Mick Hartley

Café Royal Books, and back to New York in the age of graffiti, with photographer Joni Sternbach:

[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Joni Sternbach]

Assad falls 1/1
It is impossible to watch the fall of the brutish brutal tyranny of the house of Assad without joy. Over in Qardaha in the Alawite lands of Latakia stands the sumptuous and pristine mausoleum worth of an Arab monarch: here the founder of the Assad dynasty, Hafez… pic.twitter.com/QM25bIg2DU

— S Sebag Montefiore (@simonmontefiore) December 8, 2024

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Full text:

It is impossible to watch the fall of the brutish brutal tyranny of the house of Assad without joy. Over in Qardaha in the Alawite lands of Latakia stands the sumptuous and pristine mausoleum worth of an Arab monarch: here the founder of the Assad dynasty, Hafez al-Assad, is buried in magnificence alongside his swaggering eldest son and chosen heir, Bassel, always promoted as the ‘Arab knight’ depicted on horseback, who died young in a carcrash, leaving the succession to the gawky, chinless eye surgeon who turned out to be just as murderous as the father. I have seen no seen footage yet of the fate of this edifice and the bodies that lie there but even Alawites are unlikely to protect this now. In April 750 when the radical blackflagged Abbasids under the new Caliph al-Saffur took Damascus, they ransacked the tombs of the fallen Umayyad caliphs; the caliph personally beheaded the bodies of the monarchs, smashed the skulls and then had the bodies ‘scourged with whips then crucified.’ Since Bashar has probably escaped to Iran, Russia or UAE, the fate of the bodies of his father and brother are unlikely to be pretty…

For 53 years this dynasty ruled Syria with increasingly savagery until the barbaric nihilistic slaughter of the years since the Arab Spring, backed by a murderous alliance of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah made the country into an Iranian vassal state. Around 600,000 Syrians were killed as Assad and the Iranians, Russians and Hezbollah perpetrated by far the worst butchery in the Middle East in modern times, symbolized by the slogan: ‘Assad or the Country Burns!’ The fall of the Assad statues, the opening of the hellish and notorious prisons (in which some benighted prisoners had survived for 40 years), the fleeing of the many secret police and now the vanishing of the dictator himself are an astonishing development and a heartening and joyous one.

It is wise to leave the analysis and predictions of what is happening and will happen within Syria to Syrian experts or veteran experienced pundits like @charles_Lister and it would be wise for many of the omniscient TV regional generalists to let Syrians speak for themselves. One follows their lead but we share their exhilaration. May this lead to a free and tolerant Syria and Lebanon that are at peace with their neighbours including Israel and may this be a domino that leads to the fall of the menacing Iranian dictator Khamenei and his regime that has exported and imposed its empire, killing, misery on Syria and Lebanon for decades.

It is for the experts to tell us if the former al-Qaeda, al-Nusra group, now known as HTS and its chameleonesque leader al-Jolani are in earnest when they announced tolerance for all sects, including Christians, Alawites and Kurds, and whether they genuinely wish to create a democracy that is at peace with Israel – or whether this is simply the latest twist in their long history of rebranding, renaming and deception on the road to creating an Islamist state on which Turkiye may exert great influence. For decades, the fate of Syria has been governed and ruined by ruthless contenders far away, chiefly Iran tyrant Khamenei and his imperial generals Soleimani and others such as Hezbollah Sec-Gen Nasrallah but also President VV Putin whose airforce power enabled Assad to survive. They long used the Syrian people as puppets in their anti-American, anti-Israeli resistance front. It was exploited too by other actors, chiefly Turkish president Erdogan who has occupied his own buffer zone in the north and may yet exploit these encouraging developments to promote Turkish power in a former Ottoman vilayet.

The HTS who led this latest offensive had been planning it for over a year and preparing for much longer; the role of Turkiye is complex and inscrutable too; but it is worth recalling the other outside player here was the Hamas chieftain Sinwar whose reckless butchery on October 7 has been a disaster not just for the Palestinians and the Israelis whose civilians have suffered grievously but also his entire ‘Resistance’ Axis of Iran and Hezbollah that have been shattered by Israel, bringing down decades of Iranian empire – the Shia Crescent from Iran across Iraq Syria and Lebanon.

