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New Lines Magazine – a local magazine for the world. Essays run daily online and quarterly in print.

07/24/2025

The MAGA right is turning on its own. Trump supporters—once united—are now demanding he release all files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted s*x trafficker whose elite connections (including Trump himself) have long fueled conspiracies. But this isn’t just about truth or justice, writes Ben Lorber. At the heart of this “Epstein revolt” lies something darker: antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Figures like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon are pushing the narrative that Epstein was tied to Israeli intelligence—using vague language and “just asking questions” rhetoric that echoes centuries-old tropes about secret Jewish cabals running the world. Carlson recently interviewed Darryl Cooper, a far-right podcaster who’s openly floated Holocaust revisionism and dangerous myths about Jewish global dominance.

Many progressives, who are rightly critical of elite impunity and U.S. support for Israel, might feel tempted to welcome this MAGA infighting. But the Lorber warns: don’t fall for it. These narratives aren’t about real justice—they’re about redirecting rage from the ultra-rich and the system they control, toward marginalized communities using old, toxic lies.

For more, please click the link in our bio.

✍️Ben Lorber
📸An image of U.S. President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein projected onto the U.S. Department of Commerce headquarters on July 18, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

07/23/2025

The growing trend of ‘japada’ — Nigerians returning home after years abroad — is sparking backlash and debate. The notion of return migration elicits a range of reactions among Nigerians, reflecting a complex interplay of hope, disillusionment, pessimism and patriotism. Kingsley Charles explores the reasons behind this reverse migration, from emotional disconnection and racism abroad to the harsh realities of life in Nigeria.

Typically, returnees are deemed “hypocrites,” who are relocating after having secured Western citizenship, or pigeonholed as those who “couldn’t make it,” writes Charles. Analysts suggest that the prevailing negative perceptions of reverse migration are a direct consequence of widespread narratives that glorify migration to the West as a ticket to abundant riches and a soft life.

Charles tells the stories of several returnees and the criticism they faced at returning to Nigeria. Many faced criticism at the hands of their own families. Some returnees say this can be for selfish reasons, such as wanting remittances to be sent back home or wanting bragging rights about a family member being abroad.

Many returnees share their stories on social media, making vlogs on YouTube or podcasts online. They share their experiences with reintegration, their successes and their failures. While some adjust to their new lives in Nigeria, some never manage to weather the storm.

For more, please click the link in our bio.

✍️Kingsley Charles
📸Passengers arriving at Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria. Not all pictured are diasporan returnees. (Livinus via Getty Images)

07/22/2025

Since October 2023, the war in Gaza has raged on. Much has happened since then, including a shift in the narrative surrounding this conflict. Drawing on sociologist Stanley Cohen’s framework of denial, Martin Shaw examines how Western governments and media have shifted from denying Israel’s atrocities in Gaza to reluctantly acknowledging them as genocide.

Shaw describes the different ways Western leaders and journalists denied the genocide: invoking Israel’s right to self defense, reproducing Israeli claims that it acted in accordance with international humanitarian law, and labeling those who challenged Israel’s violence as “supporters of Hamas” and “antisemites.”

But he argues that there has been a shift in public sentiment. While Israel’s supporters in Western governments and media still reject the charge of genocide — even while, in some cases, they finally acknowledge some of the harm being caused to civilians — many media outlets, especially on the center-left, have been queuing up to acknowledge genocide or, if still ducking the genocide label, to publish strong opinion pieces and shocking accounts by people in Gaza of the suffering that Israel is inflicting.

A conspiracy of helplessness is abandoning Gaza, trickling down from leaders to media to voters. “The philosophers have interpreted the world; the point is to change it,” Karl Marx famously wrote. Today, genocide scholars, the serious press and even voters have interpreted Gaza as a genocide — but the point is to stop it, writes Shaw. Until we do that, we are still in denial.

For more, please click the link in our bio.

✍️Martin Shaw
📸Pro-Palestine activists protest in front of the New York Times building on May 27, 2025. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

07/18/2025

For months, Sweida in southern Syria has been a tinderbox waiting for a match. Now, the mountain of the Druze is burning. Since the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in December, the region has essentially been mired in a low-level conflict. Trenches have cleaved the landscape in two. Armed checkpoints have separated Druze villages from their Bedouin neighbors. The pot had been simmering with each cycle of escalation and de-escalation. It felt inevitable that it would boil over eventually, writes Cian Ward for New Lines.

