Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 265

Why Are So Few Film Critics Female?

When the Golden Globe Award nominations were announced earlier this month, many writers took the opportunity to assess how well women were represented. A preponderance of nominations for Carol aside, there were no women in the screenwriting and directing categories, as Bustle noted, and women of color didn’t crack even the film acting category, according to Indiewire. Check-ups on representation in Hollywood are pretty routine for publications these days, and the fact that journalists haven’t relented, even in a relatively good year for stories about women, is a sign of their crucial role in changing the industry behind the camera. Online media has seemingly become one of female filmmakers’ most tireless advocates.

But in one significant area, entertainment media isn’t doing women in Hollywood any favors. News sites, which now write so often about women in film, still have yet to publish male and female film critics in equal numbers. It’s been noted before that women write just 18 percent of the top reviews and constitute only 20 percent of top critics on Rotten Tomatoes—but it’s also the case that in four of the top film critics’ associations, women don’t even account for a quarter of the overall membership.

Katie Kilkenny Katie Kilkenny

This might all seem a tad esoteric. Do film critics really matter anymore? But research published in the past decade indicates not only that they do, but that, in unison, their reviews can still make or break audience attendance and influence, and even predict, box-office success. Since film critics tend to write about movies helmed by directors of their own sex, it stands to reason that if news organizations want more female filmmakers on feature-length projects, they can start by hiring more women critics.

A brief look at history indicates the drop-off of women in criticism occurred fairly recently. Women were relatively strong in number and influence in film writing until news went online—which means that, to do their part for women in Hollywood, Internet publications will have to act, too.

* * *

Film criticism wasn’t always such a boy’s club. In the 1920s and through World War II, women weren’t welcome covering hard-news topics like politics and international news, but they did find a rare place writing about the moving pictures. At the time, film was considered less prestigious (books and theater being the more highbrow arts), and writing jobs were ideal for homemakers, who could attend press screenings during the day and accept short-term or contract work. As a result, women like Dilys Powell and C.A. Lejeune enjoyed decades-long gigs at prestigious publications (The Sunday Times and The Observer, respectively). Editors liked female reviewers, as several made the assumption that women were softer on films than men, thus endearing their publications to studio ad men. Film criticism, Jerry Roberts writes in The Complete History of Film Criticism, was considered a “suitable domain for women—something for them to do along with ‘sob-sister’ columns and society pages.”

But the joke was on the editors. Film rapidly grew in prestige, and, thus, women critics and writers grew in influence. Some of these writers were even overtly feminist, reviewing movies in ways that challenged Hollywood’s macho culture. In the 1940s and 1950s, Cecelia Ager wrote incisive takes on films like Camille and King Kong, focusing on their female characters. E. Arnot Robertson fixated on films marketed to women, gently mocking sentimental romances while also acknowledging their pleasures. (MGM, so threatened by her review of The Green Years, banned her from future screenings; later, Robertson brought suit. The whole affair cost her a gig at the BBC.)

By the ’60s, two of the biggest voices in film criticism were women. At the New York Herald-Tribune, Judith Crist was banned from 20th Century Fox screenings after panning Cleopatra, a move that made it the fashion for newspapers to “import or create their own hard-to-please reviewers,” according to Roberts. Writing for The New Yorker and others, Pauline Kael became the most famous reviewer in America. Her first book of criticism, I Lost It at the Movies, sold 150,000 copies—unthinkable at the time—and helped make writing books an important source of both revenue and prestige for the critic contingent. Kael’s fight with Andrew Sarris over the “auteur” theory of cinema became film myth.

Controversy and public spars were important for the development of film criticism: Without them, critics wouldn’t have become have been so well-read, or appeared on television and radio to endear themselves to new generations. And the ’80s and ’90s were peak times for the female critic, in terms of the sheer number of them installed in full-time gigs at newspapers, according to Roberts.

