Jeff Jacoby

She told him he was the little girl’s father, and he believed her. When the state asked him to acknowledge his paternity, he went in and signed the paper they put before him. Though scarcely more than a child himself, he understood that good men don’t walk...

Earlier this year in April (2001), Secretary of State Colin Powell rebuked Israel for sending tanks and bulldozers into Gaza following Palestinian mortar attacks on the Israeli town of Sederot. “The Israeli response,” he said, “was excessive and...

His nomination isn’t even official yet, but the knives are already out for Gerald Reynolds, the former president of the Center for New Black Leadership whom President Bush has tapped to run the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. His crime? He...

Two days after Timothy McVeigh’s execution, The New York Times published eight letters to the editor discussing the event and expressing an opinion on the death penalty. Six of the eight were against executing murderers, one was in favor, and one was in favor in...

The Palestinians, you may have noticed, have changed their tune. When the current orgy of violence against Israelis began last fall, the explanation out of Gaza City — faithfully echoed by most of the Western media — was that it was all Ariel...

I had this column all figured out. “Good news,” I was going to begin. “Gasoline prices are up. And why is that good news? Because it means more gasoline is on the way — and more gas means cheaper gas.” I intended to explain that prices...

In the two-year political cycle that culminated on Election Day 2000, some 350 initiative petitions were submitted to election officials in the 24 states that permit laws to be passed at the ballot box. Of those 350, only 76 made it onto the ballot. And of those 76,...

Our ruined EP-3 surveillance plane is still parked on that Chinese runway, months after it was forced down and its crew taken hostage. At least six Chinese-American scholars have been jailed in China on groundless spying charges; their families have not been allowed...

Normal human beings would blanch at the thought of staging an athletic event at the site of an infamous massacre. But China’s Communist rulers, who are bidding hard to host the Summer Olympics in 2008, are not normal human beings. So it comes as no surprise that...

Socialism is dead in the former Soviet Union, but if you live in New England, it is alive and well in your grocer’s dairy case. The price you pay for a gallon of milk is not determined by competition and the free market. It is set instead by a cartel called the...

The death of Pol Pot, 23 years to the week after he and the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia, occasioned long backward glances at one of the 20th century’s most horrific genocides. It was noted everywhere that the communist reign of terror in Cambodia...

I could tell it was a parody. “Dear Warden Lappin,” began the letter to the director of the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., where Timothy McVeigh is being held, “On behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), I am writing...

It is no secret that the civil rights establishment has become a parody of what was once a courageous army for racial dignity and fairness. There was a time when those who claimed to fight against prejudice confronted genuinely terrible injustice: segregated public...

The demand for slavery reparations got a good airing last weekend at a National Reparations Convention held in Chicago. A formal plan for compensating the descendants of American slaves has yet to be drafted, the Chicago Tribune reported, but among the proposals...

Late in September 2000, the Palestinian Authority kicked off a campaign of organized violence meant to hasten the final “liberation” of Israel from the Jews. The fighting began with mobs throwing rocks and firebombs at Jewish civilians and vehicles. Soon...

“NOTHING in his life,” one character in Macbeth says of another, “became him like the leaving it.” It would have been nice to say of Bill Clinton that nothing in his presidency became him like the leaving it. Those of us who spent the last...