Twitter’s “terms of service” policy on “hateful conduct” forbids users to abuse others with “repeated slurs, tropes or other content” that “dehumanizes” or “degrades” them. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has chronically violated Twitter’s policy, yet his accounts in English and an assortment of other languages remain intact. Over the years, Khamenei has exploited Twitter […]
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban ventured into dangerous terrain recently when he made the racially-charged argument that Europeans should not become “peoples of mixed race.” Speaking to members of Romania’s Hungarian minority in Transylvania, he lambasted the “flood” of non-European migrants being “forced” on Hungary and assured his listeners he sought to prevent it from […]
Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, needlessly waded into a cesspool of controversy recently when he glibly denied the historically-proven fact that the late Ukrainian nationalist icon, Stepan Bandera, was a “mass murderer of Poles and Jews.” During an interview on German television, Melnyk fancifully described Bandera as a “freedom fighter” who personified Ukraine’s struggle […]
Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American to be elected to the U.S. Congress, introduced a unique and controversial resolution in the House of Representatives on May 16. Its chance of passage is extremely slim, but its very appearance is unsettling and surely a sign of the times. Tlaib’s resolution broadly calls on the United States […]
Payton Gendron’s murderous rampage in Buffalo, New York, is yet another jolting and disturbing reminder of the deadly dangers of white supremacy in contemporary America. Gendron, an 18-year-old from a small town in central New York state, drove 300 kilometres to kill 10 shoppers at a Tops Friendly Market store on May 14. Eight of […]
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, having purchased the giant social media company Twitter for a cool $44 billion, has said he would be receptive to welcoming back former U.S. president Donald Trump to the platform. I can live with Trump’s reappearance on Twitter, his blatant and dangerous lies and half-truths about the last U.S. presidential election […]
With no end in sight to the nearly three-month-old war in Ukraine, the United States has doubled down on its commitment to help the Ukrainian armed forces beat back or defeat Russia. This has been an incremental process. Soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, he issued a […]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov bit off more than he could chew recently when he lamely tried to justify Russia’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine on the grounds of fighting Nazism in that former Soviet province. Moscow’s wildly unsubstantiated claim that its naked aggression was aimed at “de-Nazifying” Ukraine was, to put it mildly, a huge […]
Israel was dealt a stunning indirect blow on April 29 when the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper at Harvard University, endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Responding to pressure from the university’s Palestine Solidarity Committee, free speech rights groups and a campus visit from anti-Zionist activist Noam Chomsky, the editorial board of the oldest […]
Russia has committed war crimes in Ukraine since its invasion on February 24. This is an ugly truth that the Russian government cannot wish away. In the past few days, the battered and bloodied bodies of more than 400 Ukrainian civilians have been found in suburbs near Kyiv recaptured from Russian forces. In particular, the […]