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In a coffee shop near Bastani Square, Al-Monitor met with Bagher, another seminary student. The cafe showed no traces of being situated in Qom. Decorated with pictures of Salvador Dali, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein, Al Pacino, Leonardo DiCaprio and others, it might have been anywhere in the world. However, two grand photos of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the two supreme leaders in the history of the Islamic Republic, brought one back to Iran.

Bagher is critical of foreign media. He said he believes international media outlets are trying to present Iran inaccurately. “There are three main models dominating the world today,” Bagher told Al-Monitor. “The Western model, the Daesh [Islamic State] model and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s model; you can’t mix any of these three.”

as Iran is about to hold key elections, it appears the country is still in the grip of a struggle for the soul of the revolution — and what it means

“From the first moment, I knew that his disappearance was not voluntary,”

“Everything pointed to that—the state’s hysteria about everything it does not know, the forced disappearances, the anniversary of the revolution with all the regime’s panic, his turned-off telephone. They were all clear signs. The disappearance was not an accident. We had to move fast.”

nside the morgue, confusion reigned. Two doctors with the Forensic Medicine Authority were about to begin the autopsy after conducting a half-hour preliminary examination. But then they received orders to stop, according to a source inside the morgue who preferred to remain anonymous. They were told to wait for Dr. Hisham Adel-Hamid, the head of the authority, to supervise the drafting of the final report.

“The young man was tortured for five separate, not continuous days…The torture was not ongoing. On some days of his 10-day disappearance, he was not assaulted.”

it seems like certain sources, namely academics, are a bit less likely to talk lately, which, if true, means the government has successfully accomplished its goal of silencing some of its most credible critics. More generally, the political situation has gotten much, much worse, and most of my Turkish and Kurdish friends have either been further radicalized or have simply given up and withdrawn from politics and following the news. There's a great feeling of helplessness. It's an exciting life for a journalist, but it's also just incredibly sad and often seemingly hopeless

Nohan also posted comments containing anti-establishment messages according to the indictment, including ‘Down with Sisi, Morsi and Mubarak’, which was branded ‘an insult to national figures’

posting pictures considered inappropriate for a member of the armed forces

‘We are truly in a Mickey Mouse state,’ his brother Mansour Nohan told IBTimes. ‘Satire is a way for any people that have a mind of their own to express themselves, be that in a democratic country or not.’

Cybercrimes and the circulation of satire have become a serious problem for the Egyptian president in the five years since the beginning of the Arab Spring.

In April, a cybercrimes law was drafted which Human Rights Watch criticised as containing ‘broadly worded provisions that could be abused to penalise legitimate expression online and through social media sites’.

more than 42,000 political prisoners behind bars

assertions that rights groups have dismissed as fanciful conspiracies. It says the protests were organised by local extensions of “forces which control global capital”, singling out billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Erdogan has vilified Soros as “the famous Hungarian Jew ... who assigns people to divide nations”. The indictment says the “Gezi Uprising” was fuelled by Osman Kavala, a well-known civil society leader and businessman who has been in jail since October 2017. A picture from Kavala’s phone taken from an academic book showing how different types of bees are distributed across the Middle East was described in the indictment as showing Turkey’s borders violated and redrawn. It said the fact that defendants discussed bringing milk, juice and pastries to Gezi, as well as gasmasks to counter the effects of tear gas, showed they were financing the protests.

The demonstrations, the indictment says, were inspired by the worldwide “Occupy” protests and Arab uprisings starting in 2011 and a book by Boston-based academic Gene Sharp called ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy’. The indictment cites Gezi protest acts that matched Sharp’s non-violent protest methods, such as Roger Waters’ “The Wall” concert in Istanbul in August 2013 when photos of people killed in the protests were displayed on a huge stage backdrop.

the request for life sentences without parole represented a “massive escalation” in Turkey’s crackdown on civil society. “What we are facing is an existential crisis for independent civil society in Turkey,” he said. “It is a blatant attempt to scare and pursue critics on completely trumped-up, fanciful conspiracy theories.”

