February 8, 2020 Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, we remain fixated on some of its worst crimes. But only some. The incessant use of Holocaust remembrance has been cynically used by some on the hard right to justify Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people and the […]

February 1, 2020 In 1916, as World War I raged on, a British diplomat, Mark Sykes, met with his French counterpart from the Quai d’Orsay, Monsieur Picot, and signed an agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire once victory was achieved. The heart of the Mideast – Palestine, Syria and Iraq […]

January 25, 2020 Plagues from the east are nothing new. The Black Death and other epidemics arrived in Europe from China during the 1300’s, killing a large percentage of its population. Much of this pestilence came from rats that stowed away on merchant ships coming from the east. At the […]