Open Letter to the Stop the War Coalition

Posted: 11/21/2013 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Grassroots Activism, Internet and Communication, Middle East, Music, Poetry, Events, Opinions and Letters, People's Movements / Struggles, Politics, Religion, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Syria, War
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agnes (1) (StWC) invited Mother Superior Agnès Mariam de la Croix to speak at its November 30 International Anti-War Conference. Fellow guests included MPs Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn and journalists Owen Jones and Jeremy Scahill.

Responding to a firestorm of protest, Jones and Scahill vowed to boycott the event if the Syrian-based nun spoke alongside them. Eventually she decided to “withdraw” from the conference and StWC issued a statement without explanation. Nor did it divulge why anyone would object to a Syrian cleric’s participation in an ostensibly pro-peace event.

Here are some reasons why we consider Mother Agnès-Mariam’s inclusion in an anti-war event to be a “red line” for opponents of conflict. Despite contrary claims, she is a partisan to—rather than a neutral observer of—the war in Syria.

Mother Agnès claimed that the Syrian opposition faked films of Bashar al-Assad’s 21 August 2013 sarin-gas attack on Ghouta in the suburbs of Damascus. In her 50-page dossier on the horrible events of that fateful morning, she wrote that the dead, gassed children documented in those videos “seem mostly sleeping” and “under anaesthesia.”

According to Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, a Jesuit priest exiled by the Assad regime for speaking out against its suppression of peaceful protests and currently a prisoner of al-Qa’ida’s Syrian affiliate, ISIS, Mother Agnes “has been consistent in assuming and spreading the lies of the regime, and promoting it through the power of her religious persona. She knows how to cover up the brutality of the regime”.

Moreover, Syrian Christians for Peace have denounced Mother Agnès for claiming there had never been a single peaceful demonstration in Syria. The also accused her of failing to disburse any of the money she raised in the name of their beleaguered community. They have asked “that she be excommunicated and prevented from speaking in the name of the Order of Carmelites.”

Having a massacre denier and apologist for war criminals like Mother Agnès speak alongside respected journalists such as Jeremy Scahill and Owen Jones is not only an insult to them and their principles. It is also, more insidiously, a means of exploiting their credibility and moral authority to bolster hers, both of which are non-existent.  No journalist should be sharing a platform with Agnès when she stands accused of being complicit in the death of French journalist Gilles Jacquier by his widow and a colleague who accompanied him into Homs during the trip arranged by Mother Agnès in January 2012.

Given that her UK speaking tour is still scheduled to last from the 21st to 30th November we, the undersigned, feel compelled to express our profound and principled objections to those who give a platform to a woman condemned by Syrian pro-peace Christians for greasing the skids of the regime’s war machine.

Signatories:

  1. Prof. Gilbert Achcar, SOAS
  2. Assaad al-Achi, Local Coordination Committees in Syria
  3. Rime Allaf, Syrian writer
  4. Omar al-Assil, Syrian Non-Violence Movement
  5. Hussam Ayloush, Chairman, Syrian American Council
  6. Noor Barotchi, Bradford Syria Solidarity
  7. Mark Boothroyd, International Socialist Network
  8. Kat Burdon-Manley, International Socialist Network
  9. Clara Connolly, Human Rights lawyer
  10. Paul Conroy, photojournalist
  11. Donnacha DeLong, National Union of Journalists
  12. Hannah Elsisi, Egyptian Revolutionary Socialist
    Raed Fares, Head of Kafranabel Media Centre
  13. Naomi Foyle, writer and co-ordinator of British Writers in Support of Palestine
  14. Razan Ghazzawi, Syrian blogger and activist
  15. Christine Gilmore,  Leeds Friends of Syria
  16. Golan Haji, poet and translator
  17. Marcus Halaby, staff writer, Workers Power
  18. Sam Charles Hamad, activist
  19. Nebal Istanbouly, Office Manager of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (SOC) in the UK
  20. Tehmina Kazi, human rights activist
  21. Ghalia Kabbani, Syrian journalist and writer
  22. Khaled Khalifa, Syrian writer
  23. Malik Little, blogger
  24. Amer Scott Masri, Scotland4Syria
  25. Margaret McAdam, Unite Casa Branch NW567 (pc)
  26. Yassir Munif, sociologist and activist
  27. Tom Mycock, Unite shop steward (pc)
  28. Maryam Namazie, Spokesperson, Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and Fitnah – Movement for Women’s Liberation
  29. Tim Nelson, Unison Shop Steward (pc)
  30. Louis Proyect, Counterpunch contributor
  31. Martin Ralph, VP Liverpool TUC (pc)
  32. Ruth Riegler, co-founder of Radio Free Syria, Syrian International Media Alliance
  33. Mary Rizzo, activist, translator and blogger
  34. Christopher Roche and Dima Albadra, Bath Solidarity
  35. Walid Saffour, Representative of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (SOC) in the UK
  36. Gita Sahgal, Centre for Secular Space
  37. David St Vincent, contributing writer and editor, National Geographic Books
  38. Reem Salahi, civil rights lawyer
  39. Salim Salamah, Palestinian blogger
  40. Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer
  41. Richard Seymour, author
  42. Bina Shah, author and contributor to the International New York Times
  43. Leila Shrooms, founding member of Tahrir-ICN
  44. Luke Staunton, International Socialist Network
  45. KD Tait, National Secretary, Workers Power
  46. Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner
  47. Paris Thompson, International Socialist Network
  48. Hassan Walid, Anas el-Khani and Abdulwahab Sayyed Omar, British Solidarity for Syria
  49. Robin Yassin-Kassab, author and co-editor of Critical Muslim
  50. Qusai Zakariya, activist from Moadamiyeh, Syria
  51. Nisreen al-Zaraee and Wisam al-Hamoui. Freedom Days
  52. Tasneem al-Zeer, activist
  53. Razan Zeitouneh, human rights lawyer

    originally published on: http://pulsemedia.org/2013/11/20/open-letter-to-the-stop-the-war-coalition/

Open Letter to a Condescending U.S. Peace Activist

Posted: 11/15/2013 by editormary in Grassroots Activism, Middle East, Opinions and Letters, People's Movements / Struggles, Resistance, Syria, War
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1460303_10151719963817016_1488318310_nWRITTEN BY MOHJA KAHF

We are going through hell and our friends inside Syria are being torn limb from limb. You come in after three years of it and tell us what our uprising is and isn’t and what it should be and shouldn’t. We all started out together in it, hopeful, finding each other, Syrians, talking to each other again after years of monstrous silence twisted by so many layers of fear, generations of fear handed down by the trauma of families with absent members in prison. Young people began hearing their own voices for the first time, shouting “freedom.” “It was the first time I ever heard my own voice,” young women, young men, street protesters, have told me over and over. Working-class urban neighborhoods and farming- and middle-class rural villagers across the country came out for clearly stated goals of human rights and democratic freedoms and no more being ruled by police state, and it had nothing to do with Islamists but that was before you bothered to notice. Some 920 different locales were protesting nonviolently on a weekly basis by summer 2011, with at least 4 million of Syria’s 23 million people having protested at the height of 2011. Even this first reality, you won’t acknowledge.

Stunning arrogant brutality is how this police state met this uprising. Insane brutality and duplicity. House-to-house raids, tank and machine gun fire, ground troops, snipers, home burnings, the capture and torture of children, the siege of Daraa—all this before the uprising began to arm. The pressure for self-defense was intense. Come live in it for a day. I don’t think you’ve ever been stopped cold by the tears and the anguish in the individual self-defense argument from a real Syrian human being demanding, “if a regime militia is raiding my home, about to kill my children, how dare you tell me not to lift arms to try to save them.” I am stopped cold by it, every day. 

My only answer is: “look, I’m really sorry, but look at the facts; after the revolution lifted arms, your children are dead and so is the whole neighborhood. Arms are not working; self-defense is not defending; it is making you a more legible target for the lethal regime. It defended that home for two hours or two weeks, but in the end the entire neighborhood was flattened by the regime, because the regime is hugely more armed. Nor will outside military intervention save you. You can only win if you band together in slow, organized, nonviolent resistance.”

I say this and I staunchly advocate nonviolence over the din of shelling, but my voice breaks saying it to someone whose children are cowering tonight because the home is shaking because the town is being shelled and his parents are already dead. Some far-sighted Syrians got that having the (secular) FSA only drew heavier regime fire. Most Syrians did not get it—gasp, they live in a pro-violence culture like most of the world—and felt the only answer to the inequity in arms only means all their problems would be solved by heavier arms for the (secular) FSA which they see as defending them. I know they’re only harming themselves in believing this romance of armed liberation, but I know it from their pain, and I can only tell them with my voice shaking because I am at a privileged distance from them, and because I haven’t been able to help them in any other way stronger than they see the (secular) FSA helping them, and then the armed Islamists—who did not come in until 2012, able to wedge in because of the regime devastation wreaked on nonviolent uprising Syrians whose screams went unheard by you, able to ride in on the false promise of armed liberation and humanitarian aid not provided by others.

And you hear their cry for arms, and you brand them intransigent militants, and demand why they won’t go to Geneva. I demand that too, but I do it from inside a Syrian anguish, at far higher damage to myself than it costs you. You then turn around and cast aspersions on me and Syrians with similar stands, not even allowing us our embattled path, because of our “associations;” we wake up damned if we do advocate nonviolence, and damned if we don’t.

Our “associations?” We are Syrians. We all started out together. Hopeful. Three years ago, we did not know how things would unfold. We began working together and creating histories and relationships. And now that different paths have been trod in this revolution, you come in and tell us we are not allowed to be associates, to be related to other Syrian people in this revolution who’ve taken other paths? There are people on the pro-FSA side who I think have done no end of damage to this revolution, but for whom I’d give my life as much as for people in civilian resistance. Yeah, those are my associations.

You breeze in and say, in effect, “how dare these Syrians fall for the romance of armed liberation. They offend my anti-imperialist stance as a progressive American. Every leftist revolution has fallen for that romance and every other revolution too, but how despicable and primitive of these Syrians to fall for it.” You demand we apologize for “associating” with each other. You demand we devote our energies to proving we are nonviolent and meet your standards, like a man demanding a feminist prove she is not a man-hater and has never associated with militant separatist feminists. This, while we get derision from fellow Syrians every day for insisting that this brutal regime can be stopped by nonviolence, hisses from starving freezing impoverished people facing its gun barrels in their faces every day, before whose trauma we tremble. Insulated from realities on Syrian ground, you point to one of us and say, in effect, “How dare any of you Syrian activists abroad be tempted, even for a moment, to see an iota of use in bombing assad’s military airports that are bombing your people?” In the din of this shriek of pain that we hear unceasingly, to the edge of our insanity, from Syrians in Syria, how dare we as Syrian peace activists abroad ever register the temptation to sympathize with the primal desire that someone, anyone just come and bomb the fuck out of this monster killing people we know daily. How dare I have a friend like that.

