’s Jewish Problem

While much has been made of Barack Obama's problems with white working class voters, especially in Appalachia, a more problematic trend may be signs of trouble with Jewish voters, a strong if relatively small part of the Democratic base. Today's NYT features Jodi Kantor's story, "Many Florida Jews Express Doubts on Obama." On Thursday, Mr. Obama will court Jewish voters with an ...

McCain’s Hamas ‘Hypocrisy’

Jamie Rubin, formerly Bill Clinton's State Department spokesman, takes to the pages of the Washington Post to call out John McCain for hypocrisy in claiming that Barack Obama wants to "appease" Hamas. Riffing on John Kerry's famous gaffe, the piece is subtitled, "McCain Was for Talking Before He Was Against It." McCain is the last politician who should be ...

Counterinsurgency Dulling Combat Skills?

Thomas Ricks reports that Matt Matthews, a historian at the Army's Combat Studies Institute, has written a new report concluding that "five years of fighting insurgents in Iraq may also have dulled U.S. soldiers' skills at more conventional combat." The study, apparently, isn't a case study of the U.S. military but rather the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war and Israel's woeful ...

Acireman Foreign Policy

I'd like to bring an article in the Hoover Institutions's publication, Policy Review, A Moral Core for U.S. Foreign Policy by Derek Chollet and Tod Lindberg, to your attention. In the article the authors note that …after two successive presidents of opposite political parties (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) have argued that spreading American values is itself a ...

News You Can Use

Megan McArdle observes that, "When I tuned into the morning news yesterday, the BBC was covering the Gaza strip. Fox News was teaching people how to make homemade butterscotch pudding." I gather that she disapproves of Fox' choice. But, really, learning about the latest bizarre chapter in Palestine will have precisely zero practical consequence. By contrast, butterscotch pudding ...

Gazans Knock Down Border, Flee to Egypt

Massive numbers of Palestinians are fleeing to Egypt. Tens of thousands of Palestinians on foot and on donkey carts poured into Egypt from Gaza Wednesday after masked gunmen used land mines to blast down a seven-mile barrier dividing the border town of Rafah. The border breach was a dramatic protest against the closure of the impoverished Palestinian territory imposed ...

Aksa Brigades Call for Murder of Palestinian PM

The al Aksa Martyr Brigades put out a leaflet advocating the assassination of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayad. Fatah's armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, on Sunday called for the murder of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayad for "collaboration" with Israel and the US. This was the first time the group has openly called for Fayad's assassination. In ...