The decline of female bylines, however, had its roots in this bubble for film criticism. The representation of women in criticism in the ’80s and ’90s was—thanks in part to the popular work of former writers like Kael and Crist—inflated by an unusually robust demand for film reviewers. But that was already changing as television, a medium seemingly tailored to the homemaker, had become the “nice little job for women” that film once was. At the time, women were also unfortunately positioned for the incipient Internet age. Many of the ’80s and ’90s women critics were employed at mid-sized papers or in less-zeitgeisty metropolitan areas for movies (glaring exceptions include Kael,The New York Times’ Janet Maslin, The Wall Street Journal’s Joy Gould Boyum, and The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson). In 1989, the New York Film Critics’ Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association included only seven women combined.

Film criticism was considered suitable for women—“something for them to do along with ‘sob-sister’ columns and society pages.”

When the print-journalism establishment hit the rocks in the early days of the Internet, and again in the aughts, women suffered. In the late 1990s, mid-sized papers cut in-house film critics and ran film reviews written by the biggies—namely Roger Ebert or Vincent Canby—provided by wire and news services. In the mid-aughts, arts sections took another hit: In 2005, Douglas McLennan famously estimated there were 5,000 positions for people to write about the arts. By 2009, that figure was cut in half. The remaining staff critics were the ones at the most powerful papers—largely, members of the old (typically male) guard. “Those [paid, full-time arts critic] positions have all been locked in while the industry has tanked,” Rebecca Ritzel, a freelance dance critic at The Washington Post, explained. “They’re frozen in time.”

* * *

Prior rigid definitions of film criticism have thawed to some extent since the news industry last faltered. Specialized arts and culture sites have restored access to freelance and amateur critics, while IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, “community” platforms, podcasts, and YouTube offer alternative methods for getting heard. Even old-guard outlets like The New Republic and The Guardian allow staff writers, editors, and freelancers to do reviews in the absence of—or in addition to—specialized critics. And yet, in the post-film critic bubble world, women still aren’t even making up 20 percent of Rotten Tomatoes bylines.

So what are some of the explanations? For one, it’s been suggested that many women feel discouraged from speaking out in such an opinionated way. “Maybe a lot of women don’t feel like they want authority to tell people what to do,” the Wall Street Journal critic Dorothy Rabinowitz told Lydia Magazine in 2014. Rabinowitz’s speculation recalls similar justifications for the dearth of women in opinion and literary writing. (Researchers say the historical inheritance of rarely being encouraged to display knowledge is one of the factors why women are still in the minority in opinion writing.) There’s also the matter of who pitches stories to editors: According to several informal studies, men tend to pitch more than women, which puts women at a disadvantage at any publication that welcomes film commentary from freelancers. Finally, the sociological angle: Some argue that Hollywood, being male-dominated itself, has spawned a macho culture among film writers that may deter women. Nothing the prominent women film critics of past decades weren’t dealing with already, in other words.

In conversation with women film writers themselves, however, an alternate theme emerges: In short, don’t lay all the blame on the critics. Even at online outlets that rely on freelance writing, film publications as a whole aren’t putting enough effort into diversifying their bylines. Niche entertainment sites have the worst record for publishing women—only 9 percent of their critics are women, compared to 20 percent on mainstream news sites. Monica Castillo, a freelance film critic who writes regularly for the International Business Times, said past editors have told her they don’t publish more women because “they don't know women who write about film well [and] that maybe women just aren't that into film.” Another freelance film critic, who wished to remain anonymous to protect her prospects pitching new stories, said that on the basis of one experience with a woman, one editor told her he was “hesitant” to work with women again.

Niche entertainment sites have the worst record for publishing women, who make up only 9 percent of their critics.

