Architecture critic @RowanMoore says he last traveled to Syria in 2009, in order to write an ill-timed piece extolling the virtues of travel to the country.

Now, Mr. Moore is back with another ill-timed piece extolling the virtues of the regime. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/29/how-syrias-blasted-cities-are-rising-from-the-ruins

For someone with an implicit focus on architecture like @RowanMoore, it's surprising that he could write paragraphs such as this, which seems to rip the Umayyad mosque from its surrounding historical context only to present it within a complete void of contextual understanding.

Mr. Moore knows the Islamic State destroyed Palmyra -- although he's unsure who destroyed the Umayyad mosque in Aleppo. He knows ISIS destroys sites for the sake of propaganda -- yet seems to lack the awareness required to contextualize this thought on both sides.

For ex, in any of the several paragraphs which @RowanMoore spent discussing the destruction of Tadmur (Palmyra), did he think to note the decades of sheer historical neglect by the regime towards these sites? How they'd imprison young children who organized to clean them up? No.

Years before @RowanMoore stepped foot in Syria for the first time in his college years, Assad was detaining and torturing my friends at all of 12 years of age for the simple crime of organizing to clean up litter from the site of ancient ruins in their hometown near as-Suwayda.

I'll end with this thought, since I've tagged the author's handle into this tweet chain several times: he's not an asshole, he's just wrong. (I'm likely the asshole, here.) This is simply a textbook example of how Assad regime propaganda permeates throughout Western media.