On Feb. 5, 1969, almost 47 years ago, my friend Sheldon Kirshner and I published an opinion piece in the now-defunct Montreal Star, entitled “Grave Impasse: Israel and the Palestinians.” We were both university students at the time. (He went on to a career in journalism on the Canadian Jewish News in Toronto.) This was […]
It’s a human tidal wave — tens of thousands of people fleeing war-torn regions of the Middle East, and crossing the Mediterranean to Italy, or else landing on Greek islands and making their way through the Balkans into central Europe. Migrants continue to board overcrowded, rickety boats, risking their lives, and horror stories are legion. […]
Has the National Front, the far-right French party, truly shed its antisemitic carapace, or is this a good cop-bad cop routine? On August 20, the party’s founder and longtime leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was expelled from its ranks at the insistence of his daughter Marine, the current head of the NF. They had already […]
By now the whole world knows about the murders of nine African Americans holding a Bible study class at the historic Emanuel Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17. It is one of the oldest African American congregations in the United States. Dylann Roof, a 21-year old man, has been arrested for […]
Iran has been slowly tightening its grip on a number of Middle Eastern countries, three of which border Saudi Arabia. It appears the Saudis have had enough. One sign of the kingdom’s more muscular foreign policy? Saudi Arabia’s new monarch, 79-year-old Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, on the throne just three months, in late April […]
President Vladimir Putin of Russia thinks Iran has rejoined the family of nations. How else can we explain his sale of sophisticated weapons to Tehran? Russia announced on April 13 the lifting of its ban on the sale to Iran of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles. Iran had ordered them in 2007, but Russia halted the sale […]
April 24 marks the centenary of the start of the genocide of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Historians estimate that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in state-organized violence between 1915 and 1922, some in massacres, others in forced marches to the Syrian desert that left them […]
We think of the Sunni-Shia “border” as the one between Iran and its Arab neighbors to its west. But there’s another: the one between Iran and Pakistan, the mainly Sunni state to its east. Two episodes in the volatile area in early April left eight Iranian border guards and three militants dead. The border guards […]
On April 2, gunmen from the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab attacked Garrisa University College in Garissa, Kenya, killing some 150 students. They warned that new attacks would be coming, and that Kenyan cities “will run red with blood.” The alleged mastermind of the terrorist attack is a Kenyan national, Mohamed Mohamud aka Dulyadeyn, believed to […]
It seems that after years, indeed decades, of vacillation, Saudi Arabia has finally decided to challenge its rival, Iran, if only via a proxy war in Yemen. The rebel Houthi Zaidis, who have taken control of much of the country, belong to a Shia school of Islamic thought distinct from the beliefs held by Shi’ites […]