Thoughts on the passing of Senator John McCain

Do not take at face value those who claim to be for human rights, as so many of those criticizing the late U.S. Senator John McCain do, if they nevertheless stood silently by as Muammar Gaddafi terrorized & pauperized Libya for decades and, through his support of armed groups like the the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and the Tajammu al-Arabi (later the Janjaweed) in Sudan's Darfur, probably killed more black Africans than any one single person since King Leopold.

 Do not take at face value the claims of those who say that foreign policy should be approached from a position of respect, who paternalistically and dishonestly argue that Arabs are subject to "age old" enmities and thus "aren't ready" for democracy in places like Bahrain or Egypt.

Do not take at face value people the claims of those who argue they stand up for the sacredness of national borders but nevertheless, at best, sat silent and often actively applauded as the Assad crime family in Syria invited the Russians, Iranians and Lebanese onto Syrian territory to aid in its ghastly slaughter of people who, when they first rose up in 2011, simply demanded to be able to chose democratically who governs them (and if anybody doubts that, read the reports of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International from 2011/2012 or books like The Impossible Revolution by Yassin al-Haj Saleh or Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin-Kassab & Leila Al-Shami).

John McCain was a very flawed politician, as he would have been the first to admit, and his flaws were often reflected in his politics. But as the world stood by and watched the dream of Syrian democracy get extinguished by Russian bombing in places like Aleppo, by chemical weapons in places like Talmenes, Sarmin, Qmenas & Khan Sheikhoun, by mass murder in Assad's death camps such asthe Saydnaya military prison, John McCain stood - and remained - on the right side of history, with the people of Syria, who have now seen that flicker of freedom that first grew visible seven years ago all but vanish. It was our generation's Guernica, and most politicians - including Barack Obama, who I voted for twice - blew it. John McCain did not.

So here lies John McCain, imperfect American, Navy veteran, public servant, and friend - when so many of my fellow self-described progressives were not - to the people of Syria. Perhaps when he gets to the other side he can talk to so many of the Syrians already there about what that meant.

Books in 2017: A Personal Selection

 Mohammad Mohiedine Anis, 70, smokes his pipe as he sits in his destroyed bedroom listening to music on his vinyl player in Aleppo's formerly rebel-held al-Shaar neighbourhood.(AFP PHOTO / JOSEPH EID/AFP/Getty Images)

Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos

One of the most important - but in many ways least remembered - Spanish-language poets of the 20th century, whose words translate seamlessly into English in this bilingual collection, Julia de Burgos was the often-anguished and sometimes dizzyingly sensual voice of Puerto Rico who died at 39 in New York City in 1953. In her poetry, recurring images - the sea, the stars - lighten to a degree what can often be the bleak inner life of her writing, and, as a committed political militant and passionate anti-fascist, one of her greatest poems, a tribute to the Rio Grande de Loíza remains, years later, a defiant call to an island and a people battered by catastrophes both natural and man-made:

¡Río Grande de Loíza!... Río grande. Llanto grande.
El más grande de todos nuestros llantos isleños,
si no fuera más grande el que de mi se sale
por los ojos del alma para mi esclavo pueblo.

Rio Grande de Loiza! . . . Great river. Great flood of tears.
The greatest of all our island's tears
save those greater that come from the eyes
up of my soul for my enslaved people.

Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania Book by Roland Clark

This all-too-relevant book looks at the foundations and growth of Romania’s indigenous fascist movements, especially Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s Iron Guard, also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael or, simply, as the Legionnaire movement. Facing a crumbling state whose moral equivocations finally eroded its authority, the Romanian fascists blended a wild, faux-mystical antisemitic violence with religious and folk-historical symbolism, including appearing in isolated rural villages dressed as haiduc, outlaws who had fought local oppressors in the 19th century. It is no coincidence that Codreanu’s image appeared on t-shirts worn by some of the far-right protesters who ran amok in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past summer. In addition to assassinations and street violence, the Legionnaires also defined themselves through art – they sold handmade crosses with the words “by sacrificing our lives we will escape from thieves” inscribed beneath them - and by long marches in between Romanian towns that “alerted onlookers that there was something distinctive about the Legion, showing that legionnaires valued hierarchy, order, discipline and physical fitness.” Though not a time in European history that attracts a great deal of attention today, this interwar period in Romania certainly holds a cautionary tale for our present moment.

