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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
It’s one of the most iconic photographs of World War II. Evgenii Khaldei’s stark black-and-white image of a Red Army soldier holding aloft a Soviet flag over the ruins of Berlin, circa April 1945, still resonates. Dubbed “Raising the Red Flag Over Reichstag,” the photograph speaks to the military victory of the Soviet Union over […]
Now that President Barack Obama has indicated that he will be removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, only three countries — Iran, Sudan and Syria — remain. The list began in December 1979, with Libya, Iraq, South Yemen and Syria. Cuba, Iran and North Korea were later added. During his 2002 […]
Hamas has strenuously denied reports that Islamic State — the jihadist organization that has conquered wide swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria — is active in the Gaza Strip. Responding to social media accounts that Islamic State had distributed fliers threatening 18 writers who had breached the “tenets of Islam” and warning women to […]
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman has not exactly forged a reputation as a pragmatist, yet he recently called for a “pragmatic approach” to deal with the simmering Palestinian problem. “I wish pragmatism dominated the political discourse in Israeli society,” he said the other day. “We are torn between … pragmatism and fanaticism.” Calling on Israel […]
The Holocaust has generated a long list of feature films, and Remembrance, unfolding in Polish, German and English, is one of the latest ones. Now available on the Netflix streaming network, it takes place in the past and the present, cutting back and forth in time. Based on a true story by Jerzy Bielecki, Remembrance shifts between a […]