Jeff Jacoby

For Gaza Palestinians, No Help From Arab Nations

Gaza civilians need refuge. Why won’t the Arab world provide it?

WMD Headlines Miss the Real Story

David Kay, the US government's top weapons inspector in Iraq, reported this month on his team's first three months of searching for weapons of mass destruction. "We have not yet found stocks of weapons," he testified, nor anything to corroborate "pre-war reporting...

Palestinian Authority: A Network of Murderers Masquerading As Government

Three Americans -- John Branchizio, Mark Parson, and John Martin Linde -- were murdered last Wednesday when terrorists in Gaza bombed the diplomatic convoy they were riding in. News accounts immediately described the attack as a first -- ''an unprecedented deadly...

The War On America Did Not Begin On Sept 11th

The War we are in didn't begin on Sept. 11, 2001. It began 22 years earlier. On Nov. 4, 1979, Islamist radicals stormed the US embassy in Tehran and, with the support of the Ayatollah Khomeini, proceeded to hold 52 Americans hostage for the next 15 months. The Carter...

Road Map to More Terror in the Middle East

The US-sponsored "road map" to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not a very challenging document. The text, which is posted at the State Department website, is only 4-1/2 pages long, and most of it is written in reasonably clear English. Anyone willing to...

Supreme Court Defends Racism in America's Universities

Last week's Supreme Court rulings in the University of Michigan cases set a modern record for shamelessess. State universities are not barred by the Constitution from engaging in racial discrimination, five justices decided. They are only prohibited from doing so...

Old Europe Grows Older

The handshakes in Evian were polite. The conversations were civil. Unlike the tens of thousands of European demonstrators who took to the streets to protest, none of the presidents or prime ministers at last week's Group of Eight summit in France raised his voice or...

Arafat on Top?

A hole was torn last month in the international "road map" to Israeli-Palestinian peace when Mahmoud Abbas insisted that Yasser Arafat remains the unchallenged ruler of the Palestinian Authority. "Arafat is at the top," Abbas, the PA's prime minister, told Egypt's...

Castro’s Cult of Sycophants

"Cuba is an anachronism in our hemisphere, an anachronism on the face of the Earth," Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked earlier this month. "And the whole international community should be condemning Cuba." Who could disagree? In a ruthless crackdown just four...

The Caribbean’s Saddam Hussein Still Rules Cuba

One of the first people I met during a week's stay in Havana last year was the economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, a once-ardent communist who had turned against Fidel Castro's dictatorial system. For daring to criticize Cuba's disastrous policies, Chepe and his wife...

New Leadership for Palestine and Iraq: A Double Standard?

In exchange for a withdrawal of US and British troops, Saddam Hussein sends word that he is prepared to share some of his power with a senior member of his Baathist inner circle. Instead of maintaining absolute control over the Iraqi state, Saddam agrees to name Tariq...

The Moral Gulf Between America and Saddam’s Iraq

The campaign to liberate Iraq is going well, though you might not know it from the shock and awe of the media, which apparently discovered only this week that war -- even for a winning army -- is hell. As is the case in nearly every war, brave soldiers have been...

Al Sharpton: The Democrat’s David Duke

If Sharpton were a white skinhead, he would be a political leper, spurned everywhere but the fringe. But far from being spurned, he is shown much deference.

The Million Fool March to Prop Up Dictator Saddam Hussein

Something was missing from last weekend's vast wave of demonstrations against war in Iraq: Iraqis. Across Europe and the United States, 2 million or more protesters took to the streets to denounce the Bush administration's plans to disarm Saddam Hussein. The enormous...

Dealing with Terror Regimes

It will not end with Iraq. The toppling of Saddam Hussein will make the Middle East a better place, free a nation that has suffered unspeakable cruelty, and shame the illiberal "peace movement" that even now counsels appeasement and willful blindness in the face of...

The United Nations Against Individual Rights

The American delegate put a brave face on it. "This is not a defeat for the United States," US Ambassador Kevin Moley said after Libya was elected to the chairmanship of the United Nations' highest human rights panel on Monday. "This is a defeat for the Human Rights...

The “Diversity” Fig Leaf

As a justification for racial preferences, "diversity" is one of the great fig leaves of modern American academia. It first appeared in 1978 -- well after affirmative action had degenerated into the practice of admitting students on the basis of color. That was the...

Israeli Restraint Empowers Terrorists

Even by the grim standards of recent years, the suicide bombings in Tel Aviv last week were horrific. The terrorists, members of the Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade (a wing of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization), positioned themselves at opposite ends of a busy street and...

Death Penalty by the Numbers

This month the Justice Department released "Capital Punishment 2001," its latest annual survey of death penalty statistics. A prowl through the data prompts a few reflections on the capital punishment debate. 1. It is striking that a controversy so large revolves...

Hope for Iran

Americans who care about Iran had something to be grateful for this Thanksgiving: The State Department finally came out foursquare in support of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have been demonstrating for an end to their country's ruthless Islamic...