Los Zetas Inc: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico by Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera

Though there have been a surfeit of books detailing the garish violence of Mexico’s drug cartels – organizations whose lifeblood depends on both the ravenous appetite for narcotics and current policies of the United States – no book has delved in such nuts-and-bolts detail into the financial hierarchies and dynamics that inform the running of one of these organizations as does Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera’s tome on Los Zetas. Highly recommended for anyone seeking to understand the inner working of organized crime and how it integrates itself into the legitimate economy.

Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad

The majesty of one of Iran’s greatest poets – who combines a world and once modern and antique and who writes as frankly and elegantly about female desire as anyone ever has – calls out from the page and evokes a forgotten glory of a national literary tradition that, while perhaps dormant at the moment, waits to be born again.

Family Portrait With Fidel: A Memoir by Carlos Franqui

A memoir of disillusionment and disenchantment with a revolution he once risked his life to support, this memoir by Carlos Franqui, an anti-Batista author and rebel who became editor of the important newspaper Revolución after the dictator’s fall, Franqui’s book shows the betrayal of the Cuban people by the Castro brothers and their allies and the subsuming of hard-fought victories and dreams of progress to totalitarianism. “We carried out all kinds of executions,” Franqui writes at one point. “Real, moral and symbolic.”

Everybody Leaves by Wendy Guerra

A moving elegy to the vanished youth of a Cuban girl’s conflicted and adventurous early life growing up in Cienfuegos and Havana.

Ghost Stories by M. R. James

Classic English ghost stories from one of the masters of the genre, including such gems as “Casting the Runes” and “After Dark in the Playing Fields.” A most enjoyable diversion.

Paradiso by  José Lezama Lima

A complicated, allusive novel of Cuba in the early part of the 20^th century, Lezama’s key work remains one of the greatest achievements of Latin American fiction of his era, and his erotic, poetic prose (“They looked each other over with long pauses of insatiation and a carnality of symphonic progression”) couldn’t be further away from the square, macho military culture of today’s “official” Cuba. A sleeping giant, waiting be discovered.

The End of Eddy: A Novel by Édouard Louis

A beautifully rendered and occasionally brutal and disturbing memoir of growing up poor and gay in  northern France, this book captures the simultaneous ache and occasional truces in difficult, dysfunctional families with great clarity and speaks to anyone who ever felt like a misfit who had to break away into the great unknown.

Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea by Shiraz Maher

A vitally important work in decoding the ideology (cosmology might be a better term) of salafi-Jihadism, this book by a noted British academic (and former radical himself) lays out in minute detail the current jihadi interpretation of such concepts as tatarrus (roughly a theological construct relating to human shields but also expanding into targeting civilians) and their roots in various schismatic schools of Islamic thought.

Mephisto by Klaus Manm

The story of an actor’s seduction by the rewards offered by proximity to power in Nazi Germany, the great German author’s 1936 novel has unnerving parables to the situation here in the contemporary United States, and one wonders how many in the orbit of the current U.S. president and his minions have - or will - mentally echo the performer Höfgen thoughts when, as Mephisto, he meets Herman Goering: ”Now I have contaminated myself…Now there is a stain on my hand that I can never wash off…Now I have sold myself…Now I am marked for life.”

Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction by Elaine Frantz Parsons

The garishly theatrical nature of the early Ku Klux Klan, where elements of minstrelsy combined with brutal violence, is here chronicled in a book that is often revelatory. Formed in Pulaski, Tennessee in May or June 1866 (and not, as is often claimed, by former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who only attached to himself to the Klan later), the Klan were defined from the beginning by a relentless repetition of “the portrayal of black people as failed citizens and of white attackers as the people” and sought to destroy black associations and kill their white allies, and to actively and deliberately to destroy familial bonds among freepeople. A vital and important part of U.S. history to be understood.

 Impossible Revolution by Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Perhaps the pinnacle of Syrian dissident literature from a man who spent 16 years in the prisons of the tyrant Hafez al-Assad only to be released and watch the dictator’s son, Bashar al-Assad, take over and level the country, Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s book is a cri de cœur that leaves few unscathed.