Ward reports on the recent eruption in tensions between the Druze and Bedouin tribes in Syria, how it started and the result of the conflict. He details the tit for tat kidnappings and attacks that resulted in several lives lost. Government forces were also drawn into the communal conflict after they were ambushed on their way into Sweida to stop the clashes.

Ward tells the stories of people such as Rawad, who lost eighteen members of his family. At least 300 have been killed in Sweida over the last few days, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, although the death toll is likely to climb far higher.

Tensions are simmering across the country. Syria’s new leaders have repeatedly stressed the centrality of unity in their new vision of Syria, but absent any meaningful integration of these minorities into the governance of the state, it seems hard to imagine an outcome in which violence like that we have witnessed over the last week won’t recur, writes Ward.

For more, please click the link in our bio.

✍️Cian Ward
📸 Black smoke billows in the distance on July 15, 2025, near Sweida, Syria, following sectarian clashes between Druze fighters and Bedouin tribes that left at least 37 people dead and 100 injured as of July 14. (Stringer/Getty Images)

07/16/2025

After Bashar al-Assad’s fall at the end of 2024, Syria broke into chaotic zones. Each zone is controlled by different factions: the government in the west, Kurdish forces in the northeast, Turkish-backed rebels in the north, and Islamist militias in pockets like Idlib. Violence rose, especially targeting Alawite communities, creating fears of deeper civil collapse.

A major breakthrough arose in March 2025. Interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa signed a reunification agreement with Kurdish SDF leader Mazloum Abdi. The deal promised Kurdish political inclusion, equal citizenship, shared control over oil and border resources, and the start of reintegrating military and administrative systems. Unlike previous efforts, it didn’t call for Kurdish surrender. Instead, it embraced decentralization and power-sharing.

Internationally backed by the U.S. and Turkey, the agreement aimed to prevent Syria’s slide into permanent partition. For the Kurds, it offered recognition without abandoning autonomy. For Damascus, it was a political win to ease tensions and start mending the country back together.

However, challenges still linger. On-the-ground militias, warlords, and sectarian hatreds persist. Key questions that include who controls prisons, oil fields, and local law enforcement, remain unanswered. Many people fear the deal will remain symbolic if it is not fully enforced.

Tensions are high because reunification could mark the start of a new, inclusive Syrian state. On the other hand, if implementation fails, the country could become an area of rivaling territories. They will be governed not by a central authority, but by competing foreign interests, ideologies, and histories of violence.

“We can’t just dismantle everything and find ourselves in danger again if things go wrong. We’ve already shed too much blood for this stability”—23-year-old Kurdish resident of Qamishli, Jihan

For more, please click the link in our bio.

✍️Laurent Perpigna Iban ()

📸 The flags of Syria and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria in Deir ez-Zor province, eastern Syria. (Alexandra Henry)

07/14/2025

In Georgia, places once rooted in white supremacy like Stone Mountain, Cobb County, and Forsyth County are now symbols of the state’s dramatic demographic and political transformation. Zaid Jilani tells the story of Georgia’s evolving identity, and what it means for the rest of the country.

Georgia is a diverse state with a Republican anti-abortion Christian governor, and two democratic senators, one Jewish and one African American. The fulcrum of the social and political change that brought these men to power is metro Atlanta, the rapidly diversifying suburbs that border the state’s capital city, where white people and minorities, conservatives and liberals, retired suburbanites and young urbanists, transplants and natives are learning to build new types of communities together.

Jilani tells the story of different counties which have seen dramatic political and cultural transformations, and their residents. Lisa Cupid and Gabriel Sanchez are among the many voices in the article who reflect Georgia’s ongoing transformation, as residents from different backgrounds work to reshape their communities and push for a more inclusive future.

If places like Stone Mountain, Cobb and Forsyth — all of which were once bastions of explicit white supremacy — can diversify and thrive, it suggests that America can do the same, writes Jilani.

For more, please click the link in our bio.

✍️Zaid Jilani ()
📸A traditional Indian dance performed in front of Georgia’s Stone Mountain, the largest Confederate memorial ever built, in August 2024. (Zaid Jilani)

07/10/2025

The Arab-electro band is the collaboration of two very different musical worlds, coming together for a shared love of music. Ameen Khayer, a Syrian refugee, and Thorben Diekmann, a German activist, came together as a result of political unrest.

In their early career, the band mixed electronic beats with “mawwal,” a traditional form of sung poetry with long, drawn-out vowels. This sentimental form of music that is heavily associated with the region’s folklore, serves as a nostalgic escape for Arab youth.