Instead of offering one bit of solidarity, you come in to tell us who we are and who we should be and are suspicious of us if we are not packaged into discrete separate compartments for you. We’re not up to your standards. We are Syrians and yes, we associate with each other, nonviolent proponents and Coalition and FSA-proponents and hard-drinking Syrian atheists and Muslim Brotherhood and gay Syrians and Nusra sympathizers, all fighting the regime together in our different ways; and some of us even have nephews in assad’s army just as much as nephews in assad’s prisons and in the FSA, and regime loyalist aunts, and military officer dads about whom we are terrified they could be killed and horrified they could be torturing someone. Yes, simultaneously. Because that is what it is to be Syrian today. Yes we are all cousins, all in-laws, all related, all family, and we all will have to live with each other for years to come in this Syria boat that is a life and a home and a country for Syrians even if it is an equation on a piece of paper for you, and we in this Revolution hate and love each other and fight with each other all while struggling against a brutal regime for a future Syria that has some ounce of justice, some human dignity and freedom in it, and for us there is green and good in Syrians worth struggling for still, and who on earth are you to drain one drop of our precious few remaining energies.

Father Paolo Dall’Oglio Double Bill (2 must read pieces)

Posted: 10/29/2013 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Culture and Heritage, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Interviews, Middle East Issues, People's Movements / Struggles, Religion, Resistance, Syria
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Syria: Getting out of the abyss that Assad has created, before it is too late

Father Paolo Dall'Oglio

Father Paolo Dall’Oglio

Interview with Father Paolo Dall’Oglio by Antonella Vicini, 9 January 2013 from Reset – Dialogues on Civilizations (translated by Mary Rizzo)

A discourse that in fact reaffirms the status quo and sixty thousand deaths that since 15 March 2011 (to January 2013, tr. note) have plunged Syria into a bloodbath: Bashar al-Assad and the Organisation of the United Nations have indicated the salient points of the current situation in the country. The former, speaking from the House of Culture in Damascus in front of his supporters, proposed a three-stage plan that substantially eliminates the revolutionary forces, labelled as “Western puppets” and the latter, in recent days, has published a series of disturbing numbers. From July to now, in correspondence with the increase of the military offensive, the dead are calculated at about 5 thousand per month, mostly civilians (approximately 76 percent). But this is only partial data: right from the title of the report the word is in fact of Preliminary Statistical Analysis of Documentation of Killings in Syria. “This figure is far higher than we expected. And it’s really shocking,” said the High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay. Also higher than the 45 thousand victims counted so far by groups linked to the opposition.

Torture, attacks on protected sites, the use of banned weapons and in general the human rights violations are delineating – as can be read also in the last report dated 2012 of the Independent International Commission of Investigation on Syria led by Paulo Sergio Pinheiro – a conflict with an increasingly sectarian character that is now extended also to those minorities initially “inclined to be neutral and non-hostile” and that reveal the presence of foreign fighters “with their own agenda.” A conflict that brought “immeasurable destruction and human suffering to the civilian population” and that cannot foresee “any military victory.”

“The only way to achieve an immediate cessation of violence is a negotiated political solution that responds to the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people.” Thus was the conclusion of the updating of the Syrian situation relative to September and December, 2012, probably simplifying the complexity of the current situation on the ground.

The person who knows the Syrian context, in its areas of light and shadow, is no doubt someone like Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, who has lived in the country for over thirty years. Founder of the monastic community of Deir Mar Musa, in the desert north of Damascus, Father Paolo has always been engaged in interfaith dialogue with the Islamic world and until last June, before being forced to leave by the regime, has spoken about the tragedy that he has witnessed daily in first person accounts.

The new UN report has just been released where a denouncement is made of 60 thousand deaths since the beginning of the conflict.

I cannot make an assessment of the number of deaths on a technical basis because it’s not my task to do that, and I note that often revolutionary movements tend to drive up the numbers for propaganda purposes. But the UN, bringing together different reasonably credible sources has arrived at an even greater number (15 thousand more compared to the 45 thousand already reported, ed. note). This does not surprise me, but I am afraid that once the dust has settled, when you can make a more accurate count, the numbers will be even higher. You cannot perpetrate months and months of aerial bombardments on civilian populations imagining to get balances of victims that look like surgical operations, which are also more than questionable on moral grounds. In Syria there is no action to hit the Resistance leaders but to kill the Syrians, en masse. The moral code of the Assad regime is one is with Assad or there will be destruction of the country.

How do you explain the substantial absence and delay of the international community on Syria?

Once defined by the regime, and by its friends, the “Islamist threat” in Syria, the international community has self-legitimised its maintaining a position of stalling and waiting: there will be no democracy in Syria, then there is no reason to take steps to activate for democracy of the Syrians. We are faced with a paradox, this position of wait-and-see has created the conditions for the expansion of radical Islamism.

The revolution, as a whole, has condemned the first actions of these groups as conspiracy actions conducted by the Syrian state. I never succumbed to this temptation, but remote-controlled manipulation is nothing new in the Syrian panorama, and there have been regime manipulations of extremist cells. Without simplifying, I say that the activity of Islamic extremism was part of the regime’s postulate since the very beginning, where they claimed the revolution was terrorism paid for by foreigners, then when this area branched, complex and effective, it has been able to take the initiative and the head of the revolution in military terms, these groups have provoked in the international community a self-justification to refrain from action. There was an incredible miscalculation and these same groups have exploded in the hands of the regime.

In the report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, it is said that, given the situation on the ground, a military solution to the conflict is now impossible, and that it is instead desirable to begin negotiations. But at this moment a negotiated solution seems impractical.

The regime wants negotiations to the extent that it needs more time to continue the systematic destruction of Syria and thus enter into the third phase and try to take the country back in its own hands. I was expecting that the regime in Damascus would work to divide the country on the line of the Orontes, once acknowledged the fact of not being able to maintain control over everything. Faced with a general revolution the only thing possible would be a Syrian Kosovo, hedging their bets on Alawite solidarity and other minorities living in that area, such as, in fact, the Christians; this is a solution accepted by Iran (Shiite, ed. note) as a lesser evil. This has not happened so far and in revolutionary circles it is said that it cannot happen because the rebels have so deeply penetrated even in that area that the regime would no longer be able to have such a division.

Why had it not chosen the way of secession as long as it was possible?

I can give you two reasons. One is psychological. Bashar al-Assad has always said I am a man of Damascus and not of the Alawite mountains. His cultural and mental space is all of Syria. In this sense, paradoxically, Assad would be a “non-sectarian”. He uses his sect for his power, but a power that if it is not of the whole of Syria, it does not interest him. We see this as a disconnect between his own idea of ​​himself and reality.

The other hypothesis assumes that the regime is a complex matter, divided between Ba’ath ideology, which is obviously not for secession, and the logic of the Alawite family. These two souls have been separated in time but not enough to contemplate the geographical dislocation of the country.

You have spoken of the need to begin to govern at least the liberated zones.

I have written in Arabic just two days ago, on Facebook, asking the head of the coalition to immediately set up in the liberated territories the sole government of transition. It is an operation that should be done immediately because it would eliminate the impression that the Syrian revolution is now entirely in the hands of Muslim extremists who are subversive and clandestine and they can begin to restore the country to the Syrians. On the ground there are practical problems such as lack of water, electricity, labour, wages.

Do you believe it is still too early to talk about the future of the minorities?

It is not early, in fact you have to talk about it now, but it is very difficult to see the future because of the omission of international relief. There is hope that the revolution as a whole may have a capacity of self-discipline that allows them to form that unity of the country in the reconciliation desired by everyone in the democratic revolution in Syria. Only some extremist military groups seem to threaten the destiny of minorities, even if they have never attacked Christians as such.

In recent days, however, there was a complaint by Mother Agnes Mariam (Carmelite and superior of the Deir Mar Yocoub monastery of Qara, known to be very critical of the rebels, ed. note) in this regard.

Mother Agnes knows how to dose the words and she is only, I repeat and I emphasise, the (able) clerical expression of the deceitful manipulation action of the Syrian regime. Mother Agnes is a self-proclaimed leader of a movement that does not exist on the ground, Musalaha (Reconciliation, ed note), and it is a real problem because for her interpretation of the facts is always selective and one-sided: that the revolution is terrorism!

How do you see a possible Syria after Assad and after nearly two years of war?

I believe that the profound nature of democratic Syria will be a laboratory of civil evolution and policy making of the Islamist Arab area of great interest. Syria has a cultural dignity of Islam that is different from that of the Gulf.

This is my vow, my hope and also the space of my commitment. At the end of January I will participate in the commission of the Syrian revolution that deals with preventing the massacres in the moment of victory and I hope, in February, to be able to re-enter the country. Syria cannot win the revolution leaving a hundred thousand Alawites deaths in its wake. We must find a way, even ideological and theological, to say that there will be no revenge against the Alawites and that all criminals will be judged with fairness.

See http://www.resetdoc.org

Nun on Irish visit accused of peddling ‘regime lies’ about crisis in Syria

17/08/12

MARY FITZGERALD, Foreign Affairs Correspondent (The Irish Times)

AN ITALIAN Jesuit expelled from Syria in June due to his outspoken criticism of government violence has accused a controversial nun who visited Ireland last week of peddling “regime lies” about the crisis there.

Fr Paolo Dall’Oglio, who lived in Syria for 30 years and has been heavily involved in interfaith work in the country, described Mother Agnes Mariam as “an instrument” of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. “She has been consistent in assuming and spreading the lies of the regime, and promoting it through the power of her religious persona,” he told The Irish Times yesterday. “She knows how to cover up the brutality of the regime.”

During her four-day visit to Ireland last week, Mother Agnes Mariam, who is superior at the Melkite Greek Catholic monastery in Syria, gave media interviews in which she claimed Christians in Syria were facing “extinction” and that rebels battling Assad were predominantly foreigners linked with al-Qaeda.

Fr Dall’Oglio, who has spent time with opposition activists in several restive parts of Syria, said these claims were “ridiculous” and constituted regime propaganda.

“I have been there, I know the people, including the youth, who are working for the revolution, and I know that what she is saying is insane. It corresponds with the regime version of the facts,” he said.

Mother Agnes Mariam, who visited Dublin and Belfast, had separate meetings with representatives of the Irish Bishops Conference justice and peace committee, Sinn Féin TD Seán Crowe, Nobel peace laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire, and an official from the Department of Foreign Affairs.

One of her interlocutors here was taken aback when the nun claimed during their meeting that the Houla massacre, in which more than 100 civilians, more than half of them children, were killed, was an elaborate hoax concocted by rebels. This week a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Syrian government forces and the pro-Assad militia known as shabiha were responsible for the massacre.

In March, Mother Agnes Mariam was accused of running a “misinformation campaign” by a US-based Syrian opposition group called Syrian Christians for Democracy.

It said she maintains “close ties” to the Assad family and alleged she had fed selected visiting journalists “distorted facts and fake testimonies for the sole purpose of tarnishing the opposition’s image”.

The group referred to the role of a number of Christians in the Syrian uprising.

“Mother Agnes and those helping her are harming the Syrian people by disseminating negative pro-Assad propaganda and tearing at Syria’s social and religious fabrics,” it said. “The Christians in Syria, as well as the rest of the population, are in need of undivided support, backing, and funding. They do not need divisive rumours and the propagation of inaccurate information.”

