Middle East

This week we honor William Luther Pierce, the founder of Cosmotheism, of the National Alliance, and of National Vanguard on the 90th anniversary of his birth by presenting classic articles of his, nearly all of which haven’t appeared on this site since their original publication more than two…

Casablanca by John Massaro THERE’S A RAILWAY network connecting the major cities of Morocco but I didn’t use it until the very end. What I had missed! My second-class carriage on the 9AM express to Casablanca was new, spotless, quiet ,and punctual. It would’ve been a great finale to my journey were it…

Djmaa-el-Fna by John Massaro THESE ARE JUST MUSINGS on my part, but the more I thought about it, the more I surmised that Arabs are a lot like Jews, though on a much smaller and harmless scale. They seem to have evolved in parallel ways over the ages in this region of the world. It’s a Semitic thing. To illustrate…

by John Massaro I MET HIM ON the way to the CTM bus station in Fez, where I was going to enquire about departures to Azrou, a small Berber town to the south. (When I had arrived in Fez, the driver demanded a “tip” before removing my backpack from the luggage compartment.) I was having trouble communicating…

by John Massaro BEFORE I BEGIN TELLING YOU about Morocco, a country in its own league, let me wrap up my overall impressions of the Arab world, which encompasses a large chunk of the Middle East and stretches across the entire Mediterranean littoral of north Africa and deep into the Sahara Desert. If you’ve…

by John Massaro THE JORDANIANS CALL IT the King Hussein Bridge, the Israelis the Allenby Bridge. At the bus station in Amman they compromise, and if you want to visit what the Jordanians and the rest of the world call the West Bank, but the Israelis refer to as Judea and Samaria, you go to the counter marked…

Ancient building carved directly into the cliff face in Petra, Jordan by John Massaro THE ANCIENT CITY of Petra is Jordan’s crowning glory. In the fourth century B.C. an obscure tribe, the Nabataeans, and after them the Romans, carved temples, palaces and tombs from the indigenous pink sandstone;…

by John Massaro SHEM WAS A frail, unattractive man who worked in the quiet [Syrian] government tourist office on Port Said Boulevard. I asked him if Zebdani, a resort town in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains – just a few miles from the Lebanese border – was worth a visit. He said it definitely was,…

by John Massaro THERE SEEMED TO BE only one hotel in Baniyas, the Hotel Baniyas. Please, oh God, please have a room, I prayed. They did. I showered, took a nap, woke up, read for an hour and went to the market to buy a melon for tomorrow’s breakfast. Seeing me return with one, the manager brought a knife…

by John Massaro “NUSAYBIN Hudut Kapisi,” the fresh Turkish exit stamp in my passport read. Straight ahead was El Qamishliye, Syria, a remote, sleepy frontier town near the desolate point where Turkey, Syria and Iraq meet. It was 1984 and I was not feeling confident. What was Syria going…