Mary Scully Reports

The family of Palestinian refugee Ismail Mohamed Falaha continues to appeal for information about their son’s whereabouts. Born in a Syrian refugee camp in 1987, he was arrested & forcibly disappeared by Syrian security forces in September 2011

Action Group For Palestinians of Syria (AGPS) has documentation that over 540 Palestinian refugees, including 34 women & many minors, died under torture in Assad’s gulag. Palestinians have been kidnapped at government checkpoints or during assaults carried out by government troops on Palestinian refugee camps & shelters. In most of these cases, the families received their relatives’ bodies from a military or government hospital wrapped in a plastic bag or a blood-stained piece of cloth.

(Photo of Ismail Mohamed Falaha from AGPS)

Please take a moment to sign another petition demanding Iran release human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh who has been sentenced to 38 years & 148 lashes for advocating women’s rights.

https://fb.avaaz.org/campaign/en/free_nasrin_loc/?fcXGCgb&fbogname=Treasa&fbclid=IwAR1F4giiLgugFWMiafrCiwBJ0EYvlxw8cuF5btUMk0lulqJ9UBUAEUxbuBo

Kevork Almassian, a Syrian of Armenian ancestry, is one of Assad’s leading propagandists who runs the blog Syriana Analysis. In 2015, he immigrated to Germany & soon associated with Alternative for Germany (AfD), an extremist right nationalist, Islamophobic, & rabidly anti-immigration party with connections to the European fascist movement. He was recently hired as the social media expert for AfD MP Markus Frohnmaier. Almassian is a colleague of Eva Bartlett & Vanessa Beeley & one of Bartlett’s most cited sources. She recently honored him for winning a rightwing journalist award also given to herself, Beeley, & the entire rogue’s gallery of Assad apologists: Rania Khaled, Max Blumenthal, Whitney Webb, Mint Press, Moon of Alabama, The Jimmy Dore Show, Gareth Porter, & Finian Cunningham.

This blog has an important analysis of Almassian’s politics & of the AfD that is important for understanding the place of Assadism within the fascist movement. The association will become more politically compelling since Assad’s defeat of the Syrian Arab Spring has destroyed the progressive movement which aligned with fascism to support him, discredited éminences grises like Tariq Ali, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky who support him, & will embolden the most Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, xenophobic & nationalist forces in world politics.

https://international-review.org/an-authoritarian-marriage-of-convenience/?

(Photo is of AfD political poster saying “Stop Islamization.”)

A legal victory in Texas against attempts to outlaw BDS & require oaths of allegiance to Israel: yesterday, a federal court ruled that a Texas law requiring government contractors to certify they are not engaged in boycotts of Israel or companies that do business with Israel is unconstitutional.

https://www.aclutx.org/en/press-releases/court-rules-texas-anti-boycott-law-unconstitutional-protects-first-amendment-right?fbclid=IwAR3ahgcMjDwgpM8T64hOFwzSEus2sQkzlA0Gxuf8TqFE14tqYS7Ptg9Qbx4

Hopefully, those antiwar activists who now claim only US ‘regime change operations’ in Syria & not Russian & Iranian military intervention in Syria are their business will take a look at Tunisians protesting Saudi-coalition & US/UK intervention in Yemen. Maybe they could look also at Sudanese protesters holding up the Syrian Arab Spring as their pole star that this will evoke the spirit of human solidarity against oppression, persecution, war, occupation, & genocide that has always inspired the best of humanity. When other human beings are being slaughtered, only dirtballs say that is not their concern.

(Photo is November 2018 protest in Tunisia against MBS)

Now that their gig as paid propagandists for Assad is coming to an end, Bartlett & Beeley will have to find new roles. Beeley may just go back to horse back riding. Bartlett is trying to reinvent herself as a Maduro fan girl but his regime doesn’t need to bankroll her since there are so many American socialists who do it for free. Anyway she would face an uphill battle since Assad propaganda rests entirely on Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, & ‘war on terror’ rhetoric. None of that will help her in Venezuela. What are washed up propagandists to do?

The Assad regime & its Russian & Iranian allies have been so engaged in bombing & killing civilians that they haven’t gotten around to clearing rubble & recovering bodies after they ‘liberated’ Aleppo in 2016—though they have worked tirelessly to vilify White Helmet rescue workers as terrorists engaged in organ trafficking. There will come a time when all those progressives (so-called) who support Assad, Putin, & Rouhani will face condemnation & scorn for such a monstrous betrayal of human rights & siding with the oppressors rather than the oppressed.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-syria-security-aleppo-insight/in-east-aleppo-bodies-still-under-rubble-show-limits-of-syrias-recovery-idUKKCN1S113K?

It’s insane on so many levels for anti-Assad activists to campaign for a ‘humanitarian’ US intervention in Syria to save a popular revolution, not least of which is US bombing in six countries, including Syria, on the side of counterrevolution. But with this new documentation in hand from an Amnesty & Airwars investigation about carpet bombing civilians in Raqqa (including with the incendiary chemical white phosphorous), we would like those war mongers to explain exactly how ‘humanitarian’ US bombing of civilians would work.

https://airwars.org/news-and-investigations/raqqa-amnesty-airwars/?

A salute to Tunisian human rights protesters who are among the few anywhere in the world who have protested Saudi executioner MBS. The protest was a few weeks after the beheading & dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy & during the state visit of MBS to Tunisia in November 2018.

(Photo from Independent)