Benjamin Netanyahu was on his best behaviour when he met Barack Obama on a fence-mending mission at the White House on November 9. It was an important meeting, given the United States’ status as Israel’s chief ally and benefactor. Netanyahu, who last met Obama more than a year ago, had his work cut out for […]
The battle of Iwo Jima, one of the fiercest of World War II, raged from February 19 to March 26, 1945, claiming the lives of 28,000 Japanese and American soldiers and leaving a legacy of post-traumatic stress among some of the survivors. But since 1995, Iwo Jima has been the world’s only battlefield where former […]
The murderous attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris last January by a French Muslim extremist called attention to a wider problem — the gradual deterioration of relations between Jews and Muslims in France since the 1967 Six Day War. Until this deadly incident, mutual hostility had not usually been the norm in Jewish-Muslim relations […]
The Red Army liberated Nazi extermination camps and freed the greatest number of Holocaust survivors, but its unsurpassed record of liberation loomed as a taboo topic in the now-defunct Soviet Union until the late 1980s, three scholars told an academic forum in Toronto yesterday during Holocaust Education Week. The role played by the Soviet Union […]
October 26, 2015 was a blessed day in the United States. Willis Allison Carto, the most influential American antisemitic propagandist of his generation, died, or should I say croaked. He was 89. By any measure, Carto had a greater impact on public opinion than all his vile contemporaries and predecessors, ranging from George Lincoln Rockwell […]
I remember that day as clearly as yesterday. Twenty years ago on November 4, on a typically cool autumn afternoon in Toronto, I greeted my Israeli friends, Arie and Ida, at my front door with terrible news. They had been out shopping and hadn’t heard what had happened just hours earlier. Yitzhak Rabin, the prime […]
The Holocaust has been explored and analyzed ad infinitum by historians. Is there really anything new to be learned? The short answer is yes, judging by Timothy Snyder’s masterful Black Earth: The Holocaust As History And Warning (Tim Duggan Books). Snyder, a Yale University professor whose last book was Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, identifies, […]
Giraffes, the beloved icons of the wild, have roamed the earth for about one million years, yet they’re now in danger of disappearing. This is the takeaway from Mark Johnston’s impassioned documentary, Giraffes — The Forgotten Giants, which will be broadcast on CBC TV’s splendid program, The Nature of Things, on Thursday, November 5 at […]
Mark Rosenblum, the founder of Americans for Peace Now, used to be cautiously optimistic about the prospect of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The Olso peace accords in 1993 and 1995 gave him reason to be hopeful. But yesterday in Toronto, Rosenblum sounded a pessimistic note. Speaking at a Canadian Friends of Peace Now […]
The British government recently announced plans to blunt the allure of Islamic extremism in Britain. The announcement came not a moment too soon. By all accounts, more than 700 radicalized British citizens have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join jihadist organizations at war with the Syrian and Iraqi governments. Islamic State, that barbaric Sunni outfit […]