Archive for May 2016
Burning Country on Your Call
Rose Aguilar interviewed Leila al-Shami and I for ‘Your Call’ on San Francisco radio . We talked about our book, and dealt with a doubting caller. We did the interview from a Chicago studio, but later we visited the beautiful Bay Area. The picture is one of the many Mexican-style murals in the Outer Mission.
Listen to the interview here.
Committees, Councils and Cultural Production
Omar Aziz
In this presentation on Syria – in green Seattle’s public library – Leila talks about Razan Zeitouneh, founder of the Local Coordination Committees, and Omar Aziz, the anarchist who first thought of building local councils. And I talk about the revolution’s cultural and media achievements. Interesting questions from the audience afterwards.
On the Brian Lehrer Show
In New York (what an astounding city), Leila and I were interviewed by Brian Lehrer for his show on WNYC. We talked about Syria’s failing ceasefire, the illusory Damascus Spring, Assad’s collaboration with George W Bush, the history of the Baath, and Obama’s deals with Iran and Russia. A couple of listeners called in with questions – one about the sectarian element.
You can listen to the interview here.
Iraq’s Forgotten Uprising
This was published at al-Araby al-Jadeed/ the New Arab. The texts referred to are Ali Issa’s Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq, and Sam Charles Hamad’s essay ‘The Rise of Daesh in Syria’, found in Khiyana: Daesh, the Left, and the Unmaking of the Syrian Revolution.
A great deal has been written on the factors behind the rise of ISIS, or Daesh, in Iraq and Syria. Too much of the commentary focuses on abstracts – Islam in total, or Gulf-Wahhabi expansionism, or a vaguely stated American imperialism – according to whichever axe the author wishes to grind. And too much describes a simple split in these societies, and therefore a binary choice, between different forms of sectarian authoritarianism – in Iraq it’s either ISIS or the US and Iranian-backed government’s Shia militias; in Syria it’s either ISIS or the Russian and Iranian-backed Assad regime forces.
To take this representation seriously, we must force ourselves to ignore the very real third option – the non-sectarian struggle against the tyrannical authoritarianism of all states involved, whether Iraqi, Syrian or ‘Islamic’. Hundreds of democratic councils survive in Syria’s liberated areas, alongside a free media, women’s centres, and a host of civil society initiatives. In Iraq too, though it holds no land, there is a potential alternative, at least a gleam of light. The Iraqi state’s attempt to smother this gleam is an immediate and regularly overlooked cause of ISIS’s ascendance.
Burning Country at the Middle East Institute
Someone in New York sneered and said Washington was a sterile city, but I liked DC a lot during our two-day visit. The centre is full of people from everywhere, lobbying, plotting and misgoverning. The rest of the city has a mainly black population. We stayed with wonderful people, ate good food, and the sun was shining, the trees in bloom. I met my niece, lots of lovely Syrians, and some great Arab thinkers at the Tahrir Institute, most notably Hassan Hassan. The Museum of the American Indian is worth a visit too.
At the Middle East Institute our talk was chaired by the great scholar Charles Lister, author of the indispensable book The Syrian Jihad. Here Leila talks about the aspects of the Syrian revolution rendered invisible by Western commentary, and I talk about what’s stopping us seeing: ideological assumptions, and the fact of war. Q and A afterwards.
Hell, Chicago
Leila and I were interviewed by phone (we were in Los Angeles) by Chuck Mertz of This is Hell radio, a Chicago-based station. We talked about the Syrian revolution. Because the radio station is in Chicago, and because its name incorporates Hell, here’s a picture of the Trump Tower, or one of them, also in Chicago.
AntidoteZine has published a transcript alongside the audio, here.
Talking About Syria in Chicago
On a pier poking into the icy turquoise of Lake Michigan, looking back at Chicago’s brutal towers, Leila and I were interviewed on Syria by Jerome McDonnell, an engaging host, for WBEZ’s Worldview. We talked about Razan Zaitouneh, revolutionary councils, imperialist intervention, American policy, Islamism, Robert Fisk, and the farmers and dentists who make history. Jerome McDonnell hosted us again that evening at Chicago University’s International House.
Daniel Lazare
Throughout April, Leila and I spoke about Syria and our book Burning Country in the United States and Canada. Some audiences were large , some were small. A couple contained a preponderance of anarchists, a couple included people from the State Department. Some were academic, some were grassroots. One was entirely Syrian. Audience questions stretched from those informed by various conspiracy theories to those grounded in humanity, intelligence, and information.
We heard some strange things, but were only once confronted by a highly aggressive, profoundly ignorant and prejudiced white man. This was during our talk at Columbia University, New York. This character was the first to put up his hand after our presentations. He’d been glaring, particularly at Leila, throughout the talks.