Mother Agnes Mariam’s trip to Ireland was organised by Alan Lonergan, who acts as churches liaison officer with Sadaka, an Irish pro-Palestinian advocacy group, though he arranged the visit in a personal capacity.

“The impression people have of what is happening in Syria is very black and white,” he said. “We need to examine more of the grey area.”

Filed Under: Assad’s Regime, distorted facts, Italian Jesuit, Mother Agnes Mariam, Propaganda,Syria

http://syrianfreedom.org/nun-on-irish-visit-accused-of-peddling-regime-lies-about-crisis-in-syria

http://www.irishtimes.com/premium/loginpage?destination=http://www.irishtimes.com/news/nun-on-irish-visit-accused-of-peddling-regime-lies-about-crisis-in-syria-1.538877

thanks to Treasa

letter to protest venues hosting Mother Agnes-Mariam de la Croix

Posted: 10/22/2013 by editormary in Education, Grassroots Activism, Internet and Communication, Middle East, Opinions and Letters, Syria, War
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suora    This is a letter that can be sent to every venue that is hosting Mother Agnes-Mariam De La Croix as a speaker. It can be personalized and altered as required. As activists and responsible human beings, we cannot stand by while an apologist for genocide is given a platform in spaces that claim to promote peace, justice, and human rights:

Dear Sir/Madam,

In reference to the visit of Mother Agnes-Mariam De La Croix, the Superior of the Monastery of Deir Mar Yacoub, (and any other persons participating at DATE/ADDRESS), we would like to draw your attention to the following:
Large scale massacres against civilian populations have been committed by government military forces and pro-regime militias in Syria. Those invited to speak about this immense tragedy should be examined carefully as to their position in support of the forces behind the massacres. It is unethical to give a platform to persons who support these massacres or facilitate them by spreading information that has been proven again and again to be misleading, false, and in many cases pure propaganda of the regime perpetrating the crimes. It would be completely unconscionable for a religious or spiritual organization to put their facilities at the disposal of such persons.

We fully respect the principle of debate and freedom of expression, but in this case the person you have invited expresses blind support for a dictator who has massacred and is still massacring his own population, including over 11,000 children. The only reason for this violence is the regime’s intention to crush any and all people who stand up for their human rights and who they deem to be a threat to their tyrannical rule. The regime has killed countless numbers of people for trying to exercise their right to free expression. It is clearly evident that the uprising in Syria started peacefully, and was not militarized. Nor was it based on religious intolerance or sectarianism. It began with non-violent protests demanding reforms and basic freedoms that they had been denied for far too long. These protests were met with extreme violence and repression, and in order to justify that, a machine of propaganda was put in place, disseminating lies, passing off hoaxes as fact, and claiming that minorities in Syria were under threat of harm from religious extremists. The speaker you have invited is one of the key players in this propaganda machine, many of her claims have been debunked by experts and witnesses, while the voices of those murdered by the regime have been silenced once and for all.

The peaceful nature of the protests that your guest attempts to depict as a violent insurgency against Syria’s minorities has been recognised by the European Union, the United States and the United Nations. The crimes against humanity committed by Assad have also been recognised by these entities, as well as by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. People in Syria only took up arms against the regime when the killing had reached such a scale that they were forced to defend themselves and their families militarily.

We are astonished that you have made your venue available to supporters of a murderous dictatorship. What is happening in Syria is in the public domain and cannot be ignored. Support for this project may amount to complicity in crimes against humanity. This is not just a legal issue but also a moral one.

It is extremely ironic that the photo used by the organisation promoting the event depicts damage in Syria caused by airstrikes. It is common knowledge that ONLY the regime possesses air power and the capacity to bomb cities and residential areas in this way. The use of the image in this way is further evidence of the bad faith of the organisers of this event. 

We request that you cancel this event immediately and we would like to suggest that you organise a new event that will present what is happening in Syria in a truthful and objective way. We thank you for your solidarity with the people of Syria.

A Call to Save Khan Al-Umdan, Acre, Palestine

Posted: 10/15/2013 by editormary in "Israel", Culture and Heritage, Middle East, Palestine, Petitions
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A Call to Save Khan Al-Umdan, Acre, Palestine

A Call to Save Khan Al-Umdan, Acre, Palestine

Khan Al-Umdan was built in 1874 and is one of the largest and best preserved Khans in Palestine. It sits in the centre of the coastal city of Akka which is a UNESCO World Heritage Centre designated as such in 2001. The proposals by the Israel Land Authority (ILA) and the Israel Ministry of Tourism to issue a commercial tender to convert Khan Al-Umdan into a 200 room luxury hotel (under the guise of maintaining and conserving the site) is but a slap in the face of heritage conservation in Akka.

The call for Tenders was dated 7 October, 2013 and the deadline for submission of all commercial bids is 6 January 2014.

Khan Al-Umdan must be maintained, preserved and left untouched by greedy commercial development plans.

We call upon all responsible people and conservationists to raise their voice and to demand a stop to this land grab.

PLEASE SIGN HERE:

see also: www.1948.org.uk

A week of welcoming Syrian refugees in Milan

Posted: 10/14/2013 by editormary in Europe, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Middle East, Refugees, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Syria, War
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sirin

WRITTEN BY Sirin Bekdash, translated by Mary Rizzo

Refugees #1

“How old are you? You look very young.”

She smiles at me in a way that it seems she has not gotten love for years, “24, 4 of these are my children. My husband has gone to a better world.”

Her eyes are green, they are not deep, but they sparkle. They say that suffering becomes light in the eyes of those who have tried it, I’ve just seen proof of that.

Refugees #2

“Take off your hood so I can fit you with this sweatshirt.”

“But my hair is a mess.”

“Well what does it matter now, it’s not important.”

“Then how should I expect to get married? I’m at the right age for it… I have to look good, I could put on my best clothes, but they fell into the sea already 3 times and the suitcase is soaking wet. I’ve been rescued each time, but the gel gets lost…”

“Don’t worry, girls like tussled hair. Tell me, is there anything else you need?”

“Yes, how many years separate us in age?”

But his was that innocent kind of questioning that is the sweetest thing that exists in the world.

Refugees #3

I learned in a week of life more than I have 3 years. You don’t learn about history by reading what’s in the newspapers, but in the eyes of the people, they have the power of incinerating paper.

Refugees #4

I stroked her fragile legs, I forced a hug, I placed a sweater over her shoulders.

I gave her a chocolate but she did not close her fist and it fell to the ground.

I asked her to choose a toy but with a chilling stare, her mouth dirty or maybe even wounded, in short, crusted, she looked beyond.

“Are you hungry little one?” She did not answer.

“Are you cold?” She did not answer.

“Are you afraid?” She lowered her gaze.

Can I die of fright in her place?

Please God

Refugees #5

This sounds terribly selfish I know, but I need those refugees more than they need me. I depend on them much more than they depend on me.

Refugees #6

There are those who wonder how you fall asleep without love, tonight I ask myself only how fall asleep in a station.

Refugees #7

Certain phrases on the walls touch my soul.

“No human being is illegal”

Refugees #8

An elderly woman with a scarred face. I do not know why, I just know that I look at you and I think that the more valuable a vase is, the more noticeable its scars will be.

Refugees #9

Slender, a back broken from 120 days of travel, 2 children in tow.

It makes me think of bamboo plants, incredibly thin trunks that are able to be tall and resilient, it leaves an impression on me.

Refugees #10

A “shukran” uttered by you has the power of reconciling myself with the world.

Refugees #11

They arrived at their destination, refugees do not put limits on Divine Providence.

Refugees #12

My mother has never had to scold me or spank me, she would tell me something was not to be done and I did not do it.

But these myopic laws…no, you cannot respect them. Mine is not an invitation to disorder but a call to demand those rights that even we one day might need.

Refugees # 13

“I’ve been travelling for two months, may daughter and I. The two of us alone.”

I prayed so that my mother would not die, she is not sick , she’s fine alhamdulillah. Then I cried silently for such a sad prayer.

Refugees #14

“What’s your name habibty?”

“Salam”

Nomen Omen, what the ancients said in Latin; your name is an omen, your destiny.

Refugees #15

I’ll reveal a work that combines mysticism and action: helping others.

Refugees #16

Probably the pages of history books will not give testimony to all the blood that Arabs have offered for free. But no matter, liber scriptus proferetur, in quo totum continetur. “A written book will be brought forth, in which everything shall be contained.”

Refugees  #17

“It’s all because of that Tunisian Bouazizi! Is it not true that it’s only his fault that all this has happened? I just wanted to live in safety and before there was safety.”

I was clamping my hands over my ears until they began to hurt. It’s a lie, an atrocious lie. But with what courage can I say that to those who have lost everything in war?

Refugees  #18

It took only a little to give me euphoria and just as little to make me sad, a goodbye. When you talk of fingerprints I seem to see you running with ankle weights. When you talk of Sweden you seem like a sunflower that stands proud and tries to get close to the sun.

Syria: genocide by international consensus

Posted: 10/04/2013 by editormary in "Israel", Children\'s Corner, Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Middle East Issues, People's Movements / Struggles, Refugees, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Syria, War, Zionism
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Some of the hundreds of civilian victims of the Sarin Nerve Gas massacre in Ghouta. Gassed in their beds by the Syrian regime.

Some of the hundreds of civilian victims of the Sarin Nerve Gas massacre in Ghouta. Gassed in their beds by the Syrian regime.

WRITTEN BY Amr Salahi
A green light to Assad

Ever since the Syrian regime gassed its own citizens in the Damascus suburbs in a chemical attack on August 21, the issue has rarely been out of the Western news media. However, the debate has been very simplistic. Any observer would be forgiven for thinking that the only crime committed in Syria was this chemical attack, and that the Syrian people had not been subjected to a genocidal war at the hands of a ruthless sectarian dictatorship for two and a half years.

Of course, the original cause of the conflict has been largely forgotten. Outside Syria, not many people remember the peaceful protests calling for freedom and democracy that began the Syrian revolution in March 2011, and how those protests were met by the Assad regime, with unarmed protesters being slaughtered in the streets and children who wrote slogans on walls or took part in the protests tortured, on many occasions to death, in the regime’s jails. It was only after many long months of killing and oppression that defecting soldiers from the regime’s army formed the Free Syrian Army, to defend peaceful protesters as well as ordinary citizens from government attacks.

An observer of the debate would also be forgiven for thinking that the countries of the world are divided on Syria. The received wisdom on the Syrian conflict is that the United States, its allies in NATO and the Gulf States are offering support to the rebels while Russia, China, Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah are supporting the regime. Bashar Al-Assad’s regime likes to paint itself as part of an “axis of resistance” against US and Israeli imperialism which includes Iran and Hezbollah and is supported by Russia; this is why it has gained support from the anti-imperialist left in Western countries. A closer look at the support the regime is receiving vis-a-vis the “support” the rebels are receiving from their supposed allies shows that there is in fact little difference between the major powers on the Syrian issue. Russian ships carrying weapons, including aircraft, dock regularly in Latakia and Tartus, ensuring that the regime remains armed to the teeth and able to fight on despite the military setbacks inflicted on it by the rebels. Iran has not only sent weapons to the regime but also troops and advisers. It is believed widely in Syria that these advisers are the real rulers of the country. Hezbollah was instrumental in the regime’s ruthless bombardment and capture of Qusair, and its fighters now line up alongside the regime in Deraa and Aleppo.

