Oil and water don’t mix, but business and politics do, judging by the 942 kilometre-long oil pipeline from Kirkuk in Iraq to Haifa in Palestine, construction of which was completed in the mid-1930s. Built by the Iraq Petroleum Company and operational from 1935 to 1948, the strategically important pipeline drove British policy in the Middle […]
Euthanasia is a huge issue that brings to mind a myriad of complex questions: Is euthanasia morally and ethically acceptable and permissible in principle? Is it inhumane? How long should a terminally ill person be allowed to linger on in pain? Should a doctor get involved? And if he does step forward, should his licence […]
Iran maintained a relatively low profile during the recent war in the Gaza Strip, but the few public comments its ferociously anti-Israel leaders uttered strongly suggest that the Iranian government is fully behind Hamas and intends to arm Palestinians in the West Bank. As the fighting raged, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, called on […]
Testifying before a U.S. Senate committee in March 1981, Alexander Haig, the American secretary of state in President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet, said he would work to achieve “a consensus of strategic concerns” among the warring nations in the Middle East in a bid to check Soviet influence. Haig, a former army general, said his goal […]
One of the strongest impressions I was left with following my first and only trip to Syria in 1975 is that Arabs and Israelis hew to radically different versions of history. Objective facts are not necessarily respected and are commonly manipulated to build historic narratives and agendas that validate or debunk a particular point of […]
KOLKATA, a West Bengal city bursting at the seams with a population of 15 million, is a raucous showplace of British colonial architecture and history. More than 300 years ago, an ambitious British merchant, Job Charnock, established a small trading post on the banks of the Hooghly River for the East India Company. The fort became […]
Andrea Di Stefano’s Escobar: Paradise Lost blends fact with fantasy. Pablo Escobar, the late, legendary Colombian drug trafficker, is the central figure in the movie, which was screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. But virtually everything else in it is a figment of Di Stefano’s fervent imagination. Which is to say that Escobar, […]
Giulio Ricciarelli’s riveting German-language movie, Labyrinth of Lies, ventures bravely into rough terrain — Germany’s historic reckoning with the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, it takes a viewer back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, when some Germans were trying to suppress or forget Germany’s central […]
Two weeks after freelance journalist James Foley was beheaded by the Sunni jihadist outfit Islamic State, the same gruesome fate befell the reporter Steven Sotloff, also an American. Before he was decapitated by a masked man wielding a knife, Sotloff, a Jew taken hostage in Syria last August, said he was “paying the price” for U.S. […]
Olivier Lubrich, a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Berne in Switzerland, has compiled a historically useful anthology of essays and letters, both published and unpublished, describing life in Nazi Germany. Travels in the Reich, 1933-1945 (The University of Chicago Press) presents a chilling portrait of a nation under the thrall […]