I wrote this a while back. It is one of the books I want to cover — if I do make this into a series. It is a great place to start since this is a memoir fathel.substack.com/p/review-of-...

Review of When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family's Forgotten History.

An intimate biography of an Arab Jewish family and a recount of the exploitative use of identity and belonging by colonial powers in the Arab region to divide.

fathel.substack.com

Fathel@fath0039.bsky.social · 14h ago

I'm considering making this a series on my Substack. There is plenty of great scholarship on French social engineering in the region, which includes the Sahel too. There's a dozen or so books I have in mind I could cover and write long-form reviews of.

The local Mormon temple in Copenhagen. I was once offered a Book of Mormon in Danish, Arabic, and Hebrew.

I'm considering making this a series on my Substack. There is plenty of great scholarship on French social engineering in the region, which includes the Sahel too. There's a dozen or so books I have in mind I could cover and write long-form reviews of.

Fathel@fath0039.bsky.social · yesterday

There is a general lack of Arab reckoning with French colonialism in the region and specifically its deeply harmful and still felt social engineering projects in the region. It is also due to lack of good education systems in the region and lack of university funding.

I'm considering making this a series on my Substack. There is plenty of great scholarship on French social engineering in the region, which includes the Sahel too. There's a dozen or so books I have in mind I could cover and write long-form reviews of.

Fathel@fath0039.bsky.social · yesterday

There is a general lack of Arab reckoning with French colonialism in the region and specifically its deeply harmful and still felt social engineering projects in the region. It is also due to lack of good education systems in the region and lack of university funding.

The import of American philosemitism has had negative effects, speaking as someone of the Danish Jewish community. It has allowed the targeting of other minorities in the name of "protecting Jews" and it has more or less allowed the latent antisemitism in Danish politics to reemerge unopposed.

Fathel@fath0039.bsky.social · 21h ago

The Danish government and most opposition parties are in the name of minority rights engaging in minority persecution. Generally people have this positive image of Denmark because of how attractive Copenhagen, but Denmark is just Orban's Hungary but many times richer. It should be viewed the same.

The Danish government and most opposition parties are in the name of minority rights engaging in minority persecution. Generally people have this positive image of Denmark because of how attractive Copenhagen, but Denmark is just Orban's Hungary but many times richer. It should be viewed the same.

There is a general lack of Arab reckoning with French colonialism in the region and specifically its deeply harmful and still felt social engineering projects in the region. It is also due to lack of good education systems in the region and lack of university funding.

The best parallels to Zionist colonization of and myth-making in Palestine are French colonization and myth-making in Algeria and Italian colonization and myth-making in Libya.

Has anyone read John Chalcraft's From Subordination To Revolution: A Gramacian Theory of Popular Mobilization?

Books to read on Nasser and Sadat's Egypt and their legacies. I'd add Imperfect Strangers by Salim Yaqub too.

Fathel@fath0039.bsky.social · 2d ago

These cover Nasser and Sadat Sadat-Hirst Making The Arab World-Gerges Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt-Salem Answering The Call-Arian Classless Politics-Sallam Nasser-Gordon Nasser's Blessed Movement-Gordon Revolutionary Womanhood-Bier Egypt-Malek Containing Arab Nationalism-Yaqub

youtu.be/dA4sobFakoY?... Recommended listening

Reconsidering 1967 : Conversation with Jonathan Hassine

YouTube video by Khaled Fahmy خالد فهمي

youtu.be

Of the many insightful books on Nasserist Egypt and the legacy of Nasser and Sadat, I still can't get over of all the great books, the one I see recommend the most by people is Alex Rowell's We Are Your Soldiers. Seriously?

One of the most informative books about the Lebanese civil war is Zeina Maasri's Off The Wall, it is about political posters and through the visual medium she explains their role in social mobilization and propagating the different ostensible narratives justifying the different sides' goals.

Anyone who thinks the Democrats in their current form are going to rebuild the NEH at anywhere near what it needs to be to support the demand for humanistic knowledge is deluding themselves. When Axelrod talks about “zany, liberal faculty lounge exotica,” he means humanists, not STEM professors

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes.bsky.social · 4d ago

We all know that class discourse is totally vibes-based in the Anglophone world, but so is educational attainment discourse (Hong is a college dropout):

Joseph Daher for @timep.bsky.social on the dangers of Syrian leaders' political-economic model: timep.org/2026/08/06/s...

