It is difficult to ignore the feeling that the White House’s recent Armenian Genocide recognition achieved a momentous victory in the narrative surrounding the genocide and what recognition means for the descendants of its survivors. Demanding recognition is both a tangible political objective and a potent motivational force which has…

Below is a transcript of my closing keynote for the Assyrian Policy Institute’s Virtual Conference 2020: I want to provide another, maybe bleaker but definitely clear-eyed perspective on what has been discussed today, first about the KRG, then about Iraq, and finally about Assyrians more broadly. In the context of…

Prof. Khan shares his experiences and calls for more Assyrians to get involved in documenting Assyrian dialects. — After the publication of my last article highlighting the activities of Ninif Tooma (Nineb Lamassu), Professor Geoffrey Khan (GK), Mr Tooma’s former PhD supervisor at the University of Cambridge, reached out to me via email to clarify the situation from his perspective. We arranged to meet on Tuesday, 28th May…

Amid budget cuts, Ealing Council is appealing to community organisations to take on several libraries in the borough. — Ealing Council is struggling to maintain its support for several libraries in the borough and have invited Ealing residents to take on and manage these facilities. The total population of Ealing is over 300k — more than the entire country of Iceland — and as such this is not a…

William Daniel (1903–1988) Chicago, 1969 — The following excerpts are republished from archived material. The text appeared online under “The Weakening Factor” on 17th February 2007 in Zinda Magazine. The book, “Assyrians of Today, Their Problem, and A Solution” written by William Daniel in 1969, remains unpublished online. … Thus far the strongest blow to the…

1. Reject Sectarianism The elephant in the room always deserves to be addressed first. There is no doubt that the positions of Chaldeanists and Arameanists are slowly getting stronger in diaspora by virtue of the fact that a unifying Assyrian movement is in a state of inertia, not because of any compelling argument…

Assyrians have been in diaspora for over 100 years and yet we are forced once again to depend on priests standing behind sultans. I refuse to celebrate this. Everyone has seen the news and the powerful imagery and symbolism of the President of the U.S. signing a bill which legislates for the continuation of aid money to minorities in Syria and Iraq. However, I advise caution: the bill continues the emphasis on religion, and empowering elements within our…

August 7th is a special date for Assyrians, a nation so obscured in our modern world that many people will still raise their eyebrows at their very mention. Nevertheless, Assyrians persisted as a distinct people after the fall of the empire, and so did the country of Assyria — or…

Iraq 3.0 is about to get going this month. ISIS has been territorially defeated and pushed into adopting insurgent tactics once again. Minoritized groups such as the indigenous Assyrians and Yazidis are trying to piece their lives back together in their ancestral homeland of the Nineveh Plain — an area…