The United States is torn by indecision in Syria, and recent events illustrate this pattern of confusion. On April 7, Syrian government forces launched a chemical attack in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, and it immediately placed the United States on the horns of a dilemma. President Donald Trump was reluctant to intervene, in line with his […]
Mission Accomplished, U.S. President Donald Trump boasted in a triumphant Twitter post on April 14, resorting to a discredited phrase appropriated by President George W. Bush in May 2003 to declare victory in Iraq after the controversial American invasion. Trump, hardly concerned by the negative comparison it would inevitably evoke, trotted it out less than […]
Cynically portrayed by Nazi Germany as a “reeducation center,” the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was a synonym for unbridled state-sponsored terror. Although it was not an extermination camp, like Treblinka, it consumed the lives of about 50,000 people from 1936 to 1945. Now a memorial and museum, Sachsenhausen was not the first concentration camp built on […]
What now? What should the Israeli government do with about 35,000 Africans who have sunk roots in Israel and want to stay but who are being pressured to leave? Whether they’re described as migrant workers or asylum-seekers, the Eritreans and Sudanese who have entered Israel illegally since 2005 have become an embarrassing problem for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. […]
The Toronto International Film Festival and Human Rights Watch are co-presenting the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at the TIFF Bell Lightbox from April 18-25. One of the films, On My Way Out: The Secret Life of Nani and Popi, is about a Holocaust survivor who finally comes clean about himself. It will be screened on April […]
Late last month, in concert with several Western nations, Canada expelled a number of Russian diplomats stationed here. The federal government explained it had acted in solidarity with Britain, which blames Russia for a deadly chemical attack on a former Russian double agent and his daughter residing in the country. Shortly afterwards, Canadian Foreign Minister […]
Round two of the Palestinians’ March of Return, which took place on April 6, unfolded almost exactly the same as the first one on March 30. Twenty thousand Palestinians Arabs converged on a tent encampment in the Gaza Strip adjacent to Israel’s border fence to protest Israel’s blockade of Gaza and to call for the […]
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently surprised and angered millions of Arabs when he implicitly recognized Israel’s existence and indicated that the establishment of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel could be mutually beneficial. Prince Mohammed, the 32-year-old heir to the Saudi throne, made his views known in an interview with The Atlantic while […]
In 1980, at the age of 24, the Swedish tennis champion Bjorn Borg was at the top of his game, having won a succession of Grand Slam titles, including four consecutive Wimbledon titles. Now he was chasing his fifth Wimbledon title, but one of his fiercest competitors, the 20 year-old American John McEnroe, was determined […]
With the 75th anniversary of the April 19 Warsaw ghetto uprising looming, Kristine Keese’s Shadows of Survival: A Child’s Memoir of the Warsaw Ghetto (Academic Studies Press), is certainly timely. Keese, born into an assimilated Jewish family in the Polish capital, was eight years old when she and her mother were forced into the ghetto. They […]