It’s been a lousy week for Bashar al-Assad. First came news that Syria was to be suspended from the Arab League despite the complicating fact that Assad still technically holds the presidency of the Arab League Council, the chief decision-making body of the organization. Then, last night, King…
It’s been a lousy week for Bashar al-Assad. First came news that Syria was to be suspended from the Arab League despite the complicating fact that Assad still technically holds the presidency of the Arab League Council, the chief decision-making body of the organization. Then, last night, King…
“Sectarian violence in Syria raises fears,” screamed the headline of a Washington Post article on the murder Tuesday of 16 Syrians in the city of Homs, which lies 100 miles north of Damascus. Admitting that "confirming details" of what happened are hard to come by in a city under siege, the Post's…
After Hosni Mubarak’s fall in Egypt, there was a whorl of ambiguous media commentary that either tried to present the Muslim Brotherhood as a conciliatory Islamist movement posing no threat to Egypt, its neighbours (read: Israel) or the West, or tried to challenge the Brotherhood about its core…
Where governments and statesmen can afford to be cynical about trade relations and security agreements with rogue regimes, human rights groups are supposed to operate at a higher level – the ultimate goal being for those regimes to alter their behavior. When NGOs traffic in realpolitik, it has a…
For a politician whose previous career was in public relations, David Cameron cannot have picked a more polarizing subject, or less opportune time to address it, than his recent speech on the failure of state multiculturalism, which he delivered in early February at the Munich Security Conference.…
The first thing that should be said about the Guardian and Al Jazeera’s dump of 1,600 documents supposedly belonging to the Palestinian Negotiation Support Unity and supposedly detailing more than a decade of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations is that neither media outlet has said how it…
The theory of linkage holds that by resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict most other problems will be resolved. The end of the Arab-Israeli will contribute to the fight against terrorism as well as improve the prospects for Arab democracy and women’s rights. The conflict, linkage advocates argue, is…
Totalitarianism thrives on deliberate ambiguity and the installation of perpetual fear in the mind of its subjected citizenry. Even after emigrating to Great Britain, the great Hungarian-Russian historian Tibor Szamuely could never get to bed at night because he never knew when that knock at the…
London
A mere two days after May’s deadly flotilla raid off the coast of Gaza, the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), in a special “emergency session,” passed a resolution by a 32 to 3 count that “condemn[ed] in the strongest terms the outrageous attack by the Israeli forces against the…
The 26-year-old Iranian human rights campaigner Shiva Nazar Ahari was sentenced last Saturday by Iran’s Revolutionary Court to six years in prison after being convicted on all charges made against her by the state, including that of moharebeh (“rebellion against God”), conspiracy to commit a crime…
BBC Arabic’s Jerusalem correspondent Ahmad Budeiri claims that were it not for “hostile environment training,” he might have been beaten and kidnapped by “an angry mob” of Israelis in Ashdod in response to his reporting on the Free Gaza flotilla raid.
Old wounds shall be worried anew; stale arguments shall be leavened once more.
The BBC World Service recently broadcast a two-part investigative documentary, hosted by John Sweeney, on the useful idiot, a concept that Lenin didn’t invent so much as expropriate to denote the semi-witting accomplices of Western imperialism. Although more frequently employed in the service of…
Iranian authorities first arrested Shiva Nazar Ahari in 2001, when she was seventeen. Her ‘crime’ was attending a candlelight vigil in Tehran that commemorated the victims of 9/11. Since then, she’s taught Iranian homeless children and Afghan refugees' children. In 2006, after she became the…
Who said this?
When Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was assassinated in Dubai last January, and his cause of death later ascribed to foul play, it didn’t take long before the British press found itself the beneficiary of a troika of good copy. First, al-Mabhouh’s end had been delivered by the injection of a…
"What's it about?" a no-nonsense undergraduate once inquired of the author of The Adventures of Augie March. "It's about 200 pages too long," Saul Bellow replied. This anecdote came rushing back to me as I scanned the numerous obituaries and literary remembrances of David Foster Wallace, who hanged…
THERE WERE TWO separate rallies taking place at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, on 1st Avenue, Tuesday, to mark the second day of protests of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to the United Nations. Both consisted of Iranian-Americans calling attention to the grave human rights atrocities perpetrated by the…
As bellwethers of liberal demoralization about this election go, I've not yet come across anything so clanging as the following comment from Hannah Rosin, responding to the phenomenon of Sarah Palin: "One of my many depressed Obama-supporting friends suggests a tidy solution: Repeal the 19th…
Not long ago in the London Times, Tom Stoppard published an essay that surely had most of his West End friends wincing. Titled "1968: The year of the posturing rebel," it was a look back in "embarrassment" at the spectacle of anti-establishment consensus 40 years ago, and an attempt to hoist a…
THE NEW FILM ADAPTATION of Brideshead Revisited has forced Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated novel upon popular culture again, and popular culture has suffered enough. This time the chorus is one of sorrow and anger over the transformation of a work of art into a dangled period piece around which swim…
Young Stalin
IT DOESN'T TAKE an Anglophile to appreciate the English way with understatement, particularly at moments of high tension or pique. Readers of the Moscow Times got a slight taste of this national characteristic last Friday, when Mr. Giles Cattermole, a resident of Sonning-on-Thames, wrote in to…
IT ALL SEEMS so familiar. Whenever the West expresses optimism about the advent of a Europeanized Russian "liberal" as the head of state, there's a good chance reference will be made to Peter the Great, the man credited with dragging Russia out of the dark ages and founding the pre-Soviet empire.…
THE ONLY MAJOR surprise of Russia's parliamentary "election," which could not have been choreographed better by Diaghilev, is that it had even the Communists lamenting the death of democracy. Gennady Zyuganov, chairman of the party, said on Sunday, "We do not trust these figures unveiled by the…
"NO MATTER WHAT happens, get Kasparov." So shouted one riot officer Saturday during the violently disrupted Dissenters' March in Moscow, according to David Nowak of the Moscow Times, one of the few newspapers left in Russia that doesn't have its reporting redacted by the Kremlin. When Nowak asked…
"It is unpleasant when the state resorts to a force against one part of its population. It was the most difficult decision. Each baton hit on our citizens was also hit on me But chaos and civil confrontation would have been an alternative to this. Georgia has already experienced that and my goal is…
TUESDAY NIGHT MARKED the eleventh Intelligence Squared U.S. debate hosted at the Asia Society and Museum on Park Avenue. Generously endowed by the conservative philanthropist Robert Rosenkranz, IQ2US underwrites a series of intellectual exchanges modeled on the full-blooded forensic style of the…
On Chesil Beach
The Life of Kingsley Amis