Despite a promising story line, a credible cast and the magic of 3D cinematography, Everything Will be Fine doesn’t measure up. Wim Wenders’ film, due to open in theatres in Canada on December 11, lands with a thud. Tomas (James Franco), a novelist living in the Quebec countryside, has fallen into a funk. He’s struggling with […]
Israel’s crackdown on Jewish terrorists has yielded tangible results of late, but Israel continues to be plagued by the troubling phenomenon of Jewish extremism. On November 30, a district court in Jerusalem found two Jewish teenagers guilty of murder in the kidnapping and murder of Muhammed Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old Palestinian whose bludgeoned and burned […]
Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayeh was a petty criminal, a pimp and a drug dealer, during his misspent youth in Jordan. By the time he changed his name to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, he had become an Islamic fundamentalist and a feared terrorist. Zarqawi was the first leader of Islamic State — the jihadist organization that has since […]
Justin Trudeau, Canada’s new prime minister, should reconsider his hasty election campaign promise to pull six CF-18 jets out of the combat mission in Iraq aimed at pulverizing the Islamic State organization. At a time when Canadian allies like the United States and France are ramping up military pressure on Islamic State following its murderous […]
Unless they’re physically or mentally unfit, young, able-bodied men in Israel are duty bound to serve in the Israeli armed forces for a fixed period. When they’re older, they’re obliged to discharge their military duties in the reserves. It’s a fair system, given the fact that Israel has been on a virtual war footing since […]
The German feature film, Naked Among Wolves, plumbs the depths of Nazi cruelty and depravity. Now available on the Netflix streaming network, Phillip Kadelbach’s movie unfolds in the Buchenwald concentration camp mainly in the last months of World War II as some inmates take desperate measures to save a Polish Jewish boy from certain death. Naked Among […]
The Chateau de Versailles, one of the crown jewels of France’s tourist industry, dazzles the senses with its inspired architecture, ornate furnishings and formal gardens. A short distance by car from Paris, it transports a traveller to a bygone world. Until the 1789 French Revolution, Versailles was the opulent seat of kings. When mobs stormed […]
France was, in a sense, attacked twice this month. Apart from the horrific massacre in Paris on November 13, the jihadi attack one week later on the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako, the capital of the former French colony of Mali in northern Africa, was also to a large extent aimed at France. The posh […]
Synagogues were an integral part of cityscapes in Germany before the Nazi era, nearly as common as churches. With about 500,000 Jews, Germany had one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. But during the two-day Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, the worst since medieval times, Nazi mobs destroyed more than 1,500 synagogues, or practically […]
Mired in an existential crisis, the newspaper industry in Canada and the United States is desperately trying to adapt to changing times. Circulation has tumbled, ad revenue has fallen, newspapers have grown thinner and massive staff reductions have exacted a fearsome toll, as I know from first-hand experience. The ink-stained wretches — the old-school journalists […]