In his essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," the French philosopher Albert Camus depicted suicide as an abdication of one's responsibility to confront the absurdities, disappointments and frustrations that accompany human existence. Our inherent freedom, Camus believed, confronts us continually with the question of whether life is worth living. To answer...

There was a time when the very phrase "human rights" represented, for a great number of world leaders, an insidious "western," not to say "Zionist," plot to undermine their titanic efforts to build utopia. Some of these leaders were communists, a few were Ba'athists, many more were populists and revolutionaries...

In Britain, where acerbic humor rules the roost, it was inevitable that the venerable London School of Economics would be rechristened the "Libyan School of Economics" the instant it embraced the financial largesse of the Gadhafi family.

In recent years, the LSE has been readily co-opted into the process of...

In all the coverage of the freedom protests in Bahrain, a certain word beginning with the letter 'A' has been strikingly absent.

I don't mean 'autocratic.' Nor 'authoritarian.' Both of those have been invoked, and rightly so.

I refer to the word 'apartheid.' The Afrikaner term for 'separateness,' apartheid...

Watching this new video produced by the human rights NGO Iran 180, I was struck by Congressman Barney Frank's pithy summation of what good governance involves. "No government ought to consider itself threatened by its citizens wanting to express themselves," Frank said. "And no truly popular government...

Marx's observation, proffered in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce, has been regurgitated so often that one feels a sheep-like silliness in reciting it again. But that's the thing about transcendent quotes: there are times when no other words capture...

In 1716, Francois de Callieres, an emissary of King Louis XVI, made this pithy observation about powers great and small in one of the foundational texts of modern diplomacy, On the Manner of Dealing with Princes:

The blunder of the smallest of sovereigns may indeed cast an apple of discord...

When I read this report on the Electronic Intifada website claiming that the largest pension fund in The Netherlands had divested from the Israeli companies in its portfolio, it struck me that the campaign to subject Israel to a regime of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions - BDS for...

Recently, I wrote about the case of Andrew Whitley, who is the New York Director of UNWRA, the UN agency tasked with aiding Palestinian refugees. Whitley told a conference in Washington that the so-called "right of return" is unlikely to ever be exercised, and that efforts would be...

I wonder how many of those commentators who diligently monitor the "muzzling" activities of the "Israel Lobby" will note the story of a UN official who made a perfectly reasonable observation at a recent conference, and now has everyone from Hamas to the government of Jordan demanding his head on...

Watching the direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians fizzle out over the last week, I was reminded of Conor Cruise O'Brien's observation that "conflicts don't have solutions -- they have outcomes." For nearly two decades, the contours of a final compromise that would enable the State of Israel to...

With tiresome predictability, the Iranian tyrant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is again in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. And again, he is performing to type. Rambling, inchoate speeches about the decline of capitalism, facile equations of the Iran's judicial system with that of the United States, ranting about Israel...

Like the Lubyanka prison in Moscow during the Soviet period, or the Prinz Albrecht Strasse headquarters of the Gestapo in Nazi-era Berlin, Tehran's Evin Prison is indelibly linked with the most gruesome abuses of human rights, involving Iranian dissidents foolhardy enough to resist ideological conformity by thinking and acting for...

It's very rare that you come across someone deserving of the title "hero" - or "heroine," for that matter - but I just did.

Cliona Campbell is a 19-year old student from Cork, in Ireland. She is something of a prodigy; in 2008, she was a finalist in the Young...

If today's attack by Lebanese forces on Israeli troops does lead to a full-scale war, then Lt. Col. Dov Harari, the 45-year old IDF reservist who will be laid to rest tomorrow at the military cemetery in the coastal town of Netanya, will have been its first victim.

This morning, I received an email from a reader informing me that I was "a chicken hawk Jew." For good measure, I was then urged to perform an act with my yarmulke which doesn't bear repeating in polite company.

What roused this person's ire was a short post of...

One of the linguistic innovations brought about by the internet is the term "whataboutery." For those who still haven't encountered it, whataboutery describes a fairly transparent argumentative technique, designed to derail debate of one issue by raising another.

I should know -- like others who defend Israel from the...

If you happen to be running an authoritarian regime which practices torture, routinely locks up dissidents and muzzles the press, there are few causes better than Palestinian solidarity to polish up your public image. One might say that it's a political form of money laundering; just as one would wash...

It was an expose in the best traditions of investigative journalism: Commerce Department documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that detailed how, between 1965 and 1977, more than one thousand American corporations colluded in the economic boycott of a small, embattled country, in a bid to please a...

Behind the rush to send further flotillas to the Gaza Strip, a power game between Islamists of various stripes is emerging. While Turkish, Palestinian, Iranian and Hezbollah flags have all been spotted at rallies and port side gatherings in support of the flotillistas, these scenes of apparent unity belie a...