The recent ultimatum directed at the besieged city of Darayya is just one example of a larger strategy of brutal population displacement that Assad’s government will use to regain control of opposition-held Syria. (More…)
Politics
Progress has a bad name these days. There is a certain degree of justice in this. For the vast majority of human history, things were seen to be static. What would be was what had been, at least until some sort of apocalypse brought matters to a close. Progress as a historical motif gained its greatest prominence during the Enlightenment, although it was not really new then. (More…)
The notion of the gem or ore prospector occupies a certain romanticism in literature, and even historical non-fiction of gold rushes past. For American audiences, a rugged individualism is the norm, and even during the heyday of Soviet extractive resource development in Siberia, concessions were made to individual initiative to encourage the miners (the ones who weren’t forced labor, anyway). (More…)
In singling out the alt-right, Hillary Clinton has done more for rebranded extremists than any amount of tweeting or memes could ever do. ‘Do not feed the trolls’ was always a sensible adage. Yet we find Hillary can’t resist giving them a rhetorical thumping. Perhaps the Democrats have a stake in provoking right-wing abuse. (More…)
Five years on and the Syrian army and rebel fighters continue to battle for Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. We asked three experts what needs to happen for the stalemate to end. (More…)
I was three years old when father bought a charming colonial style two-storey villa on No. 14 Nahmani Street, in Tel Aviv. It had the traditional, symmetrically laid out garden. In each part of the neatly divided area, a baby palm tree spread its wide fan-shaped branches shading the oval flower bed in which it stood. (More…)
When conservative American pundits berated black gymnast Gabby Douglas for not putting her hand over her heart during the national anthem during her team’s medal ceremony at this summer’s Olympics, the subsequent furor recalled the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the meaning of patriotism was called radically into question by the counterculture and Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” answered back harshly. (More…)
Fighting and airstrikes may be increasing in Aleppo, but this is not a sign that the more than four-year-old stalemate in Syria’s largest city is approaching an end. (More…)
You can tell Jeremy Corbyn is worth supporting just by looking at his opponents: Owen Smith, Angela Eagle, Lisa Nandy, Hilary Benn, Chuka Umunna et alia. A long list of nobodies and know-nothings, each of them produced by the spawn pool of career politicians. The rise of Corbynism is a great revolt by people who are sick and tired of conventional politics. (More…)
Farah is a young woman living in Syria’s capital city, where she faces the daily struggles of trying to maintain a normal social and professional life in a country being ripped apart by war. (More…)
As refugees continue to stream into Europe from Western Asia, fears of terrorist infiltration grow. The problem does not begin, as most persons believe, with Syria, and Iraq. Its origins go back much further, to Afghanistan, and the refugee crisis which began in the country, during the Russian occupation. (More…)
ISIS has been increasing its influence on the local population, creating changes in the fabric of society that could outlive the militant group’s existence, Syrian journalist Jalal Zein al-Deen explains. (More…)