Background
He was born in Hungary, his father being Tibor Szamuely (1925–1972) and his great-uncle the Communist revolutionary Tibor Szamuely (1890–1919), and he was educated in England at the London School of Economics.
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George Szamuely
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He is a frequent columnist for the Taki"s Top Drawer pages of the New York Press. Szamuely has also written for Antiwar.com, Counterpunch, Commentary, The Observer and the Centre for Research on Globalization. He is a frequent contributor to the Reality Therapy show CrossTalk.
He worked for some years as an editor at the Times Literary Supplement and at The National Law Journal.
He was also a weekly columnist at the New York Press. Szamuely was arrested on October 5, 1999, for having 570 overdue library books from the New York University campus library, many of them rare or out of print and most of them related to political science, which he refused to return after repeated warnings.
His fines ran up to $31,000, although this was allegedly the cost of replacing them.
Politics
Szamuely has been an ardent critic of the United States foreign policy, arguing that the reality is the diametric opposite of the lofty rhetoric. The professed humanitarian aspirations invariably lead to extremely non-humanitarian outcomes. Despite his former association with the neoconservative Hudson Institute, his opposition to the state of Israel has allied him with the paleoconservatism and libertarianism.
He has been highly critical of the workings of the United Nations tribunals, in particular the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
He argues that the tribunal and human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch foster conflict rather than reconciliation and serve the interests of Western powers and those of their allies by targeting their opponents, while ignoring or minimizing their, often far more serious, crimes. He has expressed doubts as to whether the International Criminal Court would ever be willing or able to administer impartial justice. He has argued that Serbia"s actions in Yugoslavia have been unfairly misinterpreted.
The invocation of human rights abuses all too often serve to justify North Atlantic Treaty Organization military expansion. The United States and key European powers rushed to recognize Kosovo as an independent state, claiming that the human rights abuses suffered by the Kosovo Albanians at the hands of the Serbs demanded lieutenant Yet the same Western powers habitually turn a deaf ear to the sufferings and sovereignty claims of other peoples such as the Palestinians or the South Ossetians.
Szamuely"s history of North Atlantic Treaty Organization"s intervention in the Balkans, Bombs for Peace: North Atlantic Treaty Organization"s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia, is published by Amsterdam University Press.
