Jeff Jacoby

It began three years ago in an ugly encounter between a motorist and the police. It ended earlier this summer in a dreadful opinion by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. And as the noted civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate observes in a characteristically...

This was George Bush's warning to the international terrorists and their sponsors: "The United States will be firm with terrorists. We will not make concessions.... If we find states supplying money, weapons, training, identification, documents, travel, or safe haven...

Of the five countries described below, can you identify the one(s) excluded from the US-led coalition in the war on terrorism? Country A is free and democratic, a steadfast ally of the United States. Its citizens know what it means to be victimized by terrorism, and...

In the summer of 1997, a young Israeli art student named Tatiana Susskin drew a caricature portraying the Prophet Mohammed as a pig and tacked up copies of it on Arab storefronts in Hebron. She could hardly have devised a more inflammatory insult. The crude leaflets...

Free trade across international borders is not just good for business or good for job-creation. It is good -- period. So said President Bush in a remarkable speech earlier this year, when he made the case for free trade on unabashedly moral grounds. "Open trade is not...

Like many other people, Bud Welch lost a member of his family -- his daughter Julie -- when Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Unlike most of the others, Welch opposes the death penalty, even for McVeigh, and is willing to say so publicly....

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 away from...

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 disproportionate." Of...

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 opposes...

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 a...

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 Sharon's fault. His...

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 were high because supplies of...

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 they...

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 lasted...