Even if the HTS offensive was long planned, Israeli defeat of Hezbollah and Iran hopelessly weakened the already flimsy and hollow Assadist regime; neither was strong enough to come to Assad’s aid. The curse of Sinwar has destroyed the entire Axis of his backers.

The history of the Assad tracks the history of Syria and I cover their dynasty in my World book. They were Alawites from Latakia province on the Mediterranean: Bashar’s grandfather was a powerful character known as Ali Sulayman al-Wahhish, the al-Wahhish meaing The Wild Beast) for his strength – he had eleven children. Hafez was his ninth son. His nickname was al-Assad – the Lion – and he adopted that his family name. As a local leader he backed the French Mandate plan for a partition of Great Syria and their promise of an Alawite homeland. When the French did not deliver, he opposed them but later cooperated. His son Hafez joined the airforce and the nationalist-socialist Baath party and emerged from its fissiparous feuds, coups and counter-coups as Defence Minister (during the Syrian defeat by Israel in 1967) and then as President from 1969, ruling ruthlessly with the aid of his brother Rifaat who himself aspired to the throne.

Assad allied Syria closely with the Soviet Union and in diehard opposition to Israel though in old age, he came close to a peace agreement with Israel that would have restored the Golan Heights. Faced in 1982 with a Moslem Brotherhood jihadist rebellion in Hama, Assad ordered his brother Rifaat to destroy the city and its civilian inhabitants, killing around 40,000 civilians in a few days – a massacre that still ranks as the greatest killing of civilians in modern times without parallel.

Assad and Saddam Hussein, Iraqi potentate from 1968 and president from 1978, were both Baathists and there were initial negotiations to unite Syria and Iraq in a single Baathist republic (as had been tried earlier in Nasser’s union of Egypt and Syria) but this was just one of many policies that led to a feud between the two Baathist regimes. The Lebanese civil war after 1976 opened Lebanon to direct Syrian military presence. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, Assad allied himself with the Iranian Imam Khomeini and successor Khamenei that ultimately dominated the country. Initially the Assads dominated Lebanon, promoting Iranian influence and the Iranian terror sect Hezbollah and assassinating anyone who resisted them. As the Assads weakened and were expelled by Lebanese people power, the Iranians expanded their informal empire across Syria and Lebanon.

Russia too is a big loser here. Ever since Catherine the Great, the Russian empire has aspired to Near Eastern power. Catherine sent a Russian fleet that bombarded Lebanon, backed Arab leaders to bring down the Ottomans. Her grandson Nicholas 1 fought the Crimean war in part to enforce Russian power on the Ottomans and greater Syria including the Holy Land esp Jerusalem. In 1947/8 Stalin initially backed the creation of Israel in the hope that the socialistic Jewish republic would be a Soviet ally. When Israeli became a French then US ally, the Soviets aggressively backed Arab dictators and were close to the Assads who gave them naval bases. Hence it was no surprise that Putin came to Bashar’s aid after the Arab Spring when he saw the fate of another Soviet-Russian ally Qadaffi as a threat to himself. Brutal Russian bombardment won the civil war for Assad and earned Putin continued possession of the Tartarus naval base that until now made Russia a regional arbiter. Russia’s easy and bloody success in Syria was one factor that gave Putin the confidence to invade Ukraine. A disastrous decision like that of Sinwar and his Iran Hezbollah backers. The aggression of both has led to the destruction of their power in Syria and the region. It is worth pointing out too the failure of US policy here: President Obama’s failure to enforce his own redlines when Assad used chemical weapons against his own people was a disaster for US power in the region and part of his administration’s abandonment of the region to Iranian hegemony. A shameful decision and worse a mistake.

