basit kareem iqbal

Once upon a time in Dahiyeh: Israel’s destruction of Lebanon’s communities Israeli attacks on Dahiyeh this time clearly aim to tear apart the communities living there, residents and experts say.

Smotrich just said Dahiyeh will soon look like Khan Younis.

I wrote about Dahiyeh in 2024 and Israel’s domicide/urbicide

www.aljazeera.com/amp/features...

This piece starts with a vignette about an Israeli drone flying around broadcasting the message that “The architect Tarek Mazraani continues his conspiracies. Chase him. Drive him out so security returns and reconstruction begins" and then somehow manages to get MORE dystopian...

Just out: Jeffrey Sacks thinks settler colonial life philosophically, philologically and politically. An essential book that moves between close readings of Arabic poetry and art and broad questions of living in a world of slaughter.

An intriguing book sponsered by a colleague, which may be of interest to some here. Spiro Jabbour was a Syrian Christian deacon writing in the 70s and 80s who sought an encounter between theology and psychoanalysis. Aaron Eldridge translated and edited this book, and Omnia El Shakry blurbed it.

Global sea levels have been underestimated due to poor modelling, research suggests Analysis shows average levels are 30cm higher than thought, and up to 150cm in south-east Asia and Indo-Pacific

www.theguardian.com/environment/... seas rising, smoke billowing, abandonment, brutality, well

A lot of people say AI isn't very good for the world and its outputs are routinely unreliable, but these haters fail to see how it's revolutionizing how we incinerate schoolchildren.

good piece. the dry and the wet burn together

You Can Just Do Things | Patrick Blanchfield As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the...

my latest column in @nplusonemag.com: on Iran, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, why no one wants to learn anything, and how the repressed returns regardless www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

This is obscene, ghastly, unacceptable.

stunning piece

See new posts Conversation Seyed Abbas Araghchi @araghchi These are graves being dug for more than 160 innocent young girls who were killed in the US-Israeli bombing of a primary school. Their bodies were torn to shreds. This is how "rescue" promised by Mr. Trump looks in reality. From Gaza to Minab, innocents murdered in cold blood.

🔴 New image shows rows of freshly dug graves after US-Israeli school strike on girls’ school in Iran

Iran's For. Min. Abbas Araghchi shared an aerial photo showing long rows of freshly dug graves, saying they are for more than 160 girls killed in the US–Israeli strike on a primary school in Minab.

We finally did it, folks. Every facile argument about AI concentrated into a fine powder. Not a critical engagement in sight to blunt the ecstasy of the void.

Restless Quietists by Matteo Benussi | Paperback | Cornell University Press Restless Quietists addresses two questions at the core of the politics of Islamic ethics: How does Islamic virtue become attractive to young urbanites in predominantly secular societies? What makes...

matteo benussi - restless quietists: muslim forms of life in russia's volga region www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501... autonomism now

In Decline How do we convince voters Hamilton isn't "in decline"?

Today on The Incline → How to challenge the narrative that #HamOnt is "in decline", especially as some candidates prepare to make that their central argument in this fall's municipal election. #YHMvotes2026

theincline.email/p/in-decline

history after the fall of assad (conference at princeton) syrianstudies.history.princeton.edu couldn't join because of ACLA this same week, sadly

made me laugh a few times. absurdities

"But the realism of Kiarostami’s cinema is distinct from the modernist project to reduce art to the bare minimum through the subtraction of extraneous elements. What Kiarostami is after, Copjec insists, is something more plentiful, expansive. More so than a realistic representation..."

This is what a large proportion of the violence in internal conflicts looks like: a state relying on regular people for intelligence, regular people weaponizing the state within their own communities, and security forces not knowing/caring what’s motivating the sources whose information they act on.

Leila Shahid, Palestine’s Brightest Voice Mahmoud Darwish once joked with his friends Elias Sanbar and Farouk Mardam-Bey that he envied Leila Shahid and tried not to walk beside her ...

Beautiful tribute by Ziad Majed to Leila Shahid. vendredis-arabes.blogspot.com/2026/02/leil...

The white nationalist dog whistle is so obvious. So enraging. And so predictable from this new MAGA brand of Canadian conservativism.

ramadan mubarak from glacial lake algonquin

It would be embarrassing under any circumstances to spend a year on this reactionary horseshit, but to have spent the year in which graduate students were sent to concentration camps for op-eds and the federal govt launched a no hold barred attack on academic freedom is just beyond

I’m Not Done With You | Mary Turfah You cannot harm a corpse, though you can use it to harm others.

In Gaza, Israel takes truckloads of Palestinian bodies for DNA testing, to make sure they are not Israeli. They seldom return them. Mary Turfah examines what they are doing with the dead, how it structures Israeli power, and why they get away with it.

proofs magick

Up to 300,000 Syrians remain missing a year after Assad’s fall. The White Helmets and a new national commission are exhuming bodies, mapping grave sites and building records in a search that will take years, reports @amelied.bsky.social . https://shorturl.at/PJwLy

thank you for this rundown!

I have a book out in June.

Mathias Énard: ‘I write with a bastard tongue’ The Prix Goncourt-winning novelist on the myths of the Middle East, the horrors and wonders of history, and life at a Madrid museum

‘All my books are written in French. But I live in another language, so my French is probably contaminated’

Mathias Énard in The Observer!

observer.co.uk/culture/book...