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Arbella Bet-Shlimon

@abshlimon.bsky.social
843 followers 569 following 146 posts

Historian (Iraq + elsewhere), Assyrian, Seattle | author, City of Black Gold | latest: “Propaganda of the Victims” (doi.org/10.1017/rms.2026.10037) | personal account | she/هي/ܗܝ

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Reposted by Arbella Bet-Shlimon
Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Greatest trick AI leaders have pulled is convincing many people—especially influential people in govt, media, and business—that their software is intelligent, independent, yet never culpable. Humans build it, humans deploy it, but no one bears responsibility for the things that happen when they do.
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 19/09/2026
Innocent civilians are being murdered with dirt-cheap and essentially impossible to ban tiny flying robots at shocking numbers globally (read our piece below). We have REAL, CURRENT cyberpunk horrors to deal with right now, and we don’t need to waste our time on hypothetical AI basilisks.
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Last week, someone wrote “Kill Amalek” at the bus stop closest to the bench commemorating Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi on the UW campus. It got painted over, so they came back this week and wrote ”Exterminate Amalek”
KILL AMALEK written in black sharpie on a bus stop post. There is a green lawn in the background with Ayşenur’s bench adjoining it (not clearly visible from afar)Same location and post six days later. It’s been painted over. EXTERMINATE AMALEK is written in the same handwriting with the same black pen, now higher upClose up of Ayşenur’s bench (which is in the distant background of the previous photos). The commemorative plaque reads: Beloved daughter, sister, wife, aunt, mentor, and friend / your love and bravery lives on in the fight for justice / Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, 1998-2024
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Amy Stanley @astanley711.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
What is the point of trying so hard to maintain your academic freedom if you’re going to abandon the entire educational enterprise, sacrifice the undergrads to the tech companies, and then light your reputation on fire?
thecrimson.com
Harvard Humanities Faculty Push Back on Deming’s Call for AI Use in Writing Courses | The Harvard Crimson
Harvard faculty in the humanities and social sciences expressed broad concern over an email Harvard College Dean David J. Deming sent students Wednesday suggesting that artificial intelligence be inte...
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Stacy Fahrenthold @sfahrenthold.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
The American Historical Association hired a lobbying firm to help silence member advocacy on Palestine. In this essay, Adam Rzepka covers @historians.org's relationship w/ Thorn Run Partners, its deep ethical conflicts, & the advocacy crisis AHA has thrust upon us. www.chronicle.com/article/a-sc...
chronicle.com
Opinion | A Scholarly Association’s Secret Washington Playbook
Did the American Historical Association ask a corporate lobbying firm for advice on how to silence its members?
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🍉نرمين @nerminelsherif.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
If you’re curious about how queen Elizabeth appears as a food blogger ranking Cairo’s best Koshari carts, or how Al-share’ beats Bashar Al-assad à la WWE style, check my latest article on AI Slop and the Precarious Politics of Digital Kitsch with @merip.bsky.social www.merip.org/2026/08/the-...
merip.org
Arab AI Slop and the Precarious Politics of Digital Kitsch
As Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the subsequent regional war reshape the Arab internet, AI-generated slop has emerged as a new form of digital kitsch and political fantasy fueled by precarious labor.
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Sholto David @sholtodavid.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
A tool used to rephrase plagiarised text changed "final solution" to "mass killing of an ethnic group" in a chemistry paper. Now retracted thanks to a PubPeer user who spotted this. pubpeer.com/publications...
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
proofs 👀
Photograph of a computer screen featuring uncorrected pdf proof of Chapter 2, Revolutionary Possibility and the Bounds of Imperial Subterfuge in Iraq, by Arbella Bet-Shlimon
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
bsky.app/profile/absh...
