One of the world’s most repressive theocratic regimes, Saudi Arabia, has won membership in the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, along with such repressive countries as Cuba and China. The UN General Assembly, much to its discredit, made that egregious decision on Nov. 12. Saudi Arabia’s application should have been denied because of its abysmal record on […]
Radical Islamists from Germany have been pouring into Syria to fight in the civil war, the German newsmagazine Focus reported recently. Disquietingly enough, some of the Islamic fundamentalist fighters who’ve joined the rebel movement trying to unseat Syrian President Bashar Assad are German Christian converts to Islam. This may come as news to most people, […]
Several months ago, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry shuttled one from one Middle East capital to another in an attempt to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, he urged the Israeli government to seriously consider a revamped Arab League peace plan as a basis for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. As […]
The Middle East has kept Barack Obama extremely busy, if not preoccupied, since he assumed office in 2009. Obama has had to grapple with a multitude of challenges in this turbulent region, from Israel’s perennial struggle with the Palestinians and Iran’s quest for an atomic bomb to the revolutionary Arab Spring rebellions that have toppled […]
Israel is widely regarded by friends and foes alike as a Western state, but is it really Western? On the face of it, Israel is quintessentially Western, a modern, developed, democratic nation dedicated to and bound by the rule of law. And like classic Western states, Israel has a post-industrial economy, a bourgeois way of […]
On Oct. 6, waves of Egyptians descended on Cairo’s Tahrir Square to celebrate the 40th anniversary of what is widely regarded as Egypt’s “victory” over Israel in the three-week Yom Kippur War. When Islamist supporters of the ousted and now imprisoned president, Mohamed Morsi, converged on the square, the symbolic heart of the 2011 revolution, […]
A progressive Zionist voice rang out clearly and strongly on Oct. 6, the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, as the inaugural national conference of JSpace Canada took place at the University of Toronto. Founded in 2010 by members of the First Narayever Congregation, JSpace Canada provides a boldly alternative voice […]
The Middle East as we know it today was essentially formed during World War I, when Britain, in conjunction with France, secretly carved out the region at the expense of the tottering Ottoman Empire and in violation of a promise to support Arab autonomy within a greater Arab state. While an Oxford University-trained archeologist named […]
Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird told the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 30 that Iran’s current charm offensive is more show than substance. “Sound bites do not remove threats to global security,” he said in a reference to Iran’s militarized nuclear program. Canada will judge Iran on the basis of its actions rather than […]
Forty years ago, I saw my first corpse. Or rather corpses. In October of 1973, with the Yom Kippur War raging, I joined an Israeli government press tour of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War. I was a freelance journalist in Jaffa and jumped at the opportunity to visit […]