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).
‘Burning Country’ North America Tour
To promote the publication of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, authors Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami are embarking on an extended tour of North America. This will be a great opportunity to hear both about the book itself and about the developing situation in Syria more generally, and to engage in dialogue with two of the most important contemporary commentators on the Middle East.
Tuesday March 29 at 2:00 PM – Wayne, NJ
Gandhian Forum for Peace & Justice at William Paterson University, University Commons, Ballroom C, 300 Pompton Road — Wayne, New Jersey
Click here for more info
Wednesday March 30 at 4:00 PM – Boston, MA
Emerson College, Charles Beard Room, 80 Boylston Street, Boston
Thursday March 31 at 12:00 PM – Cambridge, MA
Harvard University, Kalb Seminar Room, Taubman Building, Kennedy School of Government, 15 Eliot Street, Cambridge
Click here for more info
Friday April 1 at 3:00 PM – Los Angeles, CA
UCLA, Bunche Hall, Room 10383 (10th floor), 315 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles
Click here for more info
Binet, Hitler and Putin
This (slightly subedited) was first published at the New Arab/ al-araby al-jadeed.
I’ve just finished “HHhH”, an excellent ‘non-fiction novel’ by the French writer Laurent Binet. It tells the true story of Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of top Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich co-ordinated by the Czechoslovak resistance and the British government.
In the Nazi surveillance agency, the SS, Heydrich was second in command only to Heinrich Himmler (or perhaps he was even more important than his boss – “HHhH” is the German acronym for ‘Himmler’s Brain is Called Heydrich’). He was the highest official in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and the chief architect of the ‘final solution’ for Europe’s Jews – the Holocaust.
The larger background to the drama of the assassination is Britain and France’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia, the final layer in these states’ disastrous appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s.
Germany had been defeated in World War One. The post-war settlement forced Germany to pay enormous reparations to the victors. This national humiliation was immediately followed by economic collapse and social disorder. Hitler emerged from this context, a strong leader promising to restore German order and pride, identifying enemies domestic and foreign, and lamenting the scattering of the German people across various borders.
With Syria Solidarity UK
It was a pleasure to give a talk at the LSE. The talk was organised by the brilliant Syria Solidarity UK.
Here is Part One:
and (after the break) Part Two:
Drawing Blood
This review was published at the National.
Molly Crabapple’s “Drawing Blood” – “the story of a girl and her sketchbook” – is at once memoir, reportage, literary description, aesthetic enquiry, road novel and romance.
Crabapple’s painting, lying somewhere between Toulouse Lautrec and surrealism, is increasingly celebrated. The surprise here is that her best writing is as provocatively beautiful as her visual art. Her prose is sweet and sour in equal measure, the eye she watches with is both refined and raw. Very often she watches herself. The comfortable clash in her personality of cynic and idealist, highbrow and lowbrow, recalls Saul Bellow’s early characters. Like Augie March, a young Molly shoplifts high-canonical texts and reads them on the elevated trains which pass above slums.
Native of New York, of a stimulating Puerto Rican (Marxist) and Jewish (artist) background, Molly nevertheless hated being a child. School diagnosed her with “oppositional defiant disorder”; by twelve she’d become a goth-punk. At seventeen she was travelling in Paris and Morocco, an American on tour – “nothing but an eye, soaking up the world” – but one seeing a freshly unexotic vision.
“When you draw you are performing quietly,” she writes, “inviting strangers to engage you.” Strangers engage her, of course, wherever she is, whether she’s drawing or not, simply because she possesses (or is possessed by) an attractive female body. This she finds to be both a power and a vulnerability. The financial power leads her to pose for photo shoots. “When I thought of every proposition and threat that I got just walking down the street in my girl body, I decided I might as well get paid for the trouble.” And so she became “rendered into image, untouchable yet tradable.”
Free City Radio
By now I’m repeating myself, but here I am talking about the Syrian revolution and our book on Canada’s Free City Radio. Topics include democracy, how Assad engineered a war, and the meanings of the word ‘jihad’.
‘Democratic Confederalism’ or Counter-Revolution?
Abdullah Ocalan (the Turkish ‘c’ is pronounced ‘j’)
This is my latest article for al-Araby al-Jadeed/ the New Arab.
The first fact is this: the Kurds have suffered a terrible historical injustice. The Arabs were rightly enraged when Britain and France carved bilad al-Sham (the Levant) into mini-states, then gave one of them to Zionism. But the post-Ottoman dispensation allowed the Kurds no state at all – and this in an age when the Middle East was ill with nationalist fever. Everywhere the Kurds became minorities in hyper-nationalist states.
Over the years an estimated 40,000 people have been killed in Turkish-Kurdish fighting, most of them Kurds. In the late 1980s, Saddam Hussain’s genocidal Anfal campaign murdered somewhere between 50 and 200,000 Iraqi Kurds. In Syria, where Kurds formed about 10% of the population, or around two million people, it was illegal to teach in Kurdish. Approximately 300,000 Kurds (by 2011) were denied citizenship by the state, and were therefore excluded from education and health care, barred from owning land or setting up businesses.
While oppressing Kurds at home, President Hafez al-Assad (Bashaar’s father) cultivated good relations with Kurdish groups abroad. This fitted into his regional strategy of backing spoilers and irritants as pawns against his rivals.
KCRW
I was talking alongside journalists Anne Barnard and Borzou Daragahi, and aid worker Dalia al-Awqati, on KCRW, a Californian radio station. The discussion concerns the Munich theatre and the effects of the military onslaught on Syrian civilians. If you follow this link you’ll hear it. I come in between 20.40 and 27.15.
Qunfuz 