In her talk for Stanford University’s conference on the subject of ‘Cruelty’, Kelly Grotke examines friendship, universality, and cruelty between the European past and the Syrian present.

In Arabic, we differentiate between taghyeer (تغيير) and taghayur (تغيّر). Both words mean change. But taghyeer connotes planned action, executed unilaterally by a powerful elite, with a pre-known end result; whereas taghayur implies an open- ended, multitudinous process that could be influenced by organized social agents. Taghyeer is engineered according to a pre-determined ideal, already complete before its application, while it is this ideal which…

When someone knows that Hitler may have had only one testicle, but she or he doesn’t know about Hitler’s hatred of Jews, then there ought to be something wrong. Several people I met recently knew only one fact about Syria, which is that Bashar al-Assad belongs to a religious minority. They sure didn’t know whether Syria is a monarchy or republic, or for how many…