Yesterday, Annie did a brief round-up of the U.S. and Russia stand-off on Syria. I cannot claim, either, to be an expert on the Ba’athist regime and opposition groups in Syria, although I have recently worked with Syrians in London raising funds and awareness on behalf of people affected by the violence, and hosted Syrian artists in exile such as Ali Ferzat. I find myself in the – perhaps not unusual – position of fending off triumphant whataboutery regarding Syria from Israel apologists, and wanting to defend Syrian people, under attack by their own government forces and hired thugs, from the insinuation that they are waging a US/Zionist/Saudi Arabia proxy war against a true friend of Palestine. It does not surprise me that the aforementioned imperialist powers would seek to exploit the conflict for their own ends, or that elements of the armed opposition are committing sectarian atrocities, but the democratic aspirations and suffering of the Syrian people shelled and hounded out of their homes by the Syrian army is genuine enough.
Last month, Max Blumenthal wrote an impressive post on his principled decision to leave Al Akhbar. It’s worth reading the whole piece, but I excerpt two salient paragraphs here:
I can not disagree with anyone who claims that the United States and the Saudi royals aim to ratchet up their regional influence on the backs of the shabby Syrian National Council while Israel cheers on the sidelines. Though it is far from certain whether these forces will realize a fraction of their goals, it is imperative to reject the foreign designs on Syria and Lebanon, just as authentic Syrian dissidents like Michel Kilo have done. Yet the mere existence of Western meddling does not automatically make Assad a subaltern anti-imperial hero at the helm of a “frontline resisting state,” as Ghorayeb has sought to paint him. Nor does it offer any legitimate grounds for nickel-and-diming civilian casualty counts, blaming the victims of his regime, or hyping the Muslim Threat Factor to delegitimize the internal opposition.
In the end, Assad will be remembered as an authoritarian tyrant whose regime represented little more than the interests of a rich neoliberal business class and a fascistic security apparatus. Those who have thrown their intellectual weight behind his campaign of brutality have cast the sincerity of their commitment to popular struggle and anti-imperial resistance into serious doubt. By denying the Syrian people the right to revolution while supporting the Palestinian struggle, they are no less hypocritical than the Zionists who cynically celebrate the Syrian uprising while seeking to crush any iteration of Palestinian resistance. In my opinion, the right to resist tyranny is indivisible and universal. It can be denied to no one.
On Jadaliyya, Khalid Saghieh takes self-proclaimed anti-imperialists who rubbish the Syrian popular uprising to task:
Some loudly proclaim that what is happening in Syria is nothing but an imperialist conspiracy led by Western superpowers in collusion with Israel, designed to overthrow the bastion of resistance. Intentionally or not, they repeat the propaganda of the Syrian regime while shaping their argument in contrast to the regime’s rhetoric. In doing so, they excuse themselves from supporting the Syrian uprising, and all other past uprisings, because the outcomes are not guaranteed with regard to the Palestinian cause. In other words, they don’t categorize the Syrian rebels as conspirators, but they withhold any support for them because their uprising will eventually benefit the imperialistic enterprise that supports Zionism. Such people tout the slogan “Palestine is our compass,” despite knowing that the world cannot be seen through one lens. Most likely, they hide behind their support for the Palestinian cause to compensate for the morally reprehensible failure to support a nation of citizens besieged by massacres.
These last months at boycott Israel (BDS) actions, I have encountered this frequent, snide retort from Israel apologists: ‘What about Syria?’. And I think of my Syrian friends, wretched with grief and distress for their families, despairing for the future of their homeland – fighting every day, tirelessly – sometimes ineptly – to raise awareness and aid money, and to counter Ba’athist regime propaganda that the people in the streets defending themselves are ‘armed terrorists’; I can hear in the voices of these vile people who object to me picketing their Israeli cultural events that they don’t care one bit for Syrian humanity, in fact that they are delighted by this Arab conflict – they embrace it as a sort of gift from god. Surely this is one of the greatest examples right now of the moral bankruptcy of the Zionist narrative, so dependent as it is on exploiting others’ suffering to deflect criticism from Israeli state crimes.
So I turn to the words of ‘Rita from Syria’ on OpenDemocracy:
Repeated experiences of military operations at the hands of regime forces in many parts of Syria, has left many scathing about the regime’s claim to protect its own citizenry. It has became well-known that being a child, a woman, an old man, a civilian, a neutral or even someone loyal to the regime does not protect you from death by a sniper’s bullet, a mortar shell or even tank fire. The number of civilians killed since the beginning of the revolution during military operations is many times more than double the number of militants. This is because the army follows what is tantamount to a scorched-earth policy: a policy aimed at quelling any kind of opposition in the Syrian street through using intimidation and the systematic mass slaughter of its own population. In the face of such overwhelming brutality and however life-threatening it is, more and more are forced to flee their homes… ”At this moment while you are reading this article, some families are fleeing their houses, and some of them have been spending days homeless. Some children are losing their joyful spirit, and also some freedom fighters are giving their lives for their country.”
While it is unforgivable how the bloodshed and instability in Syria are being exploited by Israel – and its declared and undeclared allies– and supporters of Palestinian human rights are understandably wary of mainstream Western press on the conflict, can we stop treating the Syrian people’s uprising with such contempt?
I’m divided.
Assad’s a brutal dictator. He butchers his own people. That he has got to go isn’t just for pragmatic purposes, the moral case is overwhelming.
