Categories
Middle East

Hamas And Iran Confront Israel

No irrefutable evidence of Iran’s operational involvement in Hamas’ devastating attack on Israel on October 7 has so far emerged, notwithstanding a report in the Wall Street Journal that the Iranian regime assisted Hamas in planning it. But analysts are certain that the onslaught — which caught Israel off guard and unprepared, caused the deaths […]

Categories
Middle East

Hamas Has Committed War Crimes

Hamas stands nakedly exposed as a deliberate perpetrator of war crimes. During its unprecedented murderous rampage through Israeli communities in southern Israel on October 7, which has so far claimed the lives of some 800 Israelis, Hamas terrorists pouring forth like wolves from the Gaza Strip not only killed soldiers, but targeted civilians in a […]

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Middle East

A Painful And Devastating Moment in Israel’s History

It was a stunning, horrific and unprecedented event on a scale that will surely be burned into Israel’s consciousness. In the early hours of October 7, under the cover of a massive rocket barrage and less than a day after Israel marked the somber 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, hundreds […]

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Books

Eighteen Days In October

Israel’s fifth war in 25 years is the subject of Uri Kaufman’s masterful book, Eighteen Days In October: The Yom Kippur War And How It Created The Modern Middle East, published by St. Martin’s Press. Oddly enough, Kaufman is a real estate developer rather than a historian, but readers should not draw hasty and unwarranted […]

Categories
Commentary

Yom Kippur War Memories

Time flies. Incredibly enough, 50 years have elapsed since the eruption of the Yom Kippur War. It broke out on October 6, 1973 and ended 18 days later when Israel, Egypt and Syria agreed to honor a ceasefire. I remember this war vividly, having lived in Israel during this tense and uncertain period, when I […]

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Commentary

Canada Should Declassify The Entire Deschenes Report

If Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau thinks he can move on seamlessly now that House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota has been replaced, he is egregiously mistaken. On October 3, a Liberal Party member of Parliament who represents the Quebec riding of Hull, Greg Fergus, was chosen as Rota’s replacement. He is the first African […]

Categories
Film

To Be Or Not To Be

Several months before the United States entered World War II, following Japan’s destructive bombing raid on Pearl Harbor, the German-American director Ernst Lubitsch started production on a new feature film, To Be Or Not To Be. An unrelentingly dark satire on Nazi Germany recently broadcast on the Turner Classic Movies channel, it was released on […]

Categories
Books

Three Worlds

Avi Shlaim’s intriguing, ideologically-driven book, Three Worlds: Memoirs Of An Arab Jew (OneWorld), is a bitter-sweet autobiography of an accomplished Iraqi Jew who left his homeland under duress, an impassioned look back at Iraq’s lost Jewish community, and a stinging critique of Zionism and Israel. He acknowledges that this is a “revisionist tract,” a “challenge […]

Categories
Television

Ordinary Germans Killed Jews During The Holocaust

Four million Jews were murdered in German extermination camps or succumbed to hunger and disease in Nazi ghettos during the Holocaust. A further two million Jews were killed by German firing squads, mainly in the Soviet Union and Poland. The cold-blooded shooters belonged to Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units and some 130 police battalions. Their overarching […]

Categories
Commentary

Trudeau’s Belated Apology Does Not Go Far Enough

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waited nearly a week before releasing a belated apology for the horrendous and avoidable mixup that brought shame to Canada, resulted in the resignation of the Speaker of Parliament, and presumably embarrassed Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s first Jewish head of state and a Jew whose relatives were murdered during […]