On the other hand, the United States and the European countries have given rhetorical support to the Syrian opposition while making sure that the Free Syrian Army remains unable to defeat the government’s forces by imposing a strict arms embargo. For example, last year the Free Syrian Army managed to acquire anti-aircraft weapons but the United States and NATO refused to allow them to be transported to Syria and they remained in storage in Turkey. In June this year, following a regime chemical attack on the town of Saraqeb, the Obama administration announced that it would arm the Syrian rebels. To-date they have not received a single bullet from the United States or from any of its European allies. The FSA’s main source of weapons remains those captured from the regime or those sold to it by corrupt regime officers. It is thought that Gulf countries have supplied weapons but not on a scale that would tip the balance of the conflict. The main factor ensuring that the conflict and genocide continue, and the Assad regime stays in power, is the continuing embargo on weapons to the Free Syrian Army, which lacks the heavy weapons needed to defeat the state’s armed forces.

In order to understand the position of the United States and its European allies, it is helpful to look at the statements of Israeli officials. While the main pro-Israel lobby group in the United States, AIPAC, publicly declared its support for strikes against the Syrian regime following the most recent chemical weapons attack, it is much more evident that Israel would in fact prefer Bashar Al-Assad to remain in power. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged US Secretary of State Kerry to reach a deal with Russia that would avoid a military strike on Syria, expressing fears that a US strike would strengthen the Syrian opposition and allow it to gain control of Assad’s chemical weapons. Netanyahu’s office later issued a denial that any such exchange took place.

In November 2011, relatively early in the Syrian revolution when there was no serious talk of an Islamic extremist presence in Syria, Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli defence ministry official, said that Assad’s removal from power would be “devastating for Israel”; the Zionist state, he added, would then face an “Islamic Empire” encompassing Syria, Jordan and Egypt run by the Muslim Brotherhood and committed to its destruction. In May 2013, shortly after an Israeli strike on Damascus, Ephraim Halevy, a former director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, went much further in an article in the American journal Foreign Affairs. Calling Assad “Israel’s Man in Damascus” he spelt out the reason why: for the past 40 years Assad has kept Israel’s “border” with Syria quiet and guaranteed its security. What Halevy means is that Assad has allowed Israel to occupy the Golan Heights, undisturbed by any resistance. Another Israeli intelligence official summed up the Israeli position towards the conflict in Syria thus: “Our ‘best-case scenario’ is that they continue to busy themselves fighting each other and don’t turn their attention to us.”

Israel’s attitude to the Syrian conflict allows us to consider the developments that have taken place since the chemical attack in a new light. After President Obama announced that the US would strike Syria, anti-war activists and left-wing “anti-imperialists” were up in arms, as were right-wing pro-Israel Republicans in the United States. There was much comment that the rebels fighting against Assad were sectarian extremists with links to Al-Qaeda, who posed a threat to Syria’s minorities, especially its Christian community, and that they were just as brutal as Assad. Conspiracy theories without any evidence which blamed the rebels for the sarin attack received mainstream coverage and were used to argue that the US and its allies were being dragged into an Iraq-style war.

Sadly for the conspiracy theorists, the evidence that the Syrian regime carried out the attack is incontrovertible. The United Nations report on the attack published on Tuesday, which does not assign blame, nevertheless concludes that it was launched from Mount Qassioun, a major government military base outside Damascus from which attacks against the Damascus suburbs are launched regularly. The report also concluded that the attack was launched using M14 rockets, which only the regime possesses, and that the sarin used was of a quality that could only be produced on an industrial scale using the resources of a government. The Assad regime’s own reaction to the attack points to its responsibility, and to its sectarian character. First, it denied that any such attack took place; then it conceded that the attack happened but blamed the rebels; then a few days later the world was treated to the bizarre spectacle of Syrian government spokeswoman Buthaina Shaaban appearing on Sky News to claim that the child victims of the attack were in fact brought to the Ghouta area from Latakia province (an Alawite-majority area 300 miles away) by “terrorists” and then killed. The government did not declare any period of mourning for the 1,429 victims of the attack and, in fact, its supporters were seen celebrating and handing out sweets on the streets of Damascus in its immediate aftermath.

The anti-war activists and their new-found allies the Assad supporters and right-wing Republicans need not have worried. Despite a great deal of emotional language from John Kerry about the use of chemical weapons and the 426 children who died as a result, Obama’s strike threat dwindled away to nothing. From being a “limited” attack to punish Assad, but not tip the balance in favour of the rebels, it became an “unbelievably small” one, as Kerry called it on his visit to London, to a non-existent one, when Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov agreed to a deal which would allow Assad to keep his conventional weapons and continue using them to kill his own people, but oblige him to give up his chemical weapons. It is doubtful whether the deal will be backed by a binding Security Council resolution, and it is estimated that it will take until the middle of 2014 to destroy the chemical weapons. This is probably the first time in history that a criminal is to be punished simply by taking away one of his weapons.

The deal struck between Kerry and Lavrov makes almost everyone a winner. The United States can continue posing as a supporter of the Syrian people; Israel is satisfied that “their man in Damascus” is still in place; Russia can continue arming Assad and today appears to have stood up to the United States, when in reality there is little difference between the positions of these two nations on the Syrian issue; and Iran can continue to participate actively in Assad’s sectarian war while pretending that it is standing up to the United States and Israel. The anti-war campaigners are in ignorant bliss because they believe that they have stopped a war on Syria, not knowing or caring that Syrians are still enduring the most horrific war since the genocide in Rwanda. The only losers are the Syrian people.

For two and a half years, they have been pleading with the world to stop Assad’s war against them but to no avail. The chemical attack is only the latest chapter in this genocide. Constant efforts have been made in both the mainstream and alternative media to belittle the suffering in Syria, discredit the casualty figures and assign blame to the opposition for the regime’s crimes but what is happening is genocide by any standard. United Nations figures reveal that 110,000 people have been killed since the Syrian revolution broke out in March 2011. Seven million people have been displaced and the death rate is approximately 5,000 people per month. Only the regime has the capacity to kill and displace people on this scale and it has now received a green light to continue killing its own citizens, as long as it doesn’t use chemical weapons.

The suffering and the genocide of the Syrian people will be detailed in the part 2 of this article.

http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/middle-east/7448-syria-genocide-by-international-consensus-

The Anti-War Movement Wins – the War in Syria Continues

Posted: 10/01/2013 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Grassroots Activism, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Middle East, Opinions and Letters, People's Movements / Struggles, Politics, Rant / Musings / Discussion, Syria, War
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Written by NOT George Sabra. [Submitted this to any number of publications, none picked it up. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone after Rania Masri…]

The anti-war movement in the West got what it wanted: the war in Syria grinds on without the involvement of the only force capable of ending the bloody stalemate, the U.S. military.

The anti-war movement in the West accomplished what it set out to do: American F-16s remained grounded while the Assad regime’s MiGs returned to the skies to bomb hospitals for the first time since Bashar al-Assad crossed President Obama’s “red line” on August 21.

The anti-war movement in the West succeeded: the big guns aboard America’s battleships parked off the Syrian coast remained silent as the regime’s big guns opened fire once more on defenseless civilian neighborhoods.

The anti-war movement in the West won a great victory: while the war-making regime in Damascus enjoys the unlimited and unconditional financial, military, and diplomatic support of Iran and Russia, the popular uprising still stands alone as the red-headed stepchild of the Arab Spring, without a steady source for the heavy weapons it needs to survive.

These are the bloody real-world consequences of this so-called anti-war movement’s triumph in the West.

This movement that arose on the basis of Sarah Palin-style concern for Syrian lives – “so we’re bombing Syria because Syria is bombing Syria?” – is nowhere to be found now that the regime’s savage campaign to end their lives has resumed in earnest. This movement that was so worried about the fate of innocent Syrians in the face of American bombs has not uttered a single word, not called a single Congressman, nor organized a single demonstration to demand the Obama administration send Syrians gas masks, something the administration has steadfastly refused to do despite its talk about basic human decency and the sanctity of children’s lives. Thus, the administration and its anti-war critics are united as one in treating Syrian lives as fodder for their political agendas, as a rhetorical device in finely-worded speeches about high-minded principles and universal ethics.

Leading figures of this movement like Rania Masri (who should know better because of her workaround Israel-Palestine) continually draw a false equivalence between the infrequent atrocities committed by a poorly armed, untrained, undisciplined, disorganized rag-tag opposition desperate to save themselves and their families from an oppressive dictatorial regime that uses sarin, tanks, jets, scud missiles, and artillery against them daily. Imagine blaming “both sides” for the carnage of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising and you get an idea of how monstrous this is.

What is worse than this “anti-war” movement’s highly selective faux outrage over the plight of the Syrian people are the bald-faced lies it continually spreads to substantiate its position.

In the run up to the 2003 Iraq war, the anti-war movement fought the Bush administration’s lies with pure, unadulterated truth. Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter declared that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed by the U.N. in the 1990s and pointed out that Iraq was a basket case militarily thanks to a decade of crippling U.N. sanctions. For his trouble, Ritter was shut out of the halls of power as lawmakers in Washington, D.C. authorized President Bush to disarm a disarmed Iraq by invading and forcibly occupying it.

In the run up to the 2013 Syria war that wasn’t, the anti-war movement fought the Obama administration’s truths with pure, unadulterated lies. Antiwar.com founder Justin Raimando saidthe Assad regime’s sarin gas attack in Ghouta on August 21 was a “hoax” and referred to it sarcastically as a massacre – in quotation marks. Retired CIA officer Ray McGovern and his Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) claimed that the Ghouta gassacre was a false-flag attack staged by the opposition in a bogus, unsourced Curveball-style “report” that VIPS plagiarized from Global Research, a conspiracy theory website founded by a man withdirect ties to the Assad dynasty.

“Bush lied, people died” is what the anti-war movement said when the Downing Street memo revealed that the Bush administration fixed the facts and the intelligence around their policy of regime change in Iraq. This time, the movement lied, Syrians died as anti-war activists went into overdrive to spin the facts and intelligence coming out of Syria in 2013 to fit the Iraq template of 2003. U.S. politician Dennis Kucinich even recapitulated in his own way Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous handshake with the Butcher of Baghdad as he was gassing Kurds and Iranians by having friendly sit down with Bashar al-Assad in the middle of his killing fields.

The movement to stop U.S. military action failed in 2003 and succeeded in 2013. In both cases, the result was needless bloodshed and brutality borne by people far from our shores.

Pilger’s denial of Syrian people’s agency

Posted: 09/19/2013 by editormary in Internet and Communication, Middle East Issues, Palestine, Syria, War, Zionism
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pilgerWRITTEN BY SAM CHARLES HAMAD    For people like Pilger, Arabs have absolutely no agency – they either have to be the passive masses living under an ‘anti-western’ strongman like Assad, wherein their very real suffering is even reduced by Pilger and his ilk to a ‘western conspiracy’ (or it’s just ignored), or they are these seemingly mindless ‘proxies’ being manipulated by all and sundry. 

