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, […]
Much to its credit, Germany has finally cracked down hard on Hezbollah. Seven years after branding its armed wing as a terrorist organization and banning it in Germany, the German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, went one step further by effectively outlawing its civilian wing and prohibiting all its activities inside Germany. Seehofer made this announcement […]
Last year, following his announcement that the wartime papers of Pope Pius XII would be released, Pope Francis declared, “The Church is not afraid of history.” Maybe it should be. One of the most controversial pontiffs of the 20th century, Pope Pius XII led the Roman Catholic Church from 1939 until 1958. During World War […]
One of the most intriguing footnotes of World War II comes to light in Shadows of Freedom, a vivid documentary by Canadian filmmakers Amos Carlen and Aline Robichaud now available on VOD/Digital platforms. On November 8, 1942, in Operation Torch, a flotilla of more than 100,000 American and British troops landed in Algeria and Morocco, […]
One hundred years ago this month, the map of the Middle East was radically redrawn by the major powers at a long-forgotten summit in a pretty resort town in northwestern Italy. The San Remo Conference, which took place in 1920 between April 19-26 at the Villa Devachan, officially ratified the breakup of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire […]
Can Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, given their record of mutual strife, get along? Dror Zahavi, an Israeli filmmaker living in Germany, puts this confounding question to the test in his latest movie, Crescendo, which opens on May 1 in a virtual cinematic release throughout the United States. Zahavi’s impassioned drama is loosely inspired by […]
A year has elapsed since a heavily-armed neo-Nazi thug, John Earnest, burst into a Chabad center in Poway, California, and fatally shot Lori Gilbert-Kaye, 60, as she shielded Rabbi Yisrael Goldstein with her body. The April 27 attack occurred about six months after a white supremacist assailant murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life […]
Israel and the Palestinians are at odds over key issues, but as the coronavirus pandemic develops, the Israeli government has been offering tangible assistance to the ruling Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. According to the United Nations, Israel is helping the Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, […]
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 […]
It would appear that Iran is cynically using the coronavirus crisis to exert pressure on its arch foe, the United States, to suspend or cancel the crippling trade sanctions that have all but throttled its oil-based economy. Iran, the leading Shi’a power in the Middle East, has been devastated by the pandemic, having recorded 87,000 […]