W. Thomas Smith Jr. (born April 30, 1959) is an American author, editor, and journalist. He has written several books. His articles have appeared in many newspapers and magazines. Smith is executive editor of World Defense Review , a columnist with Townhall.com, and a former contributor to National Review Online.
This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(March 2008) |
Smith graduated from the University of South Carolina (USC) in 1982 with a BA degree in history. He then served in the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantry leader, parachutist, and shipboard special weapons security and counterterrorism instructor. Following his service in the Corps in 1987, he served on a para-military SWAT team in the nuclear industry. Soon thereafter, he began his career as a journalist.
This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(March 2008) |
Smith has written for numerous publications, including USA Today , U.S. News & World Report , BusinessWeek , The New York Post , and the UK's The Guardian . In 1998, he co-authored a George magazine feature with John F. Kennedy Jr. (Smith interviewed Gen. William C. Westmoreland in Charleston, South Carolina – Kennedy interviewed Gen. Võ Nguyên Giáp in Vietnam). The interviews were published together as a single piece on the Vietnam War in the November 1998 issue of George.
As a war correspondent, Smith reported from battlefields in both the Balkans in 1995 and in the Middle East in 1997, and he covered the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks from ground zero in New York. Also during the 1990s, he worked as a business magazine editor, a contract media relations director, a publicist for NBA basketball player Vince Carter and other professional athletes, and was the sole columnist for head football coach Lou Holtz's official website during Holtz's inaugural season at USC.
Smith's first book, Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency , was published in 2003. He has since written five other books.
Smith has been a guest commentator on the Fox News Channel, E! Entertainment's True Hollywood Story, and Bill Bennett's Morning in America . He has also been interviewed by numerous national publications (including Woman's Day , Writer's Digest , The Writer , and others); NBC, CBS, and ABC television affiliates; and he is a frequent guest on nationally syndicated radio programs, National Public Radio (NPR), and international radio, including the BBC. His articles have been included numerous times in radio-host Rush Limbaugh's daily "stack of stuff."
Smith is a contributing writer for A Nation Changed, a book commemorating the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (published by U.S. News & World Report). He is the technical editor and foreword writer for the second edition of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Iraq by Joseph Tragert, and he is the technical editor and "special afterword" writer for Contract Warriors by Fred Rosen.
He has served as adjunct professor at USC's College of Journalism and Mass Communications, and he has lectured groups and conferences from Fortune 500 companies to the U.S. Armed Forces.
A former correspondent for 'Agencia EFE' (the world's largest Spanish-language news wire), Smith currently writes a column, 'Beyond the DropZone', for – and is executive editor of – World Defense Review. He is a columnist for Townhall.com, and an erstwhile contributor to National Review Online. Some of his stories have been picked up by the Scripps Howard News wire. Others have been re-published by the U.S. Department of Defense. He also writes for Family Security Matters and is the director of their Counterterrorism Research Center.
In November 2007, Smith became the subject of controversy for blog posts he wrote as a freelancer for "The Tank", a section of National Review Online (NRO). On September 25, 2007, Smith reported that some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen were occupying a sprawling Hezbollah tent city close to the Lebanese parliament. [1] Four days later, he blogged that between 4,000 and 5,000 Hezbollah gunmen deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling show of force. [2]
The Huffington Post published a story alleging that Smith exaggerated or made up two events. [3] In response, Smith said he had only failed to be "specific in terms of detailing his sourcing." [4]
After an internal NRO investigation, Smith's editors declared that NRO could not stand by the blogging because both reports were disputed as implausible by sources independent of Smith. [5] On December 7, 2007, Smith voluntarily ended his relationship as a freelancer with NRO, saying this would be "in the best interest of the publication." [6]
Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and militant group, led by its Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah since 1992. Hezbollah's paramilitary wing is the Jihad Council, and its political wing is the Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc party in the Lebanese Parliament. Either the entire organization or only its military wing has been designated a terrorist organization by several countries, including by the European Union and, since 2017, also by most member states of the Arab League, with two exceptions – Lebanon, where Hezbollah is the most powerful political party, and Iraq. Russia does not view Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" but as a "legitimate socio-political force".
The wakizashi is one of the traditionally made Japanese swords (nihontō) worn by the samurai in feudal Japan.
The University of South Carolina Aiken is a public university in Aiken, South Carolina. It is part of the University of South Carolina System and offers undergraduate degree programs as well as master's degrees. Additional graduate courses and degree programs are offered through the University of South Carolina Extended Graduate Campus program. The University of South Carolina Aiken awards baccalaureate degrees in more than 30 major areas of study include the bachelor of science in business administration online through Palmetto College.
Hassan Nasrallah (Arabic: حسن نصر الله [ħasan nasˤrɑɫɫɑh]; born 31 August 1960) is a Lebanese cleric and political leader who serves as the 3rd secretary-general of Hezbollah since his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, was assassinated by the Israel Defense Forces in February 1992.
