‘Ideas Cannot Be Killed With Weapons.’ Why the Assassination of Syria’s Most Prominent Citizen Journalist Matters

A year ago, I spent an entire day with Raed Fares at the Human Rights Foundation office in the Empire State Building. My colleagues and I had learned that he was in the United States to speak at Harvard, and we decided to host a closed-door press meeting for him. We sat with him in a conference room 40 stories above New York City, writing and rewriting his remarks, translating Arabic to English, and figuring out the best way to tell his story.