Excellent films
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/battle-for-syria/#a
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/battle-for-syria/#b
[youtube http://youtu.be/BElhkwObDUs?]
There were three days of excellent Syrian films and on Sunday, which coincided with a day without cars, we had this solidarity chain that spread from Bozar to the European Parliament. In the morning we had a Round Table of utmost interest and quality. Father Paolo played an important role in mobilising our energies. He is the monk who renovated Mar Moussa and who has been expelled from Syria.
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A protestor at a Sydney march in support of the Syrian regime, August 2012 |GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty
By Jess Hill
How prominent commentators from the ‘anti-imperialist’ left have twisted the public discourse on Syria and, in the process, provided intellectual cover for the Assad regime.
Forget the ambitions of Syrians themselves — they’re just pawns in an international conspiracy.
“ He doesn’t kill his people. We’ve got militants in Syria. They’re terrorists.”
Demonstrators march in Sydney against foreign intervention in Syria, August 2012 |GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty
“ That is why they are asking the Crusaders to bomb them — because the Crusaders are asking their servants to ask them to bomb them.”
“ For Syrians who want dignity and democracy in a free country, the rapidly mushrooming dependence of their uprising on foreign support is a disaster — even more than was the case in Libya.”
President Assad in a rare public appearance in Damascus, January 2012 |STR/AFP/Getty
The moral of the Libyan story is that just because you fund a revolution, doesn’t mean you own it.
Journalist John Pilger in Kabul, Afghanistan |AAP Image/SBS
On no other topic have the ideologues been more ‘truthy’ than on the Houla massacre.
It was the first weekend of August, and on the highway leading out of Damascus, Syrian tanks rumbled northwards towards Aleppo. As 20,000 government troops mobilised outside the city, Syrian bomber jets shattered the shopping district of Salahedin, a rebel stronghold. Just metres away from the fighting, a Reuters reporter found a local couple, shaking with fear. “Just to hold power he is willing to destroy our streets, our homes, kill our sons,” cried Fawzia Um Ahmed as she waited for a car to take them to safety.
In Sydney that weekend the sun was out, and so were hundreds of Syrian Australians. In a rally organised by a group called ‘Hands off Syria’, they marched through the city, brandishing posters of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and signs that read, “Thank you Russia and China 4 Vetoes” and “Let the whole world hear: Syria is our Nation, Bashar is our Leader”.
“He’s a doctor, he studied in England,” ‘Naja’ told TruthNews in a broad Syrian-Australian accent, adding that President Assad had been ‘democratically elected’ by 75 per cent of Syrians. “He doesn’t kill his people. We’ve got militants in Syria. They’re terrorists.”
Flanked by cheering Assad supporters, Dr Tim Anderson, a senior lecturer in political economy at Sydney University and a member of Hands Off Syria, made an impassioned speech in support of the Syrian president. “People in this country are very ignorant about what’s going on in Syria,” he began.
“That’s not a crime in itself. But what is unacceptable is the unethical use of this ignorance… Those people saying Assad must go, they have no ethical basis to make that sort of claim,” he continued, cheered by the crowd. To this, he added: “They haven’t
understood that it’s the foundation of the post-colonial era… that a people have a right to self-determination.”
Hang on a minute. Isn’t the Syrian opposition fighting the Assad regime for its right to self-determination?
Don’t try to make sense of this logically; think ideologically.
Anderson is among the ideologues who believe there is no greater enemy than American imperialism. That means the Syrian uprising poses a grave threat to the ‘Axis of Resistance’ — Iran, Syria and Hezbollah — which, according to them, is the only force blocking America’s imperialist ambitions in the Middle East. If Assad falls, they believe it is America, Israel and Saudi Arabia that have the most to gain.
This ideological war is being fought at varying levels of sophistication by leftists with far greater influence than Dr Anderson, such as The Guardian’s associate editor and columnist Seumas Milne, award-winning journalist John Pilger, military historian and intellectual Tariq Ali and British MP George Galloway.
At first glance, it might seem indulgent to slip from reporting on the facts, to reporting on the reportage. Many of us would like to ignore these commentators. Increasingly, however, journalists reporting from Syria are
being driven to despair as their reporting is dismissed as propaganda by anti-imperialist ideologues who claim to know ‘the truth’. Many Syrians I’ve spoken to are also aware that their fate is connected to how the conflict is reported.
