Every once in a while, & now again after the horrors of Yarmouk, I want to personally reach out to old antiwar & socialist activists I once worked with to urge them to more carefully study & rethink their support for the Assad regime & bombing of civilians. But I know they will scoff because I am a working class woman activist & not a credentialed academic or eminent left male guru, most of whom support Assad & haven’t done a damn thing politically in nearly 40 years. Therein lies the incapacitating problems of the left that make them impotent & discredited: snobbery, elitism, do-nothingism, misogyny. If you’re wrong on Syria, you are not even close to progressive but are marching with the extreme right, including fascists.