Free Republic

This Friday marks the 15th anniversary of the death of Menachem Begin. He died of a broken heart on March 9, 1992, vilified as a warmonger by the Left and cast off by right-wing purists after he traded the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. The purists also berated Begin for his 1978 Camp David offer of five years of limited self-government to the Palestinian Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, to be followed by final-status negotiations between Israel and a Jordanian-Palestinian negotiating team - a proposal the Arabs rejected. Begin would have been...

THE DEAD BABY MEDIA If the text on that one is too small for you, it's a CNN piece headlined, "Why the Syrian regime is killing babies." There's not much to add to that. The Syrian regime may be killing babies, but CNN killed journalism. With some help from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the BBC. Anyone who has spent time in the Middle East knows quite well that parading around dead bodies is part of the Muslim ceremony of rallying for the next attack. These aren't funerals, these are corpse parades and the corpses are often...

Fear was a New Yorker’s constant companion in the 1970s and ’80s. We lived behind doors with triple locks, some like engines of medieval ironmongery. We barred our ground-floor and fire-escape windows with steel grates that made us feel imprisoned. I was thankful for mine, though, when a hatchet turned up on my fire escape, origin unknown. Nearing our building entrances, we held our keys at the ready and looked over our shoulders, as police and street-smart lore advised; our hearts pounded as we tried to shove the heavy doors open and slam them shut before some mugger could push...

Saul Bellow, Trotsky, and Mexico By Stephen Schwartz Reforma | April 19, 2005 In the first week of April, Holy Father, John Paul II, Pope of the world’s Catholics, died at 84 in Rome. Three days later, he was followed in death by the sole contemporary individual who could be called the Pope of the Jews, if that community were to acknowledge such a figure of authority: Saul Bellow, the Canadian-born American author and Nobel laureate. Bellow died, aged 89, in Massachusetts. As the Pope represented the Catholic virtues, Bellow embodied the Jewish values of high intelligence, dedication to the...

OP-ED COLUMNIST In this country we have hotels that are democratized versions of European palaces. We have parks that are democratized versions of royal hunting grounds. And we have the novels of Saul Bellow, which are European novels of ideas adapted to the idiom of the American wisenheimer. So much of the best American culture has been an imitation, adaptation or rejection of European forms and ideas. But Bellow's death reminds us that we're now living in a unipolar moment, culturally as well as politically. Today's writers and artists are much less likely to be Americanizing European stuff, and a...

Just heard it on the radio...........

And thus spake ZarathustraAugust 21, 2003 When speaking of his family’s immigration experience to America, 1976 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Saul Bellow noted that, “The country took us over.  It was a country then, not a collection of ‘cultures’”.  Such candor...it’s surprising that our little friends in Stockholm didn’t send him to The Hague for prosecution. Whether you like to think of yourself as a liberal or conservative, there is only one truth; America is dismembering itself into a collection of disparate cultural cells and the politicians of both political parties are playing into this nonsense.  This isn’t a question of...