“You hold these people responsible for all the windows that were broken in June 2013... but provide no evidence. This is not something that can be done legally,”

Istanbul Bilgi University law professor Yaman Akdeniz said the indictment lacked legal detail and reasoning, with only 1-1/2 pages of legal issues in the 657-page document. “Basically, it is shambolic and if it was written by one of my law students, he or she would get a clear F mark,” he said.

investigation was originally launched by prosecutor Muammer Akkas, himself now a fugitive accused of membership of what Ankara terms a terrorist group led by U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, which Ankara blames for the failed 2016 coup.

many Nasserists and supporters of the 1952 revolution have harshly criticized the film. Last month, Magdy Eltayeb, film critic for the newspaper Al-Qahira, posted on his personal Facebook page, “Diamond dust is poisonous. … [The film] adopted a stance against the 1952 revolution. … It showed excessive sympathy with the Jews to the extent that this has undermined this work’s aesthetic value as a film noir.”

“Many viewers saw this vision as biased, as it addressed only Abdel Nasser’s flaws and neglected his virtues, while glorifying Mohammad Naguib with no reliable proof,” Shennawi told Al-Monitor. “Egyptian cinema suffered a lot in the era of Abdel Nasser, who exploited cinema to promote the ideas of the July 23 revolution and gradually root out any opposing ideas. Egyptian cinema started breaking free from those restrictions with the film ‘Al-Karnak’ [1975], which criticized Abdel Nasser’s era, and ‘Ahl al-Qima’ [People on the Top, 1981], against [President Anwar] Sadat’s Egypt.”

A hit, “Diamond Dust” has so far earned 27.6 million Egyptian pounds ($1.5 million) at the box office.

“What I fear is that this pool of currently unemployed talent will switch careers, which will come at the longtime expense of the industry since these are trained professionals. I do not believe that the military [Synergy] sees this; they simply have one clear goal: to control the industry. The government has effectively, through the institutions it runs, carried out the first monopolization process in the history of neoliberalism.”

In June 2018, the authorities banned a film examining a love affair between a Muslim man and a Christian woman before it hit the cinemas, although director Khaled Youssef said he obtained the necessary licenses. The decision was later revoked, but was alarming to many given rising censorship levels

While over fifty shows typically aired during the peak Ramadan season, even during economically turbulent years as in 2017 and 2018, only twenty-four shows aired last Ramadan, and over two-thirds of them are produced by Synergy. Production powerhouses like El Adl Group and Beelink Productions were notably absent this season from their regular Ramadan run, while regionally acclaimed megastars like Yossra, Adel Imam and Laila Elwy uncharacteristically did not star in any shows during the peak season either, likely due to the dramatic, forced budget cuts which make casting an A-lister virtually impossible. Compensation levels for many of these lead faces could often be as high as EGP 50 million (~USD 3 million), the currently imposed budget cap for aggregate production costs of a Ramadan soap opera’s full season

“For a producer, the direct client of drama series is television channels, and several factors have negatively impacted their purchasing power. The GCC-owned channels are struggling in light of the economic difficulties there, primarily due to the war in Yemen, so the main overseas market for selling television series is not that great. Add to this that privately owned channels in Egypt were never highly profitable, and media budgets generally were slashed with Egypt’s high inflation levels [during the past couple of years], and you have a situation where many production companies are struggling to stay afloat.”

Over the course of the past year, EMC CEO Tamer Morsy also gradually gained majority ownership of key television networks such as CBC, ONTV, DMC and Al-Hayat, a move facilitated through the recent launch of EMC affiliate United Group for Media Services. Moreover, state-owned entities effectively gained control of both the production and purchasing sides of the business as these unprecedented levels of regulation and government ownership were put in place.

in early May United Group for Media Services launched paid streaming app WatchiT and prohibited the longtime convention of shows airing online on YouTube for those who couldn’t catch them on satellite television channels. Widely accessed streaming app EgyBest, among other free online streaming services, were also blocked to allegedly mitigate “piracy”, granting government intelligence-affiliated WatchiT a monopoly over streaming services. Since digital finance and financial inclusion levels are low in the most populous Arab country, the decision came to the dismay of throes of viewers regardless of political affiliations or regulation concerns. For those following television series on satellite channels, short broadcast announcements interrupt episodes to denounce a May 28 Human Rights Watch report on enforced disappearances, killings and torture in North Sinai. Other broadcasts order audiences to pay heed to “threats to terrorism and national security.”

“Because these people [Synergy and EMC] are military men, their mentality is to cut off what doesn’t work, with little concern for the consequences. The military don’t understand or love the arts; they see it as just another industry they can profit off by minimizing losses.”

