Lessons from Brooklyn College BDS, Barghouti, and Butler

. This commentary originally appeared in the Algemeiner on February 22, 2013. Reader and correspondent David Lurie has directed me to some not well-publicized revelations about the Brooklyn College BDS event. To begin, the campus BDS chapter defended itselfagainst various accusations of selective and prejudicial admission to the event and other claims, including the discriminatory eviction […]

Why Obama Hearts Hagel

. This commentary first appeared in the Algemeiner on January 11.  The last time I wrote about President Obama’s then only rumored selection of Chuck Hagel I said two things I knew I would wish to revise. The first, rhetorically, was the question: “What was he thinking?” The second was a quotation from Gil Troy’s generally very good writing […]

The Israeli-Palestinian Enthymeme

. This commentary first appeared in the Algemeiner on on October 18, 2012. In rhetoric, an enthymeme is an argument that contains an unarticulated premise. Commonly this is because the conversation is among a group of people with shared values, among whom one or more of those values — premises to an argument — it is assumed, […]

Playing Politics with Jews

. This post previously appeared in the Algemeiner on August 1, 2012. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), in his best Captain Renault form – which includes being entirely insincere and unconvincing – is shocked, shocked to discover that there is politics going on in the U.S. of A. Never played any of that sort […]

Jews Denied Entry

Good. I got your attention. Yesterday we got the double whammy – fodder for the BDS (Bias, Deceit, Sensationalism) movement – of news of Noam Chomsky’s denied entry to the West Bank and Peter Beinart’s lamentable New York Review of Books article buying into the prevailing Left narrative of the American Jewish leadership’s moral decline […]