The most obvious answer for breaking down the purported misconceptions about women and film writing is to hire more of them. Thankfully, that’s a step that several major news outlets have taken in the past two years. In 2014, Buzzfeed hired the film writer Allison Willmore to be its first-ever critic; just last month, Time hired Stephanie Zacharek to fill Richard Corliss’ vacancy; and The Village Voice

Another Wildfire in Southern California

NIGHT BRUSH FIRE 12/25/15 COPT16 assisting @VCFD w/the wind driven #SolimarFire near Hwy 101/SolimarBeach (

Floods in South America

At least five people have been killed and more than 150,000 displaced after some of the worst flooding in years in Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil that has been caused by a powerful El Niño weather pattern.

Paraguay is the worst affected—the BBC reports around 130,000 people were forced to leave their homes. The flooding also affected the country’s power supply. According to NPR, 125,000 homes in Asuncion, the capital, were without power Friday. President Horacio Cartes declared a state of emergency, a move that authorizes $4 million “to assist flood-hit families.”

In Argentina, around 20,000 people were evacuated due to flooding. An estimated 1,800 were evacuated in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, and thousands more were forced from their homes south of the border in Uruguay—though the BBC reports many in this region have been able to return home.

The weather is expected to dry up on the Brazilian border with Uruguay, but rain is expected to continue in Paraguay and Argentina, with water levels rising.

Another Journalist's Effective Expulsion From China

A French journalist has managed to incite “the outrage of the Chinese people” with an article on Beijing’s relationship with Uighurs, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and will effectively be expelled from China as a consequence.

In the article in question, which was published in the French weekly L’Obs on November 18, Ursula Gauthier called into question the Chinese government’s motives for linking the Paris attacks with violence in China’s Xinjiang region. She maintained that violence in Xinjiang had “nothing in common” with the kind of attacks Paris had witnessed just days earlier—a view the Chinese government called sympathetic to terrorism.

At issue is Beijing’s complicated relationship with the Xinjiang autonomous region. The Chinese government views the sometimes violent unrest among ethnic Uighurs as the work of Islamist separatists. But the Uighurs say Beijing restricts their movement, adding they are frustrated by the economic development brought about by settlement by Han Chinese.

Beijing maintains the violence in Xinjiang is a symptom of global terrorism, but many human rights groups and scholars have a different view. According to the Washington Post these groups and scholars believe that “what's happening in China’s far northwest is less about global jihad than China's suppression of its Uighur population.”

This is the line that Gauthier took in her report as well. She focused on a September 18 knife attack perpetrated on ethnic Han miners in Xinjiang, and revealed that Chinese media did not report the attacks until after the Paris attacks two months later. That’s when the official report depicted the Chinese struggle against violence in Xinjiang as being part of a global battle against terrorism. Gauthier’s article questioned this narrative.

The announcement that Gauthier’s press credentials will not be renewed is the culmination of a monthlong onslaught n the Chinese media against her. According to The New York Times, “her article was denounced in editorials in the state-owned news media and publicly rebuked by a government spokeswoman, and she was subjected to a torrent of online criticism that was often vulgar.”

Gauthier has called the accusations against her “absurd” and says she believes her expulsion is "only meant to deter foreign correspondents in the future in Beijing." The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China said in a statement it is “appalled” by the decision of the Foreign Ministry, and called the accusation that Gauthier supports terrorism “a particularly egregious personal and professional affront with no basis in fact."

Gauthier, who has reported from Beijing since 2009, told the AP on Friday she is “prepared to leave China” — if and when she does she will be the first foreign journalist expelled from the country since Al Jazeera’s Melissa Chan in 2012.

Southern Storms: Birmingham Is Hit

A tornado struck Birmingham, Alabama, on Friday, downing tree limbs, causing flooding, and trapping some people under debris, officials said.

  

A few pictures from Jefferson Avenue tornado damage pic.twitter.com/lIelfFxrEd

— City of Birmingham (@cityofbhamal) December 26, 2015

The twister touched down at about 5 p.m. local time (6 p.m. ET), prompting a warning from the National Weather Service.