The politics of the Assad dynasty resembled a cross between a Mafia family and the court intrigues of a medieval monarchy combined with a Stalinist cult of personality and Soviet secret police and rigidly-controlled economy: when Hafez had a heart attack, his brother Rifaat tried to seize power and was exiled; Hafez groomed his son Bassel as successor but his death opened the way for the succession on his death of Bashar who had gone to London to train as an eye surgeon. His medical background was not that exceptional: many doctors have become ruthless dictators – ‘the doctators- and terrorists (many of the leaders of PFLP and Hamas were doctors) and he turned out to be as ruthless as the rest of the family. Like his father with Rifaat, he promoted and struggled to control a wilder brother, Mahar, who became the murderous enforcer of the regime. The Mafia parallel became even more striking as the dynasty degraded into a organized crime family engaging in feuds and surviving as a drug cartel selling Captagon through Hezbollah and across the region.

It is worth recalling that for fifty years, a long time, Hafez al-Assad was lauded by Western particularly British and American ‘Arab experts’ as the wise Sphinx of Damascus as was his son Bashar after him, praised by illiberal progressives, anti-colonialists, anti-Israeli, anti-Western tankies, fake ‘human rights activists’ and foolish fashionistas (the famous Vogue Desert Rose piece on British-educated, fashion maven Mrs Assad remains a classic) as shrewd humanitarians, Arab modernizers and leaders of the resistance against wicked US and Israel. That sycophancy and praise continued right up to today – an astonishingly illiberal hypocrisy, spattered in the blood of 600,000 Syrians who did not count, and still embraced EVEN THIS WEEK by a certain discredited UN rapporteur…

The tragedy of Syria may be coming to an end in a wondrous flowering of tolerant democracy with the end of repression, Islamism and the closing of Syria’s recent history as the plaything of outside powers OR this may just be the latest act in a failure of the Syrian state and its tragedy as a battlefield of local contenders, Iran, Israel, Turkiye and great powers America and Russia.

There may be much rejoicing over the collapse of the horrendous Assad regime in Damascus:

 Geir O. Pedersen, the United Nations' special envoy to Syria, says today "marks a watershed moment in Syria’s history".

The country has endured nearly 14 years of civil war, facing "relentless suffering and unspeakable loss," he says.

He adds: "this dark chapter has left deep scars, but today we look forward with cautious hope to the opening of a new one—one of peace, reconciliation, dignity, and inclusion for all Syrians."

And it seems likely that this marks another disaster for Iran's planned Shi'ite crescent circling Israel. Hen Massig:

Syria was primarily used by Iran as a route to supply Hezbollah with weapons and money. It was a crucial part of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” which includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi militias.

Each day, we witness the gradual weakening of Khamenei’s oppressive regime.

With some luck, a free Iran may soon become a reality—a long-overdue freedom for Iranians and the entire Middle East.

Likewise, Elica Le Bon:

While there is still uncertainty over the power vacuum that will follow, one thing is for sure, and that’s that the Islamic Regime in Iran just lost one of its closest allies that it had long assisted in massacres against Syrians with its proxy Hezbollah.

Iranians have been watching the heart-felt moments Syrians have deserved finally coming true over the past few days: release of political prisoners, returning home after exile, and visiting the graves of the beloveds they lost. This feeling is something many of us, like Syrians, could only imagine in our dreams.

Now with the Islamic regime’s proxy Hamas all but crumbled, Hezbollah disenfranchised in Lebanon and disempowered in Syria, this is the moment to finally take Iran back and free the Middle East from the regimes that finally met their match.

Let's hope so. Unfortunately we don't know yet what this new Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group have in mind for Syria. So, "cautious hope" maybe, but it's a fair bet that a liberal pluralism and warm relations with Israel are not on the cards. In the Middle East change often – usually – means change for the worse. 

From the Sunday Times:

During her long and distinguished NHS career, Elizabeth had rarely experienced antisemitism in the workplace.

That was until June last year, a few months after the senior consultant, who is Jewish, began working for a new trust in a London borough.

She was discussing Orthodox Jews with a colleague as part of a conversation on how to communicate health messages to marginalised groups. “I was introducing myself to a colleague and I was talking about how sometimes it’s very hard to reach that community, because there’s a lot of fear about statutory services getting involved,” she said.

“She said, ‘Yes, there’s a lot of fear about it, but you know of course they [Jews] are everywhere, because they believe there is going to be another Holocaust and they continue to reproduce.’