Jonah Jacob Goldberg is an American conservative syndicated columnist, author, political analyst, and commentator. The founding editor of National Review Online, from 1998 until 2019 he was an editor at National Review. Goldberg writes a weekly column about politics and culture for the Los Angeles Times. In October 2019, Goldberg became founding editor of the online opinion and news publication The Dispatch. Goldberg has authored the No. 1 New York Times bestsellerLiberal Fascism, released in January 2008; The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, released in 2012; and Suicide of the West, which was published in April 2018 and also became a New York Times bestseller, reaching No. 5 on the list the following month.
Duck sauce is a condiment with a sweet and sour flavor and a translucent orange appearance similar to a thin jelly. Offered at American Chinese restaurants, it is used as a dip for deep-fried dishes such as wonton strips, spring rolls, egg rolls, duck, chicken, fish, or with rice or noodles. It is often provided in single-serving packets along with soy sauce, mustard, hot sauce or red chili powder. It may be used as a glaze on foods, such as poultry. Despite its name, the sauce is not prepared using duck meat.
This is a timeline of events related to the 2006 Lebanon War.
The Israeli–Lebanese conflict, or the South Lebanon conflict, was a series of military clashes involving Israel, Lebanon and Syria, the Palestine Liberation Organization, as well as various militias acting from within Lebanon. The conflict peaked in the 1980s, during the Lebanese Civil War, and has abated since.
Hezbollah has the armed strength of a medium-sized army. Hezbollah is generally considered the most powerful non-state actor in the world, and to be stronger than the Lebanese Army. A hybrid force, the group maintains "robust conventional and unconventional military capabilities." The party's fighting strength has grown substantially since the 2006 Lebanon War.
The 2006 Hezbollah cross-border raid was a cross-border attack carried out by Lebanon-based Hezbollah militants on an Israeli military patrol on 12 July 2006 on Israeli territory.
The 2006 Lebanon War, also called the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah War and known in Lebanon as the July War and in Israel as the Second Lebanon War, was a 34-day military conflict in Lebanon, Northern Israel and the Golan Heights. The principal parties were Hezbollah paramilitary forces and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The conflict started on 12 July 2006, and continued until a United Nations-brokered ceasefire went into effect in the morning on 14 August 2006, though it formally ended on 8 September 2006 when Israel lifted its naval blockade of Lebanon. Due to unprecedented Iranian military support to Hezbollah before and during the war, some consider it the first round of the Iran–Israel proxy conflict, rather than a continuation of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Mitchell Geoffrey Bard is an American foreign policy analyst, editor and author who specializes in U.S.–Middle East policy. He is the Executive Director of the nonprofit American–Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE), and the director of the Jewish Virtual Library.
The Battle of Najaf was fought between United States and Iraqi forces on one side and the Islamist Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr on the other in the Iraqi city of Najaf in August 2004.
The funding of Hezbollah comes from Lebanese business groups, private persons, businessmen, the Lebanese diaspora involved in African diamond exploration, other Islamic groups and countries, and the taxes paid by the Shia Lebanese. Hezbollah says that the main source of its income comes from its own investment portfolios and donations by Muslims.
Guy Pelham Benson is an American columnist, commentator, and political pundit. He is a contributor to Fox News, political editor of Townhall.com, and a conservative talk radio host. Benson served as a Fellow at the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service during the spring 2021 academic semester.
An editorial (US), leading article or leader (UK) is an article written by the senior editorial people or publisher of a newspaper, magazine, or any other written document, often unsigned. Australian and major United States newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe, often classify editorials under the heading "opinion".
Sheila Lowe is a British-born novelist and graphologist who has lived in the United States since 1964. Her first book was published in 1999 and became a bestseller in the Complete Idiot's Guides series. Her second book was released a year later. In 2007, the first edition of Poison Pen, the beginning of her Claudia Rose forensic mystery series came out with a small publisher, Capital Crime Press. When Poison Pen received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, who called it "a dynamite debut," Kristen Weber, then-senior editor at New American Library, picked it up and published the first four books in the series. She is currently the president of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation.
Joel Chasnoff is an American stand-up comedian and writer with stage and screen credits in eight countries, and author of the comic memoir The 188th Crybaby Brigade, about his year as a tank soldier in the Israeli Army.
Colorado Springs Business Journal, founded in 1989, is a weekly business periodical for Colorado Springs, Colorado.
A manuscript is the work that an author submits to a publisher, editor, or producer for publication. In publishing, "manuscript" can also refer to one or both of the following:
... I should have caveated the reporting by saying that I only witnessed a fraction of what happened (from a moving car), with broader details of what I saw ultimately told to me by what I considered then – and still consider to be – reliable sources within the Cedar Revolution movement, as well as insiders within the Lebanese national security apparatus.
Two of our independent sources agreed with Smith's critics that the event was unlikely, and one—an editor who lives and works in Beirut—flatly stated that it didn’t happen. [...] In general, too much of Smith's information came from sources who had an incentive to exaggerate the threat Hezbollah poses to Lebanon.
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