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In recent weeks, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has accelerated his recent campaign to bolster his credentials as Europe’s most determined authoritarian leader. Citing France’s secular philosophical tradition, he appears to believe in the 18th-century cultural meme of the...
Throughout Danis Tanovic’s Oscar-winning film “No Man’s Land,” a viewer waits distressingly for the bouncing mine to explode below the body of Cera, an injured Bosnian soldier lying in a trench. The last moments of this antiwar satire do not capture a real ending for the story — or...
As the world discusses the sudden cessation of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh and the deployment of Russian “peacekeepers” to the region to monitor the truce, one critically important question is overlooked: Why did Russia not discourage...
At some moment in the recent past, French President Emmanuel Macron assigned himself the mission to single-handedly reform Islam and imbue it with the Enlightenment values that made it possible for a lowly Rothschild banker to rise up to become the democratically elected pseudo-monarch of...
As the European Union comes to terms with a changing strategic environment, it needs to do more to provide for its own defense and security. This includes better and more comprehensive EU-NATO coordination but also the participation of non-EU members in projects and processes initiated...
Earlier this year, an internal report from the UK’s Labour Party revealed that some of its influential members worked to sabotage former leader Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral chances in 2017, the election in which he nearly achieved an unexpected victory against Prime Minister Theresa...
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a man on a mission. The goal: to make Turkey great again. Making Turkey great again, I guess, means wiping history clean of a series of humiliations, from the ignominious decline of the Ottoman Empire, dismissed as the “sick man upon the Bosporus” in the late 1800s, to...
On October 29, the French Ministry of Interior sent out a message on social media warning of “Violent radicalization, Islamism ... If you have any doubts about someone you know, contact the toll-free number.” The situation in France has exploded into what is now increasingly reminiscent...
The decision of who will follow Angela Merkel to become Germany’s next chancellor is still up in the air. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party conference to elect a new leader has been postponed until January next year. Merkel’s approval ratings have...
Two conflicting narratives have been clashing anew in extremely heated debates amid what we may call “a new cartoon crisis.” On one side, there is a sizable portion of orthodox Muslims with a strong aniconism tradition and who perceive the representation of sacred characters as unpardonable...
While the Ukrainian military continues to fight Russian-backed separatists in the east, it was the country’s bitter war on corruption that has exploded back into the spotlight last week. The decision by Ukraine’s constitutional court to strike down elements of anti-corruption legislation has...
