a better human being than I could ever hope to be

Another link I've had sitting around for a couple of weeks: Abd el-Kader and the Massacre of Damascus.

Read the whole thing. Yes, it's long, and we live in an age of attention-deficit disorder, where any blog post longer than a few paragraphs threatens to trigger a tl;dr response. But you need to go through it to grasp the enormity of this man's life: not just what Abd el-Kader accomplished in his fifteen years fighting the French (notice how many times he wrestled them into stalemates or su...