Writing that, by early 2012 it was “increasingly clear that the unimaginable situation we had discussed privately - the regime would be willing to destroy the country for the sake of staying in power - was its only political agenda, and that it was already being implemented,” Saleh chronicles massacres in Damascus, Homs and elsewhere and illuminates such critical moments as the July 2012 killing of various Syrian security officers (and the subsequent escalation of the use of barrel bombs) as the moment Iran began taking control of the regime’s defenses.

Saleh scathingly critiques “a neo-bourgeois during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, a class that owes everything to the regime and has a lot to lose were the revolution to emerge victorious” who in turn serve a government who views its people “with contempt and disdain, in a manner no different from a colonizing power’s view of the colonized; this justifies the use of violence against the “backward” masses and cheapens the value of the lives, so much so that killing them is a matter of no great concern.” Saleh sees his hometown of Raqqa slide under control of the jihadists, noting bitterly that he was “unable to walk around the city where I had spent years of my adolescence, where most of my brothers lived, and where my parents had lived until their deaths, while some religiously-obsessed, enraged Tunisians, Saudis, Egyptians and Europeans roamed freely, unable to engage in anything other than murder.” Detailing the depredations of the regime’s muscle-bound, murderous shock troops, known as shabiha (many with roots in the seaside city of Latakia), Saleh quotes the Syrian-British writer Rana Kabbani describing pro-regime Western writers - especially Robert Fisk - as "shabiha of the pen." Nor does former U.S. President Barack Obama – whose inaction in the wake of Assad’s August 2013 Ghouta must be seen as a turning point of the war escape critique, cited for his “treacherous and dastardly” deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Syria shortly thereafter.

“Those who had appointed themselves the guardians of international law were reassuring a murderer that they might be compelled to punish him for violating international law,” Saleh writes of the toothless response to the attack. “But without affecting his ability to kill people and with no reference to his other crimes…The international community decided mass slaughter of Syrians by regime wasn’t a crime, but the weapon used was.”

The government in Syria, Saleh writes, only ever offered “a cosmetic modernity…without any emancipatory privileges,” whose “real identity” consisted of “ the combination of an obsolete, inhumane political apparatus with a glamorous material façade.”

Today, seven years after Syria’s war began, the international community’s abandonment of the people of Syria has never seemed more complete.

Foreign Correspondent by Robert St. Johh

An extraordinary first hand account of Europe’s slide into fascism, this memoir contains, among other details, chilling eyewitness accounts of the rise (and fall) of Romania’s fascist Iron Guard and of the destruction of Belgrade by the Nazis. A searing and timely reminder of how quickly a society that thought of itself as civilized can descend into madness.

Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada by Zoé Valdés

A novel of a rebel voice living through the hundred daily humiliations of life in an ossifying tyranny, this book sets out to chronicle “the island that in wanting to build a paradise has created a hell,” and in doing so skewers many hoary myths of Cuba.

“There are those who maintain that people throw themselves into the sea over insignificant economic deprivations - can’t get any blue jeans, can’t find any chewing gum - but anyone who says that simply doesn’t know Cuba,” Valdés writes. “Doesn’t know the terror and hunger the Cuban people have known; people who say that are those whose knowledge of the country is limited to the luxury hotels and the government."

Books in 2016: A personal selection

A Kurdish YPJ fighter with smoke behind her rising from an ISIS held area near the town of Al Hol, Hasakah, Syria. Photo by Delil Souleiman.

Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War by Francesca Borri

This excellent book by Italian journalist Francesca Borri recounts her reporting from the Syrian city of Aleppo between 2012 and 2013, and presents a vital primary source recounting a siege that became one of the 21st century’s great crimes. Syrian Dust’s depiction of the terrified, terrorized lives of the Syrians living under the Assad regime’s relentless barrage - from the 25 year-old mother reduced to living in a drainage pipe with her 3 children who ventures out to buy bread and is shot by a sniper to the citizens of Moadamiya “with those bodies that are all bones” to those trapped in Al-Qusayr, during its siege reduced to sending frantic texts pleading “Where are you? They’re killing us all!” - will afflict the reader's conscience long after the book ends.

Afro-Cuban Tales by Lydia Cabrera

A striking and sometimes surreal collection from the woman who was perhaps Cuba’s greatest anthropologist, this book is a rich and splendid account of how Africa’s tradition of oral history and myth was translated to the Caribbean’s largest island.

