In unveiling the Charter of Values recently, Quebec Premier Pauline Marois optimistically predicted that it would unite Quebeckers. Much to her distress, it has become a political football, a source of deep division in the province. Judging by a Leger Marketing poll, the charter is supported by only a plurality of Quebeckers, 43% to 42%. […]
A German official who prosecutes Nazi war crimes has recommended that prosecutors in Germany lay charges against 30 men and women who worked as guards in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where 1.5 million people, mainly Jews, were ruthlessly killed. “This is really an important milestone in the effort to bring Nazis to justice,” observed Efraim […]
Marcel Reich-Ranicki was an anomaly of the first order, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who launched a stellar career as one of the foremost literary critics in Germany. Reich-Ranicki, who died in Frankfurt on Sept. 18 at the age of 93, was a man for all seasons. He wrote for Germany’s most influential newspapers, Die […]
The 1,400-year history of Jews living under the banner of Islam has been extremely checkered, marked as it has been by periods of acceptance and discrimination. Reflecting on the status of Jews in Muslim domains, the historian Bernard Lewis adopted a balanced approach, saying it had never been as “bad as in Christendom at its […]
World War II was not just another destructive conflict between warring nations, but a nationalist crusade on the part of Germany to acquire territory, attain hegemony, disseminate Nazi ideology and murder Jews on a massive industrial scale. When Germany attacked Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, touching off an international conflagration that dragged on for six […]
They died in the last little while, leaving a lasting legacy … Robert Fogel, 86, a University of Chicago economist, shared the Nobel Prize in economic science in 1993 for his work in explaining the role of railways and slavery in the development of the American economy. His books on these topics, Railroads and American […]
The vile rhetoric of antisemitism pervades the Muslim world. Malicious myths and unfounded assumptions about Jews have become all too commonplace. No where else in the world today are Jews so openly maligned and excoriated. Two examples will suffice. On the eve of leaving office, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a brazen admission that […]
Even within the loathsome Nazi hierarchy, Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich (1904-1942) was one of the most appalling figures. Hailed by Adolf Hitler as “one of the best National Socialists,” Heydrich was indeed an iconic villain. As head of the political and criminal police apparatus, as exemplified by the Gestapo and the SS, he was directly […]