“It’s understandable that they [the military] would be more concerned with penetrating television production as opposed to the cinema industry, because viewership numbers are higher for television series in comparison to films. Not everyone can afford a cinema ticket, but most Egyptians, be they rich or poor, have access to a television set. There’s nothing to stop them from gaining as much control of the film industry as they have with television, but I believe they’re not investing in it [as much] because it isn’t as lucrative,”

Saudi Arabia is once again opening cinema theaters following a 35-year ban, creating a significant potential box office market for Egyptian films, particularly since plans for the inauguration of 2,000 theatres in the kingdom before 2020 are in the works

our country was once the Hollywood of the Middle East,”

There was a time when everyone in the Arab world recognized Umm Kalthoum and Ismail Yassin, even more so than [our own president] Nasser. We need to work towards reestablishing that, and understanding how entertainment can be used as a tool for soft power

In 2018 Egypt adopted a cyber crime law that grants the government full authority to censor the internet and exercise communication surveillance. A media regulation law also allows authorities to block individual social media accounts.

Several women in Egypt have previously been accused of “inciting debauchery” by challenging the country’s conservative social norms, including actress Rania Youssef after critics took against her choice of dress for the Cairo Film Festival in 2018.

Hossam denied any wrongdoing but Cairo University - where she is studying archaeology - said it would enforce maximum penalties against her which could include expulsion.

Egyptian women’s rights campaigner Ghadeer Ahmed blamed the arrests on rising social pressures on women and “corrupt laws”. “[These laws] condemn people for their behaviour that may not conform to imagined social standards for how to be a ‘good citizen’ and a respectful woman,” she wrote in a Tweet.

Other Qatar backed networks that were accused of incitement on official Gulf TV channels include Al Quds Al Arabi (Arab Jerusalem) newspaper which was founded in London in 1989, online Arabic news portal Arabi 21, the London based website Middle East Eye, the Arabic version of Huffington Post which is headed by former Al Jazeera boss Waddah Khanfar and Al Khaleej Al Jadeed (the New Gulf).

will also demand the expulsion of all Muslim Brotherhood leaders and their Hamas affiliate figures from Qatar, along with Azmi Bishara and Islamist writer Yasser Al-Za'atra. Other demands will include the sacking of Al Arab newspaper editor Abdullah Al Athba

It seems though the initial pressure has already somewhat worked on Qatar. Last week Doha deported Saudi activist Mohammed Al-Otaibi who arrived in Qatar in March, while a number of Hamas officials have left Qatar at the country’s request.

Qatar imports over 90 percent of its food, and by one estimate about 40 percent of that comes from the its only land border, which is now closed. Within hours photos started circulating on social media of Qatari supermarket aisles that have been emptied by panicked shoppers. Furthermore Gulf media has hinted at an escalation of the dispute with Qatari commercial and trade ties being severed next.

Within Sisi’s approach to Islam, censorship remains key. In addition to going after the Muslim Brotherhood, he has locked up thousands of youth and other perceived dissidents. His brutal crackdown has ensnared over 40,000 prisoners of different political stripes. In the security-first mindset of the Sisi regime, writers and other dissidents pose a considerable threat: They have the ability to make the larger population question his policies

Fahmy is optimistic that the current repressive period is already creating burgeoning subversive spaces of critical resistance. “Within the readership there actually is a more healthy and critical reception of books and engagement with them [than before]. The reading public hasn’t expanded but deepened.”

The effects of these suspensions was not just hiding a set of tweets critical of the government, but completely disabling the influence network of Egypt’s dissidents. This is potentially the first documented politically motivated mass shutdown of twitter accounts at a time when online interaction was high and translated to possible action on the ground

accusations are not limited to Egypt but the entire region who have a sense that being critical of their governments was met with punitive measures by Twitter against them

many of those suspensions had a common denominator: being critical of the Egyptian government

suspensions seemed to have happened around late September and lasted from one day to a few days. In many cases Twitter had responded that they had suspended the accounts by mistake. The accounts affected varied from having a few followers to hundreds of thousands

a trending anti-Sisi hashtag disappeared suddenly in July 2018, and then later on in 2019. It didn’t help either to find that an officer in the British Army information warfare unit was head of editorial in Twitter for the MENA region.

