Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Martin Barnay, The Libyan Affair — Sidecar

Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 5d

"For the Qataris, discreet backers of the Iraq invasion, Sarkozy offered an Atlanticist counterweight to a French political class still steeped in de Gaulle’s pro-Arab line."

@newleftreview.bsky.social
newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

On Sarkozy’s conviction.

newleftreview.org

Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 5d

"The Persian conquest of Babylon brought some respite, as Cyrus the Great allowed Babylonian deportees to return home, even if some chose not to do so: people in Babylon were still calling themselves ‘of Ashkelon’ and ‘of Gaza’ more than a century later."

@lrb.co.uk
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Josephine Quinn · At the Institut du monde arabe: ‘Trésors sauvés de Gaza’

This show has excited controversy: should we even be talking about damage to antiquities in the context of so much...

Yun Sheng · Short Cuts: China’s Gen Z

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Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 5d

Yun Sheng in the current @lrb.co.uk on 'China's Gen Z' and a Labubu on the tomb of Marx.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

A passive-aggressive ‘lying flat’ attitude is easily dismissed as laziness, but Gen Z-ers have developed a...

France: the past is never past

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Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 5d

"From Algeria to Cameroon, and Senegal to Haiti, the Élysée’s posturing on memory has exhausted the patience of those demanding justice. The time for being fobbed off with words is over."

Excellent from Thomas Deltombe in the current issue of @mondediplo.com
mondediplo.com/2025/10/09fr...

Subscribers // by Thomas Deltombe (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, October 2025)

mondediplo.com

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Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 12d

After a year and four months away, even the sea held the sorrow of the northern waves. “Sad nights of the north,” I repeated, “remember me, remember me.”

In @nybooks.com from Doha Kahlout, translated by Katharine Halls.
www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Sad Nights of the North | Doha Kahlout, Katharine Halls

After seven hundred days of death announcements, of lost faith, of suffering that has choked our breath and lined our faces, the nightmare of forced

George W Bush’s finest piece of war

Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 13d

Jimmy Kimmel hosted George W. Bush. They had good laughs about UFOs, in case America’s revolutionaries need a reminder. I wrote about it in @opendemocracy.net
www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-afr...

Painting immigrants’ faces and laughing on chat shows will not excuse the former US president’s blood-stained past

www.opendemocracy.net

What Is Political Violence? - Boston Review

Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 13d

"Violence does not disappear when order is established; it becomes diffuse or even invisible through its law-preserving functions, no matter how unjust, arbitrary, and cruel the law may be."

Eric Reinhart on 'political violence' in @bostonreview.bsky.social
www.bostonreview.net/articles/wha...

Pundits and politicians conceal the truth: it’s all around us, perpetrated by our political system itself.

www.bostonreview.net

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Reposted by Nabil Salih

Granta @grantamag.bsky.social · 14d

‘There is no medical training for this, no papers to help guide me.’

Mina Naguib on the hard lessons of medical care in Gaza.

granta.com/impossible-r...

Impossible Referrals

‘There is no medical training for this, no papers to help guide me.’ Mina Naguib on the hard lessons of medical care in Gaza.

granta.com

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Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 15d

"The people will become real at last – but by then of course they will all be dead."

Fintan O'Toole @fotoole.bsky.social · 15d

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

Fintan O'Toole: How can you live with the knowledge that you have facilitated mass murder?

One term encapsulates the way Israel and its enablers are dealing with the genocide in Gaza: instant amnesia

www.irishtimes.com

Reposted by Nabil Salih

David Cole @davidcole-gtown.bsky.social · 17d

On the cold-blooded execution of alleged drug smugglers.

www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

Getting Away with Murder | David Cole

During his first presidential campaign Donald Trump famously claimed that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose

How Europe covered up the assassination of Palestinians on its territory

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Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 18d

Baghdad.

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Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 18d

Layla al-Attar (1944-1993)
Untitled, c. 1980

Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 18d

'How Europe covered up the assassination of Palestinians on its territory' by Alain Gresh in @orientxxi.bsky.social orientxxi.info/lu-vu-entend...

Between 1972 and 1973, a series of Palestinian leaders were assassinated in Europe and around the world. The pretext was to avenge the deaths at the 1972 (…)

orientxxi.info

Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 19d

"The Naked City is not, however, just a noirish police procedural but a love letter to an ineffable place alternatively known as the modern Babylon, the city that never sleeps, and Baghdad-on-the-Subway."

Brenda Wineapple on New York in @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

A Helluva Town | Brenda Wineapple

A new history of New York City during World War II captures the glory, tawdriness, poverty, narcissism, beauty, and grime of this “aggregation of villages.”

Slaughter for Hire | Joshua Hammer

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Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 20d

"A prisoner who claimed to have been a cellmate once suggested that Prigozhin became the sexual plaything of an inmate who was part of the mafia underworld."

Joshua Hammer in the current issue of the @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

From Africa to Ukraine, the rise and fall of the Wagner Group and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was marked by theatrical violence, the seizure of resources, and an utter lack of accountability.

Sheila Fitzpatrick · Diary: Two Cultures of Denunciation

Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 20d

Shelia Fitzpatrick on 'cultures of denunciations' from Moscow to Washington in the @lrb.co.uk. Decades after the walls that had ears in Saddam's Iraq crumbled, today's MoI has a "report service" for "decadent" content and what troubles societal stability on its website.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Among the difficulties of talking about denunciation is that there are so many words for it, along with sharply opposed...

I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it s...

Reposted by Nabil Salih

James Meek @jamesmeek.bsky.social · 20d

The outrages and atrocities fall like leaves, uncountable, ungathered; we're left with a residue of powerlessness and shame
Pic by Abed Rahim Khatib. In Gaza, the body of one-month-old Majed Mohammed Zarab, thought to have starved to death, is brought to his funeral

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Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 21d

"He told me, once, that he regretted his support for the Iraq war terribly, that it was the biggest mistake of his career. He’d been swept up...by the mood of the times."

A former @newyorker.com fact-checker speaks: 'House Arab'
www.bidoun.org/articles/hou...

House Arab

www.bidoun.org

Reposted by Nabil Salih

London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 21d

‘Wertheimer was Sargent’s sixth painting of a Jewish subject; he would paint 29 more. Altogether, if we include his charcoal portraits, some 70 of his sitters were Jewish, around 5 per cent.’

Abigail Green on John Singer Sargent’s relationship with the Wertheimers:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Abigail Green · In Full Sail: Sargent in London

John Singer Sargent was a certain kind of rootless American. Born in Italy, where he first learned to sketch and paint,...

The Ayatollah’s Kingly Woe | Christopher de Bellaigue

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Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 22d

So pervasive is the suspicion that Mossad has penetrated all aspects of government that one post on X declared, “Call the Tehran gas company right now and someone picks up saying ‘Shalom, how can I help you?’”

Christopher de Bellaigue in @nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

The Supreme Leader’s frail health and Israel’s recent attacks have left the Islamic Republic on the brink of paralysis.

Looking for Alicia | Marcela Turati, Will Noah

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Nabil Salih @nabilsalih.bsky.social · 23d

"I traveled to Pie de la Cuesta, in Guerrero, to find you. I looked out at the sea that probably swallowed you and I sense a storm: it’s you. For you I would cover the sea in white flowers."

@nybooks.com
www.nybooks.com/online/2025/...

On the beach in Pie de la Cuesta, a small vacation town in the municipality of Acapulco, a soldier in a cream-colored desert camouflage uniform appears