Cohen also excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for their mealy-mouthed failure to support Salman Rushdie when Islamists started burning his books. To the shame of British freedom, John le Carré and Roy Hattersley found excuses for the mullahs. And...

Obama’s recognition of America’s limitations is not a sign of cowardly pessimism, but of realistic wisdom. His relative discretion in the Middle East has allowed people there to act for themselves. We do not yet know what the outcome there will be, but...

Israel, the beacon of democracy in the Middle East, has nothing more to say. For some reason, we – in the press, on television, in our parliaments – are not discussing this silence. But, as Professor Ian Buruma pointed out recently, the political heirs...

Some may have been sufficiently indoctrinated to feel that the Great Leader really was a benign father figure to whom they owed everything. Others no doubt displaced their emotions, which could have stemmed from any number of private and public sorrows.

Ian Buruma has a theory: We often suppress real pain, such as that caused by the loss of a family member. Numbness, rather than hysteria, is the norm. But our feelings must find an outlet somehow, and they can emerge when a celebrity dies. All of the...

Hitch 22 is a literary masterpiece, an absolute joy to listen to. I’ll leave it to his literary/politico peers to critique the ideas within (see, for example, the latest issue of The New York Review of Books with Ian Buruma’s review, as well as David...