I interviewed @OfficialAmro1, a user affected by mass suspensions with over 265K followers and 115K tweets. He was suspended without cause and added, “I don’t even curse.”To which I foolishly replied, “Cursing would not suspend your account, particularly if directed against a public figure. Incitement will.”“No, now it does,” he replied. He also added that if you criticize a figure loyal to the Arab regimes, you can get your account locked or suspended.

The 'hateful conduct' policy as defined by Twitter states: You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.Analyzing the message contents that were flagged for hateful conduct I saw that most did not violate Twitter’s rules. Soon I began to discover that what @OfficialAmro1 had told me was true. The content I was seeing contained profanity. But that wasn’t the whole story.Arabic curse words are used often. I sampled around a little under 50 claims, with over 30 screenshots that contain Twitter’s email identifying the violating tweet. It was clear that profanity alone was not causing the suspensions.

Tragically funnier still are those who were joking around with their friends using their usual language that has profanities @ism3lawy_ ended up cursing Egypt’s Zamalek football club and for that his account was suspended permanently along with that of one of his friends. In a separate conversation, his friend @EHAB_M0 was also joking around with his friends and eventually got a permanent suspension.

Within seconds of my post, the algorithm identified the curse words and locked my account for 12 hours. It was my first violation ever. The irony of documenting this as a reply to the platform’s account is probably lost on them.

the most dangerous and disconcerting of my findings is that the appeal system in Twitter for MENA is broken.

Even things like talking about prostitution can get you banned

There is an element of guardianship that is present in despotic Arab regimes, and that moral guardianship is reflected in the algorithm by Twitter as was shown through the numerous examples above.

With my limited access to Twitter’s data, I have found nearly 20 accounts probably wrongfully and permanently suspended. I imagine hundreds or even thousands more have been kicked off the platform.

“Thank you for trying to help make Twitter a free space once again.”

The increased repression, coupled with persistent concerns over the government's incapacity to handle the pandemic, and plummeting oil prices that spell disaster for Algeria's economy, are all contributing factors to a tension threatening to boil over onto the streets, pandemic or not. 

"We work in fear," an Algerian filmmaker who spoke to MEE on condition of anonymity said. "People aren't only afraid for their safety, but also for their families' safety, as you never know how things can escalate with this Kafkaesque judicial system.

"Algeria is the country where, more than any other in the Middle East, authorities have exploited the pandemic to neutralise active opposition to its rule," Eric Goldstein, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division, told MEE.

"President Tebboune took office saying he had heard the Hirak's calls for reform and promised a new constitution. "Instead, he exploited the Covid-19 lockdown to try to put the Hirak genie back in the bottle, while proposing a draft constitution that does little to advance political and civil rights."

Reporters without Borders has ranked Algeria 146 out of 180 countries and territories in its 2020 World Press Freedom Index - five places lower than in 2019. 

Many journalists and activists face campaigns of disparate accusations and slander, and anyone using the internet to voice dissent against the monarchy and ruling elite faces possible prison time. 

Some 16 Moroccans have been arrested on similar charges as Radi since October, including famous rapper Gnawi, YouTubers, as well as several high school students.

Since Morocco's Hirak protest movement erupted in 2016, the Moroccan Association for Human Rights has documented more than 1,000 cases of political detention.

Moroccans continue to advocate under the #FreeKoulchi ("Free everything") campaign for the release of all those imprisoned.

Despite adopting some reforms since 2011, citizens are offered little political power under King Mohammed VI, who this year has entered his third decade heading the kingdom. Like much of North Africa as a whole, unemployment levels are high, political corruption and abuses of police power are widespread, and social services are lacking. 

According to the Arab Barometer,  a central resource for quantitative research on the Middle East, 70 percent of Moroccans aged 18-29 have thought about emigrating, a strongly held sentiment shared by both Algerians and Tunisians, whose migration to Europe has increased significantly this year. 

Last month, a Tunisian woman was sentenced to six months in jail after sharing a Facebook post about the coronavirus written as a Quranic verse. The post mimicked the style of the Quran in reference to Covid-19, encouraging people to wash their hands and observe social distancing.

he consolidation of the prime minister's power in Tunisia, high levels of corruption, security and economic challenges along with political stagnation, are all factors that have helped to scupper Tunisia's democratic consolidation.

Though the best performing out of the Maghreb countries, Tunisia still has much room for improvement when it comes to freedom of expression. Despite the steps taken, journalists still face pressure and intimidation from government officials, and reporters covering the operations of security forces often face harassment or arrest.