Using tactics that vary from the overt to the insidious, these ideologues are willfully twisting the narrative on Syria to score points against the ‘imperialist West’. In the process, they are excusing and providing intellectual cover for the Assad regime. What’s worse, their ‘truth’ is filtering into the mainstream, with many in the public convinced that the conflict in Syria is now little more than a proxy war between the world’s great powers.
This is not to say that hawks who are cheering for intervention in Syria aren’t guilty of peddling their own kind of propaganda — they are. But right-wing hawks don’t typically claim to be champions of the oppressed. Those mentioned above do, and in the same breath, happily undermine a civilian-led uprising against a remorseless dictator, all because said dictator is (on paper, at least) opposed to
Israel and the United States.
“It’s a dreadful moral and political capitulation,” says Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. “It surrenders all other leftist values to a reductive, hyper-simplistic, anti-Western stance which makes all regimes opposed by the West worthy of support by default… That means supporting fascist right-wingers, as long as they have the right enemies.”
Syria has been one of the hardest conflicts in living memory to report on, largely because of the extreme restrictions imposed by the Assad regime. Earlier this year, I wrote about how these restrictions were making it immensely difficult for reporters to sort fact from propaganda, and how important it was that we maintain a critical eye on both sides (‘Syria’s Propaganda War’, April 12).
Now the fog of the Syrian war is providing cover for conspiracy theories which are published as fact with increasing frequency.
Here in Beirut, the worst offenders in this category write for the leftist Hezbollah-friendly newspaper, Al Akhbar. In his scathing letter of farewell to the paper, former columnist Max Blumenthal decried its opinion pages as “a playpen for dictator enablers”.
[youtube http://youtu.be/JOzE2PbAPns?]
The Syrian government has has tried with great determination and dexterity to fragment the society and to exploit sectarian differences and class differences to prevent the emergence of a secular nonsectarian nationalist opposition. Michael Provence is the director of the Middle East Studies Programs at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the colonial and post-colonial Arab world, particularly popular insurgency and nationalism, and he has travelled and lived in many countries in the region including Lebanon and Syria.
Says OTW from Walls : I received the following letter sent from a dear expat friend of mine to her niece in Syria with a request to share it. In fact, this letter could have been sent from me to some of my own relatives by simply replacing “your aunt” with “your uncle, or you cousin“
To my niece with love
Dear niece.
You are my niece and I love you and will always do. I am going to explain to you my view point. Syria has been ruled by the Assads for over 40 years. I lived under their rule as a little girl all the way up to starting a business and working at the university and for Syrian TV, thus, I really do not need anyone to explain to me what the Syrian regime is all about. I left the country 20 years ago and went back almost every year to visit. I watched Syria falling slowly into the abyss. I could see it very clearly coming from outside the country, while people inside the country were completely oblivious. They genuinely believed that Syria was getting better and moving forward, while in reality it was inching backwards. They thought that having the Internet and being allowed on limited web sites was the ultimate achievement. They figured that having some private schools meant progress in education, but they truly had no clue what progress meant or required. As time went by, the few institutions that we had in Syria were slowly disappearing under the pressure of corruption and nepotism. Syria was no longer ruled by a government, it was ruled by a mafia. You could get anything and everything done if you knew the right person, businesses could only operate if they partnered up with the right people and law and order was completely based on fear and torture. This type of government was not sustainable. The people in Syria were either becoming filthy rich or dirt poor, the middle class slowly, but surly disappeared and young people could neither find jobs nor hope for a better future. In summary, the Assads could write the book on how to destroy a nation. Today, the people said enough is enough. They watched other Arab countries get rid of their dictators and decided that it is now or never. I was not born yesterday; I know that the FSA is committing some atrocities. I know that the CIA and the MI 5 and others are roaming free in Syria. I realize that some Jihadi elements are there too, but this, to me, is the natural result of what the Assad regime did and continues to do. Forty years of persecution of free thought and speech. Forty years of the outlawing of free assembly. With that in mind, I do not understand how anyone can expect a unified opposition of any sort. We have literally not talked to each other in forty some years. How are we going to immediately make the connection and understand each other?. This is beyond normal human abilities. The demonstrations started as purely peaceful demonstrations. The