Assadists speculate a lot about the relationship of Israel to Syria & get it all wrong because their views combine extreme Muslim-hating with putrid hatred of Jews. They have several crackpot conspiracies which you can’t reason with any more than you can reason with the racism of the KKK.

In fact the dialectics between the liberation of Palestine & the revolution against Assad are of the greatest consequence & need to be understood. Many are thinking about the issue but it’s not certain there has been the necessary & sufficient elaboration. As one person said, “Palestine is not going to be liberated without Syria being free from the Assad regime.” It’s a life & death issue.

Partly the lack of discussion is because so much time is taken up with polemics against the banalities & treacheries of Rania Khalek, Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, & the list of Palestinian supporters (of questionable commitment) who infect solidarity activism with the compromises, betrayals, & hatreds of Assadism. Then there are the hardened paid propagandists like Beeley & Bartlett who spent a little time in Palestine to legitimize themselves & get credentials & wave the Palestinian flag to obfuscate what they’re really all about.

There’s no point in beating around the bush: these opportunists & lying ideologues are weakening & compromising Palestinian solidarity. It’s regrettable to admit but there is a current of Palestinian solidarity that harbors antipathy toward either or both Muslims & Jews. There’s no need for witch hunts to weed them out & purge them. That would be divisive & destructive. Social movements often attract unsavory characters who are there for the wrong reasons. But there is need for political debate in every form & venue to clarify where people stand, to educate ourselves & those who are lost on the question of Syria & taken in by these shysters. Many are put off by debate & think it rancorous but it’s an essential part of building a movement. No struggle has ever found a way around it when human beings have different views of the problem & what to do about it.

It is in action that the weeding process will unavoidably take place–is taking place, since Assadists talk out of both sides of their ass by saying they oppose Islamophobia but then inviting nationalists, supremacists, Islamophobes to speak at their rallies–something which is unacceptable to principled activists.

One thing is sure: when Europeans & Americans like Beeley, Bartlett, Blumenthal, Khalek claim to speak for Syrians they aren’t lying. The Syrians they’re speaking for however are the Assadist forces of counter-revolution, not the working people fighting against dictatorship.