In the recent piece by John Pilger  he writes:  “Syria is the current project. Outflanked by Russia and public opinion, Obama has now embraced the “path of diplomacy”. Has he? As Russian and US negotiators arrived in Geneva on 12 September, the US increased its support for the Al-Qaeda affiliated militias with weapons sent clandestinely through Turkey, Eastern Europe and the Gulf. The Godfather has no intention of deserting his proxies in Syria. Al Qaeda was all but created by the CIA’s Operation Cyclone that armed the mujahedin in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Since then, jihadists have been used to divide and Arab societies and in eliminating the threat of pan-Arab nationalism to western “interests” and Israel’s lawless colonial expansion. This is Kissinger-style “realism”.”

Let me just make something very clear: John Pilger is basically saying here that the Syrian rebels are ‘jihadists’ being used to destroy the regime of Bashar al-Assad because it somehow represents a threat to ‘western interests’. It’s not just that Pilger’s understanding of the conflict is so utterly stupid and bereft of any logic or historical fact, but it is also is in its content a very definite form of apologia for the regime’s crimes. Unlike most of the other witting and unwitting apologists for Bashar al-Assad on the left, Pilger doesn’t even bother paying lip service to Assad’s crimes (or the wider crimes of the Assad dynasty), but instead ‘treats’ us to the now familiar narrative of the conflict, wherein Assad is cast as the righteous protagonist, who was presumably just keeping on keeping on, when these vicious antagonists, the jihadist Al-Qaeda proxies, appeared from nowhere and started causing all kinds of fitna. Basically, it’s all a US plot and Assad’s ‘war on terrorism’ is very real and very righteous (unlike the west’s ‘war on terrorism’, every aspect of which Pilger was, as you might expect, dead against).

For people like Pilger, Arabs have absolutely no agency – they either have to be the passive masses living under an ‘anti-western’ strongman like Assad, wherein their very real suffering is even reduced by Pilger and his ilk to a ‘western conspiracy’ (or it’s just ignored), or they are these seemingly mindless ‘proxies’ being manipulated by all and sundry. The only time that somebody such as Pilger would ever comment on, let alone turn up with a camera to document, the suffering or resistance of the Arab peoples is if they are ‘victims’ of what he perceives to be the West, or, in other words, if they are Palestinians living under and resisting the Israeli occupation or Iraqis being ravaged by US sanctions or fighting against the imperialist occupation forces. However, if you are a Syrian who has been living under the cruel tyranny of the Assad dynasty, Pilger will not merely ignore your suffering or apologise for it, but if you resist such tyranny, he will actively essentialise you as being an ‘Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist’ or a mere proxy for the West. His entire worldview is in essence the mirror image of the worldview of the defenders of US power and hegemony, who, for example, care only about the very few Israeli victims of rockets fired on Sderot from Gaza, while they actively deny the suffering of the Palestinian victims of Israeli state terror – or, as Pilger implies with Syria, they actually justify the death and destruction inflicted upon Gaza by Israel as being necessary in a ‘war on terror’.

To various different degrees (some more subtle than others), events in Syria have allowed this kind of facile ‘anti-imperialism’ to come to the fore among significant sections and individuals of the left, and you’ll notice that there has been – over the past two-and-a-half years – a gradual coalescence of not just the type of language used by some on the ‘anti-imperialist left’ and that of the pro-imperialists, but the actual substance of the arguments are basically the same, albeit with different ‘sides’ corresponding to the similar content and form of the arguments. This is not a type of leftism that I could ever accept or be a part of.

Imperialism Wins! The Westerners know BETTER!

Posted: 09/02/2013 by editormary in "Israel", Children\'s Corner, Europe, Grassroots Activism, Hasbara / Zionist Propaganda, Hasbara Deconstruction Site, Human Rights, Middle East, Palestine, People's Movements / Struggles, Refugees, Resistance, War, Zionism
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Sryrian Children. Worth more than all the "pundits" put together. They should be seen AND heard.

Sryrian Children. Worth more than all the “pundits” put together. They should be seen AND heard.

Written by Mary Rizzo
For well over two and a half years, there has been a war in Syria. Some will call it a Civil War, and yet… these same people who call it a civil war (despite having been repeatedly corrected by fighters on the ground that it is an Intifada, an uprising and a revolution) are now finally taking to the  streets to chant, “No War – Hands off Syria” as if it is currently waiting for a war to start and are simply being targeted by the West for imperial expansionism. A variant on the theme, they shout, “Stop the War” and again, they don’t mean to in any way address the bombing that has destroyed most of Syria, they mean the air strikes that a very few Western leaders are threatening to do to a very limited amount of targets inside Syria. Why on earth would the Western leaders do something like this when for two and a half years they have not done anything more severe than “deplore” the use of barrel bombs and carpet bombing of residential areas? Because they had to in some way establish a point of no return and it randomly fell on the use of Chemical Weapons.

It is beyond all reasonable doubt that the Syrian regime (which had admitted they possessed these weapons and have the only means to have implemented their use on a massive scale this August, exposing 15,000 people, including the elderly, women and children, to lethal nerve gas while in their beds) used Sarin Gas against its own people. Many more details about its acquisition will come out in the future, but at the current moment, over 1,500 have succumbed to it immediately (including hundreds of infants and children) and thousands more who have been exposed have had to deal with its very dangerous effects. So, I would think that any human being would be against the use of this weapon, considering it to be an atrocity that should not be ignored or even in the slightest way defended.

But what has instead happened? After the international news agencies, refusing to support the revolution also due to the fear that the western public has of any change of regime in the Arab world and an allergy to revolutions in general, finally displayed a fragment of the visual evidence of people suffocating to their deaths, their bodies writhing in pain or struck by uncontrollable spasms, the solidarity world started to move. But how did it happen that instead of condemning the atrocity, they are rallying around the Syrian regime and demanding the contradictory “no war” and “stop the war”. It seems that the western solidarity industry (yes, that part where people make a living as “activists”) again has been working overtime to keep its overwhelmingly white, male, western and older pundits on their pedestals. From these pedestals, they lament of the terrible hypocrisy of the very West (where most of them thrive and are “alternative media stars”. (Hint: the Syrian people sure have very little use for them, if they even know who they are).

The Western activists who have not opened their mouths in support of the popular revolution that they have pretended to have supported for the Palestinians but when push comes to shove, even over 1,600 Palestinians murdered by the Assad regime and tens of thousands sent into further exile, have been silent and uncaring, are disgusted by the hypocrisy of their own leaders. This is the argument they use: The West didn’t come in and in any way strike those who were using chemical weapons against the Palestinians, so the West is comprised of freedom hating hypocrites.  And this position begs the question: does this mean that if the US and the West had acted in this way for Palestine, it would not have been intervention, but something else instead? And if it is something else, what would they classify it as? Could it be exactly what the Syrians who are besieged in many parts of Syria and subject to ethnic cleansing and massacres have been begging for?  This seemingly contradictory stance (intervention for Palestine is considered as “good”, intervention for Syria is considered as “evil”) is at the core of what I will call “the Waffle Syndrome”. Waffling on a position and changing it according to a specific point of view fuelled not by a revolutionary vision of liberation and freedom, but by an ideological position of “anti-west” activism and money to be made in a cause that has long ago entered into the discourse thanks to the hard work of many activists (in primis Palestinians and Arabs, with the support of some Westerners who run the gamut from pan-arabists to anarchists, Marxists and anti-imperialists).

If the sudden interest in the death of Syrians (which of course, if you follow the discourse of these pundits, will only start when NATO bombs the living daylights out of Syria, so the “humanitarian” thing to do is to wash “our dirty hands that have always been evil” of it and stay out now… in stark contrast with the calls to support the Intifada and Arabs that were part of the discourse until the Arab Spring actually happened!) is going to do anything for Arab-Western relations, it is going to heighten the distrust not only of the West, which never does what it says it will, or which uses the pain of other people as a means to get involved in international disputes, but it is going to bring the level of hatred for western ACTIVISTS who are showing now, like never before, that they have not got a grasp on even the very basic and core ideals of revolution or struggles to liberate oneself from an oppressor.

sarinWhen push comes to shove, when the most widely condemned atrocities are added to atrocities that started from shooting peaceful protesters and arbitrary arrest and torture of civilian political opposition and even of children, leading up to the absolute destruction of most of Syria where the majority live (leaving the minority who sustain the bombing of their own country by their own leader unscathed because it maintains their privilege- similar to the theory of “if you want an omelette, you have to break a few eggs” of imperialist memory) it is clear that the bulk of the activists stand by the perpetrator of the crimes and against the common people, the refugees and the unarmed. They are following the hasbara (Israeli propaganda that knows it is propaganda and a narrative) tricks used against the Palestinians, accusing them of using their homes and people as human shields for terrorists. It is a new version of hasbara, but applied to the Syrian people: claiming to be with the Syrian people but selectively ignoring any crimes against them except for the few that the Syrian regime and propaganda machine want them to be scandalised by, specifically if they are backed by flags with Islamic or Islamist slogans. The problem is not that Assad is bombing the Syrian country into oblivion and driving one quarter of its population into refugee status. The problem is that there are evil foreign agents who will impose their will on Syria. They are imperialists and Islamists, and in a three-card-shuffle, these two diametrically opposed entities are scratching one another’s back, as if they have the same goal and interests. As far as the Wafflers are concerned, they are the same, and they use the same reactionary rhetoric that the hasbarists use against the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

But what is worse than the lack of interest of the “activists” and their support of the regime “because the alternative is worse FOR THE SYRIANS”, if you follow their rhetoric? It is the hypocrisy they have regarding the very issue of intervention and the role of the international community.

They have not seemed to have ever taken the streets or set the internet on fire with their calls against intervention in Syria before. They seem to ignore that for years there has been foreign intervention in Syria, that Russian weapons and experts, troops from Iran and Hezbollah, have been waging the war already, fuelling it and at times even bringing their own soldiers home in flag draped boxes. Are they unaware that Russian intervention has also used the tool to advance their personal agenda and interests, the tool that every single one of us for years had believed was the “original sin”: the UN Veto of a resolution condemning an act of war or imposing a restriction on intervention. It seems that the arms embargo against the revolutionary Free Syrian Army has been in force while there has been no such restriction in arming the regime. If it is a civil war, it is indeed alimented with great gusto by the Russians by means of the unethical tool of their power to impose their will by means of a veto.  It is this waffling and hypocrisy that will deepen the gulf of “misunderstanding” between the people of the Arab world and the “caring” West, which is represented by impotent leaders or reactionary, counter-revolutionary activists who are expert navel-gazers.

PLEASE don't tell the Syrians things will get bad once they start getting bombed. They might think you are insane.

PLEASE don’t tell the Syrians things will get bad once they start getting bombed. They might think you are insane.

