From the ashes: a ground-breaking account of an underexamined horror

Times Literary Supplement | 22nd August 2024

Abd al-Qadir protecting Christians in Damascus by Jan-Baptist Huysmans, 1861

Armed gangs of men and boys rampaged through the Christian Quarter of Damascus for eight days and nights in July 1860, burning, looting, raping and murdering. Colonel Charles Henry Churchill, who had served as vice-consul in Damascus before taking up permanent residence in Mount Lebanon, recorded multiple atrocities: The violation of women, the ravishing of young girls – some in the very streets amid coarse laughs and savage jeers, – some snatched up and carried off … Men of all ages from the boy to the old man, were forced to apostasise, were circumcised, on the spot, in derision, and then put to death. The churches and convents, which, in the first paroxysm of terror, had been filled to suffocation, presented piles of corpses, mixed up promiscuously with the wounded and only half dead; whose last agonies were amidst flaming beams and calcinated blocks of stone falling in upon them…

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If Joe Biden Really Wants to Celebrate Press Freedom, He Should Free Julian Assange

The Nation


Joe Biden will celebrate World Press Freedom Day tomorrow. But it is a safe bet that he’ll have nothing to say about Assange or Imran Khan, both behind bars for defying the US. President Joe Biden’s eloquence, such as it…

Demonstration for Julian Assange, Barcelona Feb 20, 2024

The US Government’s Plot to Murder Julian Assange

The Nation


While dictators kill troublesome journalists with guns and missiles, democracies can afford to be more patient. But the end result is the same. In most of the countries whose wars I’ve covered over the past 50 years, journalists were fair…

Medic carrying wounded Palestinian child in Gaza, 17th October 2023

Aren’t the Children of Gaza Worth Saving?

The Nation


If our answer is yes, then we have to stop sending Israel the weapons that kill them. Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. Dr. Revathi Balan of India’s Tirunelveli Medical College Hospital received word last week that an ambulance was delivering an…





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About the Author

charles-glassCharles Glass is a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau with Peter Jennings. He covered the October Arab-Israeli War on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. He also covered civil war in Lebanon, where artillery fire wounded him in 1976. He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1993, he has been a freelance writer in Paris, Tuscany, Venice and London, regularly covering the Middle East, the Balkans, southeast Asia and the Mediterranean region. He has also published books, short stories, essays and articles in the United States and Europe.

Contact

Charles Glass at cg@charlesglass.net

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William Morris Endeavor (WME)
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