So Robert Fisk, as always, embedded up the ass of the Syrian army, goes to Douma (now occupied by Russian & Syrian troops) on a mission: to disprove allegations of a Syrian chemical gas attack on civilians. Those who want to believe his reports hang on his every word & call him a highly respected éminence grise in the world of journalism about the Middle East. Those repulsed by his orientalism, contempt for the Arab Spring uprisings, & support for the Assad regime find him something of a wreck as a journalist & of not much value as a propagandist. The guy’s Islamophobia isn’t subtle. It hits you, or at least it should, like a Mack truck in his writings on the Arab Spring uprisings–of which Syria is a part.

So our man enters Douma, alights from the military convoy, & hotfoots it to a doctor someone (from the regime?) has referred him to in one of the underground clinics. We won’t question the good doctor’s medical credentials but a worthy journalist might have when Douma is under military occupation by both Russian & Syrian forces. If he did serve in hospitals during the alleged chlorine attack, he may be reluctant to speak whilst Russian & Syrian soldiers are breathing down his neck & when Fisk rode into town with a convoy of them. Fisk doesn’t say how long the discussion went on but it was long enough for the doctor to say that the video of children foaming at the mouth was real but it wasn’t caused by a chlorine attack. It was hypoxia caused by oxygen starvation from living in underground tunnels & basements choked with dust & debris. Then the conversation switches to jihadi terrorists, the non sequitur suggesting that it was the terrorists who drove them underground rather than massive bombing by Syrian warplanes. That Fisk is slick.

Fisk does mention that the regime has barred the Organization for Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) from entering Douma to investigate the chemical gas allegations. But the regime has nothing to fear from Fisk revelations so he walks about Douma interviewing random citizens. He reports a great deal of nonchalance & perplexity about the gas attack to suggest that it didn’t happen. Does he think residents under occupation would be forthcoming with a journalist embedded up the ass of the regime? He asks, with awe-inspiring imbecility: “How could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in Turkey were already describing a gas attack which no one in Douma today seemed to recall?” How could it be that refugees out of harm’s way from the regime feel free to say what Syrians under occupation play dumb about? Is our man so credulous a fool that he has to ask?

He got his chops in against the White Helmets, actually reporting that panic at the clinic about a gas attack was set off by a White Helmet shouting “Gas” like shouting fire in a crowded theater. He also mentioned, as if it were damning, that every member of the White Helmets in Douma left in the convoys “with the armed groups,” as if only terrorists were being evacuated & not that thousands of civilians were being forcibly evacuated or on the run. Since Fisk travels in Syria with the army, does he think the White Helmets, a thorn in the side of the Assad regime, are advised to trust Russian & Syrian troops in Douma? Does he think they should stick around & tempt fate or risk the gulag? What doesn’t Fisk understand about war, occupation, revolution & counterrevolution?

Those who want to believe Fisk will believe him, no matter how tawdry & pathetic his journalism. But those with an ounce of journalistic discretion will question his narrative & recognize his rubbish for what it is: tendentious & propagandistic.

Photo is children in Douma on respirators from chlorine gas attack.

Fisk’s article: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-chemical-attack-gas-douma-robert-fisk-ghouta-damascus-a8307726.html

(Photo by AP)

In the end, you can cut through all the propaganda, deceits, & war mongering about Syria by asking if there was in fact a Syrian Arab Spring uprising in 2011. Of all the Arab uprisings that year, certainly the most documented was the Syrian one. Every day, hundreds of videos were uploaded to YouTube by participants in those protests. They showed hundreds of thousands of unarmed protesters pouring into the streets across Syria against the Assad dictatorship. It was turned into a civil war when the Assad regime began to attack those protesters with artillery & aerial fire. That revolution is on the last legs of its existence because of the counterrevolutionary might of Syria, Russia, Iran, the US coalition, other military forces, & the hundreds of militias armed by foreign powers who use those militias to obfuscate the thrust of the revolution against Assad. That is the fundamental reality.

One can pretend, as Assad’s professional propagandists do, that the Syrian Arab Spring never happened. Or one can claim that it existed briefly but that opposition to Assad is now ‘head-chopping jihadi terrorists’. But the sole purpose of those claims is to justify support for Assad’s national sovereignty & right to self-determination, support for Russian & Iranian intervention, & claims that the war is a US regime change operation. Of course, the right of self-determination for dictators is a novel, grotesque concept, one that only an amalgam of fascists & Stalinists could conceive. The ideology of Assadism is indistinguishable from that of the war on terror, rooted as they both are in Islamophobia & hysteria.