In terms of the pandemic, unlike in Morocco and neighbouring Algeria in particular, the majority of Tunisians have expressed trust in their government - with 71.2 percent trusting the government to control the virus, and 84.5 percent trusting it to communicate effectively with the public, according to the Sigma Conseil. 

"The Covid-19 pandemic has been a stress test for authoritarian and democratic governments alike,"

The social, economic, and security effects of the pandemic are likely to divert attention away from needed long-term reforms, the political agency of civil society, and risk the permanence of authoritarianism that mirrors Egypt under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, after the worst of the pandemic has gone.  

With all this rich, Maghrebi and Middle Eastern culture, aesthetic and historical references on display, once again I must ask: where are the significant MENA actors?

What an opportunity it would have been to cast the likes of Egyptian actor Amr Waked or French-Algerian actress Lyna Khoudri in these roles. Instead, we get Javier Bardem doing whatever the Arab version of Blackface is.

The rest of the Fremen - those whose faces aren't masked and have speaking roles - are made up of actors of Guyanese, West or East African heritage. This wouldn’t be a problem at all if there were at least some MENA actors to reflect the diversity of that region which Villeunueve claims to care so much about and admitted to using as inspiration: “I feel true that I’m right in doing it this way. It feels authentic, it feels honest and true to the book.”

We’re used to being vilified, maligned or erased on screen. We’re used to having most of our representation in Hollywood limited to plane hijacking or suicide bombing or perverted sheikhs or refugees or having non-MENA actors replacing us in our own stories. Like Dwayne Johnson who is playing Black Adam, the first MENA superhero character to get his own solo movie. Can you imagine the outrage if The Rock was cast as Black Panther? Or Shang-Chi? People wouldn’t stand for it.

But in a post-9/11 world where Arabs and Islam are still considered too dangerous and foreign to pass the racial profiling in studio boardrooms and casting call discrimination, too taboo to be given the same equal opportunities for positive or nuanced representation as other ethnic minorities are now slowly beginning to benefit from, must we continue to wait and bittersweetly watch films like Dune that take but do not give back?

changing climate is forcing families to sell off their livestock and pack up for urban centers such as the region’s largest city, Basra, in search of jobs and better services

As hotter, more-crowded cities become the future of a warming world, a lack of preparedness will only exacerbate the discontent already fraying the social fabric

decades of U.S.-backed sanctions and war, combined with the weight of corruption and neglect, have left Basra’s infrastructure unable to adequately support the 2 million people the city already houses — let alone the rising tide of newcomers.

According to official figures, Basra province has a population of over 3 million — an increase of at least 20 percent in 10 years. And most of that growth has been in its urban areas

nearly 40 percent of farmers across the country reported an almost total loss of their wheat crop.

Social media has been awash with photos showing water buffaloes lying dead on the cracked mudflats of southern Iraq’s dried-out marshlands

12 percent of residents were newcomers who had settled in Basra over the past decade, mostly because of water scarcity and a lack of economic opportunities. The number is even higher in other southern Iraqi cities, such as Shatrah and Amarah.

water degradation in the province cost Iraq $400 million in lost animals, palm trees and crops in 2018 alone

As he saw it, migration was only making the situation worse, and he felt that the slow tide of arrivals was changing his city. “Their mind-set is different; we don’t know how to deal with them,” he said. “They don’t respect the laws here.”

Decades of government neglect in rural areas, particularly in the education sector, have left many of the migrants illiterate.

often struggle to access the city’s formal labor market and instead rely on temporary employment as construction workers or truck drivers, or hawking goods from carts in the street. And their habits and attitudes clash with those of their urban cousins.

political leaders in southern Iraq have started blaming the city’s crime rate — as well as other problems — on its migrants.

A few years ago, huge demonstrations decrying corruption and unemployment were crushed with deadly force. Since then, every summer has brought scattered daily protests over authorities’ failure to provide basic services.

“This is how you drive these people into criminality, by discriminating,” she said. “They move to irregular neighborhoods where there’s no proper public services and no employment. And then social issues will emerge.”

When a heat wave forced the shutdown of Basra’s power grid in August, the homes of newcomers and longtime residents alike were plunged into darkness as millions spent sleepless nights drenched in sweat

“My dreams in this country are being lived by a dog in Europe,”

Among the 1930s cultural and intellectual figures given place of pride are Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and John Steinbeck. Guernica is reproduced in an inset about Picasso, illustrating the artist’s hatred of war. (47) A lengthy excerpt from the Grapes of Wrath concludes with Steinbeck’s denunciation of depression-era America: “And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.”

