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The (Really) Moderate Muslims of Kosovo

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

City Journal - By Michael J. Totten - Dec. 21 (Special Report) - Kosovo’s brand of Islam may be the most liberal in the world. I saw no more women there wearing conservative Islamic clothing—one or two per day at most—than I’ve seen in Manhattan. There is no gender apartheid even in Kosovo’s villages. Alcohol flows freely in restaurants, cafés, and bars, where you’ll see as many young women in sexy outfits as you’d find in any Western European country. Aside from the minarets on the skyline, there is no visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all.

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The Humanities Move Off Campus

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

City Journal - By Victor Davis Hanson - Dec. 07 (Opinion) - Until recently, classical education served as the foundation of the wider liberal arts curriculum, which in turn defined the mission of the traditional university. Classical learning dedicated itself to turning out literate citizens who could read and write well, express themselves, and make sense of the confusion of the present by drawing on the wisdom of the past. Students grounded in the classics appreciated the history of their civilization and understood the rights and responsibilities of their unique citizenship. Universities, then, acted as cultural custodians, helping students understand our present values in the context of a 2,500-year tradition that began with the ancient Greeks.

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Taxachusetts No More?

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0700

City Journal - By Daniel J. Flynn - Nov. 01 (News Analysis) - Thanks to the tenacity of Carla Howell of the Committee for Small Government, voters may be able to eliminate Massachusetts’s income levy through Question 1 of a ballot referendum. In 2002, a similar ballot question asking for the repeal of the income tax earned 45 percent support. Today, with jobs and residents fleeing the economically limping Bay State, the political climate for eliminating the income tax is even more hospitable. Backers also hope that the repeal would force Massachusetts to practice tough fiscal discipline—the income tax constitutes more than 40 percent of state revenue.

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Sarah Palin rally

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

City Journal - By John Leo - Oct. 10 (News Analysis) - Dana Milbank of the Washington Post often writes with a good deal of attitude, and his Tuesday column was no exception. In his report on Sarah Palin’s campaign speech in Clearwater, Florida, laced with mocking Palinisms (“darn right,” “betcha”), he wrote that “the self-identified pit bull has been unleashed, if not unhinged.” The “unhinging,” in Milbank’s assessment, came when Palin charged that Obama still has some explaining to do about his relationship with 1960s Weatherman bomber William Ayers. Milbank also wrote that Palin blamed Katie Couric for her “less-than-successful” CBS interview. Other newspapers reported a more light-hearted Palin response to the dismal interview. The Tampa Tribune, for example, reported that she said: “I shoulda told them I was just trying to keep Tina Fey in business.”

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A Confusion of Tongues

Sun, 25 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

City Journal - By Theodore Dalrymple - May. 25 (Special Report) - Problems with interpreting the law are not the only, or even the most important, ones that arise in an ever more diverse society. A feeling of unease is widespread, even among the longer-resident immigrants themselves, that Britain has lost its distinctive character: or rather, that the loss of a distinctive character is now its most distinctive character. The country that those immigrants came to, or thought they were coming to, no longer exists. It has changed beyond all recognition--far beyond and more radically than the inevitable change that has accompanied human existence since the dawn of civilization. A sense of continuity has been lost, disconcerting in a country with an unwritten constitution founded upon continuity.

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Bizarre Bedfellows for Barack

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

City Journal - By Fred Siegel - Feb. 05 (Opinion) - Obama's achievements in reaching out to moderate voters are largely proleptic: words aren't deeds. And while he has few concrete achievements to his name, he does have a voting record that hardly suggests an ability to rise above Left and Right. In 2005, his first year in the Senate, the man who made a specialty of voting "present" in the Illinois State Senate refused--despite repeated entreaties--to join a bipartisan agreement among 14 senators not to filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees. After his first two years in the Senate, National Journal's analysis of roll call votes found that he was more liberal than 86 percent of his colleagues, and his voting record has only grown more liberal since then. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action now gives him a 97.5 percent rating, while National Journal ranks him the most liberal member of the Senate. By comparison, Hillary Clinton, who occasionally votes with the GOP, ranks 16th. Obama is such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, he voted more often with the Democrats than did the party's majority leader, Harry Reid.

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A SLAPP Against Freedom

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:48:45 -0700

City Journal - By Judith Miller - Oct. 11 (Special Report) - The case shows that while anti-SLAPP legislation makes it somewhat easier, cheaper, and faster for those accused of libel to fight back, "it doesn't solve the problem entirely," said Jeff Hermes, a lawyer for the Boston Herald. "Media companies are not covered by our state's statute, and defendants in such cases still need to prepare a full defense."