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Mariam and I talked about why it’s important (and hard) to write about genocide denial in the academy, how Assyrian issues are treated by our fields, and more. It’s on YouTube now for anyone who wants to watch: youtu.be/T6mNxrS0w20?...
youtu.be
In Conversation with Dr. Arbella Bet-Shlimon
YouTube video by Assyrian Studies Association
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
there is clearly some psychological thing going on here. If anyone’s researched it let me know and I will read the paper (without an AI summary) (only if the paper was not AI generated)
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Something I haven’t seen discussed much is how some people are drawn to LLMs—if they’re ”anti-AI,” they see them as a temptation to be resisted—while others (me) find them repulsive and wouldn’t use them even if personal and professional norms allowed or encouraged it
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Elizabeth Alsop @elizabethalsop.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
when cuts like this happen at Harvard of all places it at least clarifies that the motives are ideological not financial — not that it’s any consolation
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
the way I cackled at this, ohhhh boy
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James Ryan @jdryan08.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
I was happy to contribute a couple comments to UW’s student newspaper on the zombie-Title VI NRC competition that is now underway after the administration of the funds moved from ED to State. www.dailyuw.com/article/jack...
dailyuw.com
Jackson School reapplies for federal funding after $2.5 million worth of allocated funds were withheld last year
Jackson School reapplies for federal funding after $2.5 million worth of allocated funds were withheld last year
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Kevin Gannon (now a Moo Deng fan account) @thetattooedprof.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
*These* are the higher education stories that matter, not some half-assed report farted out by a group of faculty cranks at ivy and ivy-adjacent universities
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
The book cover features the painting “Mother Earth” by legendary Iraqi artist Layla al-Attar, killed in a U.S. airstrike in 1993
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Iraq is a site of contested sovereignties and a barometer for global crises. I’m excited to have contributed to this forthcoming volume (Edinburgh, 2026) that theorizes from Iraq to understand land, law, politics, and to imagine something better 🧿 edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-living-...
edinburghuniversitypress.com
Living Iraq
Living Iraq
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
(If you can’t make the webinar, it will be recorded and posted on YouTube!)
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Here’s the article itself icymi www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
“Propaganda of the Victims”: Atrocity Denial, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Disparagement of Assyrians in Middle East Studies | Review of Middle East Studies | Cambridge Core
“Propaganda of the Victims”: Atrocity Denial, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Disparagement of Assyrians in Middle East Studies
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Well, I’m going to talk in public about my latest article—why it’s important to write critiques like this, the challenges, what editors tell us to leave out—with the great Mariam Georgis. Register here if you’re interested 🙏🏽 us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Register for Our Next Webinar
Dr. Arbella Bet-Shlimon
Dr. Mariam Georgis,
Discussant
Dr. Nahrain Bet Younadam,
Moderator
Wednesday, July 29
11:00am PDT | 2:00pm EDT
How did the story of Assyrians, Indigenous to and an intrinsic part of the fabric of the so-called Middle East, begin to disappear in dominant academic narratives? Join Assyrian Studies Association for a conversation between Dr. Arbella Bet-Shlimon and Dr. Mariam Georgis about the challenges and urgency in critiquing dominant modes of scholarly inquiry about Assyrians in light of the recent publication of Dr. Bet-Shlimon's article, "Propaganda of the Victims': Atrocity Denial, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Disparagement of Assyrians in Middle East Studies" published in Review of Middle East Studies this year.
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Laleh Khalili @lalehkhalili.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Friends of Exeter, former students and alumni, can you please sign the petition below: www.change.org/p/stop-redun...
change.org
Sign the Petition
Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
I love how every recipe with spinach in it is like “You need 1 assload of spinach. If you do not own a donkey, take a wheelbarrow to the grocery store. Back home, divide into 17 giant bunches and sauté each one at a time until wilted. After sautéing you will have 1.5 cups [225 g]”
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elia ayoub @ayoub.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Mona Khalil, Lebanon’s most well-known sea turtle conservationist, died of her wounds today after being injured by an Israeli strike I feel sick
MARINE ECOLOGIST MONA
KHALIL HAS PASSED AWAY
AFTER SUSTAINING INJURIES IN AN ISRAELI AIRSTRIKEMona and a turtle in Lebanon
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Local Observer 🇮🇶🇵🇸🍉 @observer46664.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
One thing that will never be not terrifying to me as a woman is how quickly and decisively things can deteriorate in terms of human rights and democracy and basic human decency. Like with women's rights, all it took is a VERY right-wing parliament and now it's legal to marry female children in Iraq.
