August 27, 2012

The Lonely Man of the Middle East

by Stanley A. Weiss

GSTAAD — When Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan met last month with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin about the civil war in Syria, political biographers had a right to be confused. After all, one is the leader of a government that has imprisoned more journalists than China and Iran combined; empowered special courts to arrest citizens on suspicion of terrorism without evidence or the right to a hearing; sentenced two students to eight years in prison for holding a sign at a rally demanding “free education;’ and has seen more than 20,000 complaints filed against it in the European Court of Human Rights since 2008. The other is president of Russia.

June 15, 2012

Israel’s Future: When It’s Jew Versus Jew

WASHINGTON—It’s a measure of Nazi effectiveness in destroying the centers of Jewish learning that when Israel was created in 1948, there were just 400 ultra-Orthodox Jewish men in the entire state. Aware of the desire to revive Jewish religious study after the Holocaust, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, cut a deal: Haredi Jews, as the ultra-Orthodox are known, could spend all their time studying the Torah. They wouldn’t have to serve in the military like other Israelis, and they wouldn’t have to work—the state would support them. Like most Jews, the prime minister believed the deal would be short-lived: he assumed that Haredi students weren’t long for the modern world.

September 15, 2011

A BRILLIANT FRAUD

LONDON— It was the first time that cattle cars would be used in the 20th Century to carry people to concentration camps, a systematic annihilation of a whole population so horrific that a new word had to be invented to capture its brutality: genocide.

July 14, 2009

Water for Peace

LONDON — Just days after the death of his father, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was asked to rank the issues of dispute between Syria and Israel. “Israel ranks her priorities in the following way: security, land and water,” he said. “But the truth is different. They consider water to be the most important.” He added, “Discussing this matter now is premature and its turn will come only after the land issue is discussed.”