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The Newseum in deep trouble
“Make no little plans,” wrote the visionary architect Daniel Burnham. “They have no power to stir men’s blood.”
Inspiring words, yes, but sometimes one can get carried away.
There are few better examples than the Newseum, the iconic edifice that opened its Pennsylvania Avenue NW doors in 2008 and has been awash in red ink ever since.
On Monday, its chief executive, Jeffrey Herbst, stepped down and the museum’s parent, the Freedom Foundation, acknowledged publicly what insiders have known for a long time:
The Newseum is in big financial trouble. It may have to sell its building — still shiny and new. And, though no one is saying it publicly, it may end up going under altogether.
The signs weren’t good from its overblown start. The building is seven stories tall with 250,000 square feet of exhibit space, 15 theaters and an adjoining multistory Wolfgang Puck restaurant.
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Village Voice Lays Off 13 Union Employees
Just before 3 p.m. on Wednesday, employees at The Village Voice in Manhattan received an email from co-workers saying that the weekly newspaper appeared to be on the verge of announcing layoffs.
Within a few hours about a dozen employees were summoned into a conference room inside The Voice office in the Financial District and told that they would no longer have jobs after the third week of September, a union representative said, when the paper’s final print edition will be distributed.
Thirteen of the paper’s 17 union workers are being laid off, said the president of the local that has represented Voice workers since 1977, when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. According to the union, they include a writer, a social media producer, an administrative assistant and a photo editor who has worked for decades at the left-leaning newspaper, which was started in 1955 by Norman Mailer and others then went on to provide a blueprint for a scrappy, muckraking journalistic format that became known as the alt-weekly.
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How not to solve the refugee crisis
On October 3, 2013, a Sicilian prosecutor named Calogero Ferrara was in his office in the Palace of Justice, in Palermo, when he read a disturbing news story. Before dawn, a fishing trawler carrying more than five hundred East African migrants from Libya had stalled a quarter of a mile from Lampedusa, a tiny island halfway to Sicily. The driver had dipped a cloth in leaking fuel and ignited it, hoping to draw help. But the fire quickly spread, and as passengers rushed away the boat capsized, trapping and killing hundreds of people.
The Central Mediterranean migration crisis was entering a new phase. Each week, smugglers were cramming hundreds of African migrants into small boats and launching them in the direction of Europe, with little regard for the chances of their making it. Mass drownings had become common. Still, the Lampedusa shipwreck was striking for its scale and its proximity: Italians watched from the cliffs as the coast guard spent a week recovering the corpses.
As news crews descended on the island, the coffins were laid out in an airplane hangar and topped with roses and Teddy bears. “It shocked me, because, maybe for the first time, they decided to show pictures of the coffins,” Ferrara told me. Italy declared a day of national mourning and started carrying out search-and-rescue operations near Libyan waters.
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The Saudi Trillions
It made perfect sense that the first port of call on President Trump’s first foreign trip, in May, was Riyadh. Saudi Arabia – the world’s second largest oil producer (after Russia), the world’s biggest military spender as a proportion of GDP, the main sponsor of Islamist fighting groups across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, the leader of a coalition in a devastating war against Yemeni rebels now in its third year – is a country one can do business with, even as the most ardent Kremlinologists in the West struggle to understand it. It is a place often defined by its contradictions, in which tribal codes of desert and oasis – puritanical, patriarchal, frugal and austere – co-exist and frequently clash with lavish displays of wealth and such emblems of modernity as air-conditioned shopping malls, designer boutiques and six-lane highways flashing with supercharged vehicles exclusively driven by men. Trump returned from his visit with a promise – he claimed – of $350 billion in Saudi spending on American armaments over the next ten years, with $110 billion right away, of benefit particularly to Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. The State Department celebrated the deal as supporting ‘the long-term security of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region in the face of malign Iranian influence and Iranian-related threats’.
