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After Assad: Syria Between Hope and Chaos

After Assad: Syria Between Hope and Chaos

The revolution is underway in Damascus. Once again, in the Arab world, history takes a dramatic turn, and the Syrian people hold their breath. Bashar al-Assad has fled the country, and Islamists have seized power. What lies ahead? The battalions led by Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, a former jihadist of ISIS and then al-Qaeda – whom he allegedly parted ways with in 2016 – thank Allah from the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, a radiant symbol of Sunni Islam. These images will go down in history, though no one knows how it will unfold.

 

4 reasons to rejoice in the citizen upheaval of July 7, 2024

4 reasons to rejoice in the citizen upheaval of July 7, 2024

The results of the second round of the French legislative elections on July 7 have generated an unprecedented political crisis in France. An impasse due to the absence of a sufficiently large parliamentary majority to be able to govern in a calm and lasting manner. However, despite the risks of blockage which threaten to shake the institutions of the Fifth French Republic, there are at least 4 reasons to rejoice at the outcome of this election:

 

France: The worst is always here

France: The worst is always here

Between fears and deceptions, France is swaying. Despite the rodomontades of Jean-Luc Mélenchon who, at 8.07pm on 7 July, announced that the affair had been completed at the same time – he implied – as his attaché case for Matignon, nothing has been resolved. “Having avoided the worst – the arrival of the far right in power – does not protect us from another worst: the ungovernability of the country”, warns Bernard Cazeneuve, former Socialist Prime Minister (between December 2016 and May 2017), with a secular and universalist left-wing leaning.

 

Facing the rising perils

Facing the rising perils

The world of yesterday described by Stefan Zweig in his Brazilian exile in 1943 has never been so close to us. His lament as a European, contemporaneous with the swallowing up of everything he loved, continues to haunt us as a new Europe and a new France emerge from the ballot boxes on 9 June, and then, in our country, from those on 30 June and 7 July. The crisis campaign preceding the European elections was marked by the disappearance of the key principles on which our civilisation is founded: courteous confrontation, rationality versus delusion, the search for meaning versus the senseless and the unthought-of.

 

Salman Rushdie, his words and their missiles

Salman Rushdie, his words and their missiles

By one of those coincidences of which history has a secret, the publication of Salman Rushdie’s account (“The Knife”, Gallimard, 2024) of the attack on him on 12 August 2022 coincides with the unprecedented attack launched against Israel on 14 April by the Islamic Republic of Iran. On the one hand, the surviving writer recounts his near-death experience of “the man in black, black clothes, black mask over his face, who came, menacing and concentrated, a real missile”. On the other, 300 drones and missiles loaded with sixty tonnes of explosives raced through the Middle Eastern night towards the Jewish state.

 

Why accusing Israel of genocide is a sham

Why accusing Israel of genocide is a sham

“Words have meaning”: this reminder from the Quai d’Orsay on the announcement of the first conclusions of the International Court of Justice in The Hague in the case brought by South Africa against Israel, accused of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. Words have a meaning and, in this case, the word “genocide”, coined in the aftermath of the Holocaust by the jurist Raphaël Lemkin, a survivor of Nazi extermination, has been distorted by the accusing country, a friend of Iran, and by the judges in The Hague. Admittedly, the Court has not yet delivered a final opinion. But it ordered the Hebrew State “to prevent any act of genocide and to prevent and punish its incitement”. Hamas immediately applauded this news, trumpeting the need to “force the occupiers to implement the Court’s decisions”.

 

About our commitment against antisemitism

About our commitment against antisemitism

Since the launch, in May 2019, of Global Watch Analysis and Screen Watch magazine – which define themselves as progressive, secular and humanist media, dedicated to resist fanaticism – we have placed the fight against antisemitism at the heart of our struggles. This is demonstrated by dozens of surveys, interviews and editorials published by Ian Hamel, Martine Gozlan, Jean-Marie Montali and Atmane Tazaghart.

 

France: The Immigration Act and the fascism to come

France: The Immigration Act and the fascism to come

Hats off to the illustrious analyst of French political life, Jean-François Kahn: a year ago, in an interview he gave us for our special issue “Resist the cretinization of the world”, he warned – with his customary brio – against the “fascisation of the mind”, while pointing out that fascism does not come from the rise of the far right or the far left, but from the junction of the two extremes.
Here we go!

 

To put an end to the anti-Semitic rantings of Mahmoud Abbas

To put an end to the anti-Semitic rantings of Mahmoud Abbas

If it is true that old age is a shipwreck, in the case of the Palestinian raïs Mahmoud Abbas (84 years old), it is more like a long and lamentable drowning that drags in its wake Palestine and its just cause. Physically worn out, isolated and politically challenged, Abbas has been multiplying blunders and aberrations for many years. Ultimate slippage, speaking on August 24 before the “revolutionary council” of his party, Fatah, he uttered extremely serious anti-Semitic remarks: “Hitler did not kill the Jews because Jews […] but only because of their social status as usurers,” he asserted.
The Palestinian raïs took up here a hazy theory that he had already developed during a “History lesson” delivered before the Palestinian National Council, in Ramallah, on April 30, 2018, according to which “the reason for the Holocaust is not the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but the “social behavior” of the Jews”! But in his lucubrations of last August 24, he enriched this infamous theory with a new argument tinged with conspiracy: in a delirious attempt to prove that the ‘‘Nazis were not anti-Semites’’, he advanced the strange argument according to which ‘‘Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites”, because “they are the descendants of the Khazars [ancient Turkish people] who have nothing to do with Semitism”. Which, of course, has no historical basis!

 

Is Pakistan targeting its ‘dissident journalists’ in Europe?

Is Pakistan targeting its ‘dissident journalists’ in Europe?

On April 23, the body of Sajid Hussain Baloch, a Pakistani national, who had been given asylum in Sweden since 2017, was found in the Fyris River, outside Uppsala. According to the Swedish police, Sajid Hussain had been last seen on March 2 boarding a train in Stockholm for Uppsala. He had been missing for nearly 2 months, and a missing report was filed with the Swedish police on March 3.