Serving the Elite? Syria’s New Political Economy

Syria’s transitional authorities have embraced a political-economic model that favors big capital, breeds new forms of cronyism, and leans on austerity policies.

timep.org

The things that really bothers me about the "fascism" debate is that almost no one is familiar with the history of the Italian Fascists. People are more interested in analyzing their aesthetics than the material reasons behind them. Gramsci writes about it, yet it is ignored to fit a western setting

But to the Stephen Millers, JD Vances and Elon Musks of the world, it is intolerable when modernity's judgment favors the product of non-Western minds and societies. And so they must embrace notions of intentional sabotage like Great Replacement Theory and recycle tired tropes of Western decline.

www.damemagazine.com/2026/07/15/w... An interesting piece.

Why U.S. Foreign Policy Needs a Fundamental Reset

American military dominance has shaped the modern world—but at enormous cost. Here's what a more peaceful, democratic U.S. foreign policy could look like.

damemagazine.com

More people should read The Call From Algeria by Robert Malley. We often hear about the rise of Islamism on its own terms, but rarely do we hear comprehensive accounts of the disillusionment with Third Worldism in Algeria & the broader Middle East outside reductive narratives about 1967 and so forth

This is the definitive book explaining the US-Israel relationship. Everything from American exceptionalism and nationalism of the frontier, white supremacy, evangelical Christianity, American Cold War New Deal Liberalism, Clintonite Liberalism, etc. It touchs on all of it.

Fathel@fath0039.bsky.social · 5d ago

Reviewing this next

"As both sides build up their arsenals and collude in defrauding the state, they are inexorably pushing Libya toward crisis. Boulos, seeking to cement the status quo by entrenching the rule of the two families, may turn out to be the harbinger of its collapse." My latest, in @nybooks.com

Libya: The Dangerous Gamble | Wolfram Lacher

On my last visit to Tripoli, this past June, the city often felt as if it had left the protracted conflicts of Libya’s post-Qaddafi era behind. At night,

nybooks.com

Wolfram Lacher@wlacher.bsky.social · 5d ago

"As both sides build up their arsenals and collude in defrauding the state, they are inexorably pushing Libya toward crisis. Boulos, seeking to cement the status quo by entrenching the rule of the two families, may turn out to be the harbinger of its collapse." My latest, in @nybooks.com

Reviewing this next

open.substack.com/pub/fathel/p... A list of books on social and cultural memory in the Arab world, and America and France and how it has shaped them and shapes the Arab world.

Books on social and cultural memory in the Arab world

Often the role of memory is often misunderstood.

open.substack.com

The adoption of renewables is great and we need to deal with climate change, looking at it from a MENA perspective, all the oil wealth has either been misspent by American pet monarchs or American wars and sanctions. It is difficult to overstate how much the US robbed the region of development.

mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social · 7d ago

The biggest technological revolution of our lifetime and it has nothing to do with AI, crypto, metaverse, robots or any of the other massively hyped "tech" the media always talks about instead

Ceuta leader is almost certainly right about Morocco engineering the migrant influx. But it's hard to hold the moral high ground when you are the governor of a 600-year-old colony carved out of someone else's country.

Melissa Chemam@melissaontheroad.bsky.social · 7d ago

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a... A growing chorus of voices has accused Morocco of helping to fuel the crisis in Ceuta

My episode with Sahrawi activist Mohamedsalem Werad, on Africa's last colony and American complicity in Moroccan occupation, is out now open.spotify.com/episode/4GcG...

Morocco’s US-Backed Occupation of Western Sahara

It Could Happen Here · Episode

open.spotify.com

From Frantz Fanon's essay on the assassination of Lumumba. It is a great essay and he is correct on the consequences of disunity and accommodation driven a belief that distance is an insulating factor.

Has anyone read Decolonizing Memory by Jill Jarvis?

Check out my long form review of Genocide in Libya where I explore the books themes like Italian Fascist myth making in Libya, how Cold War politics was instrumental in the coverup of genocide, commemoration and the memory of the genocide under Gaddafi and the monarchy, & the limits of area studies

Fathel@fath0039.bsky.social · 2w ago

My review of Genocide in Libya open.substack.com/pub/fathel/p...