The New York Sun, November 2007
A review of: A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.
In the wake of the First World War, leaders of the Western powers — Britain, France, Italy, and America — assembled in Paris to redraw the maps of the world. From the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, they meatballed together Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia; they invented Iraq and Jordan ex nihilo.
by John Hawkins, September 2006
John Hawkins: Why are Europeans so secular compared to Americans?
Claire Berlinski: American religiosity doesn’t need to be explained; after all, throughout history, in every civilization, people have believed in the supernatural. What needs to be explained is European atheism, which is the aberration-unique in the world and in human history. It has its origins in politics, I think, not metaphysics. Voltaire was of the view that it is not so much the intrinsic power of the argument for atheism that caused people to reject faith, but rather the corruption of the Church, and largely I agree with him. Before the French Revolution, there were no atheists in Europe. Heretics, sure. But atheists? Unheard of.
Continue reading An Interview With Claire Berlinski, Author Of Menace In Europe
New York Sun, March 21, 2008
A Review of Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East
In suggesting that Islamic extremism may be, if not a spent force in the Middle East, no longer the most dynamic or important one, Robin Wright has more credibility than most. In 1983, Ms. Wright surveyed the wreckage of the United States Embassy in Beirut. Beneath it lay the remains of her friends. Two years later, Ms. Wright wrote “Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam.” The title is self-explanatory and its thesis, unfortunately, has hardly passed into obscurity.””
The New York Sun, July 2007
A review of The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent.
Last month, en route to the British Library, I strolled past the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Piccadilly. I was on foot because it was a beautiful day and because there is a distinctly creepy mood, these days, on London’s tubes and busses. Signs everywhere remind passengers that they are on CCTV. The police presence is heavy and visible. To be sure, the odds of any one bus blowing up are tiny, but the ubiquitous security prompts the unwelcome thought that there are people about who seek to better those odds. Days later, I flew out of Heathrow airport, where the mood was creepier still.
The New York Sun,September 2007
In 1995, having read Olivier Roy’s The Failure of Political Islam (1992), Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes asked, “How can someone who knows so much be so completely wrong?” Mr. Roy’s latest work, Secularism Confronts Islam, prompts the very same question. It is a remarkable book: articulate, original, lucid, without a paragraph that fails to contain an interesting thought. It is clearly the product of a wide-ranging intelligence in possession of a refined analytic sensibility, a first-rate historical education and a generous spirit. And one wonders how someone who knows so much could have written it.
The Globe and Mail, September 2006
THE FILM SUBMISSION aired in the Netherlands on August 29, 2004. It was promptly and predictably decried by Muslims as blasphemous. Fair enough; it was. If you make a film that depicts verses of the Koran printed onto the skin of half-naked women, you must expect to be called a blasphemer. Expecting to be murdered is another story. Filmmaker Theo Van Gogh expected no such thing; he continued to cycle through the streets of Amsterdam unarmed and unprotected, dismissing the threats against him as empty bluster.
Policy Review, February 2005
ATHEISM, AS THEOLOGIAN Alister McGrath understands the term, is not merely the asseveration that no God exists. It is a distinct movement in intellectual, cultural, and political history and may be mapped to particular historic events — the arc of its rise and decline demarcated at either end by two tumbling edifices, the Bastille and the Berlin Wall. This movement, curiously, has behaved much like a religion: It has produced gurus and proselytizers; it has been appropriated to serve political ends; and, ultimately, it has been embraced not for its compelling internal logic but on faith — or at gunpoint.
The Washington Post, June 2005
MOVE FROM AUSTERE Paris to this anarchic city as I have done this summer, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the idea of integrating Turkey into the European Union is and always has been ludicrous. Turkey is not Europe, and it is certainly not France.
I do not say this merely because the phones, electricity, hot water and front door lock have failed on me, serially, since my arrival, along with the Internet, refrigerator and stove.
Azure, January 2005
THE COMMENCEMENT OF the second Palestinian Intifada, in late 2000, ignited the most extensive outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in France since the Holocaust. It continues to this day. The crimes have been perpetrated almost entirely by the beur — Arab immigrants. The political alliances forged between Jewish and Arab leaders during the rise of the right-wing National Front have broken down.
Education, entrepreneurialism, and democratic institutions bode well for the country’s future—but profound challenges remain.
City Journal
Spring 2015
I attended a dinner in Paris full of tech experts, scientists, and investors, all of whom were gloomy about the West. Progress isn’t progressing, they complained. There are too many impediments to innovation. What on earth has gone wrong with our universities? We once put a man on the moon, and now we can’t even figure out a humane way to fly from Silicon Valley to Paris. Everything’s overregulated. The Scientific Revolution is over; the Industrial Revolution has reached the end of the line. No one understands what made America great anymore. We haven’t conquered death, but taxes have conquered us. We’re doomed.