Their latest project embodies the meeting of two very different musical worlds, writes Mary Fawzy, an alignment of spirit despite differing cultural backgrounds. This became their overarching message with the release of the band’s latest EP, “Greater Than One.”

Khayer has expressed how the music allows him a connection to his home while living in exile. The Syrian folkloric music helps him connect with people and places that are lost to him due to displacement. His dream is to one day perform in Syria, while currently, his refugee status disallows him to travel to certain countries that lay outside the European Union.

“As a refugee in Europe I’m limited with my actions, and limited with what I want to do. So music is the only platform that lets me at least speak freely and express myself more with freedom.”

For more, please click the link in our bio.

✍️Mary Fawzy
📸Shkoon performing in Cairo in 2022. (Azema X via Wikimedia Commons)

07/09/2025

New Lines investigates a bizarre conspiracy from the 1990s that has taken on a new shape, and whose core tenants have become major themes in GOP politics.

According to the proponents of the Nesara / Gesara conspiracy theories, a massive financial shift is imminent, and they were divinely chosen to warn and protect the masses. They do this by collecting money from their supporters under the guise of protecting and multiplying their wealth.

“Just as in the days of Noah, the ark was open — but many laughed and scoffed until it was too late,” one email reviewed by New Lines reads.

The conspiracy theory persists today in the form of a relatively fringe cryptocurrency scam. Yet its proponents now count some Republican Party lawmakers among their supporters.

In some ways the affinity is natural. The ideas that made the Nesara conspiracy theory powerful have had a significant role in GOP politics under President Donald Trump. Nesara’s core elements — like their proponent’s claims of divine authority, and the use of cryptic language alongside apocalyptic predictions — also formed the basis for QAnon, the conspiracy theory that was especially popular with a large segment of MAGA supporters, including many Jan. 6 rioters.

New Lines’ investigation uncovered some of the ways that these scammers operate, how they exploit their victims’ conspiratorial beliefs and how they use cryptocurrency to scam them out of their personal savings in a way that makes them incredibly difficult to recover. The investigation also sheds light on GOP lawmakers who bolster the conspiracy theory and, in at least one case, appear to promote the very cryptocurrency that scammers use when targeting victims.

For the full investigation regarding political backing of conspiracy-fueled fraud in America, click the link in our bio.

✍️Alec D’Angelo
📸A cutout of U.S. President Donald Trump holding a Bitcoin is displayed on a group of servers during The Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, May 27, 2025. (Ian Maule/AFP via Getty Images)

07/08/2025

In the media, Gaza often has to fight for attention with other world events. These days, it rarely wins. The last weekend of June was therefore unusual, since a story related to Gaza was on every broadcast and the front pages of Britain’s most widely read newspapers for the first time since October 2023, writes New Lines Associate Editor Muhammad Idrees Ahmad.

Ahmad details how BBC broadcasted punk-rock duo Bob Vylan’s “Death, death to the IDF” chant at the Glastonbury music festival, and the slew of racism that followed. Every news media outlet was talking about the incident, some even calling for the arrest of the duo. British politicians and pundits had turned “Death to the IDF” into “Death to Israelis” before inflating it into “Death to the Jews.”

The attacks on Bob Vylan, though, had the paradoxical effect of encouraging others to speak out. By the end, at least 25 acts at Glastonbury had made statements in solidarity with Gaza. And even as lobbyists and politicians declared Bob Vylan’s career over, streams of their songs and their social media following surged.

Gaza is a turning point. Lisa Nandy and Keir Starmer might have won the round by mobilizing the power and resources of the state to intimidate media institutions, event managers and venues — whose livelihoods depend on their businesses — into avoiding political acts. But they hold no power over the artists and their imaginations, which have only been inflamed by these ham-handed attempts at silencing, just as they hold no power over their audiences’ conscience, which has been stirred by the unfiltered images from Gaza’s killing fields.

For more, please go to the link in our bio.

✍️Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
📷Bobby Vylan of Bob Vylan crowdsurfs in front of the West Holts stage at the Glastonbury music festival. (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

07/07/2025

Ask any foreigner why they first came to Tijuana, and they will likely recount their vision of the American dream, of a plan to traverse the world’s busiest border crossing and journey into the U.S., a place where there is justice, support and security for all, and the chance not only to earn a living for oneself but also to support family back home. But lately, that appeal has dimmed, writes Frankie Mills.

