Intent on laying the groundwork for a resumption of bilateral peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, U.S. President Donald Trump sent his top Mideast negotiators, Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, to Jerusalem and Ramallah last week. Three years after the last round of American-sponsored negotiations broke down in a welter of mutual recriminations, […]
George Orwell, the great British essayist, famously wrote, “Who controls the present, controls the past.” Orwell’s penetratingly wise credo came to mind after I read a Canadian Press news story, dated June 20, about a ongoing Polish campaign to discredit a respected Canadian academic. Jan Grabowski, a University of Ottawa historian specializing in the Holocaust […]
The sudden decision on June 21 by the aging King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia to name his 31-year-old son Mohammed bin Salman as the new crown prince, as well as deputy prime minister, came as a surprise to many. Maybe it shouldn’t. He has replaced 57-year-old Mohammed bin Nayef, the king’s […]
Shortly after Muslim suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself to smithereens at a concert in Manchester, taking down 22 people with him, British Prime Minister Theresa May advised internet providers that they were duty-bound to monitor and stop the spread of jihadist propaganda. “We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed,” […]
The Muslim Brotherhood, the most organized and cohesive political force in Egypt following the collapse of Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian government in 2011, ruled the country from 2012 to 2013. During this interim period, Mohammed Morsi was at Egypt’s helm as its first democratically elected president. Morsi squandered the opportunity the electorate had handed him, catalyzing […]
In the early hours of April 4, an African Muslim drug dealer/lowlife named Kobili Traore broke into the Paris apartment of a 66-year-old Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, and proceeded to assault her. As he viciously beat Halimi, he cried out, “Allah hu akbar.” He then threw Halimi to her death from her third-storey balcony. The horrific […]
Elsa Dorfman, an American portrait photographer whose subjects run the gamut from Allen Ginsberg to W.H. Auden, was once under-appreciated. Today, she’s sufficiently important enough in photographic circles to rate rave reviews from peers and clients alike. Certainly, filmmaker Errol Morris thinks highly of her, judging by his biopic, The B-Side, which opens in Canada […]
This year being the centenary of his birth, many articles are appearing about one of the 20th century’s most eminent historians, Eric Hobsbawm. The accolades are coming particularly from the left, as Hobsbawm was a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and chair of its Historians’ Group. As he himself stated, the […]
Jose Arturo Castellanos was one of the unassuming heroes of the Holocaust, an army colonel and diplomat from the small Central American country of El Salvador who rescued thousands of European Jews from the clutches of the Nazis. Honored by Yad Vashem in 2010 as a Righteous Gentile, he issued more than 12,000 Salvadoran citizenship certificates […]
If Israel is ever to make peace with the Palestinians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have to display a lot more courage and backbone. In recent days, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that Netanyahu was prepared to restart peace talks with the Palestinians, broken off three years ago, in the hope of negotiating a comprehensive […]