Miscellany

East West Street
Peter Ryley is always a wonderful writer. Here he reviews Philippe Sands' East West Street, and then veers into a brilliant set of asides about nationalism.

Antisemitism: George Soros

I am fascinated by the way George Soros has become the iconic hate figure for such a wide spectrum, from the arrested anti-capitalists of the pro-Russia left to the Breitbartian and Brexiteer right, along with the anti-democratic nationalist leaders of Hungary, Russia, Poland and Israel. The appallingly dishonest Telegraph article last week by former Theresa May chief of staff Nick Timothy was a good case study in this, and some good articles were written in response - e.g. Adam Barnett in politics.co.uk, James Bloodworth in IBT, Stephen Bush in the NS, Rafael Behr and John Henley in the Guardian. What was depressing about it was that many on the right (Dan Hodges, Eric Pickles, the Campaign Against Antisemitism) rushed to Timothy's defence, even though identical rhetoric from some anonymous Corbynista on a Labour Party Facebook forum would certainly have been used by the same people as ammunition in writing of the whole of the left as antisemitic.

Antisemitism: record attacks, hate mainstreamed
Meanwhile, the CST records that 2017 was the worst year since counting began for antisemitic incidents in the UK. Read about their 2017 incident report here. And in the US, the ADL shows how Holocaust deniers are increasingly making their way into the political mainstream.

The fascist international
Patrick Strickland on why Italian fascists love Assad. Tobias Rupprecht on the geopolitics of Russian Orthodoxy. Bill Weinberg on Cossacks fighting in Syria.

Women's resistance
The brilliant al-Jumhuriya magazine has a powerful interview by Anton Mukhamedov (who recently contributed a guest post to this blog) on the women fighting for Syria's vanished.

Denialism, and countering it
Newsweek, the dysfunctional news outlet, recently published a damaging and utterly spurious op ed by Putinist non-entity Ian Wilkie. Eliot Higgins has written an excellent piece on chemical weapons denialism and Syria for Newsweek in response to it. Louis Proyect fact-checks some Syria denialism by alt-leftist Ben Norton here. Brian T has some questions for some denialist professors here. Olivia Solon continues her reporting of smears against the White Helmets.

Wikileaks
The Intercept has published a ghoulishly fascinating analysis of a DM message list that reveals the political culture of Julian Assange's Wikileaks project: casual antisemitism and misogyny, a strong preference for Republicans rather than Democrats, obsessive hatred of Hillary Clinton.

"Anti-imperialism"
This long blogpost, "Syria seen from the Viewpoint of imperial purity: the crushing narcissism of empire", at anarchist communist blog "Cautiously Pessimistic" is a brilliant analysis of the eurocentrism of some forms of "anti-imperialism", focusing on a recent dreadful article by Patrick Higgins in the usually quite good left periodical Viewpoint. Louis Proyect has also fact-checked Higgins' piece, and another dreadful one by Daniel Lazare.

#MeToo
Shannon Liao on the crackdown on feminism in China.

Radicalisation
An interview at Media Diversified with Javaad Alipoor, writer of The Believers are but Brothers.