In one section of Andrew Arsan's book on Lebanon (2018), he analyzes Hezbollah's multifaceted institutional presence in the lives of the country's Shia communities. Worth a look.

This is orders of magnitude greater than the worst days of Israel's 1982 siege of Beirut -- and those days shocked the 'conscience of the world' at the time. (If any such thing ever really existed in Western metropoles with respect to non-Western peoples and places.)

An assumption of absolute impunity, and the recklessness that goes along with it.

Grim. From all I hear and read, this is the worst it's ever been in Beirut. Thank you for your witness and resilience.

The sheer bloody minded destructiveness of the present stands out. I remember how we shocked were in 1981 when Israel destroyed a high-rise in Fakahani (PLO offices and ordinary apartments). But today, flattening whole neighborhoods and displacing 100s of 1000s is 'just another day's work'.

+1. Will there ever be a reckoning, and if so what form might it take? Very grim.

As a retired professor (Middle East history), I used to think that "more education" was an antidote to ignorance and cluelessness. How naive.....

Wasn't it the open-air Ansar camp in Lebanon, where thousands of mainly Shia Lebanese were detained and concentrated during Israel's 1980s occupation of southern Lebanon? Germane to the present situation, if so.

But after Suez, GB & France couldn't pretend still to be Great (imperial) Powers free to act unilaterally however they pleased. Iraq did not teach American elites the same lesson.

Just like the "fiscal conservatism" of yesteryear, the anti-authoritarian stance of right-wing Republicans is malleable. When a GOP president is profligate and authoritarian, all good.

Funny (scary) how so many institutional facades collapsed so quickly in the face of this onslaught. Historians of the future (if we get there as a society) should have something to say about the hollowness of what once seemed well grounded and enduring. No elite accountability is a major part of it.

You missed one of the great cinematic car chases of recent years.

Toronto needs the morale boost.

Obviously, “no to tyrannical big government“ — unless they’re the ones in power.

Feels naive to ask, but: aren't major public properties like the White House, Capitol grounds, the National Mall, etc., subject to oversight? Or can an American Ceausescu deface whichever of these he wants, based on a whim? (I'm afraid we're about to learn the answer.)

Particularly striking is his thesis that Arabs trained in/by the Ottoman army were prominent in anti-colonial insurgencies in Arab lands during the 1920s and 30s. It gave me a better understanding of the interwar nationalist movements, and their debt to the late Ottoman state-building project.

Thanks -- speaking as a retired classroom instructor, I appreciate your clarity and straightforward language on this subject (and others).

I hope people in the UK will learn from the American experience. Don't open the door to wolves.

The depressing thing is that "bigoted buffoonery" seems to have a large fan base among American voters. Will that change when consequences get real for these same voters? To date, Trumpists get a lot of mileage out of deflection and scapegoating.

The biography of Fawzi Qawuqji by Leila Parsons (The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence 1914-1948) is a good illustrated read. It highlights dilemmas of former Ottoman loyalists like Qawuqji who had to navigate the post-Ottoman Arab world, 1920s-40s.

Going clockwise from top left? Pictures that take me back to my visits there, prior to 2011.

Explain, please? Likud was in office then. Did Reagan et al. have enough interest in partition along 1967 lines to compel an unwilling Israel to go along? I don't recall that this was the case, PLO or no PLO. Arafat even agreed to consider a confederation with Jordan at one point, to no avail.

Retired historian here. Actually, Ottomans were transactional. They had no illusions (in general) about "model minorities." If thus-and-such a tribe or clan were useful, great! Come to Yildiz and get a medal. When they ceased to be useful... too bad. There was always a factional rival to promote.

I've been away from the literature for a while, but I remember a discussion of one sharia court (was it Nablus?) where marriage contracts regularly occurred. Not in the Damascus & Hama documents that I used, though.

How common was this kind of thing (in the records)? Years ago I sampled 18th-19th c. Ottoman-era sharia court records from Damascus and Hama, and marriage contracts of any kind were rare. Did formal recording of marriages vary from locality to locality?

Maybe they are, in the aggregate.

Don't the Democratic senators elect their leader? Are they so wedded to "tradition" that they won't consider replacing Schumer with someone else?

Kurds and the State in Modern Syria A narrative history of Syrian Kurds and their relationship to the modern state up through 2019.

In light of news of the Sharaa-Abdi agreement in Syria, here is a background article on Kurds and the state in modern Syria (written 2020, published 2021). www.academia.edu/72844901/Kur...

Is Susan Collins "very concerned"?

Assuming that the USA will have "free and fair elections" in 2026 and 2028. The Trumpers' reckless and heedless behavior suggests they don't think so.