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Guest Voices

Afghanistan War Ends With A Whimper

The Western-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan has, we are told, come to an end. It began on Oct 7, 2001, a month after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, and was initially aimed at degrading Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization, which had found a home in the country, then ruled largely […]

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Arts

Woody Allen Revealed

Woody Allen will be 80 next December and is still going strong. Indeed, he’s probably finishing his latest film script or movie as I write these words. For about the past four decades, he’s turned out one movie per year, and like the old-school craftsmen he is, Allen composes his scripts on a yellow pad […]

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Arts

Winter Sleep

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 196-minute-long film, Winter Sleep, which opens in Toronto on January 9, focuses on fraying and broken personal relationships. Amid the lunar landscape of Cappodoccia, a rugged region in Anatolia replete with eerie caves and strange rock formations, a wealthy, good-looking man in his fifties struggles to understand the two most important women in his […]

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Guest Voices

Palestinians Roil The Waters

In an article I published in the Calgary Herald in November 1999, I wrote that “it is conceivable that some international tribunal may someday indict an Israeli leader for war crimes.” Might this soon come to pass? On Dec. 30, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed the Rome Statute, paving the way for membership in the International Criminal Court […]

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Middle East

Israel’s Pyrrhic Victory

For decades, Israel has yearned for recognition and acceptance from the Arab world and Palestinian Arabs. Until quite recently, this was not possible because Arab states and the Palestinian diaspora remained on a war footing and were obdurately opposed to recognizing and accepting the Jewish state. In accordance with this mindset, the Arab League, at […]

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Arts

Lost Airmen Of Buchenwald

More than 50,000 prisoners perished in the Buchenwald slave labor camp in Germany, and if fortune hadn’t intervened, the death toll would have been 168 higher. In the summer of 1944, in contravention of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, 168 Allied airmen — pilots, gunners, radio operators — were incarcerated […]

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Middle East

Hezbollah Should Pay Reparations

By a margin of 170-6, with three abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly recently passed a non-binding resolution awarding Lebanon $856.4 million in damages for a massive oil spill caused by Israel during the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006. Apart from Israel, only five countries — the United States, Canada, Australia, Micronesia […]

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Arts

The Unbelievable Robert Ripley

Robert Ripley believed there is an infinity of strangeness in the world and capitalized on it to his advantage. Or as he might have told his legion of admirers, paraphrasing the entertainer Al Jolson, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” A newspaper cartoonist who parlayed a child-like sense of wonder and curiosity into a personal fortune, he […]

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Middle East

Lone Wolf Phenomenon

The expression “lone wolf” was once almost exclusively associated with white supremacists in the United States seeking to overthrow the U.S. government by violent means. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who killed 168 civilians in one of the most deadly terrorist acts in American history, was such a creature. Since the Oklahoma City outrage, […]

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Arts

The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust

Noam Chayut was a young officer in the Israeli army who wholeheartedly believed in his nation’s cause and raison d’etre. He was such a model of the Zionist narrative that, upon the completion of his military service, he was sent to Miami, Florida, on a public relations mission on behalf of the Israel Defence Forces […]