12/26 215AM: flooding threats cont. w/ dense fog SE. Avoid travel 2nite. Details here: https://t.co/GYnRRqfc7u #alwx pic.twitter.com/cZZ2MFgwTL

— NWS Birmingham (@NWSBirmingham) December 26, 2015

The City of Birmingham reported that the storm downed trees, caused severe flooding, trapped some residents under debris. Several people were rescued from their cars, the city said. Lt. Sean Edwards, a Birmingham police spokesman, told the AP several people were taken to hospitals for treatment of minor injuries. As of Saturday morning, 2,800 people were without power, Alabama Power said. The figure on Friday night was 10,000.

The worst of the storms may be over, but flooding continues to be an issue and there still may be some scattered thunderstorms in the area.

On Thursday, Governor Robert Bentley declared a state of emergency after the severe weather. Over the past week, storms have crisscrossed the South, leaving 15 people dead across Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The storms are unusual for this time of the year, but not unprecedented.

Tornadoes in southeast Mississippi at this time last year killed four people.

Although the East Coast and parts of the South are seeing record high temperatures for this time of the year, a major winter storm is expected Saturday and Sunday from the southern Rockies to the southern plains.

The Case Against Colorblind Casting

Gods of Egypt, a fantasy-action epic, came under fire recently for casting white actors including Gerard Butler and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to play ancient Egyptians. While the director Alex Proyas and the production company Lionsgate have apologized, their words fall somewhat flat coming just two years after Ridley Scott’s Exodus faced similar criticism. In an interview with GQ, one of the film’s actors, Chadwick Boseman, tried to respectfully defend Gods of Egypt, but ended up noting a depressing truth about Hollywood: “People don't make $140 million movies starring black and brown people.”  

On the surface, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which has a budget far exceeding $140 million, seems to contradict Boseman’s point. Its director, J.J. Abrams, has received considerable praise for casting a mix of diverse and relatively new faces including Daisy Ridley and John Boyega. Boyega, who is black, joins the more experienced Oscar Isaac, an actor of Cuban and Guatemalan ancestry who plays the fighter pilot Poe Dameron. Having earned considerable acclaim in recent years for his character work, Isaac can be seen as a colorblind-casting success story: His biggest roles have had nothing to do with his race, and have vaulted him to a level of stardom that few Latino actors have achieved.

But Isaac’s career also brings up uncomfortable questions about the merits of colorblind casting, which has been highlighted as a way to make Hollywood more diverse. Film (and pop culture in general) has held up a mirror to white men for so long that the mere presence of people of color—especially in a blockbuster film like Star Wars—is regarded as progressive. Colorblind casting might land a few promising actors prestigious roles, but it isn’t a sustainable strategy: It neither addresses the systemic problems that exists behind the camera nor does it compel Hollywood to tell more racially aware stories.

It would be nice to believe that someone as talented as Isaac could have done as well without colorblind casting or an ability to be seen as “ethnically flexible.” Isaac has steadily increased his profile in recent years by bringing intensity and intelligence to vastly different roles. His breakthrough performance as a folk singer in the 2013 Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis earned him a Golden Globe nomination. This year, Isaac played an obsessive bro-genius who creates artificial intelligence in Ex Machina and a belabored mayor dealing with housing desegregation in HBO’s Show Me A Hero. In each of these roles, Isaac’s ethnicity is a non-issue, perhaps freeing him from the stereotypical expectations many Latino actors face.

Colorblind casting might land a few promising actors prestigious roles, but it isn’t a sustainable strategy.

But his success hasn’t come without compromises. Isaac is open about the choices he’s made in his career including dropping his last name, Hernández. “Starting out as an actor, you immediately worry about being pigeonholed or typecast,” he said to the magazine In. “I don’t want to just go up for the dead body, the gangster, the bandolero, whatever. I don’t want to be defined by someone else’s idea of what an Oscar Hernández should be playing.” His tendency to play characters of different backgrounds extends to his new Star Wars character, whom Isaac has described as “non-ethnic.” Notably, he didn’t say “white” or “racially ambiguous,” instead referring to his character’s absence of ethnicity.

