In response to the Guardian exposé, Vanessa Beeley–the Leni Riefenstahl of the Assad dictatorship & a fascist who openly supports the Burmese junta in its genocide of the Rohingya people–is declaring herself “the direct voice of the Syrian people” & claiming that any attempts to smear her are attempts to smear & silence Syrian voices. On the contrary. Many of us, like the Guardian exposé, work assiduously to show that Beeley is a ventriloquist dummy for the Assad regime. Those are the Syrian voices she represents.
Bartlett & Beeley came out of nowhere only a few years ago to declare themselves independent journalists & experts on Syria. Some of us have spent decades longer trying to understand the politics of our own countries & would never presume to expertise on revolution & counter-revolution in Syria after only several months of blogging. As I wrote just one year ago: “It cannot go without protest that the promotion of two western women–who’ve spent a total of five or six weeks in Syria traveling by their own admission with Assad officials & Syrian military security–over the voices of Syrian journalists & activists is a parody of white supremacy.”
The truth of the matter is, Bartlett & Beeley did not come out of nowhere. As the Guardian article shows & their own articles repeatedly boast, they have contacts at the highest levels of the Syrian & Russian governments. They are not journalists; they are professional propagandists for the Assad dictatorship. The authentic voices of the Syrian revolution are in exile, in Assad’s gulag, dead, or under aerial bombardment by Syrian, Russian, & US-coalition warplanes.
There’s not much confusion under the Trump regime which class runs the US government. But is a pumpkin the best the elite can come up with to represent them?
According to a recent estimate, 41 million out of 325 million Americans live in poverty. That’s about 11-percent of the population & almost certainly a lowball estimate. The federal & state governments fudge & fiddle with numbers to determine eligibility for benefits for children, elderly, disabled, & the poor. In one instance several years ago, the government raised the IQ level for disability benefits & excluded thousands with learning disabilities who have limited access to employment. More often, they raise the income level to establish eligibility & exclude thousands.
Now Congress is withholding funding for poor children’s health insurance to make sure the tax bill for corporations & millionaires gets passed. They really have no idea how many children & elderly are going without food, how many are living on the streets, how many suffer & die from serious illnesses & infections because they could not afford health care. The worst part is they don’t give a damn.
Does anyone really care what China thinks about the US declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel while China is arming the Burmese military to exterminate the Rohingya people? With an economy based on sweatshops & a party to genocide, China has no cachet when it comes to human rights. In response to Trump’s provocation, China repeated its proposal for a Palestinian bantustate. Hardly avant-garde when the two-state thing is a stinking corpse reeking of deception & betrayal.
What China doesn’t talk about is its multi-million dollar contracts with Israel, including with universities & Israeli settlements in the West Bank, for high-tech & manufacturing technologies. In part, these contracts serve China’s economic needs & advance its political influence in the Middle East in competition with the US. In large part, these contracts counter the impact of the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement on the Israeli economy–& that is how China is making itself important to Israel.
Stand with Palestinians by honoring the economic boycott of Israel. Check every label on the products you buy to make certain the country of origin is not Israel.
Photo is Netanyahu being feted by Chinese president Xi Jinping in Beijing in May 2013.
If you look up “Orientalist” in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of journalist Robert Fisk’s rear end which is where he speaks with pompous idiocy & gets paid handsomely for it. You know what it’s called when children do it at the dinner table but such unseemly toots have become our man’s journalistic stock-in-trade–especially in his contempt for the monumental, massive, fearless revolutions against dictatorship called the Arab Spring uprisings.
It was a natural progression for him to start tooting out apologetics supporting the Assad dictatorship. He fit right in with that crowd as an éminence grise of Islamophobia with disdain for Muslims, Arabs, & popular democracy. His sarcasms, often mistaken as insights, reached their heights when he told a Canadian interviewer that Muslim Arabs in the Middle East no longer believe in the nation-state; that nearly a million Syrian war refugees proved that by trying to forcibly cross the borders of Europe. With that, Fisk placed himself in the same league as that Slavoj Žižek guy. No deeper toots are heard in all of hell.
It may not always serve polemics, but I come from the political tradition of “kick ’em while they’re down” & try to take no prisoners. You don’t have to tell me it’s not a virtue. This is a piece I wrote in January 2017 on the death of Udo Ulfkotte, a perfectly detestable & corrupt German fascist who was eulogized by Assad supporters, including Eva Bartlett. I’m reposting it to show the scope of Assadist collaboration & political affinities with fascism.
To conform to standards of civil discourse, I changed the title but Google algorithms have not yet caught up with my uncustomary foray into diplomacy. Rest assured, it will be brief. Not that I’ve changed my characterization of Ulfkotte–not by a long shot. It’s just that “shithead” seems inadequate to describe this creep who developed the concept of “fecal jihad” waged by Muslims against other Europeans.
Assad supporters are braying like jackasses over the Guardian exposé of their scurrilous campaign to vilify the White Helmet rescue workers in Syria. They remind you of none so much as those troubled groupies who fall in love with incarcerated serial killers. For the longest while, they’ve been triumphal over all the bombing of civilians, choosing to call it “liberation from head-choppers.” Now, this exposé has them showing their true nature as something of a mesmerized cult around Assad & Putin.
The great tragedy of Syria is that supporters of the revolution against Assad’s dictatorship are so weak against such a confused & anti-intellectual cult who not only worship Putin & Assad; they worship militarism & glorify the Syrian army. What weakens the political forces who oppose Assad & support the revolution is that many support US military intervention under the misguided belief that US bombers & special forces will switch sides from their alliance with the counter-revolution & save the revolution. No one should oppose the revolution arming itself in self-defense. By any means necessary applies to revolution against dictatorship as it does to any struggle against oppression. But that’s a very different thing than calling on the US Pentagon, the epicenter of barbarism, to save the revolution–especially since the US played such a central role in defeating all of the Arab uprisings.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed with the massive suffering in the world because of war, occupation, & genocide & to become defeatist & misanthropic. Is it too late to turn the counter-revolution in Syria back & defeat it? Have the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Tunisia been decisively defeated? Is it all over but the crying? Those who have ever participated in massive struggle–from union strikes to antiwar mobilizations to social revolutions–never lose the vision of possibilities after they have witnessed the political power of united mass action in the cause of justice & freedom–even if they have been temporarily defeated. In that regard, Kashmiris & Palestinians stand as a model of how to stand ground against tyranny & that’s just one of the things that makes their struggles so important to all of humanity.
This photo is from the 1990s archives of the Indian occupation of Kashmir. It resonates with nothing quite so much as Abu Ghraib & the entire US occupation of Iraq. International solidarity is an imperative.
End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.
The proposed tax bill in the US Congress is 1,100 pages long of legalese. A majority of Americans are opposed to it even though they haven’t read it because we know it’s a bonanza for corporations & millionaires. Most of the senators haven’t read it either but will pass it because they’re mostly millionaires.
Observe that the trade union movement in its inertial, collusive state has not done one damn thing to oppose this bill even though working people & the poor will get it in the jugular. The crisis of leadership in politics is profound & has nothing to do with the two corrupt political parties.