But the last few months have seen a series of changes in the kingdom that make its future more unpredictable than ever. At the beginning of June, Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties with its neighbour Qatar, demanding that its al-Jazeera network be shut down for broadcasting propaganda and launching a regional stand-off that is far from being resolved. Then, two weeks later, there was what appeared to be a palace coup. Since the death in 1953 of the modern kingdom’s founder, Abd al-Aziz Al Saud (generally known as Ibn Saud), succession has passed down the line of his sons. The present king, Salman, reportedly Ibn Saud’s 25th son, inherited the throne in 2015 on the death of his half-brother Abdullah and is close to being the last of his generation. At 81 Salman is in fragile health: he has had two strokes and suffers from Alzheimer’s. On 21 June the doting king promoted his favourite son, the 31-year-old Prince Mohammed bin Salman (widely known by the initials MBS), to the position of crown prince, putting him in line to be the first of the third generation – Ibn Saud’s grandsons – to occupy the throne. According to the New York Times, MBS’s elevation at the expense of his older cousin, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef (known as MBN), was the result of a well-executed plot. MBN had been highly regarded by the US and its allies: as head of the interior ministry and chief of Saudi intelligence he presided over operations against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP); he had attended training sessions with the FBI and was a powerful advocate of continued close relations with the Americans. In February the CIA honoured him with the George Tenet medal, in recognition of his ‘excellent intelligence performance in the domain of counterterrorism and his unbounded contribution to realise world security and peace’.
On the night of 20 June, the eve of the Eid al-Fitr festival that ends the holy month of Ramadan, MBN was summoned along with other senior princes for an audience with the king. Shortly before midnight courtiers answering to MBS – who was already chief of the royal court as well as the world’s youngest minister of defence – removed his phones and pressured him to relinquish his posts. MBN at first refused but eventually gave in and is now said to be under palace arrest. Afterwards clips of MBN paying allegiance to his younger cousin were shown on Saudi media, to demonstrate a smooth transition, and it was put about – this time by US as well as Saudi officials – that MBN had been suffering from the effects of the ‘arsehole bomb’ attack in 2009, when an al-Qaida operative masquerading as a petitioner approached him and blew himself up with an IED hidden in his rectum. MBN survived the attack but was said to have become addicted to medication he had been taking to mitigate the effects of the trauma. Members of the Allegiance Council, a body of 34 senior princes established by King Abdullah in 2006 to resolve disputes by approving changes in the line of succession, were told that MBN had a drug problem and was unfit to be king. Despite private reservations, the council deferred to King Salman and rubber-stamped its approval, in a vote of 31 to three.
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‘Can I ever return home?’
Earlier this year, while in Pakistan, I visited my village where I share a house with my sister. Built nearly 300 years ago by an ancestor, it’s a traditional courtyard house with fountains, frescoes and wooden balconies. It’s also next door to a mosque mounted with powerful loudspeakers. Since we were staying the night, I sent a polite request to the mosque’s imam. Would he, just this once, just for the dawn prayer, in line with age-old tradition, call the faithful to prayer in his own voice, instead of using the loudspeaker? He obliged. Two days later someone sent an anonymous note to the house. Before you make any such demands again, it read, remember what happened to Salman Taseer.
Taseer, governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, was assassinated in January by a fanatical member of his own security guard for proposing a review of Pakistan’s contentious blasphemy laws. Taseer was a flamboyant figure who made no secret of his liberal views and lifestyle. Ecstatic lawyers showered his murderer with rose petals and mullahs led thousands in street demonstrations in support of the blasphemy law. Some Pakistanis who live in the west and enjoy every one of its hard-won liberties, set up Facebook pages lauding Taseer’s murderer as a hero. Middle-class kids, who salivate over Angelina Jolie and dream of a green card, condoned the murder of “an immoral, westernised liberal”. Taseer’s murder and its aftermath marked a turning point in my relationship with my homeland.
I live in London. I moved here 15 years ago from Lahore, when I married a London-based Pakistani. My London life is full and varied. I have good friends, engrossing work and live in a nice part of town. My children go to good schools, my husband’s work is prospering. We live with security and the rule of law. I have a deep affection for Britain because I spent my late teens and university years here. Much of what I am, I owe to my UK education.