The book places added emphasis on the harsh terms imposed on Germany at Versailles. Prefiguring the later treatment of Al Qaeda terrorism, the intention appears not so much to justify Nazism, but rather to present injustice as the causal force behind violence and cruelty in world politics.

the Holocaust instead appears here as one among several examples of Western barbarity

The foundation of the UN is immediately followed by a discussion of Israel under the heading “Imperial Powers in the Remaking of the Middle East.” (80-81) The Palestine problem, students learn, is the principal cause of conflict in the region. It began when the Ottoman Empire, “the biggest obstacle to the foundation of a Jewish state,” grew weak, leading to the creation of Israel.

Next comes a discussion of the post-war financial order and the International Monetary Fund. Students learn that “the IMF’s standard formula, which recommends austerity policies for countries in economic crises, generally results in failure, chaos and social unrest.” (81-83) An excerpt, which students are then asked to discuss, explains how the IMF prescribes different policies for developed and developing countries.

only in the context of the Cold War origins of the EU does the book engage in any explicitly religious clash-of-civilizations style rhetoric. The idea of European unity is traced back to the Crusades, while a quote about the centrality of Christianity to European identity appears under a dramatic picture of Pope Francis standing with European leaders. (112) The next page states that the EU’s treatment of Turkey’s candidacy, coupled with the fact that “all the countries within it were Christian” had “raised questions” about the EU’s identity.

Early Cold War era decolonization also provides an opportunity to celebrate Atatürk’s role as an anti-imperialist hero for Muslims and the entire Third World. (122-123) “Turkey’s national struggle against imperialism in Anatolia struck the first great blow against imperialism in the 20th century,” the authors write. “Mustafa Kemal, with his role in the War of Independence and his political, economic, social and cultural revolutions after it, served as an example for underdeveloped and colonized nations.” Atatürk himself is quoted as saying, in 1922, that “what we are defending is the cause of all Eastern nations, of all oppressed nations.” Thus, the book explains that “the success of the national struggle brought joy to the entire colonized Islamic world, and served as a source of inspiration to members of other faiths.” The section ends with quotes from leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Habib Bourguiba about how Atatürk inspired them in their own anti-imperial struggles or was simply, in Nehru’s words, “my hero.” An accompanying graphic shows Atatürk’s image superimposed over a map with arrows pointing to all the countries, from Algeria to Indonesia, whose revolutions were supposedly influenced by Turkey’s War of Independence.

Amidst the polarization of the Erdoğan era, what is striking in this book is the authors’ efforts to weave together the conflicting strands of Turkish political history into a coherent narrative. Illustrating Ernst Renan’s argument about the role of forgetting in nation-building, this account glosses over the depth of the divisions and hostility between rival historical actors, presenting them as all working side by side toward a common national goal

Turkey’s real struggle in the 21st century, as in the 20th, is against dependence on foreign technology

The narrative of national independence also helps smooth over Turkey’s Cold War domestic divides. Students are introduced to the ‘68 Generation and left-wing leaders likes Deniz Gezmiş as anti-imperialists protesting against the U.S. Sixth Fleet in support of a fully independent Turkey. (185-186)[9] In this context, Baskin Oran’s work is again cited, this time quoting Uğur Mumcu on the role of “dark forces,” presumably the CIA, in laying the groundwork for Turkey’s 1971 coup.

The book also offers a relatively neutral treatment of political activism during the ensuing decade, suggesting that rival ideological movements were all good faith responses to the country’s challenges. On this, the authors quote Kemal Karpat: “Both right and left wing ideologies sought to develop an explanation for social phenomena and a perspective on the future. A person’s choice of one of these ideologies was generally the result of chance or circumstance.” (202) Thus the authors imply that while foreign powers provoked or exploited these movements, the individual citizens who participated in them can be given the benefit of the doubt. Interestingly, the book takes a similar approach in discussing the 2013 Gezi protests: “If various financial interests and foreign intelligence agencies had a role in the Gezi Park events, a majority of the activists were unaware of it and joined these protests of their own will.”

