11 October 2018
The disappearance and possible murder of the Saudi Arabian writer has struck such a nerve because, for a change, Westerners are able to see themselves in the victim’s shoes.
Commentary
Though the pro-regime axis has its own reasons for wanting to avoid an Idlib offensive, there is ultimately no reason to think last week's cessation of hostilities has any more chance of holding than its predecessors, argues James Snell.
In an open letter to the United Nations, over 100 prominent writers, academics, and activists say the time has come to consider radical reform of the U.N. Security Council, given its abject failure to protect Syrians from the Bashar al-Assad regime's mass violence.
Jimmy Carter’s proposal to rehabilitate Assad and ignore Syrians’ demands for justice isn't just morally bankrupt in the extreme, it also would fail to produce even the “ugly peace” of his imagination.
The “Syrian Democratic Council”—ostensibly a vehicle for Kurdish-Arab coexistence in former ISIS territories—is increasingly looking to normalize ties with the Assad regime, spelling disaster for the displaced residents of Raqqa and elsewhere, with no apparent opposition from its Western sponsors.
How a late French thinker gave us a framework with which to view Syrians as complex individuals, rather than central-casting actors in our grand-narrative fantasies.
Animals have not fared well at militants’ hands in Syria over the past seven years, though civilians have been kinder. Dr. Uğur Ümit Üngör traces the shifting role and symbolism of animals in Syria’s recent history.
In his foreword to Theo Horesh’s new book, The Holocausts We All Deny, Yassin al-Haj Saleh decries the present “lack of a global vision or project” capable of resisting the crisis of democracy from China through the Middle East to Trump’s America.
A recent manifesto signed by academics and activists called for a “reimagining of migration” in response to the new UN Migration Compact. Kester Ratcliff proposes further concrete steps toward a more humane—and sustainable—approach by the international community.
While generally well-intentioned, the concept of solidarity involves an unequal power relationship between those offering and receiving it. A preferable state of affairs would be partnership, placing Western activists and their counterparts elsewhere on equal footing.
The Assad regime is much more than a mere dictatorship—understanding it, and its horrors, requires updating our conventional thinking about murderous states, argues Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
Seeing Beirut slide into war in 2006 transformed the late TV presenter, moving him to humanize peoples—in the Middle East and beyond—whose voices were rarely heard in the US mainstream.