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Twists in Regeni’s disappearance in Cairo
The target of the Egyptian police, that day in November 2015, was the street vendors selling socks, $2 sunglasses and fake jewelry, who clustered under the arcades of the elegant century-old buildings of Heliopolis, a Cairo suburb. Such raids were routine, but these vendors occupied an especially sensitive location. Just 100 yards away is the ornate palace where Egypt’s president, the military strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, welcomes foreign dignitaries. As the men hurriedly gathered their goods from mats and doorways, preparing to flee, they had an unlikely assistant: an Italian graduate student named Giulio Regeni.
He arrived in Cairo a few months earlier to conduct research for his doctorate at Cambridge. Raised in a small village near Trieste by a sales manager father and a schoolteacher mother, Regeni, a 28-year-old leftist, was enthralled by the revolutionary spirit of the Arab Spring. In 2011, when demonstrations erupted in Tahrir Square, leading to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, he was finishing a degree in Arabic and politics at Leeds University. He was in Cairo in 2013, working as an intern at a United Nations agency, when a second wave of protests led the military to oust Egypt’s newly elected president, the Islamist Mohamed Morsi, and put Sisi in charge. Like many Egyptians who had grown hostile to Morsi’s overreaching government, Regeni approved of this development. ‘‘It’s part of the revolutionary process,’’ he wrote an English friend, Bernard Goyder, in early August. Then, less than two weeks later, Sisi’s security forces killed 800 Morsi supporters in a single day, the worst state-sponsored massacre in Egypt’s history. It was the beginning of a long spiral of repression. Regeni soon left for England, where he started work for Oxford Analytica, a business-research firm.
From afar, Regeni followed Sisi’s government closely. He wrote reports on North Africa, analyzing political and economic trends, and after a year had saved enough money to start on his doctorate in development studies at Cambridge. He decided to focus on Egypt’s independent unions, whose series of unprecedented strikes, starting in 2006, had primed the public for the revolt against Mubarak; now, with the Arab Spring in tatters, Regeni saw the unions as a fragile hope for Egypt’s battered democracy. After 2011 their numbers exploded, multiplying from four to thousands. There were unions for everything: butchers and theater attendants, well diggers and miners, gas-bill collectors and extras in the trashy TV soap operas that played during the holy month of Ramadan. There was even an Independent Trade Union for Dwarfs. Guided by his supervisor, a noted Egyptian academic at Cambridge who had written critically of Sisi, Regeni chose to study the street vendors — young men from distant villages who scratched out a living on the sidewalks of Cairo. Regeni plunged into their world, hoping to assess their union’s potential to drive political and social change.
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Julian Assange, a Man Without a Country
The Ecuadorian Embassy in London is situated at the end of a wide brick lane, next to the Harrods department store, in Knightsbridge. Sometimes plainclothes police officers, or vans with tinted windows, can be found outside the building. Sometimes there are throngs of people around it. Sometimes there is virtually no one, which was the case in June, 2012, when Julian Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, arrived, disguised as a motorcycle courier, to seek political asylum. In the five years since then, he has not set foot beyond the Embassy. Nonetheless, he has become a global influence, proving that with simple digital tools a single person can craft a new kind of power—a distributed, transnational power, which functions outside norms of state sovereignty that have held for centuries. Encouraged by millions of supporters, Assange has interfered with the world’s largest institutions. His releases have helped fuel democratic uprisings—notably in Tunisia, where a revolution sparked the Arab Spring—and they have been submitted as evidence in human-rights cases around the world. At the same time, Assange’s methodology and his motivations have increasingly come under suspicion. During the Presidential election last year, he published tens of thousands of hacked e-mails written by Democratic operatives, releasing them at pivotal moments in the campaign. They provoked strikingly disparate receptions. “I love WikiLeaks,” Donald Trump declared, in exultant gratitude. After the election, Hillary Clinton argued that the releases had been instrumental in keeping her from the Oval Office.