If you refuse to believe there ever was a Syrian Arab Spring, you only have to go to YouTube. It’s unfortunate that when that uprising against dictatorship unfolded in 2011, you were not paying attention. Because if you were, you would have noticed that all of the Arab Spring uprisings were denounced as orchestrated by the US & Israel in libertarian & fascist journals like Global Research. Global Research is the trough that feeds all the Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, libertarian, & fascist narratives which have so corrupted political discourse in our times. If you refuse to believe the Syrian Arab Spring still stands, there are many reliable sources showing that it does, although on feeble legs because it has been so vilified as terrorist. Willful ignorance is a political stance that has brought many into the sphere of fascism-cum-Stalinism. If one is part of sustaining the Assad dictatorship, one is on the wrong side of history. Regrettably, on the fascist–in the full sense of that word–side of history.

Photo is one of thousands of bombing attacks on the Syrian Arab Spring uprising.

(Photo from Anadolu agency)

Assad propagandists claim the chemical weapons research facility bombed by the US, UK, & France in fact produced cancer medications & snakebite antidotes. They say the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) certified it free of banned substances in November 2017. Fact of the matter is, it’s entirely possible the military triumvirate are lying through their teeth about what they bombed in this dog & pony show of force. But a review of OPCW fact-finding missions in Syria doesn’t turn up any during the month of November 2017. The propagandists may have borrowed this deception from the 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical manufactory in Khartoum, Sudan under the Clinton regime. The US claimed the plant produced nerve agents & was run by Al Qaeda operatives. There is also that matter of the two chemical weapons storage depots that were bombed. Beeley is meeting today with Bouthaina Shaaban, the propagandist handler within the Assad regime, so she’ll soon have the line on those two depots soon to be morphed into kindergartens for orphans or old folks homes. Do you ever get the sense that Assad propagandists don’t believe a word they say because it’s so close to farce?

Watched the 2008 movie “Traitor” written by the comedian Steve Martin & some other guy & starring Don Cheadle as a Black American Muslim who operates as a bomb maker & undercover US agent in Islamic terrorist groups. If you know how ponderous & humorless Martin has become in real life, the dead weight of this Islamophobic travesty won’t surprise you. It sets the mood for treacherous Arabs & Muslims with Arabic music, a long-time, tiresome Hollywood cliché. The Kasbah effect & all that. The movie seems to have no other purpose, since it certainly wasn’t an entertaining thriller, than to create distrust of Muslims, with or without the veil, who are your next door neighbors in America. When you read through the mile long list of credits, there aren’t more than a handful of Arabic names so you wonder why Martin & the other schnook wrote about things–like terrorist cells, undercover operations, Islam, & Arabs–which in truth they know little about. Color the damn thing Islamophobic propaganda & don’t waste your time like I did even if it’s free on Roku.

If you didn’t see it tweeted for all the world to see, would you believe that Hindutva nationalists are blaming “jihadi Rohingya” refugees living in Jammu for the murder of Asifa? They’re doing so, the slander goes, to push back against nationalist objections to their living in Jammu. That must be why nationalist women lawyers in Jammu are protesting & threatening deportation of Rohingya refugees rather than standing with a little girl. This dehumanization of Asifa truly exposes the fault lines of gender, ethnic, religious, caste, & class oppression & the ideological relationship between nationalism & fascism.

It doesn’t take Nostradamus to say: “The extreme rightwing in India will use this incident to incite violence against Muslims, including Rohingya refugees living in Jammu, & against oppressed castes. Demanding justice for 8-year-old Asifa Bano has become part of opposing anti-Muslim pogroms in India, opposing the occupation of Kashmir, the defense of oppressed castes, & the defense of Rohingya refugees. They are all of a piece in the matrix of Muslim & caste oppression in India.”

#JusticeForAsifa

(Photo of placard from Kashmiri justice for Asifa rally last February by Faisal Khan)

Nobody made me the fake news police but there are too way many people posting rubbish, usually of the salacious kind, from “yournewswire.com.” It’s demented tabloid stuff & when you post articles from there you run the risk of others questioning everything you post. If there’s one thing social media has made compelling, it’s vet your sources.

https://www.thequint.com/news/india/shwetambri-sharma-sit-member-on-kathua-rape-case

This is an interview with the young, tough-minded woman homicide detective in Jammu who cracked the case of the murder of Asifa & discovered that other police officers were involved in the crime & the cover-up.

https://leilashami.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/the-anti-imperialism-of-idiots/

This is a cogent essay by Leila Al Shami, the co-author of “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution & War,” about the corruption of the antiwar movement particularly in the US & Europe. The Assad regime, in alliance with foreign militaries, has brought the Syrian Arab Spring uprising that began in 2011 nearly to collapse. It’s only a matter of time. The postmortems of that revolution will be as cacophonous & divisive as the debates between fascist propagandists for Assad & rightwing opponents of Assad who stand together on a militarist solution to the crisis.

