The biggest sign, which Foreign Policy’s Mitch Prothero calls “the equivalent of blowing up the Death Star,” is clearly the July 18 assassination bombing in Damascus that killed several key members of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, including Defense Minister Daoud Rajha, Deputy Defense Minister Assef Shawkat, and Assistant Vice President Hassan Turkmani. The attack prompted “unrestrained glee” among Syria’s rebels, as it showed they had a much longer reach – into the heart of the Assad regime – than international observers had guessed.
The most significant death, writes the Monitor’s Nick Blanford, is probably Mr. Shawkat’s. While Mr. Rajha, a Christian, headed the defense ministry, Shawkat was Assad’s brother-in-law, a member of the Alawite sect that controls Syria, and a key enforcer for the regime. His death “suggests that no one in the regime is immune from the potential reach of the armed opposition, a grim fact that must send a shudder up the collective spine of the Syrian leadership.”
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
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