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An app for Journalists: Flyr
What is it? An app for making animated stories with images, video and text, that can then be shared on Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook.
Cost: Free, with an upgrade to Pro available for $9.99 (£7.80)/ month
Devices: iOS (Android version in progress)
How is it of use to journalists? News outlets have been using the ‘stories’ feature on Instagram and Snapchat to give their audiences a behind-the-scenes look at their newsrooms, to cover events, or to take the pulse around an issue. Stories can also sometimes be tweaked and repurposed according to the strengths of the platform – while Snapchat is more recognised for its unfiltered content, Instagram is more well-known for its carefully crafted visuals. Flyr enables journalists to create animated stories for these platforms, either from scratch or by tailoring its selection of pre-made templates.
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Unlearning the myth of American innocence
My mother recently found piles of my notebooks from when I was a small child that were filled with plans for my future. I was very ambitious. I wrote out what I would do at every age: when I would get married and when I would have kids and when I would open a dance studio.
When I left my small hometown for college, this sort of planning stopped. The experience of going to a radically new place, as college was to me, upended my sense of the world and its possibilities. The same thing happened when I moved to New York after college, and a few years later when I moved to Istanbul. All change is dramatic for provincial people. But the last move was the hardest. In Turkey, the upheaval was far more unsettling: after a while, I began to feel that the entire foundation of my consciousness was a lie.
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When Silicon Valley Took Over Journalism
Chris Hughes was a mythical savior—boyishly innocent, fantastically rich, intellectually curious, unexpectedly humble, and proudly idealistic.
My entire career at the New Republic had been spent dreaming of such a benefactor. For years, my colleagues and I had sputtered our way through the internet era, drifting from one ownership group to the next, each eager to save the magazine and its historic mission as the intellectual organ for hard-nosed liberalism. But these investors either lacked the resources to invest in our future or didn’t have quite enough faith to fully commit. The unending search for patronage exhausted me, and in 2010, I resigned as editor.
Then, in 2012, Chris walked through the door. Chris wasn’t just a savior; he was a face of the zeitgeist. At Harvard, he had roomed with Mark Zuckerberg, and he had gone on to become one of the co-founders of Facebook. Chris gave our fusty old magazine a Millennial imprimatur, a bigger budget, and an insider’s knowledge of social media. We felt as if we carried the hopes of journalism, which was yearning for a dignified solution to all that ailed it. The effort was so grand as to be intoxicating. We blithely dismissed anyone who warned of how our little experiment might collapse onto itself—how instead of providing a model of a technologist rescuing journalism, we could become an object lesson in the dangers of journalism’s ever greater reliance on Silicon Valley.
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Mideast Peace Play a Trump-Era Sensation
When Donald Trump became president, he touted his plans to make many previously unthinkable deals—including the most elusive one of all, between Israel and the Palestinians. “There’s no reason there’s not peace between” them, he insisted this spring. “None whatsoever.”
A few months later, the deal looks more predictably distant, and these days White House officials resort to anonymity to speak of “productive” meetings and plans to “continue our steady engagement.” Few of those who closely follow the issue think peace—or even a serious new round of negotiations—is at hand.
Which may help explain why Oslo, a three-hour, serious-minded play about a few months back in 1993 when Middle East peace finally seemed to be within reach, is the unlikely Broadway hit of 2017, a critical success that just won this year’s Tony Award for best play and is soon to be made into a movie. Call it wish fulfillment, or a belated recognition of what could have been—especially at a moment when the Oslo dream of a permanent two-state solution is, if not dead, at best on permanent life support.
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My Mosul photos for free
My name is Kainoa Little, and I am a Shoreline, Washington-based conflict photographer. I was in Mosul in April and May 2017, documenting Iraqi forces as they fought Islamic State militants to liberate the city.
I tried and failed to find newspapers and wire services who would purchase my photos. But the soldiers had fed me and given me a seat in their Humvees, and the refugees had tolerated my presence on some of the worst days of their lives. They very rightly expected that I would tell their story.
