You don’t have to be Irish to like Irish films, so enjoy the forthcoming Irish Film Festival, which runs from Friday, March 6 to Sunday, March 8 at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Bell Lightbox. The festival gets under way with the Toronto premiere of Standby, directed by the brothers Rob and Ronan Burke. A romantic […]
Iran’s film industry is subjected to censorship and hobbled by a poor global distribution system, but it has chalked up stellar achievements nonetheless. It has produced internationally-recognized directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf and films like A Separation (the first Iranian movie to win the best foreign language film award at the Academy Awards) and […]
On Aug. 25, 1938, Der Angriff — a Nazi newspaper published in Berlin under the auspices of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels — described Henry Morgenthau Jr., the U.S. secretary of the treasury, as “the real chief of a wide Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” against Germany. The antipathy was mutual. Morgenthau, the sole Jew in President Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet, hated […]
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has unveiled a new counter-terrorism strategy that other Western countries should emulate. It seems like an effective method of curtailing the spread of radical Islam. Under his proposals, announced on February 23, a senior government official will oversee counter-terrorism measures and be placed in charge of efforts to achieve better […]
Israel and its closest ally, the United States, are embroiled in an acrimonious dispute over a looming agreement to constrain Iran’s contentious nuclear program. The broad objective of the latest round of talks, which have been going on for one and a half years, is to ensure that Iran cannot build a full-fledged nuclear arsenal. […]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for mass Jewish emigration from Europe is well-intentioned, but ultimately unhelpful and maybe even counter-productive. Netanyahu issued his appeal earlier this month, shortly after a 37-year-old Jewish Danish citizen named Dan Uzan was fatally shot in front of a synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark, by a Dane of Palestinian origin, […]
Regrettably, President Barack Obama is averse to calling a spade a spade when it comes to labelling terrorism perpetrated by Muslim radicals. The Obama administration, in the interests of abiding by a strange kind of political correctness, has created the impression that it prefers to use vague rather than direct language to describe the vile […]
At a moment when antisemitism in Europe is visibly on the rise, it’s shocking and distressing that no less a person than Roland Dumas, the former foreign minister of France, is pouring oil on the fire rather than trying to douse it. Dumas, who served under the late Francois Mitterrand, said in an interview recently […]
The Sunni jihadist organization Islamic State appears to have lost some of its momentum. It has not made any meaningful territorial gains in Iraq since last year, when it threatened Baghdad, the capital, and captured Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in a lightning offensive that reverberated across the Middle East. More to the point, Islamic […]
Queen Isabella’s legacy is nothing if not checkered. Consider her virtues and failings: She paved the way for the unification of Spain after having subdued the last remaining Islamic kingdom in the country. She launched the Spanish Inquisition and drove Jews and Muslims out of Spain. She sponsored Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the New World, […]