Mills details how Tijuana, once seen mainly as a stopover on the way to the U.S., has increasingly become a permanent destination for migrants from across the globe due to harsher U.S. immigration policies and the growing opportunities and community support available in the city.

As entry points, Mexico City and Mexico’s southern border host some of the country’s largest refugee hubs. But once people have the papers they need to move legally throughout the country, many head north to border towns like Tijuana, undeterred by the violence. But since Trump’s crackdown and declaration that people arriving at the border constituted an “invasion” against which the U.S. needed “protection,” people are forced to come up with a new plan.

Yet Tijuana still holds appeal, and migrants are motivated by both job prospects and being closer to a dream they once had, even if it is not realized and they do not manage to cross over. Mills tells the stories of Tijuana’s residents, and how migrants are shaping the city through businesses, restaurants, cultural fusion, and labor. For an increasing number of migrants, Tijuana is no longer just a stepping stone, but a place to build a life and find a different kind of “American dream.”

For more, please go to the link in our bio.

✍️Frankie Mills
📷A Haitian boy tries to hit a pinata during a celebration in Tijuana, Mexico, in March 2025. (Carlos Moreno/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

07/02/2025

The Houthis and al-Shabab operate on opposite shores of one of the world’s most strategic waterways. Their two campaigns were unfolding separately, but behind the scenes were becoming increasingly intertwined, writes journalist Sammar Khader.

Khader details how the Houthis and al-Shabab have come together in an unexpected alliance, and what that could mean for the rest of the world. Both needed to acquire resources in the face of military pressure, and they struck a deal: The Houthis would supply al-Shabab with weapons and, in return, al-Shabab’s pirates would divert naval patrols’ attention toward themselves, allowing smuggled weapons and shipments to reach Yemen’s Houthi-controlled ports.

At first glance, the relationship seems unlikely, Khader writes. The Houthis have spent years fighting fierce battles against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Sunni Islamists ideologically opposed to the Houthis’ Zaydi Shiism. But in recent years, this dynamic changed.

The two groups quietly exchanged prisoners and, by early 2024, the Houthis were backing AQAP attacks on forces belonging to Yemen’s internationally recognized government, according to the United Nations. Now, the Houthis’ cooperation with al-Shabab, al Qaeda’s East African affiliate, no longer seems far-fetched. What had once been regarded as clandestine cooperation has fast become a global concern, and the U.S. knows it.

For more, please go to the link in our bio.

✍️Sammar Khader
📷Military forces affiliated with Yemen’s Houthis protest against Israeli bombardment of Gaza in Sanaa, Yemen, in May 2025. (Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images)

06/30/2025

“Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” posted President Donald Trump on June 16, 2025. Just like that — in five blunt words. For those of us from Tehran, my hometown, the message was shocking in its coldness and detachment, writes author Asef Bayat.

Israel’s unrelenting bombings have shaken the city, upended its balance and killed hundreds of civilians, including more than two dozen children, such as 7-month-old Zahra Amiri, 7-year-old Mahya Nikzad and 8-year-old gymnast Tara Hajmiri. Those who have survived carry deep psychological scars.

Bayat tells the stories of people in Tehran who refused to leave their homes amid the war, feeling a responsibility to protect their city. “When someone posted a plea for medicine, dozens responded. A car mechanic rode his motorbike across the city, helping stranded drivers on their way to safety. And a restaurant in Shahryar — my old rural district outside Tehran — announced it would serve free meals to a thousand people every night for as long as the war continued,” he writes.

Iranians do not want Israel, the U.S. or any other foreign power coming to “liberate” them. They’ve watched this play out in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and they know how it ends, Bayat writes. No nation can be genuinely freed through the war of a war criminal. Iranians will configure their own emancipation.

For more, please go to the link in our bio.

✍️Asef Bayat
📷Heavy traffic builds up as people attempt to leave Tehran following Israeli airstrikes on June 15, 2025. (Contributor/Getty Images)

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Introducing Newlines

Newlines Magazine, published by the Center for Global Policy, is a forum for the best ideas and writing about the Middle East and beyond.

We specialize in long-form essays, including reportage, arguments, and memoirs, which bring together politics, culture, and history.

The Middle East is central to our focus, with an emphasis on voices that have an intimate relationship with the region. But we aim to include work from or about other parts of the world. Our only requirement is thoughtfulness and good prose.

With Newlines, we aspire to create a platform for original writing and thinking about a complex and often misunderstood and caricatured region. We consider the popular Arab uprisings of 2011 and their turbulent aftermath to be pivotal points of modern history.