Which fits in neatly with the idea that colorblind casting is the easiest and most visible way to address the need for diversity within Hollywood. Indeed, the practice has led to great, high-profile performances including Morgan Freeman’s Red in The Shawshank Redemption, the majority of Will Smith’s career from the mid-1990s onward, Eartha Kitt as Catwoman in the kitschy 1960s Batman television series, and most recently, Laverne Cox taking on the role of Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. On a more political level, colorblind casting exists as a hopeful emblem for how many wish the world to be: post-racial. The powerhouse showrunner Shonda Rhimes, who’s been extensively praised for her use of colorblind casting, has said that she doesn’t write with race in mind. In the early days of Grey’s Anatomy, Rhimes explained her reasoning by saying, “My friends and I don't sit around and discuss race ... We’re post-civil rights, post-feminist babies, and we take it for granted we live in a diverse world.” And yet, with minorities making up a small fraction of directors and other key behind-the-scenes roles, it’s hard to know how seriously the industry cares about improving representation in general.

In the face of Hollywood’s deeply entrenched racism, colorblind casting seems like a solution with broad appeal and an actual history of producing great performances. But its downsides go beyond the fact that white actors can end up taking roles for non-white characters, as in Aloha and Pan, or that productions can slot minority actors into secondary roles and get praised for “diversity.” It’s simply counterintuitive to argue that problems related to race can be fixed by ignoring race altogether. In practice, colorblind casting isn’t a form of acceptance or progress: It can just as easily be erasure wrapped up as benevolence.

Colorblind casting exists as a hopeful emblem for how many wish the world to be: post-racial.

At the heart of colorblind casting is the belief that race doesn’t affect character. If Hollywood’s history is any indication, race only really matters in mainstream stories when it comes to historical dramas, biopics, and films explicitly about that theme. Given its demographic makeup, the film industry struggles to imagine the experiences of people of color beyond strife and bigotry, with a few notable exceptions. When looking at the fact that acclaimed films like Her only have people of color talking for 46 seconds despite taking place in a futuristic Los Angeles, it’s tempting to look at the casting of actors of color like Isaac as immense progress. But if the cost of this is perpetuating disinterest in stories about people of color then we need start to question if this is progress at all.   

On another note, Isaac’s career shows how casting non-white actors in roles that sidestep race can lead to a disturbing tension between the story onscreen and reality. Alex Garland’s directorial debut, Ex Machina, follows Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson), an unassuming programmer at a Google-like company tasked with helping the hard-drinking playboy CEO, Nathan (Isaac), figure out if his beautiful android has artificial intelligence. There’s a pivotal moment later in the film when Caleb discovers footage of Nathan’s other attempts to create A.I. (all housed in the bodies of women). When I first saw Ex Machina my stomach lurched when the only black android, who is naked and lifeless, is revealed to have no face. Another Asian android wants so desperately to escape sthat he beats against the wall of her prison until her arms shatter. Even more troubling is that Kyoto, Nathan’s Japanese android assistant, embodies a slew of stereotypes about Asian women being voiceless and servile. The fact that the film is so self-aware about its most brutalized characters being robotic women of color becomes even more unnerving considering the audience is expected to forget Isaac is himself Latino.

The film industry struggles to imagine the experiences of people of color beyond strife and bigotry.

Creating interesting roles for actors of color is a multi-layered challenge that can’t be solved by colorblind casting alone. But it’s not an impossible one. For screenwriters, ignoring the way race, culture, and ethnicity affect character is a failure of imagination. Film might look to television for cues on how to acknowledge the experiences of people of color without making them the central theme. This year, standouts include CBS’s Supergirl, Cinemax’s The Knick, The CW’s Jane the Virgin, and ABC’s Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder. Additionally, the Golden Globes nominations make it clear that actors of color receive more recognition on TV than they do in film.