regime opened fire on them killing droves of people. Yet they continued and persevered. Giath Matar, from Daraya, organized residents to meet the army with roses and bottles of water. He was arrested and tortured to death. The regime said that they are open to talk to the opposition. Every single person who showed up to those meetings was either arrested, killed or fled the country after continuous molestation. I can go on and on, but you get the picture. I spent 5 days with your father when he came to visit me. I know exactly how he feels about this whole thing. He was one of the lucky ones who had a good life that is now destroyed. He is worried about the future and rightly so. We are all worried and are under no illusions that this will take many years to stabilize. From his perspective: he was doing well and living well and he did not need this disruption at this stage in his life. I do not blame him. I would have probably felt the same way, had I been through the same experience, but the life of a nation and 23 million people cannot be decided by individual interests. It has to be decided by the will of the majority. I am an ardent supporter of this revolution and of the Free Syrian Army. I cannot wait for the bastard-in-chief to go. I want Syria to have a chance in becoming a nation of institutions. A nation where people can thrive because of their abilities, not their connections. Please remember that this regime that you are supporting is bombing Halab with planes that we, the people, paid for. They do not really care about anyone except themselves. He wants to keep his power period. They hit hospitals by tanks with straight aims. Wake up and open your eyes. This is no longer a plain and simple “difference of opinion”. At this point, you are either with the murderer or with the victim you cannot even choose to be in-between.
Your loving aunt….
Human Chain
Sunday 16 September 2012 at 13:00
Launch Point: BOZAR
Arrival: Place du Luxembourg
Why
The violence of the Syrian regime in suppressing the protests that shake the entire country for more than a year revolts us. The Syrian regime’s army planes deliberately target the most fragile civil populations, notably hospitals. They also target doctors, families, and journalists.We admire the courage, determination, and resilience of Syrian society, which is fighting for liberty, freedom, and democracy.We are convinced that what is happening in Syria today (despite specificities and differences) is part of the same process that begin in Tunisia in December 2012 – a process that is leading to the fall of one dictatorship after another in the Arab world.
The violence of the Syrian regime in suppressing the protests that shake the entire country for more than a year revolts us. The Syrian regime’s army planes deliberately target the most fragile civil populations, notably hospitals. They also target doctors, families, and journalists.We admire the courage, determination, and resilience of Syrian society, which is fighting for liberty, freedom, and democracy.We are convinced that what is happening in Syria today (despite specificities and differences) is part of the same process that begin in Tunisia in December 2012 – a process that is leading to the fall of one dictatorship after another in the Arab world.
We also recognize that this will prove a long, arduous, and sometimes contradictory process, and that the final result is neither pre-determined nor guaranteed. However, we refuse that this recognition justifies the lack of reaction and mobilisation of the international community in solidarity with democratically driven Syrians.
It is the silence and the insufficient solidarity of European civil society regarding events in Syria that concern us and drive us to this initiative. It is high time for us to organize with our civil societies to end this silence. We want our leaders to move towards decisive action and for Europe to assume a more active role in putting an end to this tragedy.
We ask the European Union and its Member States to:
• Increase humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees and displaced persons, not only in neighbouring countries, but equally and especially inside Syria
• Implement urgent humanitarian aid for the Syrian population
• Facilitate access for Syrian asylum seekers to Europe, to provide them with an adequate reception and welcome, and to facilitate their mobility within the European Union
• Increase European Union funds available for the support of Syrian human rights defenders
• Reinforce sanction policies and to strike all enterprises or individuals, which contribute to the continuation of this regime
• Actively support the calls of the United Nations Human Rights Chief that the crimes perpetrated in Syria be referred to the International Criminal Court
• Increase pressure on the powers implicated in the conflict (in particular Russia and Iran) in order to halt all military support to the Syrian regime
Who we are
We are a group of citizens from diverse cultural, professional, and political backgrounds motivated and animated by the shared determination to break the silence regarding the massacre of the Syrian people. With this initiative, we wish to respond to the call of our friends in Syrian civil society for a strengthened solidarity and mobilization of European civil society.
Concerned and Consternated Citizens
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