The worst uncertainty for me as a freelancer in conflict isn’t that I won’t be able to pay my rent; it’s that no one will see the story, and then I will have failed to give a voice to the voiceless. So I have tried to share them where I can, and hopefully people can imagine some of the human tragedy and triumph playing out in Mosul.
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Indigenous culture fears extinction
A legal battle over the ownership of dozens of churches, monasteries and other property in southeastern Turkey has embroiled one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.
Turkish authorities have seized approximately 50 properties, totaling hundreds of thousands of square meters, from the Syriac Orthodox Church on grounds their ownership deeds had lapsed, church and community leaders said.
An appeal by the fifth-century Mor Gabriel, one of the oldest working monasteries in the world, against the confiscation was rejected in May by a government commission charged with liquidating the assets.
Among the properties are at least two functioning monasteries erected 1,500 years ago, said Kuryakos Ergun, the chairman of the Mor Gabriel Monastery Foundation. The loss of these monuments threaten the survival of one of Turkey’s oldest indigenous cultures.
“Our churches and monasteries are what root Syriacs in these lands; our existence relies on them. They are our history and what sustains our culture,” Ergun said. “While the country should be protecting this heritage, we instead see our culture is at risk.”
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The Arab World’s Coming Challenges
Fifty years after the Six Days War, the Middle East remains a region in seemingly perpetual crisis. So it is no surprise that, when addressing the region, politicians, diplomats, and the donor and humanitarian community typically focus on the here and now. Yet, if we are ever to break the modern Middle East’s cycle of crises, we must not lose sight of the future. And, already, four trends are brewing a new set of problems for the coming decade.
The first trend affects the Levant. The post-Ottoman order that emerged a century ago – an order based on secular Arab nationalism – has already crumbled. The two states that gave weight to this system, Iraq and Syria, have lost their central authority, and will remain politically fragmented and socially polarized for at least a generation.
In Lebanon, sectarianism remains the defining characteristic of politics. Jordan has reached its refugee-saturation point, and continued inflows are placing limited resources under ever-greater pressure. As for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is no new initiative or circumstance on the political horizon that could break the deadlock.
The Middle East is certain to face the continued movement of large numbers of people, first to the region’s calmer areas and, in many cases, beyond – primarily to Europe. The region is also likely to face intensifying contests over national identities as well, and perhaps even the redrawing of borders – processes that will trigger further confrontations.
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German Professor Supports Refugees
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the size of the refugee problem confronting the world today. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, more than 30,000 people are forced to flee their homes every day because of conflict or persecution.
But one energetic university professor in Germany decided that bemoaning and hand-wringing wasn’t solving anything, so she decided to take action.
Carmen Bachmann is a professor of tax and finance at Leipzig University. There are some 6,000 political refugees living in Leipzig, and the government is only able to supply their basic needs. She could have helped by volunteering for relief agencies that collect clothing or furniture for the refugees, but that didn’t seem to her the best use of her time.
“I’m a full professor,” she told me when I visited her Leipzig office. “I thought my contribution to [easing] this problem is what my profession is.”
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Paperback sale outperform digital
At the start of this decade publishers feared the death of the paperback. Britons abandoned bookshops at an alarming rate, seduced by e-readers and cheap digital books.
Even Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, was shocked by the speed of readers’ defection when Kindle downloads outsold hard copies on the website for the first time in 2011. “We had high hopes this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly,” he said at the time.
But the ebook story has turned out to have a twist in the tale. Sales of physical books increased 4% in the UK last year while ebook sales shrank by the same amount. Glance around a busy train carriage and those passengers who aren’t on their phones are far more likely to have a paperback than a Kindle.
The e-reader itself has also turned out to have the shelf life of a two-star murder mystery. Smartphones and tablets last year overtook dedicated reading devices to become the most popular way to read an ebook, according to the research group Nielsen.
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Journalism faces a crisis worldwide
Australia’s two largest legacy media organisations recently announced big cuts to their journalistic staff. Many editorial positions, perhaps up to 120, will disappear at Fairfax Media, publisher of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and News Corporation announced the sacking of most of its photographers and editorial production staff.