Because, when it comes down to it, the counter-revolutionaries are going to scream bloody murder when a protester in Berkeley gets pepper spray in her eyes by the cops and at the same time defend the ruler in a regime where rule of law and democracy has never been in force, there is some heavy-duty orientalism/superior thinking going on. Evidently, a single protester in the USA is worth more, or the belief that Americans deserve full rule of law and justice but Syrians just must persevere because they have to resist “Western Imperialism” is rife. And why is this idea so common? Because (as usual) the Western activists have a great deal of trouble accepting that maybe they don’t know better than “the other” what’s better for them. They impose their fears on them, their ideology is naturally “revolutionary” but it does nothing in the slightest to back the revolution, and in fact, uses the terminology that the reactionary right/hasbarists have been using against the Palestinians for decades. They say that they would really support the Syrians, but they “know” that the Islamists are worse than Assad. How do they know this? Because they watch Press TV (run by an Islamic Theocratic state that incidentally finances Assad’s regime because it is holding back the majority rule in Syria, which would likely be democratic or in the lack of that, Sunni dominated) and they read who I have been referring to for years as the “fat white male western pundits”.

For years, I have managed and run various sites for Arab freedom causes, and for years, I have placed at the top of those sites articles and commentary written by Arabs. I believe that if you are able to serve a cause, the first task is to listen, then if you can, amplify the voice of the oppressed. But, while the names I published and translated on my site were overwhelmingly Arab, the names getting the big circulation on the web and doing the well-paid speaking tours were non-Arab, many times they were actually Israelis (ostensibly speaking “for” the Palestinians), almost all the time they were male, the educated élite of punditry and most of them were at least a generation older than those who were marching in the streets for their own rights. It was a rare thing to see the actual protagonists saying, “this is what I think, this is what I want, this is what I want from you”.

All of that has changed so much recently. There is a vast range of articles written by Syrians about their situation, by Palestinians about their situation as “double refugees” and by Arabs around the world who want to express solidarity with those of their language/culture and often religious affiliation. More than that, any week of the year, you can see the posters from the marches INSIDE Syria. Yes. After two and a half years, they are still marching in their streets and expressing what they want. They are not props set up by anyone, they are not the pawns of someone else’s interests, they are THOSE WE ARE SUPPOSED TO LISTEN TO AND EXPRESS SOLIDARITY WITH. What are they saying? Are they begging for the world to ignore them and let them sort it out on their own? No. In fact they are saying what they have been saying since the beginning, “if you don’t help us, we will be killed”.

Can the message get any clearer?

Can the message get any clearer?

Are you prepared to understand what kind of help they have been begging for from the start? They have been first of all asking for protection from the bombs. That means that those who are in the streets in the West have ignored for two and a half years that an entire population has been bombed night and day and that hundreds of thousands of them have lost everything they had. How could the “No War” people have missed this? Oh, that’s right, they have been listening only to the well-paid, popular, fat, white, western guys who get money from Press TV or Al Manar to tell them what is happening in Syria. They don’t actually have to LISTEN to Syrians or watch their videos that they load with constancy despite the difficulties, because they WANT us to know and to do something. They have been asking for the lifting of the arms embargo against the Free Syrian Army, which they recognise as their liberation force. The first commander of the FSA said (two years ago) that if the FSA were armed adequately, they would finish the revolution in a matter of weeks with no direct foreign intervention. He also said that if this did not happen, there would be other forces around who would not wait to form militias and enter into Syria, without the same revolutionary goals, and definitely not with an interest in a Syria for all of its people, even those who currently support Assad.

I suppose the most ironic part of the waffling hypocritical “activism” world that woke up now to “stop a war” that they aren’t even sure exists or not, and if it does, what kind of war it is, is that they claim to be anti-Zionist, but when for the first time a true threat to the Zionist state has been uttered by the regime and some of its supporters (Iran and Hezbollah) as the Syrian regime Army Generals warned “in case of attacks on Syria, ‘Israel will burn’ and that if Syria weakens, ‘certain irresponsible groups’ will be formed that would endanger Israel,” they don’t seem to understand the actual regional dynamics – or else they really don’t want anything to threaten Israel, whose own “security” has always trumped Arab rights and Arab lives.

Now, here is the core of the hypocrisy. Evidently, a Syria that accepts the provocations of Israel without responding, that accepts for decades the occupation of Syrian soil and helps to actually displace once again more Palestinians and to engage in a “scorched earth” policy with regard to what is supposed to be a threat to Israel (Syria itself), is considered as “resistant”. It is considered as an idea that is beyond the pale to bring Israel into any kind of conflict, and if there is such a thing, it can only be considered “irresponsible”. Israel has got to be left alone, not even a slap on the wrist, the Syrian regime is the one that sees to their protection, they are their border guardian not only throughout the decades, but more than ever now that Syria might actually lose Assad as its leader.

The expansion of the conflict is not what anyone wants, and in fact, Assad has seen to it to be the exact party not only to maintain the Israeli status quo, but to also keep any kind of anti-west or anti-pluralism elements at arm’s reach. If nothing else, this statement alone shows the fundamental flaw of the reasoning of at least a portion of the “solidarity activists against the war”. Now, not only will they be used to enhance the totalitarian, Arab-hating and Islamophobic forces in the area, but they will be given the legitimacy that they don’t get from their own people. Once again, Imperialism Wins! The Westerners know BETTER! And there is an important lesson to be learned, and repeated by any kind of “oriental despot”: massacre your own people in their sleep and the “solidarity” champions will make a hero of you.

 

Fermare la guerra – Stop the War deve sostenere la rivoluzione siriana

Posted: 08/30/2013 by editormary in Europe, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Middle East Issues, People's Movements / Struggles, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Strategy for Liberation, Syria, War
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Quello che stiamo vivendo è una rivoluzione, per favore ci dovete capire

Quello che stiamo vivendo è una rivoluzione, per favore ci dovete capire

Scritto da Salwa Amor, tradotto da Mary Rizzo

Giornalista britannico – siriana Salwa Amor dice che il movimento Fermare la guerra – Stop the War ha perso il rispetto dei siriani, non sostenendo la loro rivoluzione.

Dal momento che la rivoluzione in Siria è iniziata due anni e mezzo fa ed è stato salutato da un regime oppressivo con una forza senza precedenti, il mondo sembra essere stato in silenzio sui crimini in corso che si sono verificati. A parte un paio di discussioni qua e là su i canali all-news, sembra a quelli all’interno della Siria che il mondo non si preoccupa di ciò che sta avvenendo nella loro terra e se il loro governo sta commettendo crimini contro l’umanità o no.

Prima della minaccia della guerra in Iraq gli arabi hanno ritenuto che l’Occidente (il popolo non i loro governi ) finalmente cominciavano a capire la loro lotta contro l’oppressione, l’occupazione e la dittatura. La Marcia del Milione che si è svolta per le strade di Londra è stato un punto di riferimento per le persone in Iraq e l’intero mondo arabo, era la prima volta che sono stati in grado di vedere una solidarietà visiva verso le loro continue lotte.

Fast forward al 2011 e un 26enne che lavorava come venditore ambulante in Tunisia si mise, insieme con l’intera regione araba, a fuoco in quella che sarebbe diventata la primavera araba. Egitto ha seguito l’esempio e il movimento contro la guerra hanno applaudite mentre erano testimoni ad un altro paese arabo che rovesciava il proprio dittatore tiranno.

Ispirato da Bouazizi, quello stesso gennaio un uomo in Siria anche desse fuoco a se stesso , sperando che le fiamme che hanno bruciato il suo corpo sarebbe l’ispirazione ai suoi concittadini a ribellarsi contro il loro dittatore. Il nome di quell’uomo era Hasan Ali Akleh. La sua storia non è così conosciuto, in realtà è stato appena documentato. Forse perché il Paese da cui è venuto non fa notizia, ma è stata la scintilla che ha illuminato i cuori di almeno alcuni siriani, siccome le proteste iniziarono lentamente a prendere vita in Al Raqa quello stesso mes , anche se hanno ricevuto poca o nessuna attenzione dei media.

Cospirazione occidentale?

Come le proteste avevano cominciato ad essere più frequenti, Assad ha orgogliosamente proclamato che egli è stato vittima di un complotto imperialista dell’occidente sostenuta da Israele e che avrebbe combattuto, succedesse qualunque cosa. E combattere il ciò che ha fatto, ma a differenza dei leader di Tunisia o d’Egitto, Assad ha usato i suoi armi più micidiali, principalmente realizzati in Russia che gli è stata fornita gratuitamente. Siriani feriti negli ospedali  vi racconterebbe delle bombe TNT che avrebbe letteralmente messo centinaia di buchi nei corpi delle vittime, lasciandoli ad implorare la misericordia della morte.

Eppure il movimento contro la guerra e la sinistra guardavano in silenzio mentre la furia assassina ha continuato per due anni e mezzo, con la paura che l’Occidente avrebbe usato questo per i propri interessi e di invadere un altro paese, in nome della libertà. Da un punto di vista politico che avevano ragione – l’Occidente “diffondere la democrazia e la libertà”, solamente dove i suoi interessi sono forti. Dal punto di vista umano, invece, la sinistra sì è sbagliato di grosso questa volta.

Come persone di coscienza, coloro che lottano per la pace e movimenti per la giustizia hanno una maggiore responsabilità nei confronti di quelli sotto l’oppressione, e temo che il movimento di sinistra e contro la guerra è caduto negli occhi dei siriani in tutto il mondo. E quando dico siriani, non mi riferisco agli alawiti, il 7% che hanno subito il lavaggio del cervello a lealtà verso Assad, perché ci sono alcuni di loro che si sono uniti alle proteste contro la guerra che chiedevano “nessun intervento in Siria”. Hanno il diritto di dire la loro come chiunqu , ma loro non rappressentano la maggioranza dei sirianni, come molti nella sinistra hanno suggerito.

Rivoluzione siriana

Se la sinistra c’era dalla parte dei siriani ordinari in tutto e dichiarato il loro sostegno per la loro rivoluzione come hanno fatto con la Tunisia e l’Egitto non sentirebbe come uno schiaffo in faccia alla rivoluzione, quando oggi si levano in piedi fuori dal parlamento chiedendo nessun intervento in Siria. Non è sufficiente in questa fase alla fine del gioco per chiamare semplicemente per nessun intervento. Ci deve essere il supporto per i rivoluzionari che hanno rischiato la loro vita per 30 mesi nella loro richiesta della libertà.

Se i socialisti/comunisti e sinistrorsi non supportano gli oppressi e gridare per la libertà, allora c’è qualcosa di molto sbagliato. Il movimento ha il diritto di chiedere al loro governo di non intervenire in guerre all’estero, ma per lo meno si dovrebbe tenere cartelli che raccontano siriani che hanno perso le loro case, le famiglie e la dignità che “noi, il popolo della Gran Bretagna siamo con voi”. Holding cartelli che dire “Nessun intervento e non toccare la Siria ” sembra ai siriani che siete dalla parte di Russia e la Russia è ed stava intervenendo fin dall’inizio (con le sue navi da guerra a Tartous dopo la 5° mese della rivolta e la maggior parte delle armi che hanno siriani uccisi erano un regalo di Assad da Putin).