There are parts of Al Shami’s analysis which I don’t agree with, the least of which is her reference to the ‘western antiwar movement’. This concept posits a schism between the US & European antiwar movements & antiwar movements elsewhere in the world. A substantial antiwar movement does not exist anywhere now because of equivocations about militarism. You cannot build an antiwar movement anywhere if you are not coherent, consistent, & intransigent against war. Outside of small rallies in Kashmir, there have been no noteworthy protests against foreign intervention in Syria. During the Vietnam War, in Palestinian solidarity, & during the Women’s Marches of 2017 & 2018, solidarity & unity were international in scope, with coordinated protests in hundreds of cities on every continent. If US antiwar activists played a leading role, it was only because the US was the primary aggressor in Vietnam. If there is no such unity in antiwar action now, it is because of the long-time political & theoretical corruption & deep-rooted sectarianism of the antiwar movement, the hold of Islamophobia derived from the so-called war on terror, & the alliance of Stalinism with fascism. Anti-Semitism, masked behind anti-Zionism, also plays no small part in this.

Where Al Shami’s analysis fails is in her equivocations, which she quite candidly admits, about US military intervention into Syria. She can’t see a solution outside of a military one. But why do her frustration & inability to see other options lead her to consider the US Pentagon as playing a role in advancing a popular revolution against dictatorship? She doesn’t have to know US military history; she need only look at what the US is doing right now in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, & in fact, Syria. Where does she think the US coalition has dropped over 100,000 bombs & missiles in Syria since 2014? Just on ISIS targets? She need only look at the role played by the US in reversing the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya. They played a central role in buttressing dictatorship in those countries & are doing so in Syria, albeit in a disguised strategy.

She ends this valuable essay with a question: what is to be done to stop the slaughter of civilians in Syria? That is not a question that can be left hanging in agnosticism & equivocations. If we want to stop the carnage, we have to counter fascist & Stalinist analyses with elaborations about the character of the Arab Spring uprisings. We have to focus defense campaigns against the incarceration, torture, disappearances of thousands of dissidents in all of those countries, including Syria. We have to demand the immediate, unconditional cessation of bombing in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, & Syria & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from those countries. We have to rebuild an international antiwar movement on a principled basis of opposition to militarism & support for the oppressed who rise up against dictatorship. The one thing we cannot do is be equivocal about war & revolution.

The pro-Assad antiwar movement held rallies yesterday in several US cities. They’ve been scheduled for months to protest the March 30th, 2003 occupation of Iraq & fell coincidentally on the day the US, UK, & France bombed three chemical weapons facilities in Syria. The antiwar movement is now run by sectarian pro-Assad political forces so I considered whether the focus on Iraq would make it possible to attend without also appearing to endorse Assad along with Syrian & Russian bombing in Syria. My conclusion was that they would have pro-Assad speakers & placards & after the military triumvirate bombed Syria, those speakers would take political prominence, whipped into a fury against US regime change in Syria. The problem is not their opposition to US coalition intervention but their support for Assad & for Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians.

Anti-Assad political forces are making a spectacle of themselves in trying to respond to the pro-Assad rallies by minimizing the destruction of the triumvirate bombing. The worst war mongers among them are calling the bombing insufficient & want a sustained bombing campaign of the kind Syria & Russia are carrying out, only against Assad. They don’t think Russia & Iran have a right to intervene in Syria but think the US does. This negates over 150 years of antiwar opposition to US & European colonial intervention in other countries.

It’s hard to define the politics of those who oppose Assad but consider the US Pentagon an agency amenable to social revolution in Syria. In the end, those marching for Assad & those marching against Assad all end up together in the dead-end camp of militarism. There is another option: standing opposed to all military intervention. Principled activists demand the cessation of Syrian, Russian, & US coalition bombing in Syria & the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Syria.

Saw more than a few placards at the justice for Asifa rally calling for the death penalty for her murderers. As long as Kashmir is under Indian rule & military occupation, as long as India engages in hanging, massively disappearing, summarily executing, & torturing Kashmiri dissidents, as long as Indian troops engage in mass rape & sexual violence with no justice in sight, it seems injudicious to sanction India to take the life of anyone. They will reserve that sanction for killing Kashmiris & those from oppressed castes, not for punishing rapists & murderers.