Eric Margolis

For the American sociologist, see Eric Margolis (sociologist).

Eric S. Margolis (born 1942 or 1943) is an American-born journalist and writer. For 27 years, ending in 2010, he was a contributing editor to the Toronto Sun chain of newspapers, writing mainly about the Middle East, South Asia and Islam. He contributes to the Huffington Post and appears frequently on Canadian television broadcasts, as well as on CNN. A multinational, he holds residences in New York, Paris, Toronto and Banff, Canada. Margolis is the owner of Canadian vitamin manufacturer Jamieson Laboratories.

Biography

Background

Margolis was born in New York City in 1943 to Henry M. Margolis and Nexhmie Zaimi, an American-Albanian. His father was a New York businessman, restaurant owner, theatrical producer and investor, while his mother was a journalist and author. Eric Margolis holds degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and New York University MBA Program.

Journalism

Margolis writes a regular column for the Huffington Post and also writes for Dawn, an English language Pakistani newspaper, the Gulf Times in Qatar, the Khaleej Times in Dubai, New York Times and The American Conservative . He appears regularly on such television outlets as CNN, Fox, CBC, British Sky Broadcasting News, NPR, and CTV. He is a regular guest on the TV Ontario's The Agenda after previously regularly appearing on its predecessor programme Studio 2.

He is affiliated with several organizations including International Institute of Strategic Studies in London and the Institute of Regional Studies based in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Animal rights

Margolis and his wife Dana have been animal rights activists for several decades. Together they created the charity The Eric S. Margolis Family Foundation which works to prevent animal cruelty and focuses on issues such as factory farming, puppy mills, and elephant poaching.

Work

Political views on United States

Margolis identifies his politics as "Eisenhower Republican". Though his domestic political persuasion is moderately conservative (he is a staunch anti-communist and a supporter of capitalism), Margolis' views on the Middle East are sharply at odds with those of the neoconservatives.

Margolis wrote about Barack Obama's election stating that:

Americans did not "liberate" Iraq, but they certainly liberated their own nation last week by sweeping the Republican Party from power. One prays America's long nightmare of foreign aggressions, fear, religious extremism, and flirting with neo-fascism is finally at an end.

In a 2009 column, Margolis stated that an American politician he very much admires is Ron Paul. Margolis wrote about Paul:

I came to deeply respect and admire Paul's courage, honesty, and his refusal to accept special interest money ... In fact, Rep. Paul has been a model of the type of legislators envisaged by America's founding fathers: men of high moral standards and intellect dedicated to the nation's wellbeing. He reminds me in many ways of the fiercely upright senators of the early Roman Republic.

Margolis has said he rejects the Republican Party of 2010 due to the growing influence of the Tea Party movement, which he says now appeals to the fears and prejudices of its followers.

9/11

Margolis has argued that the American government may have been behind the 9/11 attacks. On September 10, 2010, in a column on his website Margolis declares "we still do not know the real story about 9/11." Margolis' arguments include: the Osama Bin Laden tapes are fakes, questioning why the Air Force didn't shoot down the planes, asserting a lack of plane wreckage at the Pentagon, and repeating the theory that 9/11 was "staged by Israel's Mossad and a cabal of right-wing US Air Force generals" without criticizing the theory. While saying there is no "hard evidence" that Americans were behind 9/11, he adds "What, in the end, can we conclude? ... The attacks plunged America into wars against the Muslim world and enriched the US arms industry[,] boosted pro-Israel neo-conservatives [and] destroyed one of Israel's two main enemies."

Middle East

Margolis is best known from his coverage of Palestine and Kashmir. Margolis' mother, Nexhmie Zaimi, was also a journalist who spent a long time in the Middle East documenting the plight of the Palestinians during the 1950s. Her influence, plus Margolis's role as a foreign correspondent in the Mideast and travelling with the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War, invested Margolis with a strong interest in the Muslim World. In a January 2009 column entitled "Eradicating Hamas", Margolis called the Gaza War a "final solution campaign" on the part of Israel, and called Hamas a popular revolutionary movement that had stood up for the rights of Palestinians "ethnically cleansed" in 1948.

World history

In a November 2008 book review entitled "Deflating the Churchill Myth", Margolis in the Toronto Sun endorsed Pat Buchanan's book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War as a "powerful new book". Margolis stated:

Buchanan’s heretical view, and mine, is that the Western democracies should have let Hitler expand his Reich eastward until it inevitably went to war with the even more dangerous Soviet Union. Once these despotisms had exhausted themselves, the Western democracies would have been left dominating Europe. The lives of millions of Western civilians and soldiers would have been spared.

In a 2009 essay entitled "Don't Blame Hitler Alone for World War II", Margolis endorsed the claims of Viktor Suvorov that Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler by an alleged impending Soviet attack, and that it is wrong to give Hitler "total blame" for World War II.

Publications

• War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Tibet (ISBN 0-415-93062-6) Routledge 1999
• American Raj: The West and the Muslim World (ISBN 1-554-70087-6) Key Porter September, 2008. Finalist in English non-fiction category at 2009 Governor General's Awards for Literary Merit.

External links

• Eric Margolis home page
• Eric Margolis: Archives on LewRockwell.com
• D-Day: We Were All Allies – commentary, revealing decisive role of the Soviet Union in World War II
• Appearances on C-SPAN