There needs to be a broader middle ground for actors of color—between the 12 Years a Slave and the Rocky Horror remake, between stories where race is everything and stories where it’s not even an afterthought. Until producers, directors, and writers take race into account with both story and casting, the systemic racism of the industry will remain, and the rarity of seeing compelling actors like Isaac in powerful leading roles will remain just that—a rarity.  

A Syrian Rebel Leader Is Killed

Updated on December 26 at 12:41 p.m. ET

The Army of Islam, one of the main rebel groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has a new leader, a day after its chief was killed in an airstrike near Damascus, dealing a major blow to the groups that are fighting the Syrian military.

The group appointed Essam al-Buwaydhani, a field commander known as Abu Hammam, as its new leader, The Associated Press reports. He replaces Zahran Allouch, who was killed in Friday’s airstrike that was claimed by the Syrian government. Two other senior rebels, one from Ahrar al-Sham and the other from  Faylaq al-Rahman, were also killed in the operation against the headquarters of the Army of Syria.

The deaths are a setback to the rebels groups that are fighting both Assad and the Islamic State group. Earlier this month, the Saudi-backed Army of Syria participated in a meeting of Syrian opposition groups in an attempt to choose a delegation to negotiate with the government’s representatives. Assad’s government regards the rebels as terrorists and had said it would not negotiate with them, though on Thursday it appeared to soften that stand. It’s unclear how Allouch’s death will affect either position.

Allouch, a former prisoner, was released by Assad in 2011 as part of a general amnesty. He joined the Syrian opposition and established the Army of Islam, which fast became one of the best organized groups. It controls large parts of eastern Ghouta and Douma, near Damascus, and is fighting both Assad as well as the Islamic State.

Allouch’s death is a boost to Assad, who, bolstered by Russian airstrikes and ground support from Iran and Hezbollah, the Shiite militia group from Lebanon, has slowly clawed back territory from the rebels. The nearly five-year-long Syrian civil war pits Assad against a range of rebel groups, ranging in their ideologies from secular, moderate Islamist to ultraconservative Islamist. Allouch, who was believed to be in his mid-40s, was no moderate. The AP points out:

Critics accused him of sectarian politics and brutal tactics similar to that of the Islamic State group.

He is blamed by other opposition groups for the December 2013 disappearance of four prominent activists including human rights activist and lawyer Razan Zaytouni. He denies holding them although they were kidnapped from an area under Army of Islam control.

Earlier this year, after government airstrikes on the suburbs of Damascus killed dozens, Allouch placed some Alawites that his group was holding in cages in public areas and markets, using them as human shields to try to prevent further airstrikes. Men and women were put in large metal cages on pick-up trucks that drove around Damascus suburbs.

The Army of Islam, like some other groups fighting Assad, is backed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, both key allies of the West. The Syrian conflict, which has spawned a massive humanitarian disaster, is complicated by the presence of the Islamic State group. Both Assad’s government and some rebels groups are fighting it, while simultaneously fighting one another. The group, which is alternately known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, controls large parts of territory across Syria and Iraq.

The Russian military presence in Syria began ostensibly as an operation against the Islamic State, but it became quickly apparent that Moscow was targeting other groups allied against Assad, including those backed by the West and its partners. Indeed, while Syria claimed responsibility for Friday’s airstrike that killed Allouch, many rebel groups said it was a Russian operation that killed him.

“The martyrdom of Sheikh Zahran Allouch should be a turning point in the history of the revolution and rebel groups should realize they are facing a war of extermination by (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s regime,” said Labib Nahhas, a senior member of Ahrar al-Sham, was quoted as saying by the AP.

The AP adds:

His death may have contributed — at least partially — to a delay in an agreed-on pullout of thousands of militants and their families from neighborhoods on the southern edge of Damascus.

