The British-made satirical film, The Death of Stalin, released last year, made fun of the absurdity of Soviet “justice” in the years when the dictator ruled his empire like an Oriental satrap. Accusations against people could come out of thin air. Trials, preceded by torture to extract confessions, took minutes. A bullet in the head […]
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Unintended Consequences In Germany
At the risk of sounding monotonous, I return once more to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hasty decision to allow more than one million Muslim migrants to flood into Germany since 2015. Much to her probable astonishment and disappointment, it has had unintended consequences. The majority of the newcomers are from Syria, an Arab police state whose […]
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Israel At 70: Strong Yet Insecure
As Israel celebrated its 7oth anniversary on April 19 by the Hebrew calendar — the day the doomed but heroic Warsaw ghetto uprising erupted in 1943 — it grappled with a paradox. Never has Israel been as militarily strong, yet so insecure. Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East, with a humming […]
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The Accountant Of Auschwitz
Oskar Groning, a functionary at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp in Poland, was charged with being an accessory to mass murder and put on trial in Germany in 2015, when he was 93 years old. Assigned to the camp as a bookkeeper, he spent much of his time there as a collector of valuables expropriated […]
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The Oslo Diaries
In the summer 1992, a small group of Israelis and Palestinians met secretly in Oslo to discuss the prospects of peace. Their talks were sanctioned neither by the Israeli government nor by the Palestine Liberation Organization. These informal negotiations gave way to formal discussions that climaxed with the signing of the Declaration of Principles in […]
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U.S. Strategy In Syria Is Muddled
The United States is torn by indecision in Syria, and recent events illustrate this pattern of confusion. On April 7, Syrian government forces launched a chemical attack in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, and it immediately placed the United States on the horns of a dilemma. President Donald Trump was reluctant to intervene, in line with his […]
Mission Accomplished, U.S. President Donald Trump boasted in a triumphant Twitter post on April 14, resorting to a discredited phrase appropriated by President George W. Bush in May 2003 to declare victory in Iraq after the controversial American invasion. Trump, hardly concerned by the negative comparison it would inevitably evoke, trotted it out less than […]
Cynically portrayed by Nazi Germany as a “reeducation center,” the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was a synonym for unbridled state-sponsored terror. Although it was not an extermination camp, like Treblinka, it consumed the lives of about 50,000 people from 1936 to 1945. Now a memorial and museum, Sachsenhausen was not the first concentration camp built on […]
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An Embarrassing Problem For Israel
What now? What should the Israeli government do with about 35,000 Africans who have sunk roots in Israel and want to stay but who are being pressured to leave? Whether they’re described as migrant workers or asylum-seekers, the Eritreans and Sudanese who have entered Israel illegally since 2005 have become an embarrassing problem for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. […]
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The Human Rights Watch Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival and Human Rights Watch are co-presenting the Human Rights Watch Film Festival at the TIFF Bell Lightbox from April 18-25. One of the films, On My Way Out: The Secret Life of Nani and Popi, is about a Holocaust survivor who finally comes clean about himself. It will be screened on April […]