Donald Trump, in his second four-year term as president, is upending the United States’ alliance with Ukraine in favor of a rapprochement with Ukraine’s mortal enemy, Russia. Some might say he is ruthlessly and shamelessly abandoning Ukraine in its hour of duress. In recent days, Trump, an admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has blamed […]
The pro-Palestinian protests and encampments that sprung up at American university campuses following the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip were bound to trigger a vigorous backlash. Many Jewish students complained that the shrill anti-Israel rhetoric bordered on or spilled into antisemitism and created a climate […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Eighty years ago today, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in southern Poland, finding 7,000 emaciated inmates who had been left behind after the Germans evacuated this mass killing center in mid-January. When the battle-hardened Red Army reached the camp, it came upon a landscape of utter devastation. Boris Polevoy, a correspondent for the […]
In the final days of his four-year presidency of the United States, Joe Biden delivered a farewell speech defending his foreign policy legacy. Speaking at the State Department a week before President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House for one more term, Biden boasted that, while the U.S. is stronger today, its “adversaries and […]
Donald Trump, the U.S. president-elect, is still ten days away from his inauguration in Washington, D.C., yet he is already causing shock waves in foreign capitals. In the past few weeks, he has unleashed a series of contentious comments strongly suggesting that he covets Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal. In this respect, he sounds […]
He was a divisive and corrosive force in French politics, and he will not be missed by the majority of voters. A rabble-rouser who pandered to xenophobia, racism and resentment, Jean-Marie Le Pen was the founder of the National Front and a major figure in the right-wing movement in contemporary France. Le Pen, who died […]