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Thank you for reading 🙏🏽
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Stacy Fahrenthold @sfahrenthold.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Reading now: Arbella Bet-Shlimon's necessary challenge to one of Middle East studies' most enduring forms of racism: the disparagement of Assyrians. The piece traces the genealogy of atrocity denial and how scholarly practices reify racism. Will be assigning this! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
“Propaganda of the Victims”: Atrocity Denial, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Disparagement of Assyrians in Middle East Studies | Review of Middle East Studies | Cambridge Core
“Propaganda of the Victims”: Atrocity Denial, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Disparagement of Assyrians in Middle East Studies
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Daniel Beekman @dbeekman.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
Her UW voice teacher said Blessing was caring and funny, with a dry sense of humor. She could sing “pretty much anything,” from Mozart to musical theater, and was dedicated to her music studies even while pursuing a scientific dream of researching hurricanes. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...
seattletimes.com
UW student Juniper Blessing, 19, remembered as ‘full of life’
Those who knew Juniper Blessing, the 19-year-old trans woman killed in her off-campus housing building, said she had a powerful, moving voice.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 17/05/2026
Trump has destroyed America’s knowledge infrastructure. This is an opportunity for knowledge workers across disciplines-natural science, social science, humanities-to see their interests in rebuilding this infrastructure on democratic grounds as connected.
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Michelle Cyca @michellecyca.com · 08/05/2026
personally I think it's a very big deal that the Canada bureau chief for the @nytimes.com — certainly one of the highest-paid journalists in the country — asked an unspecified "AI tool" what Poilievre said & published its AI-hallucinated quotes in her reporting.
Editors’ Note: May 1, 2026
This article was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned.  The article now accurately quotes from a speech delivered by Mr. Poilievre in April. He said, “My personal opinion is that when a member of Parliament goes back on the word they made to their constituents and switches parties, constituents should be able to petition to throw them out and have a byelection. That would put the people back in charge of our democracy rather than having dirty backroom Liberal deals by Mark Carney determine our destiny.” He did not refer to politicians who changed allegiances as turncoats in that speech.
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ali alkhatib @ali-alkhatib.com · 06/05/2026
we're getting pretty close
reddit.com
From the rutgers community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the rutgers community
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Unfortunately it’s only been released as a Google doc, but the link from this page might work? www.ghscn.org/letters-and-...
ghscn.org
GHSCN - Letters and Statements
April 29, 2026 - Letter to Le Moyne College in support of Mosab Abu Toha
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
The steering committee of the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network writes in defense of Mosab Abu Toha, a writer from Gaza who has been smeared absurdly by the president of a university for describing a genocide as a genocide drive.google.com/file/d/101OZ...
