Peter Berger Habermas is exactly my age. Our paths crossed briefly in the 1960s, when he was a visiting professor in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where I was then teaching. We did not particularly take to each other. I was put off by both his leftist politics and his ponderous philosophical language. (German philosophers, no matter where located on the ideological spectrum, vie with each other in producing texts which are comprehensible only to... Read more

By Fareed Zakaria, CNN I am opposed to the Palestinian effort at the United Nations because I think that it is going to get them nowhere. This is not the time for romantic gestures. This is the time for them to do something that will actually help them get a Palestinian state – a goal that I support. http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/22/zakaria-i-oppose-the-palestinian-un-bid-for-practical-reasons/ Read more

Geroeg Weigel One of the (many) signs of our cultural decline is that verbal insults, these days, are almost invariably scatological or sexual, provoking a blizzard of asterisks whenever A wants to put the smackdown on B. Once upon a time, it was not so. Once, the ability to come up with a clever insult that could be repeated in polite society was thought an important, if not necessarily essential, component of being a gentleman. http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.4488/pub_detail.asp Read more

The 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly has just begun. Unless a diplomatic miracle happens, that body will soon approve what amounts to a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. Palestinian spokesmen say they had no choice but to make their end run around serious negotiations with Israel—because what Israel is offering in such negotiations is just a fraction of the territory to which the Palestinians are entitled. http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/9/19/main-feature/1/settling-for-statehood/e Read more

Jonathan Sacks It is not clear that the West has successfully met the challenge of 9/11. Worse: it is not clear that the West yet fully understands what the challenge is. http://standpointmag.co.uk/features-september-11-how-to-reverse-the-wests-decline-jonathan-sacks-ibn-khaldun-9/11-social-cohesion Read more

Carol Swain This hastily conceived policy has the potential to destroy every religious organization on campus by secularizing religion and allowing intolerant conflict. Carried to its logical extension, it means that no organization can maintain integrity of beliefs. Christians can seek to lead Muslim organizations, Muslims can seek to lead Jewish ones, and Wiccans can seek to lead Catholic fellowships. The policy encourages people holding antithetical views to infiltrate organizations they seek to destroy. http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110915/OPINION03/309150052/Vanderbilt-flirting-religious-suppression?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|s Read more

Egypt’s revolution against Hosni Mubarak captivated the world. It helped inspire an armed rebellion against Moammar Qaddafi’s hellish dungeon in Libya and peaceful protests against Bashar al-Assad’s Baath Party regime in Syria despite his government’s ruthless repression. The only problem with the Egyptian revolution is that it was not a revolution. It was a coup d’etat against the president by the army. http://pajamasmedia.com/michaeltotten/2011/09/11/egypt%E2%80%99s-botched-revolution/ Read more

In the Torah [Exodus 4:10], Moses initially resists being God’s messenger because of his speech, saying: “Please, O Lord, I have never been a man of words…. I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue.” From this the rabbis concluded that Moses was a stutterer, which a story in the midrash attributes to his having burned his tongue on hot coals as an infant. Yet why decide that he stuttered rather than that he suffered from some other speech... Read more

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opinion/if-it-feels-right.html?_r=3&hp Read more

David Pollock According to face-to-face surveys conducted according to the highest international standards, more Palestinians in east Jerusalem would prefer to become citizens of Israel rather than citizens of a new Palestinian state. In addition, 40 percent said they would probably or definitely move in order to live under Israeli rather than Palestinian rule. http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=442&PID=0&IID=8573&TTL=What_Do_the_Arabs_of_East_Jerusalem_Really_Want Read more