“I need someone who speaks Farsi.” Early one day at the Humans4Humanity community centre on Lesbos, the voice of the centre’s Syrian cofounder Rafat echoed through the main lobby.
I poked my head out from the grocery store. “Ali can do it,” I said. (More…)
Qods Force leader Qassem Sulaimani expressed anxiety over an escalation of tension and possible war with the US. The general claimed Iran is doing its part to reduce conflict by pressuring allied Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to impose a freeze on attacks on American forces by his Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) militia, and by stopping the flow of Iranian weapons to Iraq. (More…)
The right would like to confine Jew-hatred to the Muslim ghetto, counting on the self-satisfied post-war view that in German society the problem of anti-Semitism has, with a few extremist remnants here and there, been dealt with. (More…)
Thanks to global media, it is easy to feel like one knows the world. Few regions evoke such a deceptive feeling of being ‘known’ to the Western observer as the Middle East. But in reality, what do Europeans know about the region’s histories, cultures, and accents? To this German, they all look kind of the same. It wasn’t so long ago that I couldn’t tell Alawites from Alevis. (More…)
BEIRUT – Thousands of civilians trapped in a Palestinian refugee camp south of Damascus are bearing the brunt of a fierce government campaign targeting so-called Islamic State (ISIS) militants holed up in the area. (More…)
I finally found time to read through Ross Douthat’s bizarre piece in Wednesday’s New York Times. The consequence of doing so was a sort of malaise resulting from recognition of the bankrupt state of intellectual culture and the realisation that those life minutes simply aren’t coming back. (More…)
The Toronto van attack has brought the so-called ‘incel’ movement into the public eye, but it should also raise our consciousness of how a right-wing subculture in online politics has turned to violence. There is a spectre haunting our sexual relations: the spectre of male chauvinism. (More…)
Iran may be the greatest beneficiary from Iraq’s occupation, the fall of the regime, and the disintegration of the Iraqi state. After all, it got rid of the enemy that broke the force of the revolution and came to have political, security, and ideological influence in the Iraqi arena. (More…)
“Muslims are the enemy,” the cab driver told me. “My parents grew up in Iraq. They learned firsthand that their middle name is jihad.” “When did your parents make Aliyah,” I asked him. “In the 1950s, as kids,” he answered. (More…)
Theresa May backed Donald Trump’s Syrian airstrikes out of weakness, not strength. But this is nothing new. The need to project strength goes to the heart of UK foreign policy since the end of empire. This is one of the symptoms of our post-imperial malaise. (More…)
DAMASCUS – I have lived in the Syrian capital of Damascus since the beginning of the Syrian conflict. I haven’t left Syria for more than a week, and even then it was only to Beirut and only recently, which means only after seven years of war. (More…)
Congressional Republicans have a Trump problem. Mr. Trump has made himself so toxic, conventional wisdom has it, that the losses normally suffered by the party that holds the White House in an off-year election will be so catastrophic as to rock the foundations of Republican hegemony. (More…)