The pullout, supposed to start on Saturday, was to involve mainly militants from the Islamic State group who earlier this year overran the Yarmouk area, which is home to a Palestinian refugee camp and has been hotly contested and fought-over in the war, and two adjacent neighborhoods.

A Palestinian official in Damascus, Anwar Abdulhadi, told The Associated Press that the withdrawal is being delayed for "logistical reasons." But Lebanon's Hezbollah-run TV station Al Manar said that Allouch was a key figure in arranging the rare deal, and that his assassination has delayed its implementation. The report could not be immediately confirmed by the AP.

A Syrian Rebel Leader Is Mourned

Updated on December 26 at 12:41 p.m. ET

The Army of Islam, one of the main rebel groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has a new leader, a day after its chief was killed in an airstrike near Damascus, dealing a major blow to the groups that are fighting the Syrian military.

The group appointed Essam al-Buwaydhani, a field commander known as Abu Hammam, as its new leader, The Associated Press reports. He replaces Zahran Allouch, who was killed in Friday’s airstrike that was claimed by the Syrian government. Two other senior rebels, one from Ahrar al-Sham and the other from  Faylaq al-Rahman, were also killed in the operation against the headquarters of the Army of Syria.

The deaths are a setback to the rebels groups that are fighting both Assad and the Islamic State group. Earlier this month, the Saudi-backed Army of Syria participated in a meeting of Syrian opposition groups in an attempt to choose a delegation to negotiate with the government’s representatives. Assad’s government regards the rebels as terrorists and had said it would not negotiate with them, though on Thursday it appeared to soften that stand. It’s unclear how Allouch’s death will affect either position.

Allouch, a former prisoner, was released by Assad in 2011 as part of a general amnesty. He joined the Syrian opposition and established the Army of Islam, which fast became one of the best organized groups. It controls large parts of eastern Ghouta and Douma, near Damascus, and is fighting both Assad as well as the Islamic State.

Allouch’s death is a boost to Assad, who, bolstered by Russian airstrikes and ground support from Iran and Hezbollah, the Shiite militia group from Lebanon, has slowly clawed back territory from the rebels. The nearly five-year-long Syrian civil war pits Assad against a range of rebel groups, ranging in their ideologies from secular, moderate Islamist to ultraconservative Islamist. Allouch, who was believed to be in his mid-40s, was no moderate. The AP points out:

Critics accused him of sectarian politics and brutal tactics similar to that of the Islamic State group.

He is blamed by other opposition groups for the December 2013 disappearance of four prominent activists including human rights activist and lawyer Razan Zaytouni. He denies holding them although they were kidnapped from an area under Army of Islam control.

Earlier this year, after government airstrikes on the suburbs of Damascus killed dozens, Allouch placed some Alawites that his group was holding in cages in public areas and markets, using them as human shields to try to prevent further airstrikes. Men and women were put in large metal cages on pick-up trucks that drove around Damascus suburbs.

The Army of Islam, like some other groups fighting Assad, is backed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, both key allies of the West. The Syrian conflict, which has spawned a massive humanitarian disaster, is complicated by the presence of the Islamic State group. Both Assad’s government and some rebels groups are fighting it, while simultaneously fighting one another. The group, which is alternately known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, controls large parts of territory across Syria and Iraq.

The Russian military presence in Syria began ostensibly as an operation against the Islamic State, but it became quickly apparent that Moscow was targeting other groups allied against Assad, including those backed by the West and its partners. Indeed, while Syria claimed responsibility for Friday’s airstrike that killed Allouch, many rebel groups said it was a Russian operation that killed him.

“The martyrdom of Sheikh Zahran Allouch should be a turning point in the history of the revolution and rebel groups should realize they are facing a war of extermination by (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s regime,” said Labib Nahhas, a senior member of Ahrar al-Sham, was quoted as saying by the AP.

The AP adds:

His death may have contributed — at least partially — to a delay in an agreed-on pullout of thousands of militants and their families from neighborhoods on the southern edge of Damascus.

