Victor Orban hates Western liberal values and makes no secret of it. Of late, this has led to a major row with American financier George Soros and Michael Ignatieff, Canada’s former Liberal Party leader. The fate of the Central European University (CEU), located in Budapest, hangs in the balance and its future will depend on […]
Has Benjamin Netanyahu no principles? This would appear to be the case following his spineless decision on June 25 to freeze a plan to create a non-Orthodox prayer section at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Finalized a year-and-a-half ago by the Israeli government, the Jewish Agency, the Reform and Conservative movements and the Women of […]
What could have possessed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a level-headed politician, to characterize Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s supreme leader from 1920 to 1944, as one of its “exceptional statesmen?” All the more surprising, Orban lauded Horthy only hours before he was to host the president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, in Parliament. Horthy, […]
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 […]