He was almost spitting with anger. How could Leila describe Iran as a prime generator of sectarianism, he wanted to know, when everyone knew it was Saudi Arabia? He himself knew for sure that Syria’s 2011 protest movement was entirely made up of Sunnis, and that they were calling for the blood of the Alawis and Christians from the first day. He knew that all the Christians and Alawis and Druze had demonstrated for Assad. He named a French commentator as evidence for this (Fabrice someone?), and expressed admiration for Patrick Cockburn, who I’d criticised in my talk.
With Ian Masters in LA
On our last morning in sunny, science fiction Los Angeles, Leila and I were interviewed by Ian Masters for his Background Briefing programme on KPFK FM. In the balmy, car-corrupted Californian air we talked about scorched earth, imperialist alignement, and democracy in Syria.
Listen to it here. We come in at about 35 minutes.
On Boston’s Radio Opensource
This was a strange experience. We were told in a long pre-interview that the actual interview would be just us (Leila and I), and would be focused on civil society in Syria. On the day, however, they brought in LRB-contributor Hugh Roberts and American commentator Jeffrey Sachs, so the conversation became enwebbed in a US-centric alternate reality. The host is Chris Lydon. Listen to it here.
How Did Syria Become a Burning Country?
It was good to spend an evening with Ashley Smith in Burlington, Vermont, in the flesh, weeks after he’d interviewed me on skype for Socialist Worker, the US version, thus:
In 2011, the Syrian people joined their sisters and brothers throughout the Middle East in a popular revolution for liberation from dictatorship. They aimed to establish democracy and equality. The regime of Bashar al-Assad responded by bombing its own people and dividing them along ethnic and sectarian lines.
But Assad’s rule-or-ruin tactics could not stop the revolt. It took air strikes and an invasion by Russia, Iran and their allies to shore up the regime in the run-up to current cessation of hostilities and so-called peace talks in Geneva. Robin Yassin-Kassab, the co-author with Leila Al-Shami of Burning Country: Syria in Revolution and War, talked with about the results and prospects of the Syrian struggle. Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami will be appearing across North America in April on a tour to promote their book.
DURING THE recent cease-fire, Syrian revolutionaries returned to the streets in popular protests. What is the significance of this?
FIRST, I would like to quibble a little bit with the terminology “ceasefire.” What they’ve officially called it is a “cessation of hostilities,” which excludes the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra. So Russia and Assad’s state have actually continued bombing ISIS-controlled territory. And they have used that as a cover to bomb opposition-held territory. For example, they have repeatedly attacked Duma, outside of Damascus, where there’s no presence of either al-Nusra or ISIS.
So it is at best only a partial cessation, in which the average daily death toll has gone down from about 120 a day, as it was a few weeks ago, to about 40 a day now. That’s still awful, but it’s a great improvement.
Syrian revolutionaries have taken advantage of this situation to return to the streets in protest on each Friday since the cessation of hostilities. They are waving the revolutionary flag, not the black flags of various Islamist organizations, and repeating the same chants that we heard in 2011. They are chanting, “The Syrian people are one,” and again demanding freedom and democracy.
So the original urge for liberation that we saw in 2011 is still alive, despite the fact that almost half a million people have been killed, that half the country is now homeless, and that every city in the country except one has been bombed. This is quite inspiring and amazing.
Wayne, New Jersey
Five weeks traveling and talking through the enormous diversity of North America (some of it at least). This was near the start, at William Paterson University, in Wayne, New Jersey. A great pleasure to spend time with Samer Abboud, author of a fine book on Syria, and even more time with Steve Shalom, of long repute, he and his wife our generous hosts.
Watch the video of the event here.
The Arab of the Future
This was my review for the Guardian of Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir.
The graphic novel has proved itself over and over. It already has its classical canon: Spiegelman on the Holocaust, Satrapi on girlhood in Islamist Iran, and (perhaps most accomplished of all) Joe Sacco’s ‘Footnotes in Gaza’, a work of detailed and self-reflexive history. Edging towards this company comes Riad Sattouf’s ‘The Arab of the Future’, a childhood memoir of tyranny.
Little Riad’s mother, Clementine, is French. His father, Abdul-Razak, is Syrian. They meet at the Sorbonne, where Abdul-Razak is studying a doctorate in history. Those with Arab fathers will recognise the prestige value of the title ‘doctoor’. But Abdul-Razak is more ambitious. He really wants to be a president. Studying abroad at least allows him to avoid military service. “I want to give orders, not take them,” he says. When humiliated, he sniffs and rubs his nose.
Abdul-Razak is a pan-Arabist who believes the people (“stupid filthy Arab retards!”) must be educated out of religious dogma. For reasons of both vanity and ideology he turns down an Oxford teaching post for one in Libya. The family takes up residence in a flat which doesn’t have a lock, because Qaddafi has ‘abolished private property’. Little Riad sees Libya all yellow, its unfinished buildings already crumbling. He sings the Leader’s speeches with kids in the stairwell and queues with his mother for food (only eggs one week, just bananas the next).
Qunfuz 