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Commentary

Muzzling The Press In America

I strongly disagreed with an op-ed opinion piece by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (Republican, Arkansas) which appeared in The New York Times earlier this month. Taking his cue from President Donald Trump’s misconceived and misguided threat to call up the army to quell violent nation-wide protests that erupted in American cities in the wake of […]

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“I Can’t Breathe”

This is a tragic and gut-wrenching moment in America. The nation-wide protests, riots and looting ignited by the murder of an African American man by a white police officer on May 25 have torn the country asunder. These eruptions broke out amid a deadly coronavirus pandemic, which has exacted a disproportionate toll on African Americans […]

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Headstones Bearing Swastikas Must Be Removed

The Department of Veterans Affairs should remove the headstones of two German prisoners of war buried in military cemeteries in the United States. The gravestones of Alfred Kafka and Georg Forst, who died in U.S. internment camps in 1943, each bear a swastika — the hated symbol of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement — and an […]

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Pandemic Has Unleashed A “Tsunami Of Hate”

Apart from having claimed the lives of nearly 300,000 persons around the world, the deadly coronavirus pandemic has emboldened xenophobes, white nationalists, white supremacists, racists and antisemites in the United States. The outbreak, which has killed 79,000 Americans so far, has forced a multitude of businesses to close and lay off or furlough millions of […]

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An Embarrassing Faux Pas

Antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, honed and refined over centuries in a multitude of countries, are so deeply engrained that they can turn up in the unlikeliest of places. This is precisely what happened a few days ago when Guy Smith, the president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the largest union in the province, […]

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Coronavirus Diary

My instinctive anti-social impulses are in full flight during these unsettling days of the coronavirus pandemic. The need to maintain social distancing so as to stay safe and curb the spread of COVID-19 means that I’m obliged to avoid even loved ones. I was never much of a social butterfly, even at the best of […]

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The Canadian Jewish News Dies Again

My eldest daughter called with the news around bedtime on April 2. The Canadian Jewish News, the weekly newspaper of record where I worked as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist from 1974 until 2013, was ceasing all operations with the publication of the April 9 edition. My first reaction was one of surprise and […]

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Commentary

Travesty Of Justice In Pakistan

A court in Karachi, Pakistan, has overturned the murder conviction and death sentence of a terrorist and three of his accomplices who kidnapped and murdered the American Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in January 2002. What a travesty of justice! What a shame! These murderers killed Pearl in cold blood just months after Al Qaeda terrorists […]

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Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories Abound

Conspiracy theories, which are always grounded in malicious lies and overblown fantasies, are the bread and butter of antisemites. Usually, their half-baked, slimy suppositions rear their ugly heads during a crisis. Jews were blamed for the Black Death, which decimated one-third of Europe’s population. And in the infamous blood libel canard, Jews were accused of […]

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Commentary

Amazon’s Policy On Nazi Books Needs Revision

Amazon, America’s biggest retail book seller, is grappling with a conundrum it seems incapable of resolving once and for all, leaving it open to justifiable criticism. The multi-billion dollar company has complied with requests to remove Nazi, neo-Nazi and antisemitic books from its bookstore, only to reinstate some of them shortly afterward. Amazon’s contradictory policy […]