The silencing of Syrian voices includes Palestinian refugees in Syria

Shrinking Palestine map

The silencing of Arab voices, specifically Syrian voices, in deference to white hired propagandists also silences the voices of Palestinian refugees in Syria. Their refugee camps have been bombed, they are locked out of Jordan, treated shabbily in Lebanon, vilified as terrorists elsewhere. We don’t know what has happened to most of those refugees. They were already locked out of Palestinian political life by the Oslo Accords which legitimized occupation & expropriation. As Israel continues to take Palestine, there is obviously no place for refugees to return & it is reported that Syria has developed plans for Yarmouk & other refugee camps once they are cleared of Palestinians. That makes the demands of the Great Return March monumentally important.

Refugee rights, as the Great Return March posited, is a central issue of Palestinian justice.

Assad propagandists who leech off Palestinian solidarity for credentials don’t give a damn about freedom for Palestinians. Not any more than KKK guy & white supremacist David Duke does though he has made videos on the issue. Their sole motivation is credentials for aligning with fascism & Assad & for a way to have a go at Jews. That is written all over their propaganda & diatribes.

South Carolina just passed a bill which defines criticism of Israel in public schools & universities as anti-Semitism. Palestinian solidarity is now a civil liberties issue in the US.

Syrian & Russian “liberation” by bombers

Syrian & Russian liberation by bombers; a child in Eastern Ghouta May 21 2018

Syrian & Russian “liberation” of Eastern Ghouta: those who do not stand against Syrian, Russian, & US-coalition bombing of civilians have no right to call themselves antiwar. There are no humanitarian or progressive military interventions & those who claim there are have rocks in their heads or are morally & politically bankrupt.

(Photo source in Arabic on photo)

A word to Assad propagandists & their guppies: if you claim you support Palestinians against Israeli genocide but support or remain silent on Syrian extermination of Palestinians in Yarmouk refugee camp because it is for the greater good of Assad’s national sovereignty & anyway they were either Hamas or ISIS, do consider that a braying jackass does not make good political commentary.

(Where are Beavis & Butthead on this question? Bartlett & Beeley are too busy denouncing the White Helmets as terrorists to comment on the annihilation of Palestinians at Yarmouk. Although Bartlett claimed a while ago that Yarmouk is all ISIS.)

Tell us the difference between Zionist propagandists who blame “Hamas terrorist oppression” for Israel shooting down unarmed protesters as ‘human sacrifice for photo ops’ & ‘martyrdom performance’ & Assad propagandists who blame head-chopping jihadists for forcing kidnapped children into playing dead & foaming at the mouth on cue.

Palestine Hospital in Yarmouk bombed to smithereens by Syria & Russia

Palestine Hospital in Yarmouk before & After (Qalaat Al Mudiq on Twitter) May 21 2018

Yarmouk apocalypse: this is Palestine Hospital in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp before & after Syrian & Russian bombers “liberated” the camp from ISIS. The Assadist song & dance explaining its violation of international law in bombing medical facilities is that ISIS fighters hole up in hospitals. We’ve heard that before when Israel bombed Gaza for seven straight weeks in 2014.

(Photo from Qalaat Al Mudiq on Twitter)

RIP 85-year-old Dhabiyah Abu Rashid, refugee in 1948 Naqba killed by Syrian bombers in Yarmouk

Dhabiyah Abu Rashid, 85-yr-old killed in Yarmouk May 2018
85-year-old Dhabiyah Abu Rashid was displaced from Haifa, Palestine by Zionist militias in the 1948 Naqba. She was killed by Syrian regime shelling of Yarmouk refugee camp on Friday. She was one of the elderly Palestinians unable to flee Syrian & Russian aerial & artillery bombardment. May she Rest In Peace.

(Photo of Dhabiyah Abu Rashid & information from Mataar Ismaeel on Twitter)

Yarmouk apocalypse

Yarmouk refugee camp May 21 2018

Apocalyptic Yarmouk: after several weeks of sustained bombing & artillery fire ostensibly to rout ISIS, the Syrian army has taken over Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp about five miles from the center of Damascus. Part of the takeover involved bussing ISIS fighters out of the camp into the “Syrian desert,” wherever that is. Yarmouk is now indistinguishable from Raqqa after US carpet bombing to “liberate” the city from ISIS.

Palestinians in Syria are descendants of those displaced in the 1948 creation of the state of Israel & in later Israeli wars of displacement. Before 2011, there were 14 Palestinian refugee camps in Syria; Yarmouk was the largest. When the Syrian Arab Spring began that year, Palestinians in Syria were divided, partially between the youth in the camps & the older leadership of political groups like Hamas, & partially because of their vulnerable position in Syria as refugees. The political organizations tried to maintain an untenable neutral position on the conflict between the regime & the revolution but it was impossible since it directly impacted the Palestinian struggle against Israel. Taking a neutral position rather than siding with the regime angered the Assad regime which portrayed itself as a champion of Palestinians. Hamas, despite support from Iran & Hezbollah (both key allies of Assad), broke its alliance with Assad & sided with the Syrian uprising. Most of its leadership hightailed it out of Syria & those who remained were executed under suspicious circumstances. Other groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) sided with the regime & functioned in the refugee camps as auxiliary to the Syrian army by carrying out raids, patrolling the streets with machine guns, arresting supporters of the revolution & handing them over to Assad intelligence to deposit in the notorious gulag. The political situation in Yarmouk was already tense when in July 2012 Assad forces fired on protesters in Yarmouk & killed ten protesters. When thousands came out for the funeral services of those killed, the regime tried to nip resistance in the bud by launching its first of many military operations against the camp.

Before 2012, there were 160,000 Palestinians living in Yarmouk plus about 100,000 Syrians in the vicinity. When ISIS captured all of Yarmouk in 2015, the regime claimed ISIS could not have done so without the help of Hamas inside Yarmouk & also accused Hamas of funneling weapons to armed opposition groups. There were only 18,000 Palestinians still living there in 2015 because of the deterioration of conditions, ISIS violence, & regime & Russian barrel bombing. One year later, there were between 7,000 & 8,000 Palestinians still living there—mostly elderly residents unable to leave. Several weeks ago, Syrian & Russian forces launched a full-scale aerial & artillery campaign on Yarmouk to rout ISIS. It became the scene of the heaviest fighting in Syria since Eastern Ghouta was taken by the regime. Airstrikes leveled over 60-percent of the camp so that the few hundred elderly civilians remaining are in uninhabitable conditions.

The Assad regime & its apologists on the one hand blame Hamas & on the other herald this as a victory of the Syrian army over ISIS, a “Zionist proxy.” Doesn’t really make sense nor does it explain the widespread looting by the Syrian army going on right now. What the regime was really routing in Yarmouk was not just ISIS but those thousands of Palestinians not fooled by regime rhetoric about being the best defender of Palestinians in the Middle East.

(Photo of post-apocalyptic Yarmouk from Arabic sources on Twitter; photographer not identified)