Both announcements were accompanied by corporate spin voicing a continuing commitment to quality journalism. Nobody in the know believes it. This is the latest local lurch in a crisis that is engulfing journalism worldwide.
Now, partly thanks to Donald Trump, many more people are turning their mind to the future of news, including “fake” news and its opposite.
How, in the future, are we to know the difference between truth, myth and lies?
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In exile, Dündar awaits Turkey’s referendum
One morning last May, Can Dündar, a Turkish journalist, was standing outside an Istanbul courthouse, waiting for a judge to reach a verdict on his guilt or innocence, when a man rushed toward him with a gun. A year earlier, Dündar’s newspaper, Cumhuriyet, a daily favored by Turkey’s secular left, had published video footage of truckloads of weapons being smuggled to Syrian rebels by Turkish state intelligence agents. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose government had denied that it was supplying the rebels, was outraged and vowed that Dündar, then editor-in-chief, would “pay a heavy price.” Dündar was arrested and charged with aiding a terrorist organization and with espionage, among other crimes. “Traitor!” the gunman shouted as he fired two shots in Dündar’s direction. Dündar’s wife, Dilek, along with a member of parliament, grabbed the gunman, and video of the scene shows the three in an odd, lumbering half-embrace until the man is ordered to drop his gun. After the shooting, Dündar looked a bit ruffled but was uncannily composed. “I am fine. I am fine,” he told reporters. “Nobody should worry. Please be calm. There is nothing wrong. My wife jumped on him. So I want to congratulate her.” Glancing at Dilek, he smiled. “Thank you. Thank you.”
When the court reconvened, a short time later, one of the judges apologized to Dündar for the shooting and then sentenced him to five years and ten months in prison for revealing state secrets. Dündar appealed the conviction and, free, pending the outcome, left for Barcelona to work on a book. At that point, Dündar was hopeful that he could get a fair trial in Turkey and intended to return. But, last July, his plans changed. President Erdoğan declared a state of emergency in response to an attempted coup, leading to a crackdown on ostensible opponents: he eventually fired more than a hundred thousand public workers, jailed opposition politicians and journalists, and arrested judges, two of whom sat on the constitutional court. Convinced of the utter impossibility of a fair trial, Dündar took up an offer to come to Germany to write a column for the German newspaper Die Zeit. He arrived in Berlin with little more than a suitcase full of summer clothes.
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Who are the new jihadists?
There is something new about the jihadi terrorist violence of the past two decades. Both terrorism and jihad have existed for many years, and forms of “globalised” terror – in which highly symbolic locations or innocent civilians are targeted, with no regard for national borders – go back at least as far as the anarchist movement of the late 19th century. What is unprecedented is the way that terrorists now deliberately pursue their own deaths.
Over the past 20 years – from Khaled Kelkal, a leader of a plot to bomb Paris trains in 1995, to the Bataclan killers of 2015 – nearly every terrorist in France blew themselves up or got themselves killed by the police. Mohamed Merah, who killed a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, uttered a variant of a famous statement attributed to Osama bin Laden and routinely used by other jihadis: “We love death as you love life.” Now, the terrorist’s death is no longer just a possibility or an unfortunate consequence of his actions; it is a central part of his plan. The same fascination with death is found among the jihadis who join Islamic State. Suicide attacks are perceived as the ultimate goal of their engagement.
This systematic choice of death is a recent development. The perpetrators of terrorist attacks in France in the 1970s and 1980s, whether or not they had any connection with the Middle East, carefully planned their escapes. Muslim tradition, while it recognises the merits of the martyr who dies in combat, does not prize those who strike out in pursuit of their own deaths, because doing so interferes with God’s will. So, why, for the past 20 years, have terrorists regularly chosen to die? What does it say about contemporary Islamic radicalism? And what does it say about our societies today?