The authors also offer a balanced treatment of the fraught domestic politics during the period from 1945 to 1960 when Turkey held its first democratic election and experienced its first coup. (138-142, 144-146) They focus their criticism on the negative impact of U.S. aid, arguing that Washington intentionally sought to make Turkey economically and politically dependent, then sponsored a coup when these efforts were threatened.

a book which begins with a portrait of Atatürk ends with a photo of the Bayraktar TB2.

the book’s biases are less in the realm of wild distortion and more reminiscent of those that plague ideologically infused nationalistic history education in all too many countries

its exaggerated critique of European imperialism may be no more misleading than the whitewashing still found in some European textbooks

At moments, Contemporary Turkish and World History is better aligned with recent left-leaning scholarship than the patriotic accounts many Americans grew up reading as well

Throughout the 20th century, America defined itself as the world’s premier anti-imperialist power, all while gradually reproducing many of the elements that had defined previous empires.[11] Today, it often seems that Turkey’s aspirations for great power status reflect the facets of 20th century American power it has condemned most vigorously

Turkey’s marriage of power projection and anti-colonial critique have been particularly visible – and effective – in Africa. Ankara has presented itself as an “emancipatory actor,” while providing humanitarian aid, establishing military bases, selling weapons across the continent.[13] In doing so, Turkish leaders have faced some of the same contradictions as previous emancipatory actors. In August 2020, for example, members of Mali’s military overthrew a president with whom Erdoğan enjoyed good relations. Ankara expressed its “sorrow” and “deep concern.”[14] Then, a month later, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu became the first foreign official to meet with the country’s new military leaders. “Like a brother,” he “sincerely shared” his hopes for a smooth “transition process” back to democracy

Selçuk Bayraktar, the architect of Turkey’s drone program, said that as a student “I was obsessed with Noam Chomsky.” [16] During the 1980s and 90s, America sold Ankara F-16 jets and Sikorsky helicopters that were used to wage a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in southeast Anatolia. No one was more critical of this than left-wing scholars like Chomsky.[17] Now, Ankara is selling Bayraktar drones to Ethiopia, where they are being used to kill civilians and destroy schools in another violent civil war.

certain themes dominate Contemporary Turkish and World History. At the center of its narrative is the struggle for global hegemony, in military, economic, technological and artistic terms

Psychiatrists have warned that the repeated viewing of such visceral imagery can lead to what’s known as “vicarious trauma,” damaging people’s mental health

Some commenters there say the videos offer a grisly lesson. They have “basically taken all the ‘glory’ out of war,” one Redditor said in a thread discussing a video of an injured Russian soldier taking his own life. “I wish politicians would watch these vids as they had their morning coffee.”Others there celebrate the violence or riff on the strange banality of seeing such carnage from home. “I’m eating coco puffs watching this,” one Redditor said on a video showing Russians soldiers killed with grenades.

The Ukrainian government last year began posting photos and videos of captured and killed Russian soldiers to Telegram, Twitter and YouTube in hopes of inflaming Russian protests over the war’s human costs. Military-justice experts told The Post that some of the images likely violated the Geneva Conventions, which demand governments shield prisoners of war from “insults and public curiosity.”

White supremacists have for years spread videos showing violent acts committed by people of color to inflame racial animus in hopes of winning potential recruits, Henry said. In recent conflicts, such gruesome videos have been used to dehumanize the enemy and get international viewers feeling more invested in the fight

“When any of the various Ukraine war influencers share videos of Russian soldiers dying from drone attacks, part of the strategy is to appeal to American or European audiences who see Russian soldiers as part of a wider hated out-group and Ukrainian soldiers as sort of like themselves.”

such videos have also been used to sow terror and provoke an emotional overreaction that could enrage onlookers, expand a conflict or play into the attackers’ hands, said Amanda E. Rogers, a research fellow at the Century Foundation think tank who has studied extremist propaganda. Nearly a decade ago, she said, the Islamic State’s video-recorded beheadings of aid workers, journalists and others helped mark a turning point for terrorists who saw the value in publishing footage so heinous many viewers felt they couldn’t ignore it.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has adopted a similar tactic to enrage Western audiences by running hundreds of haunting YouTube ads, including videos in which Israeli medical examiners describe what they saw in their autopsies of the bodies of children purportedly killed during the Hamas attack, according to YouTube’s ad library.

President Joe Biden condemned the Islamophobic attack that led to the death of the Palestinian child earlier this weekend, as he should have: but he, and all of us, have to go after the background music that gives fuel to that kind of atrocity, and worse.