By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 7, 2015
In 2012, Bernard Lewis published his memoirs, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian, which included a chapter on the court case brought against him in France in the 1990s for refusing to agree that the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 constitute genocide in the original sense of the term, as applied to the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry. The chapter is reproduced below.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on May 9, 2015
Lee Smith’s The Consequences of Syria is part of the Hoover Institution’s “The Great Unravelling” series, which also included The Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent by the late Fouad Ajami (which I reviewed here.) You can purchase a copy here.
Published in June 2014, Smith narrates Syria’s terrible war to the opening months of 2014, the innumerable excuses made by the Obama administration for letting it run, and the theoretical framework behind the administration’s decision. The book is relatively short and the prose is direct; it takes very complex discussions of ideas and puts them in easily-digestible terms—all while keeping the reader’s eye on the practical implications.
Smith starts with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the central event in President Obama’s thinking about the Middle East. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on March 31, 2015
Statue of Hafez al-Assad defaced after Idlib City falls, March 29, 2015
After an insurgent offensive began on March 24, Idlib City fell on March 29, making it only the second—of Syria’s fourteen—provincial capitals to slip from the control of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the last one being Raqqa City on March 4, 2013. The regime has been on borrowed time in Idlib City since Wadi al-Deif to the south, near Maarat an-Numan, fell in mid-December.
In a scene reminiscent of Raqqa—and indeed the fall of Baghdad—a statue of Hafez al-Assad was destroyed. The insurgents broke open some secret prisons, while finding that in a final act of needless cruelty the regime had murdered other prisoners in the cells before retreating.
An operations room, Jaysh al-Fatah (Army of Conquest), organised this offensive, and is composed of: Faylaq a-Sham (Sham Legion), Liwa al-Haq, Ajnad a-Sham, Jaysh al-Sunna, Ahrar a-Sham, Jund al-Aqsa (JAA), and al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, Jabhat an-Nusra. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 5, 2015
Mother Agnes Mariam on RT. An agent of the regime, she dismissed Syria’s rebels as a foreign conspiracy.
Fouad Ajami once said Syria was the “first YouTube war“. An academic study called Syria “the most socially mediated civil conflict in history“. From the start of the Syrian war, the media and propaganda dimension has been of immense importance, impacting the course of the war on the ground and affecting the policy of foreign States who could make a decisive difference in the conflict. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on December 28, 2014
There has been much gloating from the U.S. government in the last few weeks about the damage the sanctions have done to the value of the Russian ruble, including a rather strange episode when President Obama adopted the third person to deny that he had been “rolled” by Vladimir Putin, and to take credit for the “financial crisis” Putin was now faced with.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 17, 2014
Abby Martin and George Galloway: Both host conspiracy-laden shows on RT
While having lunch on Saturday I got stuck for fifteen minutes in a room where the television was tuned to Russia’s English-language propaganda station, RT, formerly Russia Today. I once saw James Kirchick write that “after 20 minutes of watching RT … I did what any sensible person would do: turned RT off.” I conclude from this that he is a much braver man than I. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 16, 2014
Also cross-posted at the Gerasites blog
Stephen F. Cohen
Since the Ukraine crisis began earlier this year, Stephen Cohen has acquired quite the reputation for apologetics for the Putin dictatorship and its aggression against Ukraine. Cohen, a scholar of Russia, especially the Bolshevik Revolution, has printed most of his pieces in support of Vladimir Putin in The Nation, a magazine edited by his wife Katrina vanden Heuvel. Now he has done so again. Credit where it is due: each salvo has been more hysterical than the last. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on May 18, 2014
Let us stipulate that getting a thing like this correct is basically impossible: there will never be enough time in three hours—the most a film hoping for commercial success can last—to adequately cover in proper detail and nuance the facts of such an inherently complicated and contested period in history. And if effort is made to go even some of the way to doing a proper job on this score, it only underlines all the things that were left out and alienates the section of the audience that has no interest in the history and wants an entertaining movie. Caveats in place …
Continue readingBy Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 6, 2014
The spokesman for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, gave a speech on 30 September 2013, entitled, “Lak Allah Ayatuha al-Dawla al-Mazluma” (لك الله أيتها الدولة المظلومة), roughly: “God Is With You, O’ Oppressed State” (The English translation released by Fursan al-Balagh Media gives the title as, “May Allah Be With You, O’ Oppressed State”.) The speech is primarily a ferocious attack on the Syrian rebel groups, accusing them of being part of a Western-led conspiracy, which includes the media stations of Arab governments and their “mouthpieces” throughout the region, to manipulate the coverage of ISIS such that it blackens their name and turns Muslims away from them.
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