This piece is written by an Assad regime guppy, a disciple to Bartlett & Beeley, named Mindi Sitterud-McCluskey who once denounced the Rohingya & Kashmiri freedom struggles as “Saudi-backed Wahhabi/Salafi terrorists.” This is her comment rebutting the Mehdi Hasan article about the Assad regime in the Intercept. Tariq Ali also came out against the Hasan article & if you go to his wall, you will see that he has no more political coherence than this halfwitted Islamophobic gibberish:

“As ludicrous as it may sound, people like Mehdi gain a following largely by offering a psychological wage to establishment liberals who need to assure themselves they are not Islamophobes. Lol. So what if the Islamic militants are head chopping Salafi fanatics who would create a caliphate where no Western liberal would last a day, and so what if the majority of the people fighting these militants are Muslim. The idea is to ease some collective guilt left over from the Iraq War (because establishment liberals don’t seem to be bothered by Obama’s wars) by romanticizing the militants & demonizing the Syrian “regime.” I think there’s a bit of orientalism going on there, as well, as if head-chopping degenerate Salafis are more genuinely Middle Eastern than Assad’s secular, educated & progressive Syria. One of Medhi’s friends (based on their twitter interactions) is obsessed with digging up biographies of dead ISIS fighters, and in a very “lost civilization” kind of way. Lol”

Tariq Ali’s incoherent piece:
“What’s going on at Intercept re Syria? The Mehdi has arrived with his clutch of cliches and demagogy on the war. He opposed the Afghan war. Were the Taliban better than Assad? More tolerant, more democratic, more protective of minorities? And applauded by my old friend Roane Carey at The Nation who at the very least should understand the difference between primary and secondary contradictions in time of war. ….The Baathists in Iraq and Syria in their post-Kassem and Assad father and son reincarnations have been brutes. No doubt at all. Is that the reason the US is and did wage war on them? Why did we oppose the Iraq war? Because Saddam hadn’t obliged Washington with the odd massacre. Had he done so would the Iraq war have been justified. After all many liberals and former Communists argued for it (sometimes in private). The reality is that the US did try and encourage a Shia rebellion to coincide with their invasion of Iraq, but having been let down badly when the did in 1991 during the First Gulf War they were reluctant to do so. More importantly, talk to pro-war Iraqi intellectuals today and most of them say that it was ‘better under Saddam.’ The wretched Makiya doesn’t go that far but even he was shaken by the outcome and Hitchens in his last debate with me came close to admitting the same.
Questions to answer for Intercept:
(a) Do you sympathise withe the US-UK-French missile raids on Syria?
(b) If the West and Israel toppled Assad who would you like in its place. A Sunni dictatorship divided into Jihadi factions as in post-conquest Libya? Or an Iraqi model of de facto partition with Turkey making the Kurdish areas an effective protectorate? There is no third choice I’m afraid. The dilemma is terrible, but it must be faced. Imperialist petulance at being denied Syria is no excuse for progressives to crumble.”