But as always the left refuses to think of the next step. Who will replace them?
Iraqi Christians got religiously cleansed from the post-Iraq invasion. The reason why many of them had mixed feelings about Saddam, just as Egyptian Christians had mixed feelings about Mubarak, was that the secular dictators were bad for everyone, but at least it was an equal burden.
The people who replaced both were islamists, for the most part, and who are bigots and have driven out much of the Iraqi Christian population out of the country due to persecution, the same is slowly happening in Egypt too.
And the Christian minorities in Syria, as well as other ethnic groups who are not perfectly aligned with the pro-Muslim Brotherhood forces now face the same threat in Syria.
But again, what is the alternative? Support Assad? Support Saddam or Mubarak(if the option had been available)?
No, that cannot be the option. But instead of just blandly supporting whatever comes next, the left should look carefully at those who come next and try to support the genuine liberals. Because the islamists may guarantee the first election, but you’re never sure about the next(just ask the people of Gaza).
My contention is to try to maintain some kind of ethnic/religious harmony and beware of the islamists who are rarely better than what they replace. Since they have the majority behind them, they can afford the luxury of time and need not be as brutal as the dictators, but nonetheless steer the country towards a less liberal, more oppressive direction.
Just the take mistakenly praised Erdogan of Egypt. Since his party has taken power, the murder of women has increased a crippling 1000 % (and this is according to the government’s own statistics).
Yet there is no widespread crackdown. It’s a more subtle, slow-moving glacial effect that is slowly crushing civil liberties for women, minorities, gays etc.
I would want a more thorough review of what options a liberal could support, instead of the whole ‘well these people are rebels, so by definition they must be good people’. That was how the left viewed the revolutions in Iran too, and can anybody say that the religious police in Iran has worked to improve the country? This goes beyond the nuclear program(whether you think they build a bomb or not). Iran was a secular country in the 1970s. And do you know that the #1 reason why women get imprisoned in Iran is because of rape? Namely, they get raped and then they get a sentence by a religious court for ‘indecency’ and then guess what happens in the confines of prison with sadistic male prison guard involved?
No, the blind support of Islamists is a scourge. Assad’s got to go, but the support for what is coming after him has to be much more critical.
And to those who say ‘well we can’t have too many opinions about other people’s affairs’. The left has always been internationalist, that’s one of our greatest strengths. I don’t see a reluctance of the left to get involved on behalf of poorer third world people on economic matters. So why should we ignore our moral compass on social/cultural issues?
Eleanor Kilroy, I have been struck by how strongly and universally Palestinians who live in Israel, Gaza, West Bank, Lebonon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf, and North Africa have come out in favor of the FSA against Assad.
Several Palestinian blogs seem to be converting themselves into Assad hate websites.
Assad has no Palestinian support base left. He does have some academic leftists in Europe, America and Russia who back him. And some Shiites who hate Assad but fear the Free Syrian Army. And Shia traitors such as Khamenei and Nasrallah. Even the Russian people are starting to distance themselves from Assad.
Regarding Israel. Do you think the FSA would welcome Israeli assistance? So far the Israelis don’t seem to have offered. The FSA wants Arab League, Turkish, European, American, Sunni world and international community help. But does the FSA want Israeli help as well?
How concerned are you about international Takfiri in the FSA? This concern is brought up a lot by Iraqis and Israelis who are wary of the FSA. How do you think the FSA should alleviate Iraqi and Israeli fears and paranoia?
Israel lobby pushing Syrian regime change to weaken Iran:
http://tinyurl.com/jamesmorrisoncrosstalk
I spoke with a Christian Syrian priest recently, and his view is that the situation is being misrepresented in the West against their government. In fact, the militarist opposition is an extreme conservative group, which in other places the US labels as terrorists. NATO’s leadership is backing them to break up the country, not to modernize it.
He feels that if the “opposition” gets in power they will do to Christians and other minorities the same kind of things that are happening in Iraq now with lots of Christians becoming refugees. In Syria, the Christians are 20% of the population. They want to avoid having the militarist fundamentalists take over the country. He pointed out that the Lebanese also do not support the fundamentalists, because the Lebanese are Christians and Shiite minorities themselves.
I responded, “Yes, but isn’t it bad that the current government is Authoritarian?” He responded that you have to understand the middle east culture. Maybe a government that would be authoritarian in the developed west is common for what is in a different region. Basically, the conclusion I came away with is that while it is better for their country to reform its government democratically, the path of arming fundamentalist opposition group simply because those groups are the force most likely to overthrow them is not a path likely to build democracy.
Whatever is going on in Syria, it is one of many revolt attempts in the ME as we have already seen in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain.
I think it’s also a given that outside powers are if not directly aiding, are nudging by some means, if only in their official statements, the outcome the outside powers want to see.
It is, for outside powers, the US and Israel in particular, still all about the ME “overall”, each event like Syria is just a mile marker on the road to an outcome for the region.
Not taking away from the struggles or suffering of the populations involved in Syria or any other countries, but it’s like that box of cholocates, no one knows what the filling is until they bite into it.
Stephen Walt does a realistic outline on the outcome scenarios — the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And says no. 2, The Bad is his bet. In all possible outcomes the US loses it’s influence because of some good that comes for the countries involved in the Good and The Bad that makes these countries capable of ignoring the US even more. In the Ugly everyone loses.
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/