David Aikman
Musings and commentary on the world scene from Senior Fellow David Aikman
The Rise of Political Hatred
Mon 04 Feb 2008 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
An article in the Wall Street Journal last November by Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, had a disturbing observation. After he had carefully explained to a group of politically liberal academics whom he was hosting for dinner that he was dismayed by the vitriolic hatred expressed in attacks upon President Bush, he was harangued by several of the guests. According to Berkowitz, one guest responded in a loud, seething, in-your-face voice, “What’s irrational about hating George W. Bush?”
Eyeless in Gaza
Thu 24 Jan 2008 by David Aikman
In case you didn’t know it, “Eyeless in Gaza” is the name of a British, post-punk New Wave musical duo who chose the name of their band from the novel by the same name by British writer Aldous Huxley. Huxley’s novel, which has nothing to do with the Middle East, was first published in 1936. Its title is borrowed from a line in Milton’s poem, Samson Agonistes, portraying the fate of the Biblical character Samson, who finally achieves revenge on the Philistines by pulling down the temple of Dagon with the last remains of his strength, and killing, in his dying act, more Philistines than he slew when he was a strong young man.
But less than two months after the much-publicized one-day conference in Annapolis, Maryland, hosted by President Bush to re-launch Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, “eyeless in Gaza” might well be an appropriate subhead—to use journalistic jargon—for anyone associated with negotiations over the future of Gaza and of Israeli-Palestinian relations as a whole.
A Church in China
Wed 16 Jan 2008 • Responses: 3 • by David Aikman
Independent, But Not Underground
“Sauna City” is a commercial building in the Asian Games district of Beijing that is only a few years old but already is beginning to look distinctly shabby. The main entrance to the building has a sign over it, “Night Club,” and there are advertisements for various kinds of bath-house activity; it doesn’t look like the most salubrious location in the Chinese capital. But as a visitor approaches the right-hand-side front entrance, his attention is captured by a most unexpected sound wafting down from somewhere above: Christian hymn singing.
Those Hard-Worked Chinese Ideologists
Fri 11 Jan 2008 by David Aikman
Poor Chinese Communist leaders! It’s not enough to rise to the top of the largest political party in the world, the Communist Party of China (66 million members in 2002) and rule the world’s most populous nation (1.3 billion). Chinese Communist leaders seem predestined to become brilliant ideological innovators in the opaque mists of Marxism.
‘Christian America, this is YOUR Columbine’
Fri 21 Dec 2007 • Responses: 2 • by David Aikman
Isn’t this a hate crime?
There is something very perplexing in the mainstream media response to the shootings at a Youth With A Mission center in Arvada, Colorado, and New Life Church in Colorado Springs, seventy miles away. The shooter, Matthew Murray, 24, initially murdered two staffers at the Youth With A Mission training base in Arvada, Tiffany Johnson, 26, and Philip Crouse, 24, shortly after midnight on December 10. Several hours later, he drove seventy miles to the large Colorado Springs church and murdered two more victims, young sisters, Stephanie Works, 18, and Rachael Works, 16, before being shot at by a female security guard, falling to the ground, and then shooting himself.
A Second Look at Annapolis
Thu 13 Dec 2007 • Responses: 2 • by David Aikman
A “successful” round of talks?
It is more than two weeks now since the Annapolis Conference on Middle East peace convened by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on the property of the U.S. Naval Academy. The one-day conference could hardly avoid being seen as a huge anti-climax, in spite of the fact that it was touch and go until just before the event that some of the countries invited would even turn up. The invitees were nearly fifty in number, and included the entire Arab League’s 22 members, representatives of the EU, the UN, China and Russia. The central guests of the conference, of course, were Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Conspicuous by their absence—they were not invited—were representatives of the Palestinian political party, Hamas, and of course, the Iranians, who denounced the conference before, during, and after it took place.
A Mandarin-Speaking Prime Minister for Australia
Tue 04 Dec 2007 by David Aikman
There was no doubt some handwringing, not to say heartburn, in the White House recently when America’s great Australian ally, John Howard, leader of Australia’s conservative coalition government, was defeated in Australia’s general election. Howard had been prime minister since 1996, and was a staunch ally of President George Bush. He had sent his country’s best troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion of 2002, and when the U.S. invaded Iraq in March of 2003, Howard sent troops there also. Howard had a blunt, Anglo-Saxon conservative view of life that was instantly attractive to George Bush. The two men clearly liked each other.
Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations
Mon 05 Nov 2007 • Responses: 6 • by David Aikman
Cynics have already charged that in the Bush administration’s intensive focus on Israeli-Palestinian issues, we are seeing a repeat of the Clinton years. Supposedly, in the seventh and eighth year of any White House administration, there is an attempt to break the deadlock over one of the thorniest negotiating issues in the world: the confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians. Just as President Clinton, in his last year in office—indeed, in his final days in office—came tantalizingly close to an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord in 2000, so President Bush is trying the same ploy in 2007 and 2008. He has dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Middle East region to try to prod the two sides towards an accord, and to mobilize support for any subsequent agreement among regional powers.
Turkey and the Armenian Genocide
Mon 15 Oct 2007 • Responses: 3 • by David Aikman
“This is a choice between condemning genocide and endangering our soldiers in Iraq,” was how Tom Lantos, Democratic chairman of the House committee and himself a Jewish Holocaust survivor, summed up the dilemma. Should the House Foreign Affairs committee approve a resolution designating a barbarous mass killing by the Turkish government in 1915 “genocide”? If the full House votes within a few weeks to pass the resolution, which is non-binding on the administration, the White House warned that vital transportation and communication links with U.S. forces in Iraq might be endangered. Turkey could slow down or even halt the passage of U.S. military goods and personnel through the Incirlik airbase in eastern Turkey. To underscore the threat, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan last week in a phone call with President Bush specifically threatened a Turkish retaliation against the resolution. The day after the Congressional Committee vote, Turkey recalled its ambassador to the U.S.
Burma: Monks vs. Generals
Fri 28 Sep 2007 by David Aikman
Is it possible that one of the most repressive regimes in the entire world, the reactionary and superstitious rule of the generals in Burma, is about to fall? It would be foolish to predict an imminent change of regime in a country where the ruling military clique has successfully resisted virtually all change for nearly half a century. But it is certainly possible. For the fifth straight day, up to 1,300 young Buddhist monks splashed through the monsoon-soaked streets of Yangon (formerly Rangoon), the capital of Myanmar (formerly Burma) in outright, but silent, protest against that country’s military regime. The generals, who rule the country, declared the Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks, were an “enemy of the people.” The monks would not desist from protesting, they said, until they had “wiped the military dictatorship from the land of Burma.”
