Last May, I published a piece about Hamas' Twitter stream or, to be more precise, about the Twitter stream of the "military wing" of Hamas, al Qassam Brigades. At the time, I was shocked not just by the fact that such a stream exists, but that Twitter would...

Last week, Israel's Academy of the Hebrew Language made an interesting ruling, reported today by Haaretz (in Hebrew), which stated that titles of official government positions can and should be described with the feminine form of the relevant noun when a given position is held by a woman.

Until...

This past Memorial Day weekend, the nation was shocked by the clumsy comments of an MSNBC host who said he was "uncomfortable" with the notion of calling fallen U.S. soldiers heroes. While it was breathtakingly inappropriate, the central stupidity of the statement lay in the timing, not the...

Christopher Hitchens has died. His death by this point was anything but unexpected. For months we knew from others and from himself about his struggle with cancer. It seemed as if all of his opus was wrapped up not into the disease itself, which we could not know, but the...

Last weekend, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared that he has "never been more worried about Israel's future." In the column, Friedman explained that the cause for his concern is Israel's diplomatic isolation in the world.

Expanding on his argument, Friedman cited what he calls the...

Turkey made headlines last week by undertaking a wholesale downgrading of its relations with Israel after the Israeli government refused to issue a formal apology for the death of nine Turkish citizens on board the Gaza blockade flotilla. Most of the media and policy narratives following the downgrade...

We all love Christopher Hitchens. And that love is heightened every time he mocks and contemns, whenever he disdains to ridicule what we most cherish. He is unrelenting, if inconsistent. He's no-holds-barred, if a little unscrupulous. He's the great media personage of our day.

With last year's publication of Christopher...

Tel Aviv Stories: Life, Love, and Death in Israel's Unholy City (Midnight Oil Publishing), a collection of six stories and one novella by me, was released on February 1st 2011 and debuts at the 25th Jerusalem International Book Fair.

At the end of the writing, editing, considering and...

We all know by now the running narrative about the sanctity of free speech in America, which we've been media-trained to accept in lieu of an actual defense of free speech when that right happens to come under threat. So when Comedy Central redacted non-obscene words and images from a...

It's impossible to know what's in a man's heart, especially when his heart is no longer beating. Even when designer Alexander McQueen was alive, "mystification" was the one reaction that united the people who saw, wrote about, and bought his work. Whether it was the bizarre nature of not just...

I came across a copy of Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now the other day and, wanting to know what all the fuss was about, made the life-altering leap of opening the book.

Naturally, I had already turned to Wikipedia for answers, but discovered only that Mr. Tolle is...

Who are we kidding -- we have no culture. Don't get me wrong, there is a cultural force in America that produces painting, cinema, music, and literature. But in no sense is it ours. Culture today is owned, operated and, in the final...

One has to wonder why after eight years of near-total silence, the media has suddenly, gushingly fallen in love with covering the war in Afghanistan. A plausible response is that prior to 2008, the Iraq war consumed most of our attention, leaving Afghanistan relegated to second place. Right around the...

The press has been bubbling with commentary on President Obama's handling of the "Christmas Bomber" incident to perhaps the same extent that the U.S. now seems to be bubbling with fresh Islamic extremist terror attempts.

We might have imagined that the election of Barack Obama marked the beginning of...

Richard Goldstone is one of today's most renowned names in human rights jurisprudence and international law concerning war crime. Already well known in human rights circles by the time he served as chief prosecutor for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the mid-1990s, Goldstone's esteem...

President Obama has given Americans much to think about over the past couple weeks. At the UN, Mr. Obama was the largest and most important element in a diplomatic menagerie which focused public attention on the international body in a way that has not occurred for years, and possibly decades....

Calm has prevailed for more than 24 hours in Tegucigalpa since Tuesday morning when the last major riots and clashes took place. The government announced via TV today, breaking all television broadcasts to display the blue-and-white Honduran flag, that the curfew will be lifted from 10 am to 5 pm....

Gunfire, the smell of burning tires, and tear gas woke me up this morning. Tegucigalpa's Palmira neighborhood erupted into violence at around 5 in the morning. Demonstrators were gathered throughout the night on the street below my hotel balcony, where I stood watching tires burn in the middle of the...

TEGUCIGALPA , September 21 -- An emergency curfew was put into order by the Honduran government today as tensions escalate upon the return of the country's ousted president, Manuel Zelaya. The center of the city, and particularly the area around Colonia Palmira, where Zelaya was reported to be, burst into...