Rojava is emulating Ataturk in its distaste for Arabic

As Syrian Kurdish leaders distance themselves from Arabic and Islamic heritage, their cultural revolution appears like an echo of Ataturk’s long-abandoned experiment. The diverse peoples of Europe, speaking their Latin and Slavic tongues, came to embrace the Christian story despite it being entirely alien to their native culture. Their kings converted, and their nations and tribes underwent a cycle of sometimes violent conversion, at the end of which Christ’s actual origins and lineage hardly mattered. His Palestinian birth and Nazarene roots faded before his divine identity as the Son of God. One is reminded of the anecdote recounted by the Syrian poet-diplomat Omar Abu Risha about his first meeting with President John F. Kennedy in 1961, when he presented his credentials as …