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David Solway

Election analysis: The election: A chance for real hope and change

By David Solway on June 10, 2011

On May 2 of this year, Canadians went to the polls and generated a set of electoral results that defied the collective wisdom of the nation’s pollsters, editors, political pundits and think tankers. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was given the majority government that had eluded him over the previous two election cycles—and a substantial majority it was. The best he could have hoped for, according to the commentariat, was yet another minority government presiding over a fractious, multi-Party House of Commons, with little chance of passing a Conservative budget and implementing Conservative legislation. 

Canada already knows a Muslim Sit-Com is not the answer

By David Solway on February 16, 2011

CBS anchor Katie Couric recently went on record deploring the “bigotry” and “seething hatred” that Muslims are supposed to be facing in the U.S., and proposing a “Muslim version of the Cosby Show” as a remedy to this lamentable situation. Of course, Ms. Couric’s reading of America’s ostensible anti-Muslim attitude is total nonsense of the sort associated with the political delirium of the “progressivist” class. The American people on the whole are probably among the most tolerant to be found anywhere in the world, with the glaring exception of the scandal-mongering left that has falsely donned the egalitarian mantle.

Ben and Barry: Just a few New Flavors

By David Solway on July 22, 2010

Benjamin Netanyahu can count himself lucky. The press has made much of the humiliation he suffered at the hands of Barry (aka Barack) Obama who, during their recent encounter, left him to stew for an hour in the White House reception room while the president enjoyed a leisurely dinner “with Michelle and the girls.” This was plainly no way to treat a visiting head of government, but let’s face it, it could have been much worse.

How to Respond to Free Gaza Flotillas

By David Solway on June 10, 2010

So much has already been written in the wake of the Free Gaza flotilla fiasco of May 31 that little remains to be said, other than to repeat the obvious: that Israel was set up, that the world’s chancelleries and the United Nations would collaborate in the usual bacchanal of condemnation, that Israel’s enemies would be gloating over yet another propaganda victory, and that Jew-haters and anti-Zionists everywhere would cite the trap into which Israel blindly stumbled as incontrovertible proof of the Jewish state’s innate savagery.

Coulter and the Camel

By David Solway on April 23, 2010

The camel is a noble animal. Had it not existed, Islamic civilization would never have gotten off the ground, just as, in the absence of the horse, we in the West would still be lugging barrows and scraping along in donkey-hauled slipes. The camel is perhaps even preferable to the horse. It is fast, carries its own water, and provides what SUV manufacturers call “command seating,” rivaled only by the elephant. Indeed, Mark Twain understood the inherently exalted nature of the creature when he introduced the cameleopard in Huckleberry Finn. Of course, the cameleopard, or “Royal Nonesuch,” is really a giraffe (Arabic: ziraffah, “tallest one”), but it sounds like a camel with a temper and enviable velocity, a beast that demands respect.

Liberalism and the Jews

By David Solway on February 11, 2010

One of the strangest and, at first blush, inexplicable aspects of the current social and political scene, remarked upon by many writers, is the swelling tide of antisemitic sentiment and the orchestrated, international campaign against the very existence of the Jewish state. We see it in the divestment campaigns of the churches, NGOs, and trade unions, in the proliferation of “Israel Apartheid Weeks” on university campuses, in the modern blood libel perpetrated by the Swedish press, and in the ramifying anti-Israel resolutions passed by the United Nations, exemplified most recently by the mendacious Goldstone report. Why should this be so?

The end of the line?

By David Solway on January 7, 2010

Following the release into the webworld of hacked emails, computer codes, and a raft of supplementary documents recording the antics of sundry paleoclimatolgists at the University of East Anglia’s influential Climate Research Unit, it has now become ice-crystal clear not only that the world has been cooling for the last decade, but that the global warming crusade is an environmental racket of historical proportions. Many “climate skeptics” and independent researchers have long known this to be the case and have understood that the motivating factor behind this massive and unprecedented fraud is the unsavory quest for power and profit on the part of governments, corporations, and ambitious individuals, scientists as well as entrepreneurs.

From Small Beginnings

By David Solway on October 1, 2009

Global warmists, environmentalists and ecological redeemers are a mixed bunch and come in every shape, size and color. There are those, of course, who adopt a sane and responsible attitude toward preserving our natural heritage.  One notable instance involves a new class of wealthy philanthropists, called eco-barons, such as the Chilean Sebastian Pinera, the American Douglas Thomas, and the Swiss Ernst Beyeler and Hansjörg Wyss, who have purchased, preserved and reconstructed millions of hectares in Chile, Argentina, the United States and South Africa. They are to be commended, not only because they are materially contributing to the planet’s well-being rather than whipping up public hysteria, but because they are not in the business of profiting from the latest environmental scare...