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On the Front Line in the War on Terrorism

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 16:42:32 -0700

City Journal - By Judith Miller - Aug. 14 (Special Report) - Three time zones, 3,000 miles, and a cultural galaxy apart, New York and Los Angeles face a common threat: along with Washington, D.C., they're the chief American targets of Islamic terror. And both cities boast top cops, sometime rivals--the cities are fiercely competitive--who know that ensuring that a dog doesn't bark will determine their legacies. After investing millions of dollars in homeland security, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York and Chief William J. Bratton of L.A. can both claim counterterror successes. What can we learn from their approaches? And will they be able to continue preventing terrorist attacks in their cities?

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The Coming Urban Terror

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 08:39:35 -0700

City Journal - By John Robb - Aug. 13 (Special Report) - Over the last few years, small groups' ability to conduct terrorism has shown radical improvements in productivity--their capacity to inflict economic, physical, and moral damage. These groups, motivated by everything from gang membership to religious extremism, have taken advantage of easy access to our global superinfrastructure, revenues from growing illicit commercial flows, and ubiquitously available new technologies to cross the threshold necessary to become terrible threats. September 11, 2001, marked their arrival at that threshold. Unfortunately, the improvements in lethality that we have already seen are just the beginning. The arc of productivity growth that lets small groups terrorize at ever-higher levels of death and disruption stretches as far as the eye can see. Eventually, one man may even be able to wield the destructive power that only nation-states possess today. It is a perverse twist of history that this new threat arrives at the same moment that wars between states are receding into the past. Thanks to global interdependence, state-against-state warfare is far less likely than it used to be, and viable only against disconnected or powerless states. But the underlying processes of globalization have made us exceedingly vulnerable to nonstate enemies. The mechanisms of power and control that states once exerted will continue to weaken as global interconnectivity increases. Small groups of terrorists can already attack deep within any state, riding on the highways of interconnectivity, unconcerned about our porous borders and our nation-state militaries. These terrorists' likeliest point of origin, and their likeliest destination, is the city.

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What Really Buys Happiness?

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0700

City Journal - By Arthur C. Brooks - Aug. 06 (Special Report) - The United States is a rich nation getting richer. According to the U.S. Census, between 1993 and 2003 the average inflation-adjusted income in the top quintile of American earners increased 22 percent. But prosperity didn't end with the top earners: those in the middle quintile saw their incomes rise 17 percent, on average, while the bottom quintile enjoyed a 13 percent increase. This isn't a short-term phenomenon, either. In the 30 years leading up to 2003, top-quintile earners saw their real incomes increase by two-thirds, versus a quarter for those in the middle quintile and a fifth among the bottom earners. Reason to celebrate? Not according to those who worry about rising income inequality--the fact that the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer. The National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey (GSS) indicates that in 1973, the average family in the top quintile earned about ten times what the average bottom-quintile family earned. By 2003, that difference had grown to almost 15 times.

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The Incredible Shrinking Father

Mon, 07 May 2007 10:12:52 -0700

City Journal - By Kay S. Hymowitz - May. 07 (Special Report) - Here's a Delphic riddle for our times: When is your father not your father? Answer: when he's a sperm donor. Consider a case now before the Kansas Supreme Court. An unmarried woman in her early thirties decided that she wanted a child and asked a friend to be a sperm donor. He agreed, one thing led to another, which led to a syringe of his sperm, which led to the birth of twins. The mother says that she always intended to raise the kids alone and never wanted the friend involved in their lives. The donor says that he planned to be the twins' father in name and practice. There is no written contract. What does the contemporary Solomon do? Well, in a Kansas trial court, Solomon rules that without a contract the twins have no father. The man who provided half of the children's genetic material has no more relationship to them than does the taxi driver who rushed their mother to the hospital when she went into labor. Now, assuming that the supreme court upholds the decision, the state of Kansas can celebrate adding two more fatherless children to its population, and Mom can rejoice by dressing her twins in bibs--available over the Internet--proudly announcing: my daddy's name is donor.

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The Empire of Lies: The twenty-first century will not belong to China

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:11:10 -0700

City Journal - By Guy Sorman - Apr. 30 (Special Report) - The Western press is full of stories these days on China's arrival as a superpower, some even heralding, or warning, that the future may belong to her. Western political and business delegations stream into Beijing, confident of China's economy, which continues to grow rapidly. Investment pours in. Crowning China's new status, Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics. But China's success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of her subjects, fortunate to be working for an expanding global market, increasingly enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining 1 billion, however, remain among the poorest and most exploited people in the world, lacking even minimal rights and public services. Popular discontent simmers, especially in the countryside, where it often flares into violent confrontation with Communist Party authorities. China's economic "miracle" is rotting from within.

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Sins of Omission

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 09:13:09 -0800

City Journal - By John Leo - Feb. 28 (Opinion) - Don't identify people in the news by race unless race is important to the story: that's the policy of most newspapers. But in practice, outbreaks of sensitivity in the newsroom often lead reporters and editors to withhold racial identification even when police are seeking a suspect after a major crime. Newspapers mention all details that might help the authorities find the perpetrator--except skin color.

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