Robin Shepherd, Director, International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society in London, has held senior fellowships at some of the world’s most prestigious public policy institutes since leaving international journalism in 2003 when his last position was Moscow Bureau Chief for The Times of London.
Shepherd’s key areas of expertise are transatlantic relations, American foreign policy, Middle Eastern(particularly Israeli) relations with the West, Russia, central and eastern Europe, NATO and the European Union. His forthcoming book: “A State Beyond the Pale, Europe’s Problem with Israel” looks at the reasons for widespread hostility to Israel in Europe among the continent’s opinion formers.
He joined the Henry Jackson Society in March 2009. Shepherd entered the think tank world in 2003 with a public policy fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Institute for Scholars in Washington D.C. where he focused his attention on the dual expansions of NATO and the EU and their impact on transatlantic relations. Subsequently he became an adjunct fellow of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Based in central Europe he wrote widely for international media and journals, focusing on transatlantic relations, Russia and relations with the Middle East. In 2006 he was appointed as a senior transatlantic fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), also based in central Europe. He returned to London and joined Chatham House in June 2007 where he ran the Europe programme.
Shepherd is widely quoted in the international media and writes commentaries for a variety of publications. He speaks Russian, Slovak, Czech and French. He studied Russian at the University of London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies and took a masters in political theory from the London School of Economics. His first book – “Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution and Beyond”, published in 2000 – looked at the first decade of post-communist transi
Perhaps it has something to do with its craving for an ever wider readership. As it has doubled its audience in little more than a decade (to more than 1.6 million weekly sales), the temptation to fall into line with the default assumptions that that audience could reasonably be expected to hold may have been too great to resist. Or perhaps it is simply that, like so many other institutions associated with the British political intelligentsia, it has surrendered to the politically correct orthodoxies that now run riot through the country’s foreign policy establishment.
Either way, the Economist isn’t what it used to be. Flat, dull, lazy and predictable, a once great institution is now little better than a receptacle for every received wisdom in the book.
tion in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
In another one of those this-is-all-you-really-need-to-know stories from the Middle East, the Jerusalem Post is reporting today that a vulture has been detained in Saudi Arabia for being an Israeli spy. The bird carried an Israeli tag and a transmitter of the kind that is standard for tracking avian migration patterns.
The Saudi newspaper Al-Weeam said the bird was part of a “Zionist plot”, while Arabic language Econohere was a sense of dreary inevitability, therefore, about this week’s leader column (the most commented article on the Economist website) urging President Obama to impose a peace agreement from above websites were said to be now awash with talk about Zionists training birds for spying missions.
Friendly with dictatorships however vile, accommodating of an anti-Semitism that knows no parallel since Germany in the 1930s, and willfully contemptuous of Britain’s long term interests in the war against terrorism, UK foreign policy in the Middle East had surely reached rock bottom long, long ago. Not so. When it comes to the British Foreign Office and its relations with Israel, there are always new depths to be plumbed.
And so it is that we wake up today to the news that two staff at the British consulate in Jerusalem have been arrested by the Israeli authorities for gun-running for Palestinian (Hamas) terrorists planning to cause carnage by bombing a packed football stadium.
The Foreign Office is being quoted as saying that security procedures will be reviewed and that the Israeli authorities do not believe the incident has anything to do with the staffers’ jobs at the embassy. But how can British embassy security procedures be anything other than severely compromised when the Foreign Office itself adopts such a conciliatory line towards Palestinian terror groups?
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Warning to the US: Don't Play by Islamic Rules
Douglas Murray has an immensely important piece in the latest issue of Standpoint, detailing America, Britain and Europe’s fatal miscalculations in dealing with militant Islam. This is the sort of piece that deserves to be read far and wide. So take a look and pass it on to all your contacts. To read the piece, click here.
New Year slaughter of Christians in Egypt shows we’re all in it together against Islamism
It will be interesting to observe the international response following last night’s slaughter of at least 21 Christians by Islamists outside a Church in Alexandria, Egypt. If it had been the other way around (heaven forfend that it had been carried out by Jews) there would have been mass protests around the world, condemnations from leading politicians and, given that this comes on the heels of other such massacres, could well have ended up with a resolution at the United Nations.
But don’t hold your breath. The politically correct multi-culturalism that holds sway across Europe and increasing sections of the United States (I hardly need mention the UN) dictates that we must always beware of enflaming Muslim sensitivities. The great diversionary spectre of “Islamophobia” silences all that go before it.
But last night’s bomb attack in Egypt is no isolated event. During a Christmas Day mass in the Philippines 11 were injured in a bombing in a Christian chapel. Also in December 38 Christians were slaughtered by Muslim extremists in Nigeria, a country where church burnings are starting to become commonplace. In Iraq last Autumn 68 Christians were massacred in the Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad by a group threatening that Christians will be “exterminated”. Across the Middle East, Christians increasingly live in fear of their Muslim neighbours, and the region’s Christian population is diminishing fast. So at what point does a series of “isolated events” start to form a pattern?
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