When I headed to the University of Rochester to take part in a panel discussion, I had no inkling of the campaign that some students had already launched to shut the event down. The reasons behind their opposition were revealing. In this one incident, concerning one event, at one campus, there’s a telling data point about today’s intellectual climate.
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On June 5, Elan Journo joined Ross Kaminsky to discuss recent developments in the U.S. approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jared Kushner’s peace plan. Listen to the segment.
The Trump administration is poised to announce a “Deal of the Century” to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hints and leaks suggest that the proposal would stop short of endorsing the goal of a sovereign Palestinian state. That prospect has pushed some into mourning.
The Trump plan, writes distinguished American diplomat William Burns, will likely be “a eulogy for the two-state solution.” The administration is about to “bury the only viable plan” for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The goal of a Palestinian state is commonly seen as an obvious good – and the fact that it has yet to be realized, a mark of shame for Israel and the United States. But, whatever the actual terms and merits of President Donald Trump’s proposal, we need to question the diplomatic article of faith that Palestinian statehood is necessary for peace.
If you care about justice and the rights of individuals – of Palestinians and Israelis – here is a crucial question seldom asked. What would such a Palestinian state actually look like?
Tribalism is rampant in other countries. In this talk, Elan Journo explores some of its forms and its role in the subjugation of individuals, the opposition to human progress, and the fueling of violent conflicts. Recorded at AynRandCon in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 4, 2018.
Tribalism is resurging. One of its most obvious manifestations can be seen in politics. Today what seems to matter first and above all else is loyalty to one’s political tribe and its leaders, not the facts about an issue, not the truth on any given controversy, not the right policy to adopt — all of these are pushed to the background.
Elan Journo interviews Rob Tarr, a contributor to Foundations of a Free Society, about Ayn Rand’s defense of capitalism and the interplay between philosophy and economic theory.
Can the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be resolved? Yes, it can, and it took me an entire book, What Justice Demands, to analyze the essential nature of the conflict and indicate a path forward. In March, I took up the challenge of debating that hugely complicated issue at the Soho Forum in New York City.
The effects of German Nazism are horrific and indelible. The overall death toll in World War II, which began eighty years ago this summer, “dwarfs the mortality figures for the Great War of 1914–18, obscene as those were,” observes historian Tony Judt. “No other conflict in recorded history killed so many people in so short a time.” By one reckoning, between September 1939 and the war’s end in 1945, an average of 27,000 people died each day as a result of the global conflict.
But what was the cause of all this carnage? Before the war, Germany was renowned for its elevated culture, famed as the land of poets and philosophers. And yet, it became the land of the secret police, concentration camps, the Holocaust.
Hitler had spelled out his vile ambition and perverse views in a book, which sold more than two hundred thousand copies between 1925 and 1932. Voters knew what the Nazi ideology stood for. And yet Hitler became chancellor of Germany and transformed the country into a totalitarian state.
What explains the rise of Hitler’s Germany?
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The documentary “Islam and the Future of Tolerance” sheds much-needed light on an issue engulfed in ignorance, confusion, taboo.
Read more: Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz in Open Conversation about Islam
Elan Journo interviews Gregory Salmieri about a new book, Foundations of a Free Society, that offers a deep exploration of Ayn Rand’s political thought.
Watch the interview: Conservatives, Libertarians, Anarchists vs. Rand on Politics
