“It would be a shame if all those buses suddenly fell into a massive sinkhole somewhere on route to Idlib. Best thing is to eliminate them all once and for all time. Letting them go means Syria will have to fight them again in the near future.”
–An Assadist proposing what humanity has come to know as the “final solution” on Twitter post of Assad official Fares Shehabi about civilians, who Shehabi calls “jihadi monkeys,” being evacuated out of Eastern Ghouta.
“…it is surely elementary ABC that for the international left, supposedly the inheritors and continuators of Enlightenment values, torture committed by anybody and against anybody under any pretext whatsoever is completely beyond the pale. If the prisoners were al Qaeda, it makes absolutely no difference to the case; how can those who protested the bestial behaviour of the US in Abu Ghraib, or the use of torture by Nazis or the French in Algeria, justify the torture and execution by hanging of 13,000 people by the Assad regime and still claim to be part of the socialist and humanist tradition? I still cling to the hope that some of those who may have embarked on a course of political support for a savage dictatorship can turn back in time before their path leads them far from the ranks of the left and far from our common humanity.”
–John Scott on fascist Vanessa Beeley & those on the left who justify the torture of political prisoners because they are “monsters, mostly hardcore Al Qaeda.”
“…tbh torture happened, I’m never going to say it publicly, but it happened. Under Bashar Al-Assad it was being brought under control…& tbh the creatures in Sadnaya were monsters, mostly hardcore Al Qaeda.”
–That statement is by Assad propagandist Vanessa Beeley justifying the torture & hanging of over 13,000 political prisoners in five years in Saydnaya prison, according to a 2017 Amnesty International report titled “Human Slaughterhouse: Mass hanging & extermination at Saydnaya prison.” Just exactly as Stalinists continue to justify the torture & execution of political prisoners in Russia’s gulag.
These photos, shown only to expose Assad’s criminality, are from the Caesar collection of 28,000 photos by a forensics officer named “Caesar” who smuggled them out of Syria after defecting from the Assad regime. These men were political prisoners & under the rule of law, even if they were terrorists, torture is a violation of their human rights. You cannot justify this unless you are so deranged as to also justify Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, & the entire CIA rendition program of secret prisons. When Bartlett & Beeley & the entire stable of deranged Assadists & their fellow travelers–from Tariq Ali to Jeff Mackler, Rania Khalek, & Cindy Sheehan–support these crimes, they become complicit & expose the political stuff they’re really made of. These young men were human beings, not monsters to be tortured, mutilated, brutalized, & murdered. They were revolutionists, not terrorists.
Stand with the Syrian people & demand the immediate release of all political prisoners; the immediate cessation of Syrian, Russian, Turkish, & US coalition bombing; & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.
(Beeley statement defending torture from Twitter, released in a dispute among Assad propagandists)
Reposting this from March 23rd, 2017 because understanding the issue of how anti-Semitism entangles with Islamophobia is extremely important. Nothing shows that more clearly than supporters of Assad who openly hate on Jews, ascribe to that Illuminati crap about Jewish bankers, & blame the entire Syrian conflict on Israel & its alleged plans for a “greater Israel.” Those who don’t understand how compromised the antiwar & Palestinian solidarity movements become by ignoring the motivation & presence of anti-Semites use the metaphor of marching with the devil for justice. What they don’t understand is that these anti-Semites & Islamophobes are not marching for justice but only to increase the persecution of Jews & the oppression of Muslims.
It is profoundly disturbing, actually horrifying, to learn the author Alice Walker, a long-time supporter of Palestinian solidarity & a participant in the 2011 Gaza Flotilla, has been a public & ardent apostle of libertarian David Icke since 2013 & advances his ideas on her website & in media.
Icke’s ideas, as deranged as they are hateful, can be called the theoretics of fascism. The core of his ideas, which Walker explicitly defends, is that the world is run by the Jewish Illuminati, a corporate & banking elite of blood-drinking, flesh-eating, shape-shifting extraterrestrial reptiles trying to create a new world order of global fascism.
Like KKK & white supremacist David Duke, Icke & his apostles like Eva Bartlett & Vanessa Bartlett, associate with Palestinian solidarity only for a platform to spread the hatred of Jews. Their role as propagandists for Assad are manifold: support for his fascism & contempt for working people; hopes the Syrian counterrevolution will help to destroy Israel & massacre Jews; admiration that the Assad dynasty has expelled all Jews from Syria. The struggle of Palestinians against colonialism & apartheid is no part of their considerations. Their goal is not a democratic, secular state for Palestinians & Jews to live in harmony but the extermination of Jews–before they then turn on Palestinians, the Semitic cousins of Jews.
Walker’s association with David Icke absolutely excludes her from participation in Palestinian solidarity events of any kind, including as a forum, rally, or honored keynote speaker, or in any formal capacity at all. She can no longer be allowed to speak on behalf of solidarity because she compromises its integrity in the most despicable way by endorsing the notion that Jewish bankers run the world, which was the ideology of German fascism & the Jewish holocaust. Her presence should be barely tolerated as a participant in public protests open to all.
