Jeff Jacoby

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. This is an excerpt from his weekly newsletter, Arguable, and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe to Arguable at no charge, click here.

WMD Headlines Miss the Real Story

David Kay, the US government’s top weapons inspector in Iraq, reported this month on his team’s first three months of searching for weapons of mass destruction. “We have not yet found stocks of weapons,” he testified, nor anything to...

The War On America Did Not Begin On Sept 11th

The War we are in didn’t begin on Sept. 11, 2001. It began 22 years earlier. On Nov. 4, 1979, Islamist radicals stormed the US embassy in Tehran and, with the support of the Ayatollah Khomeini, proceeded to hold 52 Americans hostage for the next 15 months. The...

Road Map to More Terror in the Middle East

The US-sponsored “road map” to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not a very challenging document. The text, which is posted at the State Department website, is only 4-1/2 pages long, and most of it is written in reasonably clear English. Anyone...

Old Europe Grows Older

The handshakes in Evian were polite. The conversations were civil. Unlike the tens of thousands of European demonstrators who took to the streets to protest, none of the presidents or prime ministers at last week’s Group of Eight summit in France raised his...

Arafat on Top?

A hole was torn last month in the international “road map” to Israeli-Palestinian peace when Mahmoud Abbas insisted that Yasser Arafat remains the unchallenged ruler of the Palestinian Authority. “Arafat is at the top,” Abbas, the PA’s...

Castro’s Cult of Sycophants

“Cuba is an anachronism in our hemisphere, an anachronism on the face of the Earth,” Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked earlier this month. “And the whole international community should be condemning Cuba.” Who could disagree? In a...

The Million Fool March to Prop Up Dictator Saddam Hussein

Something was missing from last weekend’s vast wave of demonstrations against war in Iraq: Iraqis. Across Europe and the United States, 2 million or more protesters took to the streets to denounce the Bush administration’s plans to disarm Saddam Hussein....

Dealing with Terror Regimes

It will not end with Iraq. The toppling of Saddam Hussein will make the Middle East a better place, free a nation that has suffered unspeakable cruelty, and shame the illiberal “peace movement” that even now counsels appeasement and willful blindness in...

The “Diversity” Fig Leaf

As a justification for racial preferences, “diversity” is one of the great fig leaves of modern American academia. It first appeared in 1978 — well after affirmative action had degenerated into the practice of admitting students on the basis of...

Israeli Restraint Empowers Terrorists

Even by the grim standards of recent years, the suicide bombings in Tel Aviv last week were horrific. The terrorists, members of the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade (a wing of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization), positioned themselves at opposite ends of a busy...

Death Penalty by the Numbers

This month the Justice Department released “Capital Punishment 2001,” its latest annual survey of death penalty statistics. A prowl through the data prompts a few reflections on the capital punishment debate. 1. It is striking that a controversy so large...

Hope for Iran

Americans who care about Iran had something to be grateful for this Thanksgiving: The State Department finally came out foursquare in support of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have been demonstrating for an end to their country’s ruthless Islamic...

Campus Diversity Fraud

Anyone familiar with the argot of modern identity politics should be able to fill the blanks in this quotation from the student newspaper at Amherst College. The speaker is explaining why the minority group he belongs to should be granted its own...

If State Government Doesn’t Do It, Who Will?

Question 1 on the Massachusetts ballot would abolish the state income tax. If enacted it will eliminate as much as $9 billion in government revenue and force a radical downsizing of the state’s budget and operations. That is exactly the purpose for which its...

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