“She carried on talking and after a while I said, ‘Actually, I know something about some of the beliefs they have, because I am Jewish’. She just said, ‘Oh my goodness, why didn’t you tell me?’ She was mortified.”

Elizabeth was shocked by the encounter, not least because the clinician was the head of a medical discipline and was required to engage regularly with the community.

Since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 last year, she and other Jewish medics say they have observed an increase in anti-Jewish hatred from NHS colleagues, both online and in daily life. They also say staff are displaying political support for Palestine in ways that are affecting Jewish colleagues and patients.

In the 12 months after October 7, more than 5,500 antisemitic incidents were recorded in Britain, a threefold increase on the previous year.

According to the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity established to protect the British Jewish community, 78 antisemitic incidents have been reported in the health sector over the past 14 months. Of these, 42 were were perpetrated by healthcare professionals.

During this period, the Jewish Medical Association submitted 28 complaints to the General Medical Council (GMC), which regulates the conduct of doctors. In the 12 months before October 7, it submitted one.

Jewish leaders are due to meet this week with Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to urge the government to act. All the medics who spoke to The Sunday Times requested anonymity.

After October 7, Elizabeth’s London trust offered little support to Jewish employees. That December, a message to staff was sent via its internal weekly bulletin. It noted a recent rise in Islamophobia and provided information on where affected colleagues could receive help. No such communication had been sent in relation to antisemitism….

Hannah, a speech and language therapist working at another London trust, had a similar experience. She said the atrocity felt to “me and a lot of Jewish people like a bereavement”. Her children received death threats.

She had worked in a “really nice and supportive team”, but Hannah said that when she and other Jewish colleagues explained to leaders “how difficult we were finding it and we needed some support”, she was told by one manager this was not possible “because in the trust we need to be fair to both sides”. While Hannah later spoke to other managers and things improved, she found the initial response “ignorant and very polarising”.

Several weeks later, she and others were alerted that a colleague had been posting “really disgusting, antisemitic” content on social media. This included imagery invoking the blood libel (an antisemitic canard that Jews in antiquity used Christian blood in rituals) and the Holocaust, as well as “poems about Israeli children living on other children’s graves”. One picture, she said, depicted “two trenches filled with bodies, one showing Jewish skeletons from the Holocaust” and the second body bags “that said [they] were from Gaza” — drawing direct parallels between the Nazis and Israel.

Hannah and her colleagues filed a complaint to the trust last December. A year on there has been no resolution and she has received no formal update, despite repeated requests.

Several of her Jewish friends working in the trust had left because of the working environment. Hannah herself is considering leaving the NHS entirely. “There’s a double standard and it’s institutional,” she said….

.@RichardBratby is telling me about trigger warnings at Gilbert and Sullivan. Amazing … we’re actually offended by the Victorians. pic.twitter.com/KNl4wxbf5A

— Dr Annette Rubery (@AnnetteRubery) December 7, 2024

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Another absurd article on the current SCOTUS case, on the same lines as that Nation article, setting up the brave fighters for "gender-affirming care" against the wicked right-wing forces of reaction. This time, no surprise, it's from the Guardian's US correspondent Moira Donegan – How did transgender children in the US become so politicized? "The US supreme court is likely to uphold a flimsy and bad-faith Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors".

The politicization of transgender children in the US is one of the most astounding coups of propaganda and organized animus in recent history. Rarely has so much attention and rage been directed at such a minuscule number of people, and more rarely, still, have those people been the most vulnerable and blameless among us: kids and teens….

These changes in public attitudes towards trans youth – from a broad if imperfect sentiment of tolerance to a widespread and politically weaponized attitude of hostility toward a small minority of kids – did not emerge by accident. It was the product of a deliberate, conscious effort to radicalize large swaths of the United States, and significant chunks of state policy, into a hostility towards a few children.

And so on. Once the preposterous idea is accepted that there are these supposed transgender children – children somehow "born in the wrong body" – then all the rest follows. But of course there aren't. It's nonsense. It's the insistence that these troubled and vulnerable kids, victims of a social contagion, need to undergo drastic and ireversible medical procedures rather than go through a normal puberty which is the real regressive homophobic scandal.

