Although most Americans, inside and outside of Washington, may not see Syria as an area of conflict between the U.S. and Russia, Vladimir Putin undoubtedly sees it that way. And he is acting accordingly, most notably by sending 300 military police and additional troop units to the northeastern part of the country, an area where the U.S. has been a dominant force for several years. Anna Borshchevskaya writes:

Putin has had his eyes set on augmenting the Russian presence in northeastern Syria for a long time, at least since the U.S. announced its partial withdrawal in the fall of 2020. A reduced American presence, it seemed, would give the Syrian Kurds no choice but to make a deal that would allow Damascus to regain control of this region and thereby bring Bashar al-Assad closer to victory. Putin’s hope has proven premature to date, but the region is fragile, and he has not given up, as the additional deployments show.

More recently, on February 16 and 17, 2021, Moscow hosted the fifteenth round of separate peace talks to discuss Syria’s constitutional process in Sochi under the rubric of the Astana talks—a trilateral forum composed of Russia, Iran, and Turkey that Moscow established four years ago, ostensibly to negotiate an end to the Syrian conflict. In reality, the Astana peace talks created an alternative track sidelining the United States and promoted Russia as a peacemaker that favored Assad and silenced genuine opposition.

Syria may not be a priority for the Biden administration, but it is a priority for Putin. A growing Russian presence in the country will only further hurt American, and more broadly Western, interests.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder and supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued a fatwa (religious ruling) in 1989 calling for believers to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie due to the content of his novel, The Satanic Verses. Over the years, two of the book’s translators have been stabbed—one fatally—and numerous others have been injured or killed in attempts to follow the ayatollah’s writ. Last week, an American Shiite Muslim came closer than his many predecessors to killing Rushdie, stabbing him multiple times and leaving him in critical condition. Graeme Wood comments on those intellectuals in the West who have exuded sympathy for the stabbers:

In 1989, the reaction to the fatwa was split three ways: some supported it; some opposed it; and some opposed it, to be sure, but still wanted everyone to know how bad Rushdie and his novel were. This last faction, Team To Be Sure, took the West to task for elevating this troublesome man and his insulting book, whose devilry could have been averted had others been more attuned to the sensibilities of the offended.

The fumes are still rising off of this last group. The former president Jimmy Carter was, at the time of the original fatwa, the most prominent American to suggest that the crime of murder should be balanced against Rushdie’s crime of blasphemy. The ayatollah’s death sentence “caused writers and public officials in Western nations to become almost exclusively preoccupied with the author’s rights,” Carter wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. Well, yes. Carter did not only say that many Muslims were offended and wished violence on Rushdie; that was simply a matter of fact, reported frequently in the news pages. He took to the op-ed page to add his view that these fanatics had a point. “While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important,” he wrote, “we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated.” Never mind that millions of Muslims take no offense at all, and are insulted by the implication that they should.

Over the past two decades, our culture has been Carterized. We have conceded moral authority to howling mobs, and the louder the howls, the more we have agreed that the howls were worth heeding. The novelist Hanif Kureishi has said that “nobody would have the [courage]” to write The Satanic Verses today. More precisely, nobody would publish it, because sensitivity readers would notice the theological delicacy of the book’s title and plot. The ayatollahs have trained them well, and social-media disasters of recent years have reinforced the lesson: don’t publish books that get you criticized, either by semiliterate fanatics on the other side of the world or by semiliterate fanatics on this one.