Black Rice The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas by Judith A. Carney

This is a revelatory and chilling book that posits the thesis that much of the agricultural might of the southern United States derived from the expertise and labour of the West African slaves that were imported en masse to work there. A highly detailed dissection of the rice growing regions of West Africa where many American slaves hailed from makes a compelling case that they were were specifically plucked from these regions in order to bring their proficiency to the “new” world.

Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War by Michael Gunter

An important work in decoding one aspect of Syria’s tortuously complex civil war, this book examines the murky and volatile relationship between Syria’s Kurds and the Assad family dictatorship in Syria, whose patriarch, Hafez al-Assad, as the author writes, took over the supposedly pan-Arab Baath Party and turned it “into a mere facade for his own Alawite family’s personal property.” Though Syria’s Kurds may not have suffered the genocidal slaughter their counterparts living in Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein endured, they were subjected to virtual ethnic cleansing from vast swathes of northern Syria in 1963 and reduced to an official status of less-than-full citizens of the country in which they lived. With particular focus paid to the Democratic Union Party or PYD (affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK founded in Turkey by imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan) and its military wing, the People's Protection Units (YPG), the book examines how the schizophrenic Assad regime could both shelter and protect the PKK for almost two decades (until they were kicked out in 1998) and, only a few years later, provide rearguard support to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which then became both the Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) jihadist rebel groups. Though the narrative hits a slight bump when the author edges perilously close toward recycling  wild conspiracy theories connected to the August 2013 chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, it is nonetheless highly valuable for its clear timeline of factors such as the newly assertive mood for Syria’s Kurds following the assumption of the Iraqi presidency by Jalal Talabani, himself a Kurd, in 2005, and such precursors to rebellion as the Qaishli uprising in March 2004 and the murder of a prominent Syrian Kurdish Sufi leader in June 2005.

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

With its stark, incantatory prose, this brief tale of familial and cultural dislocation describes a Mexican woman’s journey to the United States to try and locate her missing brother and, in doing so, spins a haunting border vignette.

The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret

The Israeli author pens short and at times quite affecting vignettes about his life as a father, son and friend in his often-conflicted land.

In the Time of the Tyrants by R. M. Koster and Guillermo Sanchez

An important document of a now-almost forgotten time when the Central American country of Panama was ruled by garish brutality, this book chronicles the governments of Omar Torrijos, Rubén Darío Paredes and Manuel Noriega and the courage of those who fought against them.

The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain by Paul Preston

The author writes that he penned this book “to convey the suffering unleashed upon their fellow citizens by the arrogance and brutality of the soldiers who rose up on 17 July 1936...(and) provoked a war that was unnecessary and whose consequences still resonate bitterly in Spain today” Though largely given short shrift in the English-speaking world, the story in this book of the terror visited upon Spain by the country’s right wing - rabidly anti-semitic, obsessed with supposed Masonic plots, addicted to benefiting from a rural economic model that seemed little better than slavery and adroit in their demonization/dehumanization of liberals in their discourse - amply proves the author’s thesis that the Spanish right “hated the Republic for being democratic long before it was able to denounce it for being anti-clerical." An all-too-relevant text for today's world.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

The great Peruvian writer's account of the quixotic and tragic (though successful) plot to kill the Dominican Republic’s cruel dictator Rafael Trujillo, this novel minutely parses the web of flattery, threats, vanity, delusion and complicity that permits a totalitarian regime to thrive and the price that is often paid by those who dare to take it down.

The Ghosts of Assad

Children in Aleppo with a pile of burning tyres behind them, which they are setting alight to create a smokescreen against the bombing runs of the Assad regime and Russian planes. Photographer unknown.

The Ghosts of Assad

A Review of Francesca Borri's Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War

By Michael Deibert

The blood-spattered, dust-covered face of Omran Daqnees, pulled from the rubble of his family’s home after a bombing in the Syrian city of Aleppo, wrenched the world’s collective conscience last month. Once the flourishing capital of Syria’s most populous region, Aleppo has been in a state of war since July 2012. The so-called barrel bombs of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad - fiendish contraptions filled with explosives, shrapnel and sometimes chemicals - have killed thousands of people in the city, and have now been joined by more technologically advanced though no less lethal air assaults by the jets of Assad’s Russian backers.

