44 years ago this month, Lebanon descended into civil war. In the first of a three-part series, Joey Ayoub draws on the work of James Baldwin to explore the "Othering" that resulted from that war and its aftermath, which is now a central component of Lebanese identity.
From the xenophobes who demonize them to the well-meaning friends who assume they must be devout conservatives, Syrian refugees in the West face stereotypes from all sides. Worse, some have begun internalizing and turning these prejudices on their compatriots, writes a Syrian in Paris.
As the costs of Assad’s Pyrrhic “victory” become clearer, even die-hard loyalists are increasingly speaking out about economic and other woes. The regime’s response makes clear it will not tolerate even this highly watered-down form of dissent.
In his thirteenth letter to his missing wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, Yassin al-Haj Saleh pays tribute to those who have given time and energy to promoting her cause.
Disinformation peddled by the Assad regime and its supporters blames Western sanctions for Syria’s economic woes. In reality, sanctions primarily target Assad’s inner circle; it is the regime’s own misrule that causes civilian suffering, writes Bente Scheller.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s twelfth letter to his wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, is penned on the occasion of her birthday, “the only day I’ve ever celebrated since your disappearance.”
The Assad regime’s “Terrorism Financing Commission” recently accused Turkey’s president, Lebanon’s prime minister, and a host of other politicians, judges, academics, and ordinary citizens of supporting jihadism. The laughable charges better describe Assad’s own record, writes James Snell.
The linguistic feminist and queer struggle should ultimately focus less on technical grammatical distractions than the empowerment of speech itself, argues Nayla Mansour.
When the self-styled “anti-imperial” left adopts the language and logic of Bush’s War on Terror, something has gone badly wrong, analytically and morally, argues Michael Degerald.
Just as Oedipus, an immigrant of Phoenician descent, had to solve the Sphinx's riddle to save his besieged people, so Syrians today—and, in fact, all of us—face a new set of perplexing, life-or-death questions.
In his eleventh letter to his missing wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, Yassin al-Haj Saleh ruminates on the temptations of vengeance, and the indispensability of justice.
Aside from all the lives it’s extinguished, the Assad regime has destroyed or damaged multiple UNESCO World Heritage sites across Syria. Why do archaeologists and professed heritage-lovers continue to laud it as a defender of civilization?
