Miscellaneous reads

These are some of the tabs I've had open on my machine for the last month or two: interesting, mostly longish reads, some of them highly recommended, especially the first bunch.

The alt-left and the war on truth

• How a chemical weapons attack in Syria spawned a shameful series of conspiracy theories, by George Monbiot
• How Syria's White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine, by Oliva Solon
• Chomsky and the Syria revisionists: Regime whitewashing, by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
• The West's Leftist Male 'Intellectuals' Who Traffic in Genocide Denial, From Srebrenica to Syria, by Oz Katerji
• Did a Kremlin Pilgrimage cause Alternet blogger’s Damascene conversion?, by Sam Charles Hamad and Oz Katerji, on Max Blumenthal

Fascism

• Three pillars of the alt right: White nationalism, antisemitism and misogyny, by Spencer Sunshine - very important
• Matthew Lyons interviews Shane Burley on fascism today
• The global fascist love affair with the Assad regime, by Alex Rowell, and Why White Nationalists love Bashar al-Assad, by Mariam Elba

Anti-fascism

• Rumors of civil war: How anti-communist conspiracies imagined an antifa civil war on November 4, by Spencer Sunshine
• Six reasons Chomsky is wrong about antifa, by Libcom
• What to wear to smash the state, in the NYT - not sure what I make of this article

Radical thought

• Emran Feroz meets Yassin al-Haj Saleh

The Middle East

• Syria: The act of forgiving (and forgetting), by Leila Al Shami
• The Common Enemy: Robin Yassin-Kassab on Iran, Syria and sectarianism 
• Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel on sectarianisation - an interview and extract
• Gaddafi's Harem: No rapist abused women like the late Libyan leader, by Clay Claibourne

Left antisemitism

• Racism, anti-semitism and the left, by Carmen Basant at Workers' Liberty
• A response by Martin Thomas: Distinctions on left antisemitism

The Labour Party

• Roy Hattersley, Momentum, and ‘Labour’s worst crisis”, by Andrew Coates

Race, culture, identity

• Loads of brilliant articles by Kenan Malik (I tried to pick just one but couldn't)
• The Rohingya and other outsiders, by Robin Yassin-Kassab

My five most popular posts of 2017

1. On Ken Livingstone's misreading of history (April)
2. On the Stalinists in the heart of Corbyn's Labour (February)
3. On anti-fascism today  (August)
4. On the ethics of punching Nazis (February)
5. On George Galloway's awfulness (December)