The ransoming of captives has been practiced by Jews for many centuries and has been regarded as a greater obligation than charity for the poor.
Elections matter, but how much they matter depends entirely on how free, open and fair they are.
First impressions matter. Experts say we size up new people in somewhere between 30 seconds and two minutes.
America was not founded to improve health care or housing; it was founded for freedom.
The story of the Jews in the Bible is replete with incidents of their ingratitude to God for His gifts to them: incidents that just as repeatedly merit and receive punishment.
The way for the Palestinians to get a state is to go ahead and build it.
A great nation like the United States has many and varied interests, and we need both to do business with tyrants and to engage constantly in multilateral diplomacy.
I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I said I had no idea about.
At the United Nations, a lynch mob for Israel is always just a moment away.
While Argentina, Brazil, and Chile - what in textbooks used to be called the ABC countries - seem settled into democratic politics and free market economics, the Andean countries are in disarray.
The Saudis and Emiratis blame all of this on Iran. I think they’d have to grant, that as has been said, that the Houthis are an internally generated movement in Yemen and the Saudis were supposed to be dealing with the Houthis, who started out in essence along their border. So one of the things that we’re seeing is a complete failure of Saudi policy toward Yemen over the past 10 years, but the Saudis totally believe that the reason the Houthis are able to succeed militarily is the amount of money, advice, and guns they are receiving from Iran.
While all Alawites fear vengeance against their entire community should Assad fall, there are varying degrees of loyalty to the Assads.
Pundits are used to analyzing the gap between what our ideals suggest and what our security interests require.
I want to be the first guy to reverse a communist revolution.
It seems clear to me that the Obama Administration has no human rights policy. That is, while in some inchoate sense they would like respect for human rights to grow around the world, as all Americans would, they have no actual policy to achieve that goal - and they subordinate it to all their other policy goals.
There isn't any way for the people of Nicaragua to find out what's going on in Nicaragua.
Obamas foreign policy is strangely self-centered, focused on himself and the United States rather than on the conduct and needs of the nations the United States allies with, engages with, or must confront.
Honduras was the original 'banana republic,' and its poverty remains extreme.
Israel's flexibility is dependent on its sense of security.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.
Two presidents pursued human rights policies that were serious and effective, Reagan and George W. Bush. They understood that American support for human rights activists is a moral imperative for us and also makes the world safer for us.
Mass killing has very clearly not been eliminated, nor has the 'international community' developed a response that will avert it or bring it to a quick end.
There are no Muslim ghettos in the U.S.
Syria's population is 74% Sunni Muslim.
There are examples of fraternal dictatorships, or one, anyway: the passing of power from Fidel to Raul Castro.
