In the spirit of the season (top ten lists!), we give you here, in descending order, the top ten most viewed and talked about posts on contentions for 2007. Consider it a crash-course, if you’re new to our blog, or a way to find all your favorite posts in one place.

The Two-Man Republican Race by John Podhoretz

Dark Suspicions about the NIE by Norman Podhoretz

What the Army Wants You to See by Michael J. Totten

Not Surrender Monkeys Anymore by Max Boot

ANNAPOLIS: Bush’s Opening Remarks by Noah Pollak

Cheapening Free Speech by James Kirchick

New York is Not in Mexico by Gordon G. Chang

William Jennings Huckabee by Fred Siegel

Candidate Gore? by Gary Rosen

Olmert’s Bizarre Reading List by Eric Trager

Larbi Charef killed dozens of people in Algiers on Tuesday when he detonated his explosives-packed car. His suicide bombing was the culmination of a year that Charef had spent training with terrorists in the mountains in Eastern Algeria.

Some of those Charef murdered this week were receiving another form of training; they were university students. Although Charef received a high school diploma while spending two years in prison, he decided to become a terrorist when he was unable to find work upon his release.

Charef’s release from prison was the result of a government program “that gives amnesty to people convicted of terrorism or terrorism-related crimes.” In comforting the bomber’s mother, a family friend said, referring to the national program, “when you put young men for two years into prison, you need to follow up. They need guidance.” By suggesting the government should take responsibility for this young man, the family friend was exculpating the very people who should have had the strongest role in shaping his character: his parents.

And yet, today Charef’s parents are shaking their heads as to what could have motivated their son. Meanwhile, other parents are quite clear about what they teach their children. To wit: Charef’s accomplice in a second Tuesday bombing was a 64-year-old father. What had he imparted to his offspring? The value of joining the Islamist militant movement. A lesson well-learned: when their father, Rabah Bechla, took his life and those of many innocents this week, he was just following in the footsteps of his sons, who had died already “for the cause.”

It is painful to witness this cycle of nihilism and destruction. But it is not poverty alone that forms a terrorist. The photo in today’s New York Times that accompanies the story of the Algerian bombers shows the miserable shanty town in which one of them lived. Yet, the story’s text depicts a poverty of thinking, in which parents reject responsibility for their children. Where terrorists are bred, it seems the real vacuum is one of leadership.

According to an American Jewish Committee poll, out yesterday, a whopping 70 percent of American Jewish Democrats favor the New York Senator in her presidential bid. This isn’t exactly a shock. But maybe it should be. Mrs. Clinton has a record of serious gaffes in regard to Israel: her engagement with activist Abdurahman Alamoudi, for example, an avowed supporter of Hamas and Hizballah, whose contributions she returned publicly in 2000. Or her infamous kiss of Yasir Arafat’s wife after Mme. Suha accused Israel of using poison gas to kill Palestinians. Clinton tried to bow out of that blunder with the excuse that the translation in her earphones at the West Bank event was different from and less offensive than what she learned later to be the truth about Mrs. Arafat’s remarks.

While Hillary now enjoys massive support among American Jews, it seems the truth about whether that support will help or harm them will only be learned later.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez–who called George Bush the devil and noted that the day after the American President addressed the United Nations “it smells of sulfur still today”–has suffered a stunning defeat. Yesterday Venezuelans voted to reject a referendum that would overhaul the constitution and expedite Chavez’s plan to transform Venezuela into a socialist regime. Under Chavez’s leadership, the country has turned away from the United States, once a staunch ally.

The referendum Venezuelans voted down contained 69 proposed changes to the constitution. Such changes called for eliminating presidential term limits, increasing the authority of the President, and designating more property as communal. Not surprisingly, Chavez enjoyed large support from poorer communities, though the New York Times reports that some voting centers in lower income areas had no lines. According to the Times, “’I’m impressed by the lack of voters,’ said Ninoska González, 37, who sells cigarettes on the street. ‘This was full last year.’”

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times notes that students were essential to Chavez’s opposition. The Venezuelan leader regards this opposition as “‘daddy’s little children,’ ‘fascists,’ and ‘the children of the rich,’ who he says are taking orders from the U.S. government.”

This moment is a good one for U.S.-Venezuelan relations, though it’s not exactly time to celebrate. As indicated by Chavez’s olfactory hallucination around our President, reason seems not to hamper the Venezuelan leader. One can only speculate as to what forms his response to today’s defeat will take.

Gillian Gibbons, the British schoolteacher working in Sudan, began serving a fifteen-day prison sentence today. Gibbon’s crime was to have allowed her students to name their class teddy bear Muhammad. According to CNN, protesters consider her sentence too light and want her executed. Executed. Over a stuffed animal.

