9 August 2019
A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.
Bashar al-Assad
A recent book argues violence is not merely an incidental feature of the Assad regime's rule in Syria, but rather an inseparable component of its governance strategy, consciously pursued and pervading almost every detail of citizens' interaction with the state.
An essential new book by the only international journalist to have lived full-time in Damascus post-2011 shows the Assad regime’s criminality to be even worse than previously understood.
The linguistic feminist and queer struggle should ultimately focus less on technical grammatical distractions than the empowerment of speech itself, argues Nayla Mansour.
The departing UN special envoy to Syria was not merely feckless or naïve about the Assad regime; he was an active facilitator of its survival strategy.
The thriving trade in possessions and even infrastructure looted by the Syrian regime isn't just a symptom of economic crisis and a wider moral breakdown following the war; it points to the ever-worsening criminality that awaits the country's future under Assad.
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.
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.
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.
As then-defense minister, Hafez al-Assad was instrumental in Syria’s loss of the Golan Heights to Israel in 1967. His quest to avert accountability for this defeat was at the heart of the tyranny he instated over the following decades, writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh on the June War’s anniversary.
For years, the Syrian regime’s allies in Lebanon have spread crackpot conspiracy theories about plots to prevent the country’s more than 1 million refugees returning. Now they belatedly realize Assad’s own actions may turn their scarecrow into reality.
Al-Jumhuriya talks to journalist Gareth Browne about his week in Syria last month observing a “crazy club” of pro-Assad British parliamentarians and priests.