Every year for several weeks before November 11, a field of scarlet poppies appears on coat lapels across Canada. This wearing of the poppy has a complex history ...
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By Jenny Ashcraft
It’s been 75 years since the HMT Empire Windrush, a former troop carrier turned migrant ship, arrived at Tilbury Docks near London on June 21, 1948. More than 800 passengers and several stowaways disembarked the following day, on June 22nd. The journey for many of these migrants began in Jamaica. They were West Indian Commonwealth migrants headed to the United Kingdom searching for jobs and a better life. From 1948-1971, some 500,000 people born in the British Empire, particularly Caribbean countries, arrived in the UK. They became known as the Windrush generation.
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by Aida Rehouma and Rabab Fayad
Tunis/Geneva - On 23 October, the country that sparked the Arab Spring led the region from revolution to political self-determination. Over 90 per cent of eligible Tunisian voters went to the polls to cast their ballots for the new 217-seat Constituent Assembly, a body that is tasked with both writing a new constitution and forming the new interim government.
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In modern times, Jews have had to wonder whether and what has changed in relation to the non-Jewish world in which we live. The issue has been divisive. Within the Orthodox community there is no unanimity on the question. In the so-called ultra-Orthodox camp there has always been a serious attempt to rebuild the ghetto walls which crumbled in the modern era. Every attempt is made to minimize outside influences that could allegedly contaminate the community. In the Modern Orthodox world this fear is greatly diminished. The encounter with non-Jews and their cultural products is not necessarily considered to be dangerous to Jewish survival and is viewed more as a challenge that can enrich our human experience.
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by Ghassan Michel Rubeiz
Palm Beach Gardens, Florida - Much of the debate about the recent burning of the Qur’an in a Florida church by Pastor Terry Jones focused on its devastating impact overseas. But beyond the power of symbolic actions to stir up religious tensions, this event also demonstrated the degree to which new technologies can speed up the dissemination of hate messages in our ever-shrinking global village.
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Toronto (Ontario, Canada) — An educational project to commemorate the internment of Italian-Canadians during the Second World War will receive federal funding, Senator Consiglio Di Nino announced today, on behalf of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney.
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Fidel Castro says Cuba's contribution to the independence struggle in Africa has never been properly acknowledged. Soon, Cuba will open its archives to researchers and historians working on the history of Africa.
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Benny Morris has been one of the best known of Israel’s “new historians” or revisionists who have challenged accepted versions of their state’s history. Morris first came to broader public attention with his challenging work on the origins of the Palestinian refugee issue, in which he ably demonstrated that the tide of refugees was not merely the result of Arab radio broadcasts or their leaders calling on them to desert their villages but also of Israel’s deliberate use of force, even terror and the thorough destruction of their villages and mosques.
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Once again the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and their co-defendant Morton Sobell has been featured in the news. Most of you will recall that the Rosenberg couple was executed in 1953 on the charge of conspiracy to commit espionage and Sobell received a 30 year sentence. The case aroused passions around the globe with those on the left condemning it as a legal lynching and those on the right defending the sentences as a reasonable response to Soviet spying. Both sides were wrong.
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Certain dates are more significant than others. November 7th, 2007 marked the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. This did not seem to be noted in the Canadian press. Yet, it is an event that is not one to be forgotten. I was recently surprised when a friend told me that some of his university students did not know what the Cold War was. Has the divide between East and West been forgotten?
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