Sublime

we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut; that, in fact, we have no way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.

“Easiest job in America,” we were told.

Born in Upper Egypt, he had, like al-Banna, moved to Cairo during the turbulent 1920s. After a brief stint in the Ministry of Education, Qutb traveled to the United States in 1948 to research its educational system. What he discovered was a nation committed to individual freedom, yet “devoid of human sympathy and responsibility … except under the f

For instance, you cannot, with any confidence, venture into a department of Middle Eastern studies at an American university and get a morally sane (much less accurate) account of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, or between western values and those of conservative Islam. But the reasons for that failure are also knowable, and ultim

The intention of the United States government in supporting Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war was to curb the spread of Iran’s revolution, but it had the more disastrous effect of curbing its evolution.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

Then the news broke that Trump had carried Florida. The voices of CNN reverberated from too many television screens, monstrous, distorted, unintelligible. Everything liberal America had told itself about itself and the rest of the country seemed inside out and upside down.