A Heretical Closure!

Many of laborers involved in the process of renovating our building are actually denaturalized Kurds, that is, descendants of Kurdish citizens that have been stripped away of their Syrian citizenship as a result of the 1962 census and the manipulations that took place at that time. In other words, they belong to the very group of people whose basic rights my team and I at the Tharwa Projectare supposed to be busy defending, and are actually doing so, to the best of our restricted abilities. Continue reading “A Heretical Closure!” →

Reform starts with a Lebanon withdrawal

Special to The Daily Star

The Syrian regime did not have to find itself in the precarious position it is in today, maligned by all for its behavior. It did not have to find itself facing sanctions imposed by the United States. It did not have to face United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559, calling for a Syrian pullout from Lebanon. And it did not have to face the outrage expressed after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

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A Liberal in Damascus

The New York Times Magazine – Encounter
By LEE SMITH

When I first met Ammar Abdulhamid in Washington in the fall, the 38-year-old Syrian novelist, poet and liberal dissident had Damascus on his mind. He had received word from his wife back in Syria that the political situation at home was becoming more precarious for rights activists like himself. As a fellow at the Brookings Institution, he’d been meeting with leading figures in the Bush administration and writing articles in the Arab and Western presses that were sharply critical of the Syrian government; he simply didn’t know what to expect on his return. Now, sitting here in a Damascus coffeehouse in late January a week after his return, he is telling me that he had found reason for optimism about the country’s future in the least likely of places. Continue reading “A Liberal in Damascus” →

Are we all racists now?

Or, to be more precise, have we always been so blatantly racist? If the events in Qamishly and Darfur prove anything about the Arab peoples, regimes and intellectuals included, is that they are far from being immune to racist stands. More so, we seem to be mired in them, immersed to the neck, in fact, but we are too numb, too absorbed with our feeling of victimhood, to pay attention, to notice. Apartheid, genocide, and slavery, especially slavery (how could we so conveniently forget about our history with slavery?) are not foreign crimes, as we have always contended. We are as equally guilty in this regard as everyone else. Continue reading “Are we all racists now?” →