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Commentary

The Astonishing Naivete of Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook, needs to rethink his position that Holocaust deniers should be permitted to post their false and scurrilous material on his social networking platform. Several days ago, in an interview with the tech news site Recode, Zuckerberg said that while he would not remove a post denying the Holocaust, […]

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Commentary

Shame On The Ontario Civil Liberties Association

Incredulously enough, the Ontario Civil Liberties Association has rushed to the aid of Monika Schaefer, a Canadian Holocaust denier who’s currently on trial in Munich for inciting racial hatred, a criminal offence in Germany. The executive director of the association, Joseph Hickey, has written a letter to Canadian Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and Foreign Minister […]

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Commentary

Amazon: Stop Selling Racist Merchandise

Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has a lot of explaining to do following a disturbing report indicating it sells white supremacist, neo-Nazi and antisemitic merchandise on its platforms. This can be very distressing for many, but imagine the people that make money through Amazon affiliate programs as well as use FBA to earn money […]

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Polish Cardinal August Hlond Was No Saint

Pope Francis recently issued a decree recognizing the “heroic virtues” of Cardinal August Hlond, the Roman Catholic primate in Poland from the 1920s to the 1940s. It brought Hlond one step closer to sainthood, an exalted status he surely does not deserve. One of his foremost admirers, the Polish priest Boguslaw Koziol, is arguing his […]

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El Al Strikes A Blow For Gender Equality

El Al, the Israeli flagship carrier, struck a blow for gender equality a few days ago when it announced it will no longer accommodate unjust and unreasonable demands by ultra-Orthodox Jews not to be seated next to women on flights. “Any discrimination by passengers is absolutely forbidden,” El Al chief executive officer Gonen Usishkin said […]

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Commentary

Chesterton Should Be Denied Sainthood

Should an antisemite be considered for sainthood by the Roman Catholic church? That’s the burning question now that a British bishop is in the process of considering canonization for G.K. Chesterton, the late British novelist and journalist. Five years ago, the bishop of Northampton, Peter Doyle, commissioned an investigation to ascertain whether Chesterton, a convert […]

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Kurz Owns Up To Austria’s Nazi Past

Visiting Israel this week, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz minced no words in fully accepting Austria’s responsibility for its role in the Holocaust. For decades after World War II, Austria basked in the blithe, blissful belief that it was a victim of German Nazism rather than an active collaborator in Germany’s crimes against humanity. But in […]

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Columbia Professor Needs To Be Reprimanded

Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian Studies and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City, has placed himself beyond the pale by having written a problematic Facebook post and a scurrilous tweet, both of which have been rightly condemned by students and faculty alike. In a Facebook post last month, which he has […]

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Trivializing Nazi Germany

Alexander Gauland, the co-leader and a founder of the far right-wing Alternative for Germany Party (AFD), has trivialized the Nazi interregnum in his country. “Yes, we plead guilty to those 12 years,” he said of the Nazi era. “But we have a glorious history and one, my friends, that lasted a lot longer than those […]

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Israeli Flag Causes Furor

A few days ago, Reiko Fuentes, the principal of Forest Hill Collegiate Institute, a Toronto high school with a considerable number of Jewish students, took it upon herself to remove a Jewish Heritage Month banner from the main foyer of the mid-town school. She did this without bothering to consult the students who had been […]