The Spectator 13 April 2013

The blows Margaret Thatcher struck against socialism at home and the Soviet empire abroad are her most noted achievements. But an even greater legacy was bequeathed to her sex.

Margaret Thatcher made her own political way, from beginning to end.

8 April 2013
CITY JOURNAL

NATIONAL REVIEW
by Kathryn Jean Lopez
April 8, 2013

There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters is the title of a book by Claire Berlinski. Berlinski talks to National Review Online about why, in fact, she does!

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Why does Margaret Thatcher “matter,” as your book’s subtitle puts it?

CITY JOURNAL

Turkey’s Marxist terrorists strike again—this time, against America.

4 February 2013

Americans seem surprised that the February 1 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, was carried out not by Islamists but by a Marxist—specifically, by a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front, or DHKP/C. But no one in Turkey was remotely surprised.

THE JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS
December 19, 2012

While Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan needs no introduction, the Turkish imam Fethullah Gülen is probably the most important person you’ve never heard about. He is an immensely powerful figure in Turkey, and—to put it mildly—a controversial one. He is also an increasingly powerful figure globally. Today, there are between three and six million Gülen followers. Gülen leads the cemaat, an Islamic civil society movement, that has until now been critical to the electoral success of Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP). The cemaat is often described as Turkey’s Third Force—the other two being the AKP and the military.

CITY JOURNAL 23 November 2012

Embracing—and challenging—Bruce Bawer’s powerful new book

The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, by Bruce Bawer (Harper Collins, 400 pp., $25.99)

In his new book, Bruce Bawer has proposed an answer to vexing questions: Why has our culture become degraded? Why have our politics become polarized? And why has our public debate coarsened? Bawer locates the source of these misfortunes in the changes that have taken place in American higher education over the last generation—above all, the emergence of multicultural “identity studies.”

CITY JOURNAL
AUTUMN 2012

Controversial Muslim preacher, feared Turkish intriguer—and “inspirer” of the largest charter school network in America.

With the American economy in shambles, Europe imploding, and the Middle East in chaos, convincing Americans that they should pay attention to a Turkish preacher named Fethullah Gülen is an exceedingly hard sell. Many Americans have never heard of him, and if they have, he sounds like the least of their worries. According to his website, he is an “authoritative mainstream Turkish Muslim scholar, thinker, author, poet, opinion leader and educational activist who supports interfaith and intercultural dialogue, science, democracy and spirituality and opposes violence and turning religion into a political ideology.” The website adds that “by some estimates, several hundred educational organizations such as K–12 schools, universities, and language schools have been established around the world inspired by Fethullah Gülen.” The site notes, too, that Gülen was “the first Muslim scholar to publicly condemn the attacks of 9/11.” It also celebrates his modesty.

Yet there is a bit more to the story.

Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide, by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea

Claremont Review of Books
September 10, 2012

In their new book, Paul Marshall and Nina Shea, a senior fellow and the director, respectively, of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, argue that the West has been slow to appreciate the devastating effects of blasphemy and apostasy laws in the Islamic world, even as these laws are the source of countless outrages against human rights, freedom, and dignity.

GATESTONE INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL
August 20, 2012

An unshocking admission: I've made some ungodly-embarrassing retraction-worthy journalistic mistakes over the course of my career. Almost every journalist does. It's hard to write about complex events at once quickly, without boring your readers witless, and without making mistakes. One example in particular embarrasses me; I'll share it with you at the end of this piece. For now, I point this out to set the stage: When I criticize my colleagues, as I am about to do, I hardly mean to suggest that I do so from a platform of unblemished faultlessness.

But criticize I must. Something has gone very wrong in American coverage of news from abroad. It is shoddy, lazy, riddled with mistakes, and excessively simplistic.

Above all, it is absent.

Why we should worry about Turkey's missing jet

GATESTONE INTERNATIONAL POLICY COUNCIL
August 11, 2012

It is apparently lore at the Economist that foreign correspondents have a shelf life of three years. After this, they know too much. They become too involved in the minutiae of local politics to explain a story to their domestic audience. Then, of course, there is the famous State Department "clientitis" problem—diplomats, it is said, need to be rotated out in roughly the same amount of time lest they begin to understand the host country's point of view a bit too well.

Having lived in Turkey for seven years, I can confirm the folklore. It seems impossible to me that the whole world isn't following the drama of escalating Turkish-Syrian tensions with the same avidity as I am, waking early to parse the statement of every concerned minister and official, studying maps, attempting to read between the lines of the Turkish press, weighing what these omens might portend. But to judge from the commentary emanating from the United State, it's not.