I was saddened to hear the news over the weekend that longtime PJ Media columnist Claudia Rosett has passed away at age 67. Claudia had maintained her column, The Rosett Report, at PJ Media since 2006, and although her writings here have been infrequent in recent years, she has contributed more than a thousand columns in these pages. And PJM was just a small part of her prolific and courageous writing career.

Much of her career was spent with the Wall Street Journal, serving as its Moscow bureau chief and editorial page editor for the Asia division. She was fearless and passionate, especially when reporting about repressive regimes around the world. Claudia was the only print journalist who witnessed the Tiennenman Square uprising in 1989, dodging bullets to get the story out to the world (you can read her first-hand account here). She was also a fierce critic of the United Nations and is widely credited with exposing corruption in the international body. She received several awards for her reporting on the UN’s Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. In recent years she had traveled to Hong Kong to cover protests over the encroachment of China. She was also a foreign policy fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.

On a personal note, Claudia was a lovely person. She was unfailingly polite in email correspondence and an editor’s dream. Every word and sentence was carefully chosen, and she could make complicated foreign policy issues understandable. Accolades poured out on Twitter over the weekend:

Looking back on her work for PJ Media over the years, I was touched to read her first “blog” post from 2006. It embodies Claudia’s practical realism and hopes that good would always triumph over evil.

“There are times I’ve wondered if there is some equilibrium amount of evil in the world –every time it is beaten back, it grows again,” Claudia wrote. “We trounce the Nazis and the Cold War begins; the Soviet Union finally collapses and out of a blue September sky, Islamic fascists are upon us. And yet, when freedom-loving people keep faith with themselves — and each other — there are mighty forces set in motion, which, as Winston Churchill foresaw at the beginning of World War II, will ‘roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.'”

Our prayers go out to Claudia’s family during this difficult time, and may she rest in peace.