The much anticipated second season of Narcos, the taut crime thriller set in Colombia, is now available on the Netflix streaming service. In a word, it’s scintillating. It lives up to expectations. Focusing on the real-life narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar and the Medellin drug cartel he controlled with an iron fist, Narcos has all the elements of […]
Waitstill and Martha Sharp were relief workers from the United States who risked their lives to help victims of Nazism. Recruited by the American Unitarian Association, they rescued hundreds of Jews and Christian anti-Nazis from the jaws of death. Their selflessness, dedication and courage, the stuff of legend, is recounted in Defying the Nazis: The […]
Skepticism is the order of the day following an agreement between the United States and Russia to reduce the scale of violence in Syria’s five-year-old civil war and to coordinate American and Russian air attacks on Islamic State and other jihadist groups in Syria. The complex accord, brokered in Geneva on September 9 by U.S. […]
It’s become de rigueur: every September 11 since 2001, Americans commemorate the most devastating foreign attack on American soil since the bombing of Pearl Harbor in World War II. All told, more than 3,000 Americans died that Tuesday. In anniversary years such as 2006, 2011, and now 2016, remembrance ceremonies have been more extensive. The […]
Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s rarely at a loss for words, has come up with a new cynical twist on Israel’s nearly 50-year occupation of the West Bank. In a video message posted on his Facebook page on September 9, the Israeli prime minister rashly equated the removal of Jewish settlers from the West Bank with the spectre […]
When I was five or six years old, my mother — an immigrant from postwar Poland whose appreciation of nature seemed boundless — introduced me to the glories of Montreal’s great urban forest, Mount Royal Park, which is still the most dominant landmark in a city filled with stately landmarks. My love affair with this […]
In the summer of 1979, I stood on a rocky, wind-swept cliff in Samaria several hundred metres above sea level. Beneath, in a narrow valley, lay the historic Palestinian town of Nablus. Behind me were an assortment of caravans, all of which were inhabited by the Jewish settlers of Elon Moreh, a brand new outpost […]
Israel is a flourishing democracy, a nation usually governed by the rule of law. I add the caveat “usually” because perfection is not a quality that can be ascribed to any country, including Israel, in this very imperfect world. Case in point: Sixty eight years ago, as the first Arab-Israeli war raged, the Palestinian residents […]
The summer Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin set a precedent for future Olympics. In terms of packaging and presentation, they would be a vehicle for slick propaganda — a projection of German national pride and glory. Daniel Kontur’s 44-minute documentary, Hitler’s Olympics, which is now available on the Netflix streaming service, deftly explores this […]
Ever since he entered the race to become the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump has been accused of being a bigot, a racist, an antisemite, a xenophobe, a nativist, a right-wing populist, and a fascist. He has been compared to, among others, Benito Mussolini, Silvio Berlusconi, Juan Peron, Vladimir Putin, even Adolf Hitler. David […]