The real "one of the most astounding coups of propaganda….in recent history" is surely that so much of the liberal left have lost their minds to the cult of gender.

Dominic Sandbrook in the Times, in the wake of the shambolic martial law pronouncement by South Korea's president Yoon, looks at other coup failures – including the largely forgotten effort here planned by "the megalomaniac media chairman" Cecil Harmsworth King:

Having endorsed Labour’s Harold Wilson in 1964, King was furious not to have been offered a hereditary peerage and was appalled by Britain’s apparent economic decline. High above the Mirror’s Holborn headquarters, he brooded alone in a vast office decorated with 18th-century Italian tables, Persian carpets, Anatolian prayer mats and entire bookcases of rare antiquities. In his desk drawer he kept a list of possible ministers in a potential “Emergency Government”, to be led ideally by himself. And in the late spring of 1968 he decided the time had come to strike.

On May 8, King and the veteran Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp drove to the country house of the Queen’s second cousin Lord Mountbatten, formerly viceroy of India and supreme allied commander in southeast Asia. Having been shown in, King announced that within weeks “the government would disintegrate, there would be bloodshed in the streets [and] the armed forces would be involved”. The British people, he declared, would need Mountbatten to take charge, “a leader of men … backed by the best brains and administrators in the land”.

At first, according to King’s own account, Mountbatten seemed tempted. Then his close friend Sir Solly Zuckerman, the government’s chief scientific adviser, joined the party and the mood changed. Zuckerman could not believe what he was hearing. “This is rank treachery!” he exclaimed. “All this talk of machine guns at street corners is appalling. I am a public servant and will have nothing further to do with it. Nor should you, Dickie.” Then he walked out.

Had Mountbatten really been tempted? It seems much more likely that he was humouring an eccentric guest, though we’ll never know for certain. Either way, King left empty-handed. A few days later he tried to launch a desultory version of his putsch anyway, devoting the front page of the Mirror to an apocalyptic signed editorial ordering Labour MPs to ditch Wilson for a new leader.

The reaction was total derision and three weeks later King was sacked by the IPC board.

Yes I know: it was always ridiculous – though I have my doubts about Mountbatten. Still, a Jewish intervention saving the day….a Jew the only one who can see the "rank treachery", surrounded by these upper-crust buffoons. My take: once again we see the centrality of Jews in British life. 

We're watching a massive, unevidenced medical experiment unfold in real time and it's shameful that lawsuits seem the only way to stop it. The cowardice of politicians and medics who let this happen, and the hubris of the idiots who cheered it on, must never be forgotten.

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 7, 2024

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Hard not to feel angry when you remember the way UK academia almost entirely rolled over for this blatantly evil malpractice. "Detransitioners are a myth", "it's a moral panic", "it's life-saving healthcare" and other obvious falsehoods, repeated ad infinitum. https://t.co/I0L5quYHTS

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) December 6, 2024

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We've come across both of the protagonists in this case before. The detransitioner, Clementine, talking to Billboard Chris, and the doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, when she suppressed a report casting doubt on the use of puberty blockers for kids in case the findings were "weaponized"  by opponents of "gender affirming care".

Now it's going to court:

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who is one of the most prominent and influential physician-researchers in pediatric gender medicine, has been hit with a damning lawsuit by a former patient. The plaintiff reports having suffered from severe, worsening mental illness while Dr. Olson-Kennedy oversaw her gender-transition treatment, including a double mastectomy at age 14. Now a college student, she recently detransitioned.

The lawsuit accuses Dr. Olson-Kennedy of prescribing the plaintiff, then a newly-gender-questioning 12 year old, puberty blockers following a single cursory appointment and no assessment with a mental health professional; of coercing the girl’s wary parents into consenting to testosterone therapy by insisting their child, who had no history of suicidality, would kill herself without such irreversible treatment; and of failing to provide the family with proper informed consent.

It was only after the girl started taking testosterone at age 13 and had her breasts surgically removed the following year that she actually became suicidal and tried to take her own life, according to the suit. The girl reportedly suffered increasingly severe psychosis, including auditory and visual hallucinations. Dr. Olson-Kennedy ultimately recommended a hysterectomy when the girl was 17….

This is a big one.