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Somewhere during Lawrence of Arabia’s blockbuster career, his bosses wondered if he was becoming “more Arab” in the desert to which they sent him to lead a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. In an endearing cue to imperial haughtiness, Field Marshal Lord Allenby asks if his man had “gone native.”

Indeed the spymaster and legendary British officer became quickly enmeshed in the tangled web he weaved back at the turn of the last century. for more click here

Waichi Okumura seems like the kindest, gentlest, sweetest 80-year-old man you could ever know, but with his brown eyes glistening, he explains in detail how he killed a young, unarmed Chinese schoolgirl with his bayonet. for more click here

HAARLEM, The Netherlands, April 16 /Christian Newswire/ — Israeli Ambassador to the Netherlands Harry Kney-Tal today presented members of the Netherlands’ ten Boom family with a certificate posthumously honoring two of its members for saving nearly 800 Jewish lives during the Holocaust. for more click here

Polish and Israeli leaders have opened ceremonies marking the 65th anniversary of the ill-fated Jewish uprising against Nazi troops in Poland’s Warsaw ghetto. for more click here

BERLIN - Germany’s Roman Catholic Church exploited nearly 6,000 forced laborers in the Nazi era, it said in a report Tuesday detailing a dark chapter in its history. for more click here

The first excavation inside the ring at Stonehenge in more than four decades gets under way on Monday.

The two-week dig will try to establish, once and for all, some precise dating for the creation of the monument.

It is also targeting the significance of the smaller bluestones that stand inside the giant sarsen pillars. for more click here

In recent weeks, the State Department watered down a report on North Korean repression, dropped China from its annual list of the world’s worst human rights violators, and conspicuously omitted the Palestinian Authority from its report on anti-Semitism around the world. Anybody notice a pattern here? for more click here

In a country where patriotism is looked down upon, a new film about a World War I pilot — one of most expensive movies ever made in Germany — takes a new twist: It paints the Red Baron as a national hero. for more click here

Recently I have been reporting on events that pass like ships in the night — the sort of occurrences that will be missed if one blinks.

I am therefore grateful to Vivien Lichtenstein, Chair of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, for bringing to my attention a very short item by Peter McKay in ‘The Daily Mail’ of 25 February 2008. Vivien and I agree on almost nothing but we do share an understanding of Jewish aspirations in a post-Holocaust world. We can both smell an anti-Semite a mile away and this article had all the earmarks of the ‘top five’ epithets of which we have been at the receiving end since early childhood. for more click here

Lewis is an American historian and two-time winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Acocella’s review is not bad, but she reveals little evidence that she has read authors such as Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or or Andrew G. Bostom. She refers to Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, but not Ibn Warraq’s excellent criticism of him in the recent book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism.According to Acocella, “The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as ‘the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior’ to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe.” This was “one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire.” for more click here