The pullout, supposed to start on Saturday, was to involve mainly militants from the Islamic State group who earlier this year overran the Yarmouk area, which is home to a Palestinian refugee camp and has been hotly contested and fought-over in the war, and two adjacent neighborhoods.

A Palestinian official in Damascus, Anwar Abdulhadi, told The Associated Press that the withdrawal is being delayed for "logistical reasons." But Lebanon's Hezbollah-run TV station Al Manar said that Allouch was a key figure in arranging the rare deal, and that his assassination has delayed its implementation. The report could not be immediately confirmed by the AP.

A Blast in Nigeria

Dozens of people who were waiting to buy fuel to prepare their Christmas meals were killed in southeastern Nigeria when a tanker truck exploded outside an industrial plant.

It’s unclear how many people were killed in Thursday’s blast in the city of Nnewi, in Anambra State, but The Associated Press and Reuters reported as many as 100 fatalities. The Nigerian president said “tens” were killed, but did not elaborate. Other accounts provided far lower figures. The New York Times cited a local police spokesman as saying the 100 figure was “very wrong.”

“I have been to the scene of the incident, many people were not affected because the gas plant is situated in an isolated area, so only few people there were killed by the explosion,” the spokesman told the Times.

The blaze that followed the explosion took more than three hours to extinguish.

“My heart and prayers go out to these grieving families at this difficult and painful moment,” President Muhammadu Buhari said Friday in a statement, quoted by Nigerian and other media.

The region where the blast occurred is predominantly Christian, and Buhari called the explosion an “unfortunate tragedy on Christmas eve.”

The Vanguard newspaper reported the explosion was triggered when a truck that dispensed cooking gas began to discharge it without waiting for it to cool. Such accidents are common in Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer.

The explosion hit the Inter Corp Oil Limited LPG plant, which is owned by the Chikason Group, a Nigerian conglomerate.

A Papal Message of Peace

Pope Francis used his Christmas message to call for peace in parts of the world ravaged by violence and terrorism.

Addressing the crowd at the Vatican from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica with his third Urbi et Orbi remarks on Christmas Day, Francis called for peace in Syria, which is in the midst of a brutal civil war; Libya, which has been in turmoil since the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi; Iraq, Yemen, and sub-Saharan Africa. He said the atrocities in those places “reap numerous victims, cause immense suffering and do not even spare the historical and cultural patrimony of entire peoples.” That’s an apparent reference to the Islamic State’s destruction of historic sites that it controls.

“My thoughts also turn to those affected by brutal acts of terrorism, particularly the recent massacres which took place in Egyptian airspace, in Beirut, Paris, Bamako and Tunis,” Francis said.

The pope also referred to tensions in the Holy Land, where, he said, “tensions and violence persist, and peace remains a gift to be implored and built.”

“May Israelis and Palestinians resume direct dialogue and reach an agreement which will enable the two peoples to live together in harmony, ending a conflict which has long set them at odds, with grave repercussions for the entire region,” Francis said.

As John Allen over at Crux, the Boston Globe’s website that covers the Catholic Church, notes: Francis has taken a personal interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In June 2014, he invited their then-presidents to a prayer at the Vatican; also attending was the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople.

The pope, an outspoken advocate for refugees and migrants fleeing into Europe and elsewhere, also urged the world to be more welcoming to the newcomers. Europe is divided over the more than 1 million people who have entered the continent this year. The pope said many of the newcomers are “fleeing extreme poverty or war, traveling all too often in inhumane conditions and not infrequently at the risk of their lives.”

“May God repay all those, both individuals and states, who generously work to provide assistance and welcome to the numerous migrants and refugees, helping them to build a dignified future for themselves and for their dear ones, and to be integrated in the societies which receive them,” he said.

Francis said prayed for peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and South Sudan, as well as Ukraine, and hoped that Colombia continues its “commitment to working for the desired peace.”