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“Revolution, a human change”
Those 18 days were the most beautiful days of my life,” Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany says of the January 2011 demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that swept his country into revolution, and forced dictator-president Hosni Mubarak to resign at the extraordinary, euphoric high point of the Arab spring.
“When you live through such a big event, you are not able – or I am not able – to write a novel about it directly. You should have a distance. I have this distance now and I’m writing a novel about the revolution,” Aswany says in his deep-voiced, accented English, as we talk over glasses of hot chocolate in a cafe on Edgware Road, London.
At first glance, his new novel – a belated arrival in its English translation, having been published in Egypt three years ago – looks like something quite different: a retreat, perhaps, from the maelstrom of Egypt’s present. Set in the 1940s, The Automobile Club of Egypt is a Middle Eastern upstairs-downstairs tale of servants and masters, Egyptians and colonials, decadent royals and family life.
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My Shattered Istanbul
I’ve been told Istanbul is best at the winter, when a light snow coats its rooftops and skinny minarets reach into a dark sky, when the cobblestones are wet and the tourists are few. I do not know that place. Istanbul to me is a hot, relentless chaos that smells of salt and sour bread and fumes. Any possibility of a cold lingering fog over the strait dissolves under the loud summer sky; I cannot imagine it.
I come here every summer. Upon landing at Ataturk Airport, after bullying my way through customs, baggage claim, and the general anarchy that is Turkish travel, I am always greeted by the innocence of June or the blanket heat of July, and then by a taxi driver.
He’ll weave through the traffic in a way that inspires a futile desire for a seatbelt. He’ll use the exit lane and shrug that it really is just faster. He’ll ask where I’ve come from and why, if my mother is Turkish, she lives in the U.S. He’ll assume my father is American and he’ll be right. He’ll tell me then about his family of taxi drivers and the twenty-six-year-old son he lost to a car accident last month. He’ll show me his son’s photograph on a cracked mobile, rendering me a mumbling fool. He’ll shed a rogue tear. Then he’ll drive me in fits through the choked and tangled backstreets off the freeway, down through Besiktas on its main thoroughfare, left and past the old palace, and onto the winding road that borders that wide, historic strait, the Bosphorus.
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Macedonia’s fake news factory
“Made in Tito’s Veles” is the trademark you may find if you turn over a dainty porcelain dish in any ex-Yugoslav country. Emblazoned alongside the initials of Yugoslavia’s chief economic planner, this was a trademark that proudly belonged to the golden era of Yugoslavia’s rapid industrialisation. It was a hallmark of reputable, tangible goods, the genuine article. Now known simply as Veles, the city that was once an industrial hub in the heart of the Republic of Macedonia recently became infamous for manufacturing a very different and pernicious product for export: the “fake news” stories being peddled by some of its digitally literate teenage population.
While older residents nostalgically recount the days when they were proud to see Ivanka (Mrs Tito) wearing silk spun in their factories, their tech-savvy grandchildren achieved a sudden notoriety last autumn, having capitalised on the lucrative media storm surrounding Donald Trump. In turn, the brief flurry of media coverage on unrepentant “adolescent kingpins” assaulting Western politics with their burgeoning empires of misinformation propagated its own distorted representations of an unfamiliar city and its inhabitants. By spotlighting the experience of disenchanted teenage boys, the media cast the whole city in the unflattering light of conventional eastern European stereotypes. Veles became a quintessentially bleak, impoverished vacuum out on the “Balkan hinterlands”, begetting amoral profiteering. Such images ignore the multifaceted reality and belong to a long tradition of Westerners seeking out what historian Larry Wolff called the “half-barbarian” at the “unpolished extremity” of the continent.
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The trauma of facing deportation
Georgi, a Russian refugee who came to Sweden with his family when he was five years old, could talk at length about the virtues of the Volvo. His doctor described him as “the most ‘Swedeified’ in his family.” He was also one of the most popular boys in his class. For his thirteenth birthday, two friends listed some of the qualities that he evoked: energetic, fun, happy all the time, good human being, amazingly kind, awesome at soccer, sly.
