Amid the unspeakable inferno of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi extermination camp in Poland, a Hungarian Jewish forced laborer named Saul watches impassively as a new transport of Jews from Hungary rumbles in ominously. It’s the spring of 1944 and the Holocaust is in full swing. Hundreds of thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary have been singled […]
With the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in Germany approaching, German eyes will be fixed on its leading light, the theologian Martin Luther, who was born in 1483 and died in 1546. Luther was a Christian rebel who, in 1517, questioned papal authority and thereby touched off a revolution in Christianity. As revered as […]
Donald Trump, the outspoken, anti-establishment Republican Party presidential candidate, has rightly been denounced for proposing that Muslims should be banned from entering the United States. It’s an offensive proposal that demonizes an entire community, panders to base instincts and runs counter to contemporary American democratic values. Trump, the master of politically incorrect dogma, issued his […]
Henry Kissinger had a finger in virtually every pie when he was U.S. secretary of state, managing the foreign affairs file of the world’s preeminent superpower. “There cannot be a crisis next week,” he once joked in a sardonic moment of levity. “My schedule is already full.” Kissinger was indeed a busy bee. He negotiated […]
Germany is girding for an influx of nearly one million Muslim refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan by year’s end. The greatest proportion of the migrants will be Syrians, whose country has been torn apart and virtually destroyed by four years of civil war. Four million Syrians have already emigrated, and more will flee as […]
The current wave of Palestinian terrorism washing over Israel has unsettled many Israelis, even those living a considerable distance from the West Bank and Jerusalem, where almost all the incidents have occurred since about mid-September Once again, Israelis are under siege. Israel fought wars on Arab soil in 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982. But ever […]
Despite a promising story line, a credible cast and the magic of 3D cinematography, Everything Will be Fine doesn’t measure up. Wim Wenders’ film, due to open in theatres in Canada on December 11, lands with a thud. Tomas (James Franco), a novelist living in the Quebec countryside, has fallen into a funk. He’s struggling with […]
Israel’s crackdown on Jewish terrorists has yielded tangible results of late, but Israel continues to be plagued by the troubling phenomenon of Jewish extremism. On November 30, a district court in Jerusalem found two Jewish teenagers guilty of murder in the kidnapping and murder of Muhammed Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old Palestinian whose bludgeoned and burned […]
Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayeh was a petty criminal, a pimp and a drug dealer, during his misspent youth in Jordan. By the time he changed his name to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, he had become an Islamic fundamentalist and a feared terrorist. Zarqawi was the first leader of Islamic State — the jihadist organization that has since […]
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s new prime minister, should reconsider his hasty election campaign promise to pull six CF-18 jets out of the combat mission in Iraq aimed at pulverizing the Islamic State organization. At a time when Canadian allies like the United States and France are ramping up military pressure on Islamic State following its murderous […]