Varia

A few items of interest from around the web this evening. First of all, remarkable results from the Illinois Senate primary, where Barack Obama, a state senator who was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, crushed a strong field of opponents to become the frontrunner for the seat of retiring GOP senator Peter Fitzgerarld. It's hard to miss the similarity between Obama's triumph and that of Carol Moseley-Braun in 1992. Like Moseley-Braun, Obama initially seemed like an afterthought in a race between two well-funded white males, who spent much of the campaign attacking each other. Obama emerged from the crossfire as the most thoughtful candidate--achieving the rare feat of endorsements from the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch to win with more than 50 percent of the vote.

Second, a superb piece in The New Republic by Andrew Sullivan on the aftermath of the Spanish election. Sullivan takes to task the sloppiness of the European left’s thinking on the issue of terrorism by focusing on a Guardian editorial that starts off by blaming Israel for the growth of international terrorism. The Sharon regime, apparently, is to sit idly by while suicide-murderers target its civilians.

Last of all, an interesting item from the HNN homepage, regarding a bizarre event at Indiana University where a professor in the department of applied health science was teaching a course called “Threats, Violence, and Workplace Safety” as an exploration of the risk of terrorism and the history and motivation of terrorists. The professor, who had no academic training in the topic (just as, I suspect, most readers of HNN would lack training to teach a course in applied health science) taught the course from what appears to have been an anti-Israel bias. After strong criticism emerged, the IU administration, admirably, stepped in and ordered the course to be taught in such a way that reflected the bulletin description. This is a more extreme manifestation of a discussion we had a few weeks back regarding Vinay Lal’s “Democracy in America” course at UCLA of the dangers of having non-specialists offering “history” courses in highly controversial topics relating to modern US politics or contemporary international relations. Such courses seem to be the most likely to involve biased presentations.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!