About Benj Demott

I went to Cairo a couple of years ago to attend a conference on international health. It was held at a hotel down the hill from the pyramids at Giza and on a free day I did my touristy duty. The pharoahs’ tombs didn’t get me too high. Maybe because I kept my head down … Read more

This is a (slightly adapted) version of a lecture Kanan Makiya gave last week at the University of New Hampshire. Makiya contrasts the relative progress made by Iraq’s victims-become-citizens with the dithering (and worse) of the country’s political class. His unillusioned, yet undespairing analysis clarifies the situation on the ground. It also hints why Makiya … Read more

Last fall, a small group of young Israeli activists began gathering on Fridays in Sheikh Jarrah to stop the eviction of Palestinian families from this East Jerusalem neighborhood. Three of those families, spawned by (once-and-future?) Palestinian refugees who had lived in West Jerusalem before 1948, have now been thrown out of their homes to make … Read more

My first time in Afghanistan was late winter 1968/69, making the Overland Trail fast as possible through howling cold of Central Asian steppes. Minibus from Mashhad to Heart, arriving at the border crossing: dark, dusty, cold and bleak (Later I was to discover that somehow Afghan border-crossings were always dark dusty cold bleak, even on … Read more

Fr. Rick Frechette is a Passionist priest-doctor (and FIRST contributor) who has been working in Haiti for a generation, running hospitals and social programs in Port-au-Prince as well as a Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos orphanage on the outskirts of the capital. One of the two hospitals he directs was destroyed by the earthquake. (Two medical volunteers … Read more

Nat Finkelstein, who died earlier this month, contributed photographs and prose to “First.” He’s best known for his 60s pictures of Warhol’s Factory (such as the one above), but his life was bigger than his images. This piece, “Kandahar, 1971”, about his time in Afghanistan is from his memoir, “The 14 Ounce Pound.” (You can … Read more

Uri Avnery, the “grandfather” of Israel’s peace movement, published these reflections in Israel last month during Passover week. Passover Week is a time for outings. News programs on radio and television start with words like: “The masses of the House of Israel spent the day in the national parks…” It is also a feast of … Read more