No. President Obama is not an idiot, and the deal that he just reached with Iran over its nuclear program will give the United States much more than it has given up, changing the face of the Middle East in the process. Perhaps, Europe will have in Iran another potential source of natural gas, breaking their reliance on Russia. Perhaps the strategic advantages for the U.S. and Europe are much larger that than whatever compromises they had to make in regard to Iranian ambitions.
Source: The Side of Freedom | The George W. Bush Institute
Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian democracy activist who exchanged radical Islamism for the Federalist Papers after studying in the United States, is featured in the Freedom Collection and recently shared his story with educators from across North Texas. “I don’t know how many people can say the Federalist Papers actually inspired them to quit their fanatical sort of outlook on life,” he says, “but to me … that was really empowering.”… Like Natan Sharansky a generation ago, the stories of men and women like Phyoe Phyoe, Joseph, Ammar, and Dalel keep the skeptics’ view in doubt today. Even in the Middle East, where the democracy deficit is the starkest in the world and the immediate outlook is bleak, there’s no doubt that the universal tug of freedom is present there as well.
Amanda Schnetzer is the director of the Human Freedom Initiative at the George W. Bush Institute.
Jon Stewart’s monologue tonight was an impassioned, frustrated meditation on the Charleston shooting and other recent tragedies. “I didn’t do my job today,” he said. “I’ve got nothing for you in terms of jokes and sounds, because of what happened in South Carolina.”
Source: Somber Jon Stewart Delivers Scathing Monologue About Charleston Shooting
If Americans still insist on dealing cynically and apathetically with one of the country’s oldest and most infamous and painful problems, namely racism, why should we find their indifference regarding the tragic and mind-numbing developments in Syria, or any number of conflict zones around the world, surprising?
Continue reading “Somber Jon Stewart Delivers Scathing Monologue About Charleston Shooting”
“When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.” (The Atlantic, Nonviolence as Compliance)
Similarly, when calls emerge from certain quarters addressing “both sides” of a conflict and appealing for calm, even when one side has been using overwhelming violence from the get-go while the other remained committed to nonviolent tactics with few exceptions, we can all be sure that a ruse is in the work.
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 