David Aikman is a former senior correspondent for Time Magazine and the author of ten books, including, most recently, The Delusion of Disbelief: How the New Atheism Is a Threat to Your Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness and The Mirage of Peace: Understanding the Unending Conflict in the Middle East.
The Terrorist Next Door: How the Government is Deceiving You About the Islamist Threat By Erick Stakelbeck (Regnery Publishing, 256 pages, $27.95) THERE PROBABLY have been few more bafflingly stupid exchanges between a government official and a congressional committee than the May 2010 question-and-answer session between Attorney General Eric Holder and members of the House […]
Foreign correspondents in Beijing were alerted to something strange going on with China’s Christian community on April 10, 2011. Hundreds of members of the prominent Beijing Shouwang house church (whose name means “Keeping Watch”) were preparing to gather in a prominent open-air space in the Zhongguancun high-tech commercial area of northwest Beijing for an outdoor […]
If it wasn’t the philosophical equivalent of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the distinguished journalists who waited in eager anticipation around the square-shaped table at the offices of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life on Washington’s M Street in late October may well have anticipated fireworks. The Washington Post‘s Sally Quinn, the […]
June 4, 1989. I had grabbed a few hours’ sleep after reporting the ominous buildup of PLA infantry units around the back of the Great Hall of the People all the previous day. It had been obvious to me since that afternoon that the crackdown would begin that evening. By the time I made my […]
About a decade ago I was working in Washington with some colleagues on a TV documentary— subsequently aired worldwide by the BBC— about the Israeli-Palestinian agreement known as the “Oslo Accords.” One of our interviews was with the prominent Palestinian American academic Rashid Khalidi, at the time a professor at the University of Chicago. I […]
Indians as well as foreign observers of all kinds were quick to call the November 26-29 massacres in Mumbai “India’s 9/11.” Mercifully for India, the 10 terrorists who took part in the attacks on 10 targets in Mumbai, including two luxury hotels, a train station, and a Jewish guest house, failed to murder the number […]
Mao: The Untold Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Knopf, 832 pages, $35) Countries, it is sometimes said, get the leaders they deserve. But that cynical dictum is surely refuted by the case of China. By what stretch of the perverted imagination did China ever deserve such a monster as Mao Zedong? The 20th […]
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