Georgi’s father, Soslan, had helped found a pacifist religious sect in North Ossetia, a Russian province that borders Georgia. Soslan said that in 2007 security forces demanded that he disband the sect, which rejected the entanglement of the Russian Orthodox Church with the state, and threatened to kill him if he refused. He fled to Sweden with his wife, Regina, and their two children, and applied for asylum, but his claim was denied, because the Swedish Migration Board said that he hadn’t proved that he would be persecuted if he returned to Russia.
Sweden permits refugees to reapply for asylum, and in 2014, having lived in hiding in central Sweden for six years, the family tried again. They argued that there were now “particularly distressing circumstances,” a provision that allowed the board to consider how deportation will affect a child’s psychological health. “It would be devastating if Georgi were forced to leave his community, his friends, his school, and his life,” the headmaster of Georgi’s school, Rikard Floridan, wrote in a letter to the board. He described Georgi as “an example to all classmates,” a student who spoke in “mature and nuanced language” and showed a “deep gratitude for the school.”
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The journey of a trafficked girl
It was close to midnight on the coast of Libya, a few miles west of Tripoli. At the water’s edge, armed Libyan smugglers pumped air into thirty-foot rubber dinghies. Some three thousand refugees and migrants, mostly sub-Saharan Africans, silent and barefoot, stood nearby in rows of ten. Oil platforms glowed in the Mediterranean.
The Libyans ordered male migrants to carry the inflated boats into the water, thirty on each side. They waded in and held the boats steady as a smuggler directed other migrants to board, packing them as tightly as possible. People in the center would suffer chemical burns if the fuel leaked and mixed with water. Those straddling the sides could easily fall into the sea. Officially, at least five thousand and ninety-eight migrants died in the Mediterranean last year, but Libya’s coastline is more than a thousand miles long, and nobody knows how many boats sink without ever being seen. Several of the migrants had written phone numbers on their clothes, so that someone could call their families if their bodies washed ashore.
The smugglers knelt in the sand and prayed, then stood up and ordered the migrants to push off. One pointed to the sky. “Look at this star!” he said. “Follow it.” Each boat left with only enough fuel to reach international waters.
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The Dirtbag Left’s Man in Syria
Brace Belden can’t remember exactly when he decided to give up his life as a punk-rocker turned florist turned boxing-gym manager in San Francisco, buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak across the border into Syria, and take up arms against the Islamic State. But as with many major life decisions, Belden, who is 27 — “a true idiot’s age,” in his estimation — says it happened gradually and then all at once.
For several years, Belden had been reading about Rojava, a large swath of northern Syria that had been carved out by a Kurdish political party and its military wing, the YPG (or People’s Protection Units), in the ruins of Syria’s civil war. The YPG had become one of the most effective bulwarks against ISIS, so much so that the Pentagon had offered support, and Western volunteers, many of them military veterans, had started enlisting. But Belden was less interested in the YPG’s battlefield victories than in what it was trying to build: a semi-autonomous region operating under a more or less socialist system. To Belden, who’d identified as a Marxist since he was a teenager, Rojava looked like Spain in 1936: Capitalism reigned supreme, and fascism was on the march, but here was an opportunity to halt the latter and foment revolution against the former. After several months of wondering whether he was truly prepared to kill for his political beliefs, and several more figuring out how to actually join a Kurdish militia, Belden told his girlfriend that he was going to Syria to do humanitarian work and got on a plane.
When I first talked to Belden, in November, he had been in Syria for two months and was looking forward to his first shower in weeks. “Incredibly filthy right down to the bone,” he said via text message. It was Thanksgiving Day in America, but Belden wasn’t celebrating. His tabor, or platoon, had spent the past three weeks advancing on Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, clearing villages of ISIS fighters along the way. They were resting in an abandoned grain silo near Ayn Issa, where a U.S. Navy officer had just been killed by an IED. “Part of me knew what I was getting into,” Belden said. “But when I got here, it sort of hit me: Oh, shit, I joined a Third World army that’s fighting ISIS.”
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