The French Syria specialist Frédéric Pichon accuses the Western media of irresponsibility in its treatment of the Syria crisis: of being ignorant about the region and its history, neglecting to verify sources, blithely parroting activist talking points–in short, of “refusing to deal with the reality.” See my new interview with him on Breitbart.com here.
Last night, a Shia mosque in Brussels was the target of an arson attack. The 46-year-old imam of the mosque died of asphyxiation during the fire. While the wire services have reported the attack, most of the reports have ignored a salient detail: according to eyewitnesses, the perpetrator was a Salafist who shouted slogans regarding [...]
The Obama administration has conceded al-Qaeda’s involvement in the Syrian rebellion, suggesting last month that the terror group had “infiltrated” the opposition to Bashar al-Assad. But video evidence emerging out of Syria suggests that “infiltration” is not the word. At least three such videos depict anti-Assad forces or demonstrators with al-Qaeda’s black flag. Numerous other [...]
Earlier this month, the French daily Libération published an interview with Sheikh Louay al-Zouabi, a self-avowed Salafist imam from Daraa, Syria, who claims to have issued a fatwa that sparked the uprising against the rule of Bashar al-Assad. A radical fundamentalist current in Islam, Salafism advocates the emulation of the Salaf: the earliest generations of [...]
According to the Spanish daily ABC, a Libyan rebel commander who played a key role in overthrowing the rule of Muammar Qaddafi previously participated in the May 2010 attempt to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza aboard the Turkish-owned vessel the Mavi Marmara. The operation famously culminated in a deadly clash between Israel Defense Force [...]
