Category: Foreign Policy

  • By Selwyn Duke They cut off the 12-year-old boy's fingertips, but still he refused to convert to Islam. They then “severely beat him,” reports the group Christian Aid Mission, “telling his father they would stop the torture only if he, the father, returned to Islam. When the [father] refused, relatives said, the ISIS militants also…

  • By Selwyn Duke It’s not a stretch to say that what ex-president Jimmy Carter did for Iran, Barack Obama is doing for the whole Middle East and beyond. Islamic State is on the move; jihadism in general is raging and all the rage; and with the Iran deal, the man who helped enable the “Arab…

  • By Selwyn Duke It looks a bit too much like a Muslim Brotherhood symbol for critics’ tastes. It’s not being worn by jihadists, however. But by U.S. soldiers fighting jihadists in Iraq. It’s a new U.S. Army patch, featuring the Arab swords called “scimitars,” and at least one critic has called it creepy. You be the judge:…

  • By Selwyn Duke “At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it.” So lamented Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr., reports the New York Times, about young boys being sexually abused by Afghan allies on his own military base. Buckley had made the startling revelation to his father, Gregory…

  • By Selwyn Duke A well known phenomenon in the animal kingdom is that when taking over a new pride, a lion will sometimes kill all the cubs. We don’t know exactly what kind of feeling drives him in this bloody act, but there’s obviously a lack of attachment. Suffice it to say the problem can…

  • By Selwyn Duke No one as yet knows how the United States' second Ebola patient — the first believed to have contracted the disease on American soil — became infected. We know that the person, a female nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, picked up the disease from recently deceased Liberian national Thomas Eric…

  • By Selwyn Duke When you send your son overseas through an exchange program for cultural enrichment, you don’t expect him to be adopted by a homosexual couple and never return home. But that’s exactly what is happening in the case of one Russian boy who was visiting the U.S. — over the protests of his…

  • By Selwyn Duke Western civilization lied and people died. It lied, that is, to itself. I am referring to Iraq, but not to the hapless George W. Bush and the claim of WMDs’ existence, which wasn’t a lie at all. What is at issue here is more fundamental. It’s a lie that imbues Bushes, Clintons…

  • By Selwyn Duke We are witnessing, I believe, a turning point in geopolitical history, one future historians may analyze as we have the Roman Empire’s fall. Vladimir Putin is making a move — and it’s not just against Ukraine. It may not be just a move against Eastern Europe. It’s not even, perhaps, just a…

  • By Selwyn Duke Imagine you go overseas and give a speech advocating a cause, only to come home and find you’re being sued for “crimes against humanity.” No, what you did wasn’t illegal under American law or under the laws of the nation in which you expressed your words. You’re being sued under international law.…