This year, the relentless carnage of Syria’s five-year old civil war - pitting the Assad government and its allies in Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah against a flailing panoply of rebel groups including the so-calles Islamic State (ISIS), the until-recently Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front, the Free Syrian Army (now believed to be all but defunct), various Kurdish militias and others - continued under the world’s impotent gaze. Death rained down on cities like Aleppo and Daraya (the latter finally falling to the government in late August) as ISIS-inspired attacks fanned out to Bangladesh, Belgium, Turkey and elsewhere, building on the horror of last year’s assaults in Paris. 

But in so many ways, and not just in young Omran Daqnees’ traumatized, terrified gaze, Aleppo, broken, bleeding Aleppo, has remained the centre of it all. And Syrian Dust (Seven Stories Press), the excellent book by Italian journalist Francesca Borri recounting her reporting from the city between 2012 and 2013, presents a vital primary source recounting a siege that has over time became one of the 21st century’s great crimes.

Who would defend the people of Aleppo after their government began killing them four years ago? In Borri’s account, the Free Syrian Army is depicted as something of  a joke of flip-flop wearing teenagers and regime defectors. Al Nusra is better-armed,  but consisting of so many foreign nationals, their lingua franca is English. And thus a terrible dynamic develops, whereby a disparate armed insurgency fights a seemingly endless stalemate with a dictatorship capable of any atrocity. 

“In theory, there are four fronts,” Borri writes. “But the truth is that there is only one front here: it’s the sky. And those who have nothing but bullets to use against the fighter jets haven’t got a chance. Without intervention from the West, as in Libya, the Syrian Free Army can’t win.”

That intervention never came, at least not in the way that Borri means it, but plenty of people did find opportunity in Syria’s agony.

There are the cynical exile opposition politicians who appear in squalid refugee camps to seek support and “distribute a few biscuits like a tourist feeds the pigeons at Piazza San Marco.” There are the Saudi rebels backers who appear and literally buy child brides from starving refugees huddled along the Turkish border. There are Borri’s own journalistic colleagues who, for the most part, far from being united by idealism, mostly appear driven to seek out the most garish and bizarre elements (“find me a drunken child soldier!”). Reporters level misogynistic advice with one hand (with one self-mythologizing reporter informing her Aleppo is “no place for a woman”) and engage in potentially lethal backstabbing with the other, with Borri allegedly once being directed towards snipers, and another time being ratted out to rebels by an ostensible colleague envious for a scoop.

And in the meantime, “you wait and you die in Aleppo, that’s all,” she writes, going on to pen that for those remaining in the city beneath Assad's planes

These are the cruelest moments, because the mind is still lucid. And as the pilot chooses his target, while maybe it will be you, all you can do is huddle there, your back against a damp wall, and stare at the floor along with everything you’ve left undone in your life, everything you put off, as you look around, now that maybe your number’s up, and even if you had something to say, here among these strangers, anything you could utter, any name, any wish, any regret whom could you say it to?

The book has its weaknesses, both in its sometimes meandering digressions into the author’s previous life working in Israel and Palestine, and in its one big omission in the lack of an real discussion of the rise of the Islamic State (there are a number of references to Al Qaeda but almost none to ISIS). But this is perhaps the result of the book’s being published first in Italian in May 2014, just as the terrorist group was becoming the major player in the conflict

But Syrian Dust’s true strength is its depiction of the terrified, terrorized lives of the Syrians living under the Assad regime’s brutal and relentless barrage. Borri tells us the story of a 25 year-old mother reduced to living in a drainage pipe with her 3 children who ventures out to buy bread with her youngest and is shot by a sniper, leaving her other two offspring “wasted away in poverty until a mortar pulverized them.” In Moadamiya “only six miles from the centre of Damascus...where bankers play tennis at their clubs...it looks like Somalia, with those bodies that are all bones.” During the siege of Al-Qusayr, she receives frantic texts from those inside the city: “Where are you? They’re killing us all!”

At the end of the book, comparing the city to Dresden after World War II, she writes simply and devastatingly “Aleppo no longer exists” and that “everything I may write, no matter how good, whatever life I may risk, this war and every war will go on.”

And go on it does.

There was another child pulled from the rubble in Aleppo the same day as Omran Daqnees: Omran’s brother, Ali.

