Ilana Mercer

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Ilana Mercer

Born	South Africa
Residence	United States
Occupation	Columnist, author, blogger
Website Official site

Ilana Mercer is a libertarian writer, born in South Africa to Rabbi Ben Isaacson and raised in Israel after the family was forced to flee because of her father's anti-apartheid preaching. She has lived in Canada and currently resides in the United States.

She writes a weekly column, “Return to Reason”, for WorldNetDaily. She has also written for Free-Market News Network, Front Page Magazine, Globe and Mail, Calgary Herald, Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Sun, Orange County Register, The American Spectator, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and others.^[1] In the past she has written for Pat Buchanan's The American Conservative, but later became highly critical of that publication for its perceived anti-Israel bias.

[edit] Editorial Positions

On foreign policy, she takes a stance of strong opposition to the Iraq war, as well as opposition to unrestricted immigration. She is a supporter of the Zionist movement, but opposed Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon. Often critical of Islam as a whole, she scorns the portraying of Islamism as a "religion of peace,"^[2] and shows skepticism towards its moderate sections.^[3]^[4]

She sympathizes with traditional religious belief, despite being non-religious herself. Among her strongest philosophical influences, as can be seen by her emphasis on privacy as the bedrock of a society that respects natural rights,^[5] is Ayn Rand.

She has also written antagonistically on global warming.^[6] She supports drug legalization and deregulation.^[7] Although she has degrees in psychology, she endorses anti-psychiatry as expressed by Thomas Szasz in his book The Myth of Mental Illness. She has expressed the belief that the excessive psychological deconstructing of even slight deviations from the norm is likely to weaken the distinction between good and evil, as well as free will.^[8]