Se la posizione dei movimenti  è “no all’intervenzione”, allora deve includere la Russia e l’Iran altrimenti è davvero unilaterale. Forse la sinistra è indulgente verso i crimini della Russia, perché non sono impegnati in nome dell’imperialismo occidentale, o forse la Russia e anche lo sfondo socialista della famiglia Assad e legami a marxismo e comunismo hanno accecato la sinistra che non riesce a vedere le loro colpe.

In qualche modo quelli che sono contro l’imperialismo occidentale sono diventati cieco da un occhio, vedono chiaramente i crimini dell’Occidente, ma la vista della loro altro occhio è bloccato da una credenza o una speranza che il mondo sarebbe un posto migliore se solo il capitalismo sarebbe rimosso insieme con i suoi ideali imperialistici.

Purtroppo, la storia ci insegna che il male esiste in molte forme e maniere, che non è definita in base al colore, religione o razza, ma risiede in tutti coloro che sono in vita, così come l’altruismo e la bontà. L’Occidente non può prendere la colpa per la Siria, non perché non è degno di biasimo per gran parte della sconvolgimenti in Medio Oriente, ma perché ci sono altri mali del mondo.

Scoraggiante

E ‘veramente scoraggiante vedere un movimento che è stato costruito per sostenere gli oppressi che è così poco solidale della rivoluzione siriana. E’ come se essi hanno completamente trascurato la rivolta. Quasi come non è mai successo, o che tutta la crisi può essere descritto come una cospirazione imperialista occidentale.

Non erano i siriani oppressi e umiliati per 40 anni? Non era la polizia segreta in Siria responsabile per avere istillato paura intollerabile nei cuori dei giovani e meno giovani o la causa di migliaia di morti sotto tortura? Per ridurre la rivoluzione siriana ad un complotto imperialista occidentale è che implica che tutto il male del mondo deriva da Ovest. Assad non era da Ovest, la sua polizia segreta che hanno torturato i bambini fino alla morte erano siriani, nati e cresciuti in Siria, lontano dall’occhio vigile del West.

Questo Sabato fermare la guerra terrà un’altra protesta contro l’intervento occidentale. Come si può discutere con la loro logica, l’Occidente infatti impone le sue idee sul mondo intero. Eppure, la prossima protesta e le sue parole d’ordine incarnano l’essenza della supremazia bianca della mente; imporre le loro credenze e le richieste sulla rivoluzione del popolo siriano. Nessun intervento , Giù le mani dalla Siria non sono slogan che sono venute dalla Siria, nemmeno lontanamente, quindi, si deve presumere che essi sono gli slogan che vengono imposte al popolo siriano.

Perché se si curava di leggere e tradurre solamente alcuni dei cartelli che quelli nelle città assediate all’interno della Siria dimostrano con orgoglio alle luci dei media  di tutto il mondo avrebbero scoperto presto che il più famoso e diffuso di tutti è SOS ! I Siriani stanno implorando aiuto, non possono prendere i bombardamenti, la fame, la mancanza di acqua e di diffusione della malattia, i corpi sotto le macerie o dei bambini che sono sepolti vivi in loro. Quindi, chi sono alla sinistra in Gran Bretagna a dichiarare giù le mani dalla Siria quando invece sono i siriani a chiedere aiuto?

Fermare la guerra è una organizzazione di base il cui lavoro è prezioso in Gran Bretagna e all’estero e la rivoluzione siriana non è diverso, è la lotta di un popolo che la sinistra ha spinto sotto il tappeto per paura dell’imperialismo occidentale. L’ironia è che i siriani stanno combattendo per la stessa cosa per cui battono i Stop the War, ma la tragedia è che la sinistra non metterà la sua paranoia del West in attesa per un tempo sufficiente per sentire le grida che esce delle macerie dalle loro controparti rivoluzionarie siriane.

5PIllarz originale http://www.5pillarz.com/2013/08/29/stop-the-war-must-support-the-syrian-revolution/

A letter from a human rights activist to an antiwar activist, on Syria.

Posted: 08/29/2013 by editormary in "Israel", Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Libya, Middle East, Opinions and Letters, Palestine, Refugees, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Syria, War
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No "more" bombs...the ones from Russia and Iran dropped by Assad's army can keep coming though... there are terrorists, you know.

No “more” bombs…the ones from Russia and Iran dropped by Assad’s army can keep coming though… there are terrorists, you know.

RE: Stop the War in Syria

Hello Antiwar Activist,

How are you? It’s been 2 and half years. I’ve missed you. I hope all is well. Thank you for writing back. Yes you’re right, we have to stop this war!

I am glad you are here now. We can use your help. You are against war, right? So you must really care about the Syrian people and want to help save them from the tragedies they have endured for far too long. Let me catch you up to speed so you can join the effort to help end this war.

The media is telling us that the West is about to attack Syria. You seem concerned. Just a heads up, Israel attacked Syria a month ago. The West attacked Mali last year, Libya the year before that, and continues to use drones worldwide every day. I didn’t hear from you then so you probably just didn’t get the memo. The war isn’t just about to start. It’s actually been going on for 2 and half years. 100,000 people are dead. 1 out of every three people is displaced. 1 out of every 3 people needs humanitarian assistance. The medical system has collapsed. And third of the country is in rubble because conventional weapons are being used indiscriminately every day.

So, the West is about to attack. We don’t want foreign military intervention right? Oh but Iranian and Lebanese forces have been there for some time now fighting with The Government’s army, and along with Russia have been arming them with sophisticated weapons. I guess that doesn’t count as foreign because those are not western countries. Israel attacked Syria a few times too but they are not Western so let’s forget about that too.

What’s important now is to stop the West. They’re always looking to start wars. They are the bad guy. So that means Syria must be the good guy. Oh you don’t know much about them. Let me fill you in. There is a dictatorship there. It’s been about 40 years. It comes with all the stuff you expect from good guys, no freedom of expression, no democracy, gross human rights violations, political prisoners, and complete theft of the economy. In fact one guy owns 60% of the entire Syrian economy! Hmm, let me see what else. Oh yeah they were responsible for the killing of an entire city of Hama killing over 20,000 people in 1982 and are a designated a state sponsor of terrorism since 1979. And in case you forgot they attacked, kidnapped, tortured, and killed peaceful protesters for the first 6 months of the conflict while people asked for their basic rights and freedoms. Most recently chemical attacks were used against people while they slept killing over a thousand men, women, and children. In case you were wondering, Syria has the largest stockpile of chemical weapons in the world.

But they are not the bad guys, right? It’s more important to stop the West because they cause collateral damage. Never mind the existing collateral damage caused by The Government that has reduced a third of the country to rubble and killed tens of thousands in the process. No need to protest against the daily indiscriminate missile strikes being used by Syria’s military because the 3 days of missile strikes by the West will be much worse for the people of Syria.

I mean who does the West think its fooling? After their claims about Iraq, who can believe them? There is no proof that a war exists in Syria and that The Government is responsible for anything. Maybe we should check with someone else who we can really trust. Let’s see what AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, UN-OCHA, INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS, AND REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS have to say. What? You’re kidding me? There actually IS a war going on and The Government IS responsible for the vast majority of crimes against humanity. You mean they have been using tanks, airplanes, helicopters and snipers indiscriminately against the population? You know, I don’t think I have heard you mention this war. Maybe you believe that war is only bad when other countries get involved, and that it is not a war when the government attacks its own people?

Let us be clear. When you say stop the war, you don’t just mean that West should not attack? You also mean that The Government should stop indiscriminately attacking its own population? I don’t think those countless reliable sources are wrong when they have repeatedly documented that a war has been going on, that The Government is largely responsible, and that this is not acceptable? You are against war, right? Or maybe it’s okay if the war is just inside the country itself? I mean the government’s crimes against humanity are needed because their enemy is foreign jihads who eat human hearts. That’s the real bad guy. Oh didn’t you know? The foreign jihadis have always been there. They have been there for 40 years so that’s why it was okay to have a dictatorship that trampled people’s freedom for decades. They were there during the peaceful protests, that’s why The Government had to attack and kill peaceful protestors for 6 months. And they are everywhere now. No Syrian has ever picked up a gun to defend himself after seeing his wife raped, his children slaughtered, and his home razed. The 100 000 people killed and 6 million people displaced are all foreign jihadis.

Don’t you know that dictatorship, oppression, waging war, and committing crimes against humanity does not cause a local population to resist? This is all just one big conspiracy by the West. Syrians don’t have a problem from 40 years of oppression. The scenes of millions of people across the entire country protesting peacefully for the human rights were all faked. And if they weren’t, well they must have been orchestrated by the West. I mean any human rights activist can tell you how easy it is to mobilize nationwide protests in the millions for 6 months. Even in the face of torture and death, they continued to protest because the West wanted them to. It had nothing to do with any internal desire for their own basic rights. We all know how easy it is to brainwash millions of people to go in the street and protest day after day when you’re facing possible death.

I mean in the end, it’s the people you care about right? That’s why you don’t want the West to attack. Protesting against a limited Western attack will help the people much more protesting against a war that has destroyed the country for 2 and half years, calling for more help in the largest humanitarian operation in the history of the UN, or demanding our governments do something, anything REAL to stop the bloodshed. Protesting against a limited Western attack will help the people by stopping the war all together. That’s what you really care about after all, the people. It has nothing to do with protesting yet another American foreign attack. You are there to protest because you truly care about the people.

Hmmm but where have you been. I haven’t seen you protesting and lobbying your government to increase humanitarian aid to the people of Syria. You do know it’s the largest humanitarian disaster of the century? That there are over 7 million people who need humanitarian assistance? I haven’t seen you asking for more pressure on the Syrian government to stop attacking civilians indiscriminately. You do know not a single UN Security Council on Syria has been passed?

Well you are here now. Nice to have you. I hope I can count on you to help the people of Syria. We need all the help we can get. We need to stop this war. We need to help the people. Let us stand together in solidarity and call for an end to the war in Syria. Let us stand together and demand protection and aid for the people of Syria. That’s why we are here right. It’s not just about stopping a small scale limited Western military intervention. It’s about ENDING THE WAR! It’s about helping the people of Syria. We are activists for a reason, right? Stopping wars is not our end goal, it’s just a means to saving our fellow man from oppression.

I have been here for some time now. I am exhausted. It’s nice to have you next to me. This war will likely not end anytime soon. I hope you will stay for the long haul.

Thank you,
A Human rights Activist

No-War? Not quite!

Posted: 08/24/2013 by editormary in Europe, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Middle East Issues, Opinions and Letters, People's Movements / Struggles, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Strategy for Liberation, Syria
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Italian protest (No War = Pro Assad)

Italian protest (No War = Pro Assad)

by Fouad Roueiha, translated by Mary Rizzo
On the pages of Facebook, we find ourselves often reading the analysis on the situation in Syria. The writers want to appear that they have at heart freedom, justice, peace. Here a post that passes itself off as No-War but instead is something different and sinister. In this case the author is the “foreign policy” voice of Rifondazione Comunista, an Italian “armchair and cocktail party left party”. Thank goodness there are people that are able to answer in a correct manner, in this case Fouad Roueiha, an Italian-Syrian.