He had been playing with friends in the street when the bombs began to fall. Like most of those in Aleppo’s agony, there was no photo to mark that moment or aftermath, nor did the world’s news sources and social media rouse themselves to a cri de cœur to mark his short life.

And like so many in Aleppo, as the world stood by, he died.

Michael Deibert is the author of the forthcoming Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History (Zed Books).

Paris, je t'aime

20 November 2015

Paris, je t'aime

By Michael Deibert

Huffington Post

(Read the original article here)

Eight months after the terrorist attacks in Paris in January of this year -- attacks during which the Kouachi brothers killed 12 people at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly murdered an unarmed police woman and four patrons at a Jewish supermarket -- something strange happened.

When the literary group PEN announced that it would be honoring Charlie Hebdo, who had attracted the ire of religious fanatics for its drawings of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, with its Courage Award, a group of writers sent a letter to the body to protest this distinction. The letter had been spearheaded by the authors Teju Cole and Francine Prose, who both teach at my former alma mater of Bard College, a place which, at least when I went there, adhered to the rather more open dictum of Walt Whitman which called on artists to unscrew the locks from the doors, unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs.

While adding the rather ludicrous caveat that "the murder of a dozen people...is sickening and tragic" the letter attacked Charlie Hebdo for engaging in "expression that violates the acceptable" and accused the publication of "being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering" to "the section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by the legacy of France's various colonial enterprises." The letter also said that, by bestowing the award, PEN was awarding a publication "that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world." So, to put it more succinctly, the journalists at Charlie Hebdo had been imperial valets who had brought it on themselves.

(Cole had written an earlier piece for the New Yorker that rather speciously claimed that Charlie Hebdo had "gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations.")

In addition to Cole and Prose, among the largely Anglophone signatories were Russell Banks, Eric Bogosian, Peter Carey, Junot Díaz, Francisco Goldman, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Luc Sante, Charles Simic and, strangely, the New York Times opinion page editor, Clay Risen.

I don't think I had ever been ashamed to be a writer until that moment. It was a scandalous display born out of ignorance of the role of Charlie Hebdo, the function of satire, and the history of modern France as a whole. It was obvious from the nature of the letter that few, if any, of the signatories had probably ever read Charlie Hebdo before the attacks, and had instead formed their opinion on a handful of out-of-context cartoons culled from the publication's 40 plus year history.

The authors seemed oblivious to the fact that satire's function is to sting, not cause guffaws, and that by far the most frequent targets of the publication's cartoonists -- artists such as Jean Cabu, Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier and Georges Wolinski (all slain in the attack) -- were France's rancid political elite and, especially, the right-wing Front National founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen and now run by his daughter, Marine. One of the cartoons most often used to demonstrate Charlie Hebdo's supposed racism, that of French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, a women of Afro-Guyanese descent, as a monkey, was in fact mocking far-right attacks against her, not Taubira herself. [For her part, Taubira gave a moving eulogy at the funeral of Hebdo cartoonist Bernard "Tignous" Verlhac.] The signatories simply threw to one side the publication's long history of attacking Catholicism, Judaism and, indeed, organized religion of any sort. They seemed unaware of the series of articles Charlie Hebdo's slain economist, Bernard Maris, had written on the effects of austerity on Europe's most vulnerable, especially in Greece, or that the magazine had spoken out in furious dissent against the 2008-2009 and 2014 Israeli assaults on Gaza.

As the French academic Olivier Tonneau wrote shortly after the attacks in response to the venomous social media slander against the paper's slain staff, "if you belong to the radical left, you have lost precious friends and allies."

(Nor were the PEN signatories alone in libeling the dead. The U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote that Charlie Hebdo was "not just offensive but bigoted" and engaged in "a stream of mockery toward Muslims generally" and "the vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims.")

Now, 11 months after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, in La Ville Lumière 129 more lay dead. They were black, white, brown (black, blanc, beur in the French phrase), men, women, Christian, Muslim, atheist, straight, gay. They were committing no other crime than sitting out to have a drink on a warm autumn night, going to see a football match or going to see a rock band play. That scurrilous display of those writers can't help but return to my mind.

Today, it is the false narrative, advanced by both left and right, that last week's attacks were the result of France's so-called "Muslim" problem, with a focus on the supposed radicalization taking place in the banlieues, as the poor, heavily-immigrant suburbs which ring many French cities are known, and a blow struck against the "white" city of Paris.