It’s embarrassing, frankly, that as Westerners we even have to be discussing this outrage. It’s difficult (if not impossible) to consider a religion peaceful whose adherents—even if they are its extreme adherents—want a woman killed because of a stuffed animal. Events seem to keep outpacing Andrew Sullivan’s attempts to set up a meaningful equivalence between fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians.

Jewcy blogger Abe Greenwald lets us know today just how far reporters from the New York Times to Time to the BBC are willing to go not to admit the obvious about the participants in the riots that began in France this past weekend.

For some reason, I can’t imagine why, these news outlets avoid stating that the rioters are Muslim. In fact, consistently referring to the rioters as “youths,” the news outlets make it sound as though, as Greenwald points out, what France and Nicolas Sarkozy are confronting is “teenage extremism” that “demands nothing less than a fully committed War on Puberty.”

Like death and taxes, there are certain things in life we’ve come to anticipate. Another item to add to the list: vapid front-page articles by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor (a wunderkind who was once Howell Raines’s pick to lead the Times’s Arts & Leisure section). Today’s edition: What the candidates eat!

Along with images of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Rudy Giuliani gorging on trans fats, we can savor other nuggets about the candidates’ eating and health habits. For example, did you know Hillary Clinton “said she prayed to God to help her lose weight”? Or that Mitt Romney eats the same thing every day, an ascetic diet that includes homemade granola and a whole lot of chicken? Or that Mike Huckabee “sticks largely to salads”?

Among the many ways filmmaker Michael Moore undermines his credibility is when he uses an image of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, running his hand through his hair to prove a point—as though Mr. Rumsfeld’s hair were emblematic of the evil-doings of the Bush administration. I wonder what epiphany Ms. Kantor expects us to have by exposing Mr. Romney’s weight or Mr. Giuliani’s predilection for pizza in Iowa. Or is this morsel, like the others Ms. Kantor has fed us in the past, just so many empty calories?

If Columbia University President Lee Bollinger had a burning desire to expose Columbia students to Islam and the realities of contemporary Iran, then inviting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak was not the most effective method of exposure.

Ahmadinejad is first and foremost a politician, an extraordinarily shrewd one at that. His goal is not education, but rather propagation of his odious ideas.

Given the two leaders’ divergent goals—one to educate and the other to indoctrinate—it seems odd that President Bollinger extended Ahmadinejad an invite. Why not ask Iranian scholars or journalists to illuminate aspects of Iranian society? Well, SIPA, Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, has done just that. As it says on SIPA’s website:

“Over the course of the 2007-2008 academic year, SIPA will host a lecture series examining the thirty year history of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Political leaders, scholars, and human rights activists will be invited to discuss the impact of the Islamic Republic of Iran on international security, peace, human rights, energy, and other critical issues.”

Dandy. I guess inviting Ahmadinejad rounded out the playbill, and had the added benefit of making not only the Columbia President, but also the Iranian President, look good.

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Regarding Columbia University President Lee Bollinger’s invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak this coming Monday on the Columbia campus, the Columbia Spectator today reports:

David Feith, CC ’09 and editor of the Jewish affairs publication the Current, expressed his concern that there was a difference between refusing to suppress hateful speech and actively inviting and providing a platform for it. Bollinger responded that the invitation very well may serve to help controversial speakers, but that the negative is “far outweighed by the importance of confronting ideas and not shielding ourselves from the world as it is.”

And what ideas will the Columbia community confront when it hears President Ahmadinejad of Iran? Denial of the Holocaust and pleas for the destruction of Israel. As Victor Davis Hanson writes on the Corner, “This is not a matter of free speech but of common decency and the most elemental common sense.”

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It’s hard to grasp the point of yesterday’s front page New York Times article on Chelsea Clinton by wunderkind reporter Jodi Kantor. While it’s clear that Kantor intended her piece to reveal the “real” Chelsea, she admits at the outset that the former first daughter and her parents “turned down interview requests for the article, as they have for countless others on the subject.” So, how does Kantor remedy this lack? With received wisdom and banalities, naturally. Kantor helpfully informs readers that the young Clinton has strawberry blond hair and favors tasteful pantsuits, that she graduated in 2001 from Stanford, did a stint at McKinsey, and works at a hedge fund run by a donor to various Clinton causes. That’s hard-hitting reportage.

The only mildly interesting nugget in the piece was the paragraph near the end, in which we discover that Chelsea hopes to learn “more about Judaism,” the faith of her boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky. Clinton, a “churchgoing Methodist,” has, of late, been attending Sabbath dinners. Perhaps Judaism will reach the White House in 2008 after all.