Categories
Commentary

The Deranged Kanye West

A deranged person like Kanye West, the African American rapper and designer who calls himself Ye, should be ignored. But ignoring him is not really an option. Due to his enormous following on social media and his ability to poison impressionable minds, his antisemitic rants on X and Instagram cannot be blithely disregarded. A few […]

Categories
Film

To Have And Have Not

Betty Joan Perske, otherwise known as Lauren Bacall, achieved fame after starring opposite Humphrey Bogart, her future husband, in Howard Hawks’ 1944 romantic thriller, To Have And Have Not. Portraying a sultry seductress in her movie debut, Bacall would appear with Bogart in three more films: The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key […]

Categories
Books

The October 7 War

Early on the morning of October 7, 2023, Israeli soldiers guarding the border along the Gaza Strip noticed signs of an imminent attack. Around the same time, the head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command, General Yaron Finkelman, returned to his post after a vacation. At 6:29 a.m., as several thousand enemy rockets began raining […]

Categories
Middle East

Trump’s Out-Of-The-Box Gaza Proposal

Donald Trump dropped a bombshell during an extraordinary press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington on February 4. It sent shock waves across the Middle East, causing a great deal of dismay. In one of the most stunning and far-reaching proposals ever presented by a sitting American president, Trump announced that the U.S. […]

Categories
Commentary

Trump’s Tariffs Tiff

Reason prevailed when Donald Trump, on February 3, pressed the pause button and postponed the imposition of hefty U.S. tariffs on Canadian and Mexican exports. Temporarily, at least, he thereby averted a nasty trade war that would be damaging to all three countries and the global economy. Trump, however, slapped a 10 percent tariff on […]

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Middle East

The U.S. Gets Tough With The Houthis

The United States recently redesignated the Houthis as a “foreign terrorist organization,” citing the threat they pose to the security and stability of the Middle East. The designation was originally imposed by President Donald Trump during his first term of office. It is richly deserved. The Houthis, a Shi’a tribal group in northern Yemen aligned […]

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Middle East

The Bibas Family Tragedy

The fourth Israeli hostage/Palestinian prisoner exchange since November 2023 took place in the Gaza Strip yesterday as Yarden Bibas, 35, Ofer Calderon, 54, and Keith Siegel, 65, were freed after 484 days in captivity. Before they were released into the custody of the Red Cross, they were forced to stand on a stage under a […]

Categories
Commentary

Politics Tarnished Auschwitz’s Commemorative Ceremony

There were glaring omissions on the list of dignitaries invited to the somber ceremony on January 27 marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Birkenau extermination camp in Poland. Presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens, representing 53 out of 195 countries, were there. Also in attendance were envoys from the Vatican and […]

Categories
Commentary

Elon Musk Stirs Unease

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and U.S. President Donald Trump’s confidant, has been stirring an awful lot of unease lately. In the past two weeks, he has praised the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), raised his hand in a gesture that looked ominously like a stiff-arm Nazi salute, made light of notorious […]

Categories
Middle East

Lebanon May Be Entering A New Phase In Its History

As widely expected, Israel did not withdraw from southern Lebanon on January 26. Under the 60-day ceasefire agreement, Israel was supposed to cede its positions to the Lebanese army before pulling out. But as the deadline for its withdrawal approached, Israel notified representatives of the oversight committee that monitors the ceasefire — the United States, France, […]