Having come to France through a somewhat roundabout route of years working in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and having only lived in heavily-immigrant neighborhoods (Château Rouge in the 18th arrondissement and Bagnolet, just beyond the périphérique ring-road from Paris proper), I have perhaps a different perspective on this than some foreigners. I've spent a fair amount of time in the banlieues of Paris, and covered the November 2007 riots in the suburb of Villiers-le-Bel from the ground. Though they have plenty of problems -- unemployment hovers around double the national average, with that for 21- to 29-year-olds ever higher -- a propensity for radical Islam is not one of them.

The so-called "problem youth" I met in places like Villiers-le-Bel and Clichy-sous-Bois (itself the site of riots a decade ago), were about as far away from Islamist as one can get, drinking alcohol, smoking hash, racing up and down the boulevards on their scooters to a soundtrack of French and American hip-hop music.

The pool of these people who would gravitate towards radical Islam was -- and is -- very small, and those who become jihadis are the same ones who would go shoot up a school or movie theater in the United States without the religious trappings, alienated losers with no life and few opportunities, scorned by many, often including their own families, not because of their ethnicity or religion, but because they are viewed as dangerous malcontents. Somehow a burqa-clad Marianne, the female national symbol of France, does not seem a realistic fear to me.

That isn't to say religion plays no role in France's current anguished self-examination, but to see this series of attacks on Paris -- which ISIS in its "communiqué" referred to as "the capital of prostitution and vice" with all the venom of a nerd being left alone at the school dance -- as a political statement by an oppressed minority is thoroughly absurd. Among the Muslims who have emigrated to Europe and their offspring, there are good people and bad people, strong and weak, secular and fundamentalist.

They are, in short, like people everywhere else. The image, somewhat massaged by both apologists of the left and blowhards of the right, that France's Muslims are bearded salafists heading to the mosque to listen to some deranged imam's calls for jihad, scorned by society, is so far off the mark as to enter the realms of science fiction, as is demonstrated by how many Muslims caught the terrorists' bullets while out at the bars last Friday night.

The immigrant and Muslim communities of France and especially Paris are an integral part of the city and help give it much of its pizzazz and joie de vivre. In my heavily-immigrant neighborhood of Château Rouge, virtually all the bars were owned by Algerians and Tunisians, who were quite happy to quaff a pint at the end of the day. And though France's anti-freedom of expression "hate speech" laws can often be selectively enforced (witness the case of the anti-semitic comedian Dieudonné, which I wrote about here), none of that exculpates such an attack, nor does it excuse discourse on France by a clutch of writers who barely know the country at all.

There has been a bizarre grief contest on social media suggesting, alternately, that if one mourns the dead in Paris and the attacks against the city, one could somehow not mourn recent terrorist attacks in Lebanon and Turkey, those dying in the civil war in Syria, or those being killed by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and that the media had "ignored" such stories, even though they all have received -- and continue to receive -- extensive coverage in every major paper in Europe and North America. Perhaps if people spent less time circulating fake Buddha and Bob Marley quotes they would have noticed.

A Brazilian friend of mine currently based in India (a country that knows a little something about religious-inspired terror) introduced me to the perfect term for both the critics of Charlie Hebdo and those whose mockery and critiques of the genuine pain of so many after the Paris attacks appeared to reveal nothing if not a collection of curdled souls: Catastrophe sommeliers.

After any major example of man's inhumanity, religious fanaticism or simple tragedy, they would appear portentously at the world's side, napkin draped over their arm to decide who, what, where and for how long it was proper to mourn, or whether one was allowed to mourn at all.

And as for me? It would be nice to move back to Paris someday, if I can ever get the money together. In terms of the letter-signers, Michael Ondaatje used to be one of my favorite writers, and I rather liked Francisco Goldman but I'll never buy another book by either man again, and am thinking of getting rid of the ones I have. Most of the rest always struck me as wildly overpraised, so no great loss there.

Though Paris is in deep mourning and will likely remain so for some time, a nation that survived the horrors of a Nazi occupation, World War II and the slaughter of the Paris Commune will certainly wash off the blood, shake off the broken glass, kick the shell casings into the sewer where they belong and get back to doing what it does best, acting as a crossroads for men and women of all faiths and all backgrounds to sample its various charms.