Walker’s prestige isn’t a good enough reason to tolerate hating on Jews in Palestinian solidarity. That isn’t imposing a purity test on the movement; it is the standard of basic principles social movements employ to protect the movements from disgrace, dissension & destruction. In the same way hating on Jews is incompatible with Palestinian solidarity, the women’s movement of the 1960s-70s distinguished our support for abortion rights from those of eugenicists who wanted legalization for ethnic cleansing purposes.
Walker has taken on the honored status of guru among women, Black, & other progressive activists & is honored by Palestinians & their supporters. Now she should face the music for promoting the wretched hatred of Jews & apparently for Muslims since she has not publicly differed from Icke’s support for Assad. Hopefully her glory days as a guru are over because in the politics of liberation you can’t play both sides of the street.
(Photo is David Icke tweet from September 2016:
Support for the Assad dictatorship finishes off the left which has been in theoretical & political dry rot since at least the end of the Vietnam War. The corruption is steeped in a grotesque adherence to Stalinist politics freebasing on factionalism, sectarianism, & cultism & making them indistinguishable from fascism.
What is to be learned from all that? Don’t do gurus. Don’t uncritically follow those who talk with bellowing authority but are glib windbags & don’t know beans from buckshot about the politics of social transformation. Don’t do elitists who treat you like a guppy with nothing to contribute. Don’t let others do your thinking & your study for you. Don’t let anybody push you around intellectually. If it looks like Stalinism, run like hell. If it isn’t democratic, don’t waste a moment of your time because there is no possibility of change coming from hand-raisers. Keep your nose clean & don’t engage in double-dealing. Never let anyone break the rebel in you because it is rebels staying a principled course who help to change the world. If you want to know what a rebel looks like, look to Palestinians, Kashmiris, Rohingya, the indigenous peoples fighting neoliberal economics on every planet, the Filipino human rights activists standing against vigilante death squads, & so many others who will not bend the knee to violence. Those who fight oppression despite seemingly insuperable odds are our teachers. Let the gurus & the windbags go to seed.
Marxist academic Moishe Postone on the lack of action against carnage in Syria. Postone died on March 19th, 2018:
“I’m very suspicious of reifying movements in national terms.
The Middle East is slightly different and that has to do with the unfortunate long history of the ideological cold war in the Middle East.
I don’t know where to find here, certainly in the US, on college campuses…to the degree to which there is, any movement about anything in the Middle East, it always is exclusively about Israel.
Not that Israel, especially the regime of the last ten years shouldn’t be very strongly criticized, but it’s not the point. My point is, I haven’t seen one movement about Syria.This is the greatest slaughter of people we’ve seen since the Second World War.
Assad has killed at least 300-355 thousand people…Nothing to say……You’d think that after the beginning in Syria of the democratic uprising that was, with incredible brutality, put down by the Assad regime, You’d think that would ring a bell. So I think that large parts of the left have essentially lost their theoretical acumen, their political analysis and their moral compass.”
W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
When you read this story about the Ghouta genocide titled “‘Dozens burned to death’ in Syrian regime strikes on East Ghouta,” keep in mind that the corrupted antiwar movement calls this for the greater good of defending Assad’s national sovereignty & that fascist propagandists claim civilians being bombed with napalm, chlorine, barrel & bunker buster bombs are all terrorists, human shields for terrorists, actors, or dolls–so it’s all good.
Stand with the Syrian people by demanding the immediate cessation of Syrian, Russian, Turkish & US coalition bombing & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces.
Vanessa Beeley changed her résumé completely after I ridiculed her for going from sales & equestrian shows to being the Leni Riefenstahl of the Assad regime in just a matter of weeks. Cynically sucking off the Palestinian struggle, she left out the sales & horse back riding & replaced it with adventures like tunneling into Gaza & being part of the Egyptian Arab Spring uprising. That must be where she got her loathing for Arabs, Muslims, & democratic uprisings. Or maybe she just learned it from her father who helped engineer the partition of Palestine for the British government. Reminds me of my underground days in the French resistance. That was just a matter of years after I hired on as a merchant marine & jumped ship in Madrid to fight in the brigades fighting General Franco. You’d think all that guerrilla warfare would have tuckered me out. But after I single-handedly handed the Vichy regime its ass, I smuggled into Vietnam, met up with Ho Chi Minh, & joined the People’s Army to defeat the French. It was hard adjusting to humdrum life after that but when the Vietnam War started, I again hotfooted it to Vietnam where I joined up with the Viet Cong & helped them hand the US military its ass. Yeah right!
Seventeen-year-old Ahed Tamimi & her mother Nariman were both sentenced to eight-months in prison plus a $1500 fine for each for assault charges. Their cousin/niece Nour was sentenced to five months. Compare this to the sentence of Israeli soldier Elor Azaria who in March 2016 walked up to a Palestinian teenager lying incapacitated from a gunshot wound on a Hebron street & shot him in the head. Despite video documentation, Azaria was sentenced to 18 months, later reduced to 14 months, for manslaughter. He will be released in May after serving 10 months of his sentence for summary execution.
When Ahed was asked how she felt about her sentencing, she responded, “There is no justice under occupation.” Damn straight, there isn’t.
End the occupation of Palestine. Self-determination for Palestinians.
(Photos of Ahed & Nariman from Bassem Tamimi)