Syrian Girl & Coleen Rowley: the Assadist follies

Assad caricature by Nelson Santos

Syrian Girl & Coleen Rowley have now teamed up to defend Assad against his accusers. Hold on to your seats; this is gonna be a bumpy ride. Until yesterday Rowley was a stodgy defender of Trump but how can she maintain that & hold her own with the irascible Syrian Girl who stopped supporting Trump last week? So she’s blaming the White Helmets for misleading Trump with the same moral nonchalance she used to accuse me of using a weapon of mass destruction.

As Assadism spirals into a political crisis for indifference to the gassing of civilians but furor over empty airplane hangars, the moral bankruptcy & stinking mendacity of their politics are laid bare & none will more effectively demonstrate that than this regrettable tag team of groveling apologists for dictatorship.

Marx said history repeats itself. First as tragedy, then as farce. Their defense of Assad will render the distinctions meaningless. Momma mia, but would I love to see their show.

(Formal portrait of Assad by Nelson Santos)

Those empty airport hangars sure got Assadists off their leaden asses. They’re whipped to a frenzy. They are so truly psychotic.

Ann Coulter is Max Blumenthal & Ben Norton’s latest fan

Max Blumenthal & Ben Norton are two social climbers trying to achieve political celebrity stature by working the peace & justice circuit. Like Rania Khalek, they morphed into Assadists, thinking that was where future grandeur & honoraria lay.

Their latest piece of rubbish for Alternet (the place where all the dead people write) titled “Is Trump Rescuing Al-Qaeda’s ‘Heartland’ in Syria?” was just retweeted by Ann Coulter along with all her Breitbart tweets. Now that’s justice, baby! Will they ever live that down? Not if I can help it.

https://twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status/850147511071264768

The Eiffel Tower went dark for the London Westminster attack last month & again tonight for the Stockholm attack. What, no Syria?

Assadists who played dead when Assad gassed civilians up in arms over US bombing of empty airbase

It’s a question about how to relate to these “hands off Syria” protests called by Assadist forces because most the speakers will be anti-US bombing but pro-Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians. Apologetics & denials about Khan Sheikhoun will be the order of the day from speaker after speaker. Participants will come waving Syrian flags & haloed images of Assad & Putin.

In some places, it may be dangerous to show up with placards denouncing Syrian, Russian, & US bombing. That would be seen as provocation. It wouldn’t be a crowd open to persuasion if their posts on social media are any gauge.

Ironically enough, anti-Assad protests often include support for US bombing. It’s a hell of a mess.

People have to make up their own minds about whether to attend or not with the rule-of-thumb not to go alone & not to invite trouble. People have a right to stand with fascism & Assadism. We have a duty to build a principled antiwar movement opposing all military intervention in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, & elsewhere.

“If Trump loves “beautiful Syrian babies” so much why is he banning them from the United States?”
–Ahmad Shabir

US Pentagon is not a liberating force in Syria any more than in Iraq

Charles Lister is a research scholar who has written extensively about ISIS & the Free Syrian Army (FSA) for Brookings Institute, a conservative think tank. He tweeted a statement today from the FSA heralding the US bombing of the airbase as a “turning point in the fight against impunity” for Assad & Russia in Syria.

According to Lister’s analysis & “Burning Country” by Leila Al-Shami & Robin Yassin-Kassab, the FSA is not a centralized army of opposition to Assad but a multitude of over a thousand militias without a central command structure. So who actually issued this statement in the name of the FSA is unclear, at least to most of us.
If there are a thousand militias in the FSA who have not cohered as one unit, there are at least a thousand points of view about how to defeat the Assad regime. Looking to the US Pentagon to help defeat Assad is one of those points of view & one of the most misguided & dangerous.

The US military is intervening in Syria as part of the counter-revolutionary forces to defeat the popular revolution against Assad’s dictatorship. The US has conducted nearly 8,000 airstrikes in Syria since 2014. Not a single one of them was to stop Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians or to support the revolution but ostensibly focuses on fighting ISIS.

The US is intervening in Syria for the same reasons it is intervening in Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Somalia. There isn’t a single instance in the past nearly 200 years when the US military has intervened for the purposes of human emancipation from dictatorship.

Many who don’t understand the role of the US in Syria or the general character of the US Pentagon may think the statement from the FSA is a mandate to support US aggression against Assad. Conceding to political delusions & confusions on the part of some Syrians is not a mandate & it would be arrant orientalism to claim that we should. The US is turning the Middle East into a killing field & our mandate is to oppose that with every ounce of our being & to build international solidarity with the peoples of those countries.

The role of the international antiwar movement is to demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces, including Russia, the US, Iran, so that the Syrian revolution can proceed to Damascus & take down the Assad regime. That alone is our mandate.

Tariq Ali rouses from stupor to support Assad

Tariq Ali has roused from his stupor on Assad’s gassing of civilians to deny it happened & to claim “sections of the Western Left,,,are besotted with anti-Assad groupings of various sorts of which the CIA funded groups are the largest.”

Betraying not a hint of that prestigious Oxford education, he continues, “For those who see the Assad regime as the main enemy its obvious that they will be publicly or privately backing Trump’s bombing raid & hoping for more.”

Time to retire the old boy as a political authority when he posts from discredited sources like Off-Guardian, Eva Bartlett, Fares Shehabi, & resorts to political idiocy by claiming opponents of Assad are CIA-funded.

Which sections of the “Western Left” is Ali referring to? Which besotted anti-Assad groupings does he mean? When he can locate them–because they don’t exist, there is no “Western left”–then we can investigate those charges of CIA funding.

Let me just add that this political torpor of Tariq Ali is not new. When I heard him speak ten years ago, most of us needed a cattle prod to keep ourselves awake. There isn’t an original thought or a sign of scholarship in his entire repertoire of banalities.
Let me also add as an antiwar activist of over 50 years of actual organizing, not just speaking like Ali, that I am publicly & privately opposed to Trump’s bombing in Syria as I have been for every war the US has conducted in my lifetime.

Assadist cognitive disorders

Assadists are up in arms against the US bombing of the empty airbase. Are they sure it happened? After all, their memes say the US has lied about Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, & Libya, so why would they tell the truth about that airbase? Maybe evil fairies from outer space did it.

Are Assadists more upset about the bombing of empty airplane hangars than they are about the gassing of civilians? Yes.