Behind the Bataclan concert hall, where 89 died, an image has already been posted up of five people raising a glass of wine in mute salute under the words Paris encore debout (Paris is still standing). Charlie Hebdo's cover after the attacks was a beret-wearing French caricature guzzling bubbly, which then pours out of copious bullet holes in the figure's body, along with the words ils ont les armes, on les emmerde, on a le champagne (They've got the weapons, fuck 'em, we've got the champagne).
The spirit of Paris, of Charlie Hebdo and the spirit of those lives -- so many of them so young -- snatched away last week can never fully leave us. They will be with us as people drink and eat and laugh and flirt on the cafes along the Canal Saint Martin, the sunlight filtering down through the leaves of the trees as their branches move in a delicate ballet from even the faintest breeze.

They will be with us as people from dozens of countries gather at the Marché Dejean in my old neighborhood to sell their wares and to seek new opportunity in their adopted land. They will be with us in the crowded basement clubs in Oberkampf where people know what it is to be young and full of possibility.

They will be with us as one looks down from the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre at dusk and sees a magnificent, multicultural city spread out beneath them, a thousand possibilities therein yet to be discovered. And they will be with us wherever people feel their hearts are free, and full of love for their fellow human beings.

It is a love that those who attack this beloved city and its culture, whether with kalashnikovs or keyboards, would be fortunate to one day know.

Brief thoughts on Syria and the European refugee crisis

I think at this point we must all ask: What are we - collectively as citizens of Western countries whose actions (and inaction) have contributed so much to this mess - doing to ameliorate the situation of these poor people fleeing Syria, Libya and so on? Though I have not reported on it myself, I feel the situation in Syria, more than any other event today, says so much about who we are as a humanity, now well into the 21st century. There is so much dishonesty and hypocrisy surrounding it: The use and betrayal (again) of the Kurds and the blind eye turned to the pummeling of them by Turkey's would-be sultan; the breaking bread with Saudi Arabia even as they flood Syria and Iraq with money and jihadis; the support by Iran and Russia of the Assad regime, the abandonment of the people of Iraq after we leveled their country...Really, what is the solution to all this, to so much violence, delusion, chicanery and grief? I wish I knew...

Angry Syrians crowd Arab League monitors

Meanwhile, in Syria today...

Today in Syria...

Syrian soldiers planting ammunition on bodies of dead protesters in Dara’a

This highly disturbing and highly graphic video - with English subtitles provided in another version by Libyan blogger Tasnim Qutait - appears to show Syrian soldiers in the city of Dara’a mocking the corpses of dead protesters and planting ammunition on them in an an attempt to stage a scene for an "official" recording. The dead men appear to have been shot in the head at close range.

The New York Times is reporting that the Syrian Revolution Coordinators Union "purchased the video, which appears to have been shot on two different cameraphones, from a member of the security forces for 200 Syrian pounds (about $40)."

I generally refrain from posting graphic content on this blog, but what is currently befalling the people of Syrian is too big to ignore. I cannot help but think that any government that is doing this to its citizens is not long for this world.

Again, the content is extremely graphic so I strongly advise discretion if viewing.

Remembering Samir Kassir

Two years ago, on Thursday June 2, 2005, the Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir was killed in Beirut when a bomb that had been placed in his car exploded as he stepped into the vehicle. He was 45 years old.

By all accounts, Samir Kassir was a dedicated and courageous journalist. A 20-year contributor to the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, Kassir founded his own monthly political and cultural review, L’Orient-Express, which published between 1995 and 1998. That year, he became an editorial writer for the daily Lebanese newspaper Al-Nahar.

His editorials criticized the dominant role that Syria had played in Lebanon's convoluted and often violent political landscape, and appealed for a genuinely democratic, self-guided transformation not only for his own country but also in Syria and in the Arab world at large.

Born to a Lebanese Palestinian father and a Syrian mother, and having studied widely in France, it seemed natural that his vision of the world should be a far more broad, inclusive and sophisticated one than any mere nationalism could ever be. He was the kind a progressive, democratic liberal voice that the world needs more of, not less.

Samir Kassir left behind a wife, the Lebanese television presenter Giselle Khoury, and two daughters, Mayssa and Eliana. Take a moment today to remember him, his work and his struggle at a page that has been dedicated to his memory here.