drive.google.com
Le Moyne letter 4-29-26.pdf
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Juan Cole @jricole.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Protesting U of Washington’s firing of Prof. Aria Fani as Middle East Center Director
dlvr.it
Protesting U of Washington’s firing of Prof. Aria Fani as Middle East Center Director
He described the war on Iran as a war on the Global Majority and the rules-based international order, and called Zionism a cancer
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
If you’re interested, I invite you to read the whole article (open access!): www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
“Propaganda of the Victims”: Atrocity Denial, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Disparagement of Assyrians in Middle East Studies | Review of Middle East Studies | Cambridge Core
“Propaganda of the Victims”: Atrocity Denial, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Disparagement of Assyrians in Middle East Studies
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
My own prior work, especially my book about Kirkuk, takes a critical angle on ethnicities and nationalisms. But in case that critique has been misunderstood, I’d like it to be read through this lens:
A good critique of ethnic nationalism is one that is conscious of the political work of knowledge production. Conceptualizing ethnicity and nationalism as modern formations forged in particular contexts allows us to view them as processes contingent on recent circumstances rather than as primordial categories. This understanding opens the possibility of modifying those concepts—or, where necessary, abandoning them for new ways of being in community—to end violence perpetrated along ethnic and national fault lines. The critical study of ethnicity and nationalism should, in other words, aim to help dispossessed people live freely. It must accountfor differences in power between dominant, oppressive ethnic nationalisms that undergird state-sponsored mass violence and the communal mobilizations of those resisting
elimination. It is not a bludgeon to coerce minoritized people to adopt state-endorsed descriptors like "Iraqi Christian" that erase their language and heritage because their own peoplehood is allegedly bigoted. It is not a game in which academics prove how clever they are by locating discontinuities among the ancestors of genocide survivors to win squabbles they choose to pick with those they baselessly deride as nationalists. That is not what Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm did, and it is not what anyone citing them today should do. That is an amoral and intellectually vapid exercise.
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
The systematic mistreatment of Assyrians in Middle East studies exposes longstanding flaws in how academics critique ethnicity and nationalism and shows how arguments favored by genocide deniers continue to be repeated even among those who are not genocide deniers.
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
April 24th is remembrance day for the Ottoman Empire’s WWI genocide of Armenians and Assyrians—which, for decades, was routinely denied by academic historians. My new article in Review of Middle East Studies documents and explains one of the legacies of that denial www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
“Propaganda of the Victims”: Atrocity Denial, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Disparagement of Assyrians in Middle East Studies | Review of Middle East Studies | Cambridge Core
“Propaganda of the Victims”: Atrocity Denial, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Disparagement of Assyrians in Middle East Studies
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Thank you 🙏🏽
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
“Given the lack of any explanation for Fani’s dismissal or even an initial acknowledgement, we are left to conclude that what was presented as a procedural intervention was in fact an act of academic censorship motivated by ideological objection to Fani’s statements.” www.dailyuw.com/article/on-t...
dailyuw.com
On the Termination of Aria Fani from the University of Washington Middle East Center Directorship
On the Termination of Aria Fani from the University of Washington Middle East Center Directorship
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
“I want students to be resilient. It's a very difficult time right now to have hope. But we must exercise our agency. We can't just be passive and let warmongers destroy everything on our planet. We must fight back. This is an existential fight.“ www.dailyuw.com/article/remo...
dailyuw.com
Removed Jackson School Middle East Center director speaks out
Removed Jackson School Middle East Center director speaks out
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Andy Carvin @acarv.in · 09/04/2026
“There was a 90-year-old who I just left a bit ago. He passed away from his wounds … There was nothing we could do...These are civilians who, without any warning, their whole apartment building was flattened. So you can imagine the severity of injuries that we’re getting.”
theguardian.com
The deadliest 10 minutes in decades: Lebanese reel from Israeli strikes that killed hundreds
Beirut residents and officials say civilians were main casualties in operation that bombed 100-plus targets in 10 minutes
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Qoboe - 3d comms open @qoboe.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Don't taco Tuesday this shit. Millions of people spent the day wondering if they would get vaporized, and no one in our government stood up to him. Nothing cutesy about it.
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WOR$T GIRL IN ACADEMIA @medievaliste.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
It’s actually not okay to pay someone with a PhD $2500 to teach a college course
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Arbella Bet-Shlimon @abshlimon.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
So well deserved! I assigned chapter 4 of EMPIRE OF AI to my history honors students in the fall—about, among other things, the history of the concept of AI—and they really connected with it. The whole book is great.
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Travis @someforeignfield.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
It's never mentioned in Western media, but Iran has types of people other than "bearded mullah" and "media-friendly feminist activist" like there's also regular municipal workers, and it's a crime to murder them too. Idk what their politics are, but they don't deserve to be murdered by anyone.
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