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.

It’s official: the trip that Benjamin Ivry deemed “likely” to happen on this blog in October will indeed go forward. This coming February, the New York Philharmonic will visit North Korea.

About the trip to the land of Kim Jong Il, the New York Times reports U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill’s commenting, “‘I hope it will be looked back upon as an event that helped bring that country back into the world.’” Yet, as horizon blogger Terry Teachout, himself quoted in today’s Times article, noted in an October opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal,

What would you have thought if Franklin Roosevelt had encouraged the Philharmonic to accept an official invitation to play in Berlin in the spring of 1939? Do you think such a concert would have softened the hearts of the Nazis, any more than Jesse Owens’s victories in the 1936 Olympics changed their minds about racial equality? Or inspired the German people to rise up and revolt against Adolf Hilter? Or saved a single Jewish life?

Only at the end of today’s article does the Times reporter mention that “Some questions have been raised about the appropriateness of visiting a country run by one of the world’s most repressive governments”—a regime that has starved millions of its own people.

The formal announcement of the New York Phil’s trip will take place tomorrow at Avery Fisher Hall, when more details about the visit will be revealed. What we do already know is that the Philharmonic sought pre-conditions relating to the trip and that these conditions have been met. Among them: “that the orchestra could play The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Philharmonic should consider whether it’s brave to entertain a land that isn’t free.

Does anybody read the New York Observer anymore? I actually didn’t know it was still published, having tuned out when Hilton Kramer retired his front page art column a few years back. But the salmon-colored sheet drew my attention this week with a candidate for the most inane cover story ever: underwear.

Spanx is a girdle-like undergarment that makes the woman who pulls it on appear five to ten pounds slimmer. Even youthful, svelte ladies are addicted to the “power panty,” as the Observer alerts us. I knew the paper’s mission was to cover every nuance of what people are wearing in Manhattan, but this week’s article hits a new low. A wad of filler, its sole objective seems to be displaying a cutesy cartoon of Spanx-sporters Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow in their skivvies.

This drivel proves the obsolescence of a society rag like the NYO in the age of Gawker and other online social diaries.

In today’s post, horizon blogger Stefan Beck points out that Stewart O’Nan’s new book Last Night at the Lobster, about the manager of a fictional Red Lobster franchise, is about “where folks live. There is nothing ironic or silly about it.”

Indeed, I think we’re all a little tired of irony. Stefan goes on to say he has “vowed to read any new fiction that depicts people working at actual jobs.” It is refreshing to read a tale about someone doing meaningful work, rather than about a sensitive guy or gal scooping lint from his or her navel.

But I would add one caveat. Of late there has been a backlash against creative writing programs, which are seen as factories in which boiler-plate first-person narratives and clever short stories get churned out on assembly lines. The conventional wisdom is that MFA grads have little life experience, and in fact that their degrees are the only things qualifying them to express themselves.

I believe the current interest in “where folks live” and “actual jobs” is part of the tide rolling against writing programs. (Full disclosure: I attended such a program.) For instance, in the catalog copy of a prestigious house for the debut novel of a young writer I know, her medical degree receives top priority in her biography, as if to say, “this writer has done something real.” Subsequently this writer’s MFA receives mention.

Now I’m not pooh-poohing work. It’s important. But just because jobs are real doesn’t mean writing programs are fake.

So much in our hectic, 21st century lives takes place onscreen, why not literature?

Jeff Bezos and his company Amazon have treaded where all other such attempts have failed: into the land of e-book readers. Bezos’s device is called the “Kindle” and features a six-inch screen and a $400 price tag. Mediabistro’s GalleyCat blog today displays the headline, “Two Weeks In, Kindle Still ‘Fugly’ & Expensive.”

It seems the Kindle could become a kind of iPod for books, where content can be catalogued and shared. Personally, I find it difficult to read at length onscreen. But if the device were comfortable to use, I would do so. And let’s face it, books are dirty and take up space. Why not get rid of them?

According to an opinion column in last week’s Wall Street Journal, reading is on the way out. Do electronics like the Kindle have what it takes to save reading?

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?

Today, the New York Times reports that five members of the board of the Poetry Society of America, including its president, have resigned. Their resignations stem from “accusations of McCarthyism, conservatism, and simple bad management.”

The blood went bad when, earlier this year, John Hollander, the poet, critic, and retired Yale professor, was awarded the Society’s Frost Medal, a kind of lifetime achievement award.

A rough time-line: Professor Hollander, in the past, made some remarks that were insensitive. For instance, according to the New York Times, Hollander noted on NPR that “there isn’t much quality work coming from nonwhite poets today.” Poetry Society board members balked when, a few years ago, Hollander was put up as a contender for the Frost Medal. When, earlier this year, Hollander was announced as the recipient of the medal, novelist Walter Mosley, a board member, resigned in protest. In response, PSA board president William Louis-Dreyfus, a commodities trader, accused Mosley of McCarthyism in using Hollander’s politics against him. Angered at Louis-Dreyfus’s reaction, three other board members, including well-regarded poets Elizabeth Alexander and Mary Jo Salter, tendered their own resignations.

Mr. Mosley deemed Mr. Louis-Dreyfus’s invocation of Senator Joe McCarthy “ridiculous hyperbole.” Unfortunately, in describing the events at the PSA, Motoko Rich, the reporter for the New York Times, has committed her own act of egregious exaggeration. In discussing whether one can praise an artist’s work while criticizing the artist as a human, Ms. Rich compares John Hollander to Günter Grass. The former is a Jewish professor who has displayed ignorance and tactlessness. Günter Grass is a German who was a soldier in Hitler’s Waffen SS.

If emotions on the PSA’s board run high, it seems that even reporting on the matter severely impairs one’s sense of proportion.

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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Today, the New York Times makes available photographs obtained by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from the other side of Auschwitz: not the familiar images of starving prisoners, but new shots of vivacious German officers. It churns the stomach to envision the high life these Germans enjoyed while participating in the murder of over one million people.

Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant, compiled the scrapbook. The photos, which include the first authenticated images of the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele at the camp, feature Höcker lighting a towering Christmas tree and a singalong of SS men at their Alpine retreat. But perhaps the most shocking depicts members of the SS female auxiliary poised on a wooden fence eating fresh blueberries.

The women, thirteen of them, are lined up in skirts with their legs showing: they look like the Rockettes in summertime, when, months from their Radio City show, they might have indulged their appetites and gained a few pounds. (Do wurst and kartoffel provide suitable energy for genocide?) As revolting and disturbing as these images are, they need to be seen.

The Times reports that the Holocaust Museum in Washington has no plans, as of now, to exhibit the photos, but you can view them online here.

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.