Yalda, St Stephen's Day, Hanukkah.
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
I swiped that subhead from the great Walt Whitman’s original 1855 volume of self-published poems, Leaves of Grass. The work was banned almost everywhere. Printer, newspaper reporter, clerk, volunteer nurse, Whitman would go on to become America’s answer to Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare.
Almost all of us contain unique assemblages of multitudes, despite the persistent fashion for taking on rigid identities of one sort or another. My family’s peculiarities and my own disposition have combined to mean, just for instance, that the auld feast of Nollaig, with a taproot that grew elsewhere into Noel, otherwise known as Christmas, is nourished by the tradition of the Menorah prayers and the lighting of candles.
For some years now I’ve also had cause to occasionally observe the ancient Persian solstice feast the Khomeinists so cruelly suppress, Shab-e Yalda. This year, Yalda came closer to home in a happy and personal way I’ll mention down below, beyond the paywall, but the main attraction down there is a deep-background essay I wrote a while back for World Affairs Journal, from my travels in Iraq, Syria and Turkey, about the Kurdish people. The Kurds comprise what is arguably the world’s biggest nation without a state of its own.
The piece should help with an understanding of what may prove to be world-shuddering events in the coming days, so I’m bringing it up from behind the sign-in for the JSTOR digital journal-storage operation. You won’t need to access it from your library. I’ll have it for you right here.
Ordinarily there’s nothing remotely disorienting about any of this holiday stuff but the past few days have been exhausting, as in Run, Hide or Fight?, my conversation with Dark Web archdruid Jordan Peterson. It’s mostly about why this weird thing that occupies all the spaces where “the Left” used to be always end up coming for the Jews.
And that was just one event in several days of bedlam that followed my piece for Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada, a subject I’ve been preoccupied with for more than a year, which arises from a sinister turn in “progressive” politics that I’ve been chronicling for nearly 20 years now.
On that subject, I highly recommend Shalom Lappin’s The New Antisemitism: The Resurgence of an Ancient Hatred in the Modern World. Shalom and I go way back, to the days of the Euston Manifesto. Here’s Shalom’s recent essay in Fathom Journal: ‘Is it time to leave?’ The resurgence of antisemitism in the modern world.
If all this wasn’t sufficient to hasten my retreat into the warm relief of rum toddies and the company of loved ones over Christmas dinner, there was the chaos of the Syrian revolution. That’s another tragedy that has occupied my working life and haunted my sleep over the past 12 years. My worries now mainly involve the Turks, and whether the incoming Trump administration and perhaps Israel’s Netanyahu government will make a hash of everything and pull defeat from the grasp of victory,. Even so I cannot help but be happy about the overthrow of the 21st century’s bloodiest tyranny.
And yes, I do mean happy. If that curdles your milk, here’s another thought you’ll find upsetting: Unlike, say, the great American revolutionary hero George Washington, at least Hayat Tahrir al-Sham warlord Ahmed Sharaa never owned slaves. And yes, I’m well aware of all the reasons to fret about where Syria may be headed. My main worry is for the Kurds.
But I’m happy, and I won’t be told that I’m naive, thanks. If you know another Canadian journalist who might be more familiar with this subject, do let me know. To be even clearer than I was here under the subheading Just so everybody knows where I’m coming from, I lay it out plainly here: The moral necessity of tyrannicide.
If it isn’t perfectly obvious, I take the Maccabean standpoint in these matters; celebrating the revolt of the Maccabees 2200 years ago against Hellenization and against the occupying forces of the Seleucid Empire in the Holy Land is what Hanukkah is all about, after all.
That’s where I was coming from in another full page in last weekend’s National Post: NATO sleepwalks away from the problems of its bloodied global allies. It was mostly about Syria, but it was about the seismic faults that connect Syria to Ukraine, to Beijing and elsewhere, connections I keep banging on about, as in: A world of trouble that's been years in the making.
Speaking of which: “Today, Putin deliberately chose Christmas for an attack,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday. “What could be more inhumane? Over 70 missiles, including ballistic ones, and more than a hundred attack drones. The targets are our energy infrastructure. They continue to fight for a blackout in Ukraine.”
I fully realize the Maccabees were not universally celebrated among the Jews, which would partly explain why their rebellion was never chronicled in the Jewish biblical canon. Oddly, the books Maccabees 1 and 2 are there in the Catholic bible, but not in the Protestant version. It’s complicated.
The original “Damascene Conversion”
I happen to be writing this on the evening of the Day of the Wren, Boxing Day, known mostly to Catholics as St. Stephen’s Day. St. Stephen was perhaps the first martyr of the Christan faith, having been caught up on the wrong side of the revolt against Hellenization that persisted in and around Jerusalem well beyond the time of the Maccabean uprising.
St. Stephen was executed on the orders of the Sanhedrin. And who participated in the execution? No less a figure than the Syrian Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, who came to be called Paul the Apostle. Infamous for badgering Jewish heretics, Paul was off on an apostate-watch assignment to Damascus when he was blinded by a bright light and heard the voice of Jesus, according to the Acts of the Apostles. Thereafter he devoted his life to the Christian faith.
This is where the expression “Damascene conversion” comes from.
Nothing quite so dramatic is known to have occurred in the life of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) warlord Ahmed al-Sharaa, who has emerged as the central figure in the overthrow of the mass murderer Bashar al-Assad. But it’s clear and plain that Sharaa renounced jihadism several years ago, and his political trajectory has been a long and cunning renunciation of and struggle with Al Qaida, ISIS and that whole crowd in Syria and Iraq.
Without getting bogged down with hypertext links to the fast-moving details of the HTS manouvres, its transitional government, its disarming and absorption of Syria’s various revolutionary militias and so on, this is from my piece last weekend in the Post:
Everything is unsettled. Everything is in flux, and whoever comes out on top of all this will rule the world.
The NATO capitals appear to be sleepwalking through it all, with the exception of Ankara, capital of the Republic of Turkey, which shouldn’t even be a NATO member owing to its descent into truncheon-state excesses. With his command of the second-largest standing army in the NATO alliance after the United States, Turkey’s neo-Ottoman strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan has embarked on a duplicitous, reckless and bloody siege of Syria’s U.S.-backed Kurdish minority in their autonomous enclave of Rojava.
The term “U.S.-backed” is a euphemism for the tentative and provisional assistance U.S. troops provide to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). If you want to be worried about Syria, it’s the caliph Erdogan you should have your eye on, and it’s Syria’s Kurds you should be worried about. The SDF should be integrated into the New Syrian government’s armed forces, obviously. I’m not holding my breath, and anyway it would still leave the thorny question of how to normalize the Syrian Kurds’ own YPG/YPJ Local Protection Force fighters, who are affiliated with the outlawed Kurdish PKK militia in Turkish Kurdistan.
The latest: Turkish military kills 21 Kurdish militants in northern Syria and Iraq. Also: Erdogan threatens to eliminate Kurdish militia in Syria. Erdogan is refusing to distinguish between the SDF, the YPG/YPJ and the PKK.
Sound confusing? Here’s how I can help with that. With bonus personal news. . .