PATRICK LAWRENCE: Blinded to Syria
I do not know anyone who was not shocked by the lightning speed with which Damascus fell to expensively armed jihadist militias last weekend. I know very few people who do not understand that another domino has just fallen in the…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Afterlives of Lies
Last Friday, while President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron and other Western leaders, along with the reporters who clerk for them, were in Normandy busily airbrushing out the Red Army’s heroism in defeating the Reich 80 years ago, something…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Outsider Among Us
John Pilger, 1939–2023 In the spring of 1983, the late and greatly missed John Pilger began broadcasting a series of interviews called The Outsiders on British television. His subjects ranged widely. Costa–Gavras, Jessica Mitford, Seán MacBride, the Irish political figure and 1974 Nobelist, and Helen Suzman,…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Gaza & Confronting Power
The American state, broadly defined, is well on its way toward a form of apple-pie absolutism, forcing distorted meanings not merely on three university administrators but on all of us. The events of the past seven days are sobering no…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Media’s Fatal Compromises
It is no longer enough to tether correspondents to the perspective of the military from whose side they report. We appear to be on the way to having wars fought — huge, bloody, consequential wars — without any witnesses. The…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Banality of Propaganda
The annals of the awful art — Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, Japan’s and America’s during World War II — show that it does not have to be sophisticated. The Israeli president’s display of Mein Kampf just proved that again. I watched a video clip Sunday of Isaac Herzog that…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The USA’s Soviet-Style President
We are in for 19 months of relentless, insultingly transparent spin by way of which a patently incompetent man will be purveyed as commander in chief for another four years. Joe Biden announces — via a video, not in person…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Dimming the Lights
Two U.S. universities have recently taken the cultivation of ignorance to new lows, although at this point one hesitates to make any assumption as to where the bottom lies. Somewhere along the line, the thought seems to have taken hold among…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A War of Rhetoric & Reality
Washington put us all on notice when Zelensky got to town: It has no intention of seeking a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis and every intention of recommitting indefinitely to its ideological war. Passing through Austin, Texas, the other night, we had…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Zionists in Amsterdam
What happened in one Dutch city is the world since the Zionist regime began its limitlessly barbaric assault on Gaza: Western powers blessed it, and Western media determined to hide it from view. In the annals of “anti–Semitism,” if not…