The Right Stuff

By David Solway on August 6, 2009

Many people today seem unable to discriminate politically between what we might call a “good Right” and a “bad Right.” From their perspective, the Right is one seamless, monolithic, invidious bloc, admitting of no distinctions. This is especially the case in Europe whose cultural and political blindness will predictably lead to protracted social upheaval in the foreseeable future. The plot goes something like this.

Israel is disproportionate.Disproportionately restrained. (DATE DE PARUTION 15 JANVIER 2009)

By David Solway on June 18, 2009

The recent outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas should give us an opportunity to reflect, once again, not only on the current belligerents, but on the role of the obligatory third party to the conflict. I refer to the ground troops of the armies of the liberal-left, aka the Western media, who inevitably tilt the balance of the war they are “covering” in favor of their confederates or, what amounts to the same thing, against the side they reprove. Thus, from the media’s squint-eyed parallax, Hamas is more sinned against than sinning and Israel is either wholly, largely or, at best, equally responsible for the “renewal” of violence in the region...

Why anti-semitism persists (DATE DE PARUTION 6 MAI 2009)

By David Solway on June 18, 2009

In his 1995 book [1] Assimilation and Its Discontents, Israeli political historian and prolific author Barry Rubin speaks of a time when “anti-Semitism became too minimal to inspire fear or defiance.” Indeed, for both the Israeli sabra and the diaspora Jew, particularly in America, “anti-Semitism’s rout and the acquisition of equality … raises the question of what to do next.” Only a little more than a decade has passed since Rubin wrote those lines but the “question of what to do next” has taken on a completely different complexion. For once again anti-Semitism has returned with a vengeance...

Why anti-semitism persists

By David Solway on May 6, 2009

In his 1995 book [1] Assimilation and Its Discontents, Israeli political historian and prolific author Barry Rubin speaks of a time when “anti-Semitism became too minimal to inspire fear or defiance.” Indeed, for both the Israeli sabra and the diaspora Jew, particularly in America, “anti-Semitism’s rout and the acquisition of equality … raises the question of what to do next.” Only a little more than a decade has passed since Rubin wrote those lines but the “question of what to do next” has taken on a completely different complexion. For once again anti-Semitism has returned with a vengeance...

The New Republic and the Mind Minus Imagination

By David Solway on April 9, 2009

 I don’t know about The New Republic. Occasionally an excellent writer, say a Paul Berman or an Adam Hirsch, will embellish its pages and generate a certain positive impact. But its measured tones and prudential camber, giving the impression of considered good sense, is largely deceptive. A vital element seems lacking. Beneath the ostensible judiciousness and studied objectivity there is a curious feel of waffle, an haut goût of empty sophistication, of something not quite kosher...

Israel is disproportionate. Disproportionately restrained.

By David Solway on January 15, 2009

The recent outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas should give us an opportunity to reflect, once again, not only on the current belligerents, but on the role of the obligatory third party to the conflict. I refer to the ground troops of the armies of the liberal-left, aka the Western media, who inevitably tilt the balance of the war they are “covering” in favor of their confederates or, what amounts to the same thing, against the side they reprove.

Academia Nuts

By David Solway on November 13, 2008

As we survey the intellectual scene today, what appears perhaps most disconcerting is the modern western University. With its mimosa administrations, Jacobin unions and an energetic left wing professoriate, it has become the new industrial farm for the production of ideological madness and intellectual obscurantism...

Procrustean History

By David Solway on August 7, 2008

The crisis in which the West now finds itself is largely one of its own making and is rooted primarily in the false relation it has entered into with history...

Merely children

By David Solway on May 15, 2008

Contemporary academics and intellectuals (or anti-intellectuals), by and large, strike me as the Mr. Beans of the vaudeville clerisy, epitomes of conceptual ineptitude. But they seem no less retarded than their immediate precursors, re-cycling the ineffable Bertrand Russell who in a 1937 speech declared that “Britain should disarm, and if Hitler marched his troops into this country when we were undefended, they should be welcomed like tourists and greeted in a friendly way.”..

The next Governor General

By David Solway on May 1, 2008

I regard my country as much in sorrow as in anger. Not so long ago I was listening to a radio news broadcast in which the remarks of an imam were being reported. Apparently, as a Jew I am the descendant of monkeys and swine and, along with those who share my theriomorphic ancestry, must be done way with, according to a Koranic sura cited by the imam in question, Sheikh Younus Kathrada. The sermon in which my demise and that of my family was being urged did not emanate from Riyadh, Teheran, Ramallah, Damascus or Sa’ana, but from a mosque in Vancouver. This particular offender may be muzzled, but there are many other Kathradas waiting in the wings...