the Middle East are sharply at odds with those of the neoconservatives. Margolis wrote this about Barack Obama's election: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 because of the growing influence of the Tea Party movement, which he says now appeals to the fears and prejudices of its followers. 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