Tariq Ali has roused from his stupor on Assad’s gassing of civilians to deny it happened & to claim “sections of the Western Left,,,are besotted with anti-Assad groupings of various sorts of which the CIA funded groups are the largest.”

Betraying not a hint of that prestigious Oxford education, he continues, “For those who see the Assad regime as the main enemy its obvious that they will be publicly or privately backing Trump’s bombing raid & hoping for more.”

Time to retire the old boy as a political authority when he posts from discredited sources like Off-Guardian, Eva Bartlett, Fares Shehabi, & resorts to political idiocy by claiming opponents of Assad are CIA-funded.

Which sections of the “Western Left” is Ali referring to? Which besotted anti-Assad groupings does he mean? When he can locate them–because they don’t exist, there is no “Western left”–then we can investigate those charges of CIA funding.

Let me just add that this political torpor of Tariq Ali is not new. When I heard him speak ten years ago, most of us needed a cattle prod to keep ourselves awake. There isn’t an original thought or a sign of scholarship in his entire repertoire of banalities.
Let me also add as an antiwar activist of over 50 years of actual organizing, not just speaking like Ali, that I am publicly & privately opposed to Trump’s bombing in Syria as I have been for every war the US has conducted in my lifetime.