The Post: FA writes: “Here we go again.  Imperialism has found and presented to the world the casus belli to justify a new aggression. We are dealing with a curious case of self-fulfilling expectations.  Obama has been talking about chemical  weapons for months.  It is likely that the same were used to justify the war against Iraq. The  Syrian civil war is full of horrors, like every civil war. To feed into that there has been the contribution of many, among them, precisely the usa, gb and france, together with their allies of the oil monarchies, that fund and train the rebels, avoiding any kind of  political solution. In Syria there is a proxy war between powers, regional and international, that  are destabilising the entire area, as the recent attacks in Lebanon show.  We are opposed to any aggression by the united states, nato, gb  or france against Syria. Italy better say out of this umpteenth  neo-colonial adventure.”

The Response: Fouad Roueiha You have left us alone, in silence, when inspired by the shout of freedom of our brothers, also our voices filled the streets and our only weapons were hope, dignity and desire for democracy. Our chants for democracy, for unity and for non-violence filled the spaces of our squares that saw history be born, while the ancient pavements of our streets were coloured with our blood. For 6 months no one responded to he provocations, to the fierce repression, to the siege of entire towns deprived of water and electricity in the middle of the summer heat. Then, when the cheeks to turn simply were no more, when our freedom fighters (like yours did) ascended on the mountains risking not only their lives but also those of the their loved ones, then you have condemned us. When we were under overpowering superiority of hostile fire, fed by the men, arms and fuel of Iran, Russia, Lebanon, Iraq and even Europe, you did not lift a finger to hinder this flow of death towards our land, clearly those forces are the Empire of Good. But if crushed by lead, explosives and MiGs of The Good, our freedom fighters have accepted the (anything but disinterested) help of the antagonists of the Empire that pleases you, finally able to give substance to the defamatory accusations that since the first hour you have directed towards us. And don’t show me maps and statistics, analysis and numbers, those work well ” in society”, in your posh meeting places, but not for those who have heard the words and the chants of those who have taken to the streets… now isn’t that odd, in Syria the children do not ask themselves which international power benefits the most from their protests; they come down to the streets for their right to a future, to have the dignity of choosing their own destiny, to demand democracy, slogans that i recall having heard in many other places, even right next to yours in Piazza San Giovanni (traditional meeting place for the Italian left protests and meetings, translator’s note) or under Montecitorio (seat of the Italian Parliament), although Italy seems like a paradise of democracy compared with our land.

Syria protesters in Baba Amr (Pro-freedom = Anti-Assad)

Syria protesters in Baba Amr (Pro-freedom = Anti-Assad)

Calm down “comrades”, the States (that Italy welcomes with open arms, when the nazi-fascists raped the lands) will not come simply because is not their interest therefore without too much effort you will obtain the result wished by “peaceful” Fabio… but the 1500 dead of Ghouta, that must be added to 100,000 lives broken from Assad and companions, are not a casus belli, but a disgrace for humanity and for you particularly, you that love to pose as champions of the oppressed and of the have-nots but you are deaf if the enemy of those oppressed is not that “traditional” one, if what happens does not answer to your narrative of the world.

Dear lazy or know-it-all judges of other people’s history, do us a favour if you can: do not come to cry over our children, do not shed a tear at the funeral of our nation, you are not invited. 

p. s.

A special thanks to all those who (how it always happens in these occasions), in response to what I have written and from on high of their knowledge of my person, of my land, of the realpolitik and of the international geopolitics,  want to define me as a rat, jihadist, throat-cutter, spy on the mossad payroll… your contribution will be really precious.

No-War? Non proprio!

Ecco sulle pagine FB, ci troviamo spesso degli analisi sulla situazione in Siria. Devono sembrare che chi li scrive ha a cuore la libertà, la giustizia, la pace. Ecco un post che si spaccia per No-War ma invece è qualcosa di diverso e di sinistro. Menomale che ci sono persone che riescono a rispondere in modo corretto.

Il Post: FA “Ci risiamo. L’imperialismo ha trovato e presentato al mondo il casus belli per giustificare una nuova aggressione. Si tratta di un curioso caso di aspettative auto realizzatesi. Obama è da mesi che parla di armi chimiche. É probabile che siano le stesse usate per giustificare la guerra all’irak. La guerra civile siriana è piena di orrori, come ogni guerra civile. Ad alimentarla hanno contribuito in molti, fra cui proprio usa, gb e francia, insieme ai loro alleati delle petromonarchie, che finanziano e addestrano i ribelli, evitando qualsiasi soluzione politica. In Siria si sta combattendo una guerra per procura fra potenze, regionali e internazionali, che sta destabilizzando tutta l’area, come dimostrano i recenti attentati in Libano. Noi siamo contrari a qualsiasi aggressione da parte di usa, nato gb o francia contro la Siria. l’Italia stia fuori da questa ennesima avventura neocoloniale.”

La Risposta: Fouad Roueiha Ci avete lasciati soli, nel silenzio, quando ispirati dal grido di libertà dei nostri fratelli anche le nostre voci hanno riempito le strade e le nostre uniche armi erano speranza, dignità e voglia di democrazia. I nostri canti per la democrazia, per l’unità e la non-violenza hanno riempito l’aere delle nostre piazze che hanno visto nascere la storia, mentre i selciati antichi si tingevano del nostro sangue. Per 6 mesi nessuno ha risposto alle provocazioni, alla feroce repressione, all’assedio di intere città private d’acqua ed elettricità in piena estate. Quando poi sono finite le guance da porgere, quando i nostri partigiani (come fecero i vostri) salirono sulle montagne rischiando non solo le loro vite ma anche quelle dei loro cari, allora ci avete condannato. Quando eravamo sotto la soverchiante superiorità del fuoco nemico, alimentato dalle uomini, armi e carburanti di Iran, Russia, Libano, Iraq e persino dell’ Europa voi non avete mosso un dito per impedire il flusso di morte verso la nostra terra, evidentemente quello è l’Impero del Bene. Ma se schiacciati dal piombo, l’esplosivo ed i mig del Bene i nostri partigiani hanno accettato il (tutt’altro che disinteressato) aiuto degli antagonisti dell’Impero che piace a voi, finalmente avete potuto dar sostanza alle infamanti accuse che fin dalla prima ora ci avete rivolto. E non mostratemi cartine e statistiche, analisi e numeri, quelli van bene “in società”, nei vostri salottini, ma non per chi ha sentito le parole e le voci di chi è sceso in piazza… pensate che strano, in Siria i ragazzini non si chiedono quali potenza internazionale tragga vantaggio dal loro manifestare, scendono in piazza per il loro diritto al futuro, per aver la dignità di scegliere il proprio destino, per pretendere la democrazia, slogan che mi sembra di aver sentito da tante altre parti, anche da parte vostra in Piazza San Giovanni o sotto MOntecitorio, nonostante l’Italia appaia come un paradiso di democrazia confrontata con la nostra terra.

Tranquilli “compagni”, gli States (che l’Italia accolse a braccia aperte, quando i nazi-fascisti ne violentavano le terre) non interverranno semplicemente perchè non è loro interesse quindi senza troppi sforzi otterrete il risultato auspicato da tovarish Fabio… ma i 1500 morti di Ghouta, che si aggiungono alle 100.000 vite spezzate da Assad e compagni, non sono un casus belli ma una vergogna per l’umanità e per voi in particolare, voi che amate atteggiarvi a paladini degli oppressi e degli ultimi ma siete sordi se il nemico di quegli oppressi non è quello “tradizionale”, se quel che avviene non risponde alla vostra narrazione del mondo.

Cari ignavi o saputelli giudici dell’altrui storia, fateci un favore però: non venite a piangere i nostri bambini, non versate lascrime al funerale della nostra nazione, non siete invitati.

p.s.

Un ringraziamento particolare a tutti coloro che (come avviene sempre in queste occasioni), a seguito di quanto ho scritto e dall’alto della loro conoscenza della mia persona, della mia terra, della real politic e della geopolitica internazionale vorranno definirmi ratto, jihadista, tagliagole, spia al soldo del mossad…. il vostro contributo sarà davvero prezioso.

Fight Against The Glory of Selfishness

Posted: 08/09/2013 by editormary in Human Rights, Middle East, Nakba and Right of Return, Palestine, People's Movements / Struggles, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance
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There will always be a Palestine, Liberated by the Palestinian Men and Women who Strive for LOVE OF PALESTINE

There will always be a Palestine, Liberated by the Palestinian Men and Women who Strive for LOVE OF PALESTINE

WRITTEN BY FIDA SHURRAB

Ever since the nation was lost, and all the efforts to gain it back were forged. Over time, they have taken the shape of a false glory.  Unfortunately, it was the “glory of selfishness”, and instead of going forward, all of this is taking the nation backwards to the land of darkness and despair. Greed, corruption, hatred and divisions are weapons that are keeping “The Lost Nation” forever lost.  Nobility is missing, honorable efforts do not exist anymore. As if it is the land of devils, and the people of the land are being handcuffed and victimized one after the other!

Those who are in control know nothing about the ethics of glory, they are very ignorant about the true meaning of nationalism, and  the only language that they are aware of  is selfishness, they lost track of their humanity, and instead of serving the nation, they are being enslaved by the enemy. The nation is being totally swallowed by the enemy, and its identity is being brutally raped! Standing still is their way of handling the enemy’s violation against their nation.

The word should not be in the hands of those who sold their nation, it is time that people must have their say and must revolt according to the following ethics:

  • Fight against the “glory of selfishness”!
  • To end the division, put aside all the factional interests!
  • To improve the status of our country, put aside your personal interest and greed and work with honesty to contribute in the developmental of your country!
  • To free the nation, resist for the sake of the nation, not for factions, parties or individuals!
  • To achieve ONENESS, act as a true human!

And seek these golden types of glory:

  • Love is a glory
  • Faith is a glory
  • Helping those in need is a glory
  • Being united is a glory
  • Launching your country towards a better status is a glory
  • Oneness is a glory
  • Resisting for the freedom of your country is the most glorious glory

PEOPLE MUST GIVE BIRTH TO THE REAL MEANING OF GLORY OF THE NATION

“Breaking the Silence” in the Palestinian Camps

Posted: 08/05/2013 by editormary in Uncategorized
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“Breaking the Silence” in the Palestinian Camps.

Uncle, please, take this money

Posted: 07/11/2013 by editormary in Children\'s Corner, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Middle East, Refugees, Syria, War
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A tiny Syrian boy who has known mostly war and suffering in his short life, wants to pay humanitarian volunteers who have brought food to his family.

A tiny Syrian boy who has known mostly war and suffering in his short life, wants to pay humanitarian volunteers who have brought food to his family.

July 9, 2013 – Kafar Naha, Syria WRITTEN BY Asmae Siria Dachan, translated by Mary Rizzo

The moment of the distribution of food parcels in a context of war is always a moment of relief for everyone. Aid that arrives in areas that are continuously bombed and under siege, becomes vital for the civilian population. The families are ready to receive the donations, without ever giving up their own dignity and self-respect. No one has chosen to become displaced, no one has chosen to undergo a genocide. They are all victims and to rescue and assist them is an imperative for all of humanity.

For children it is a time of celebration: they get to see the vans with people who move from house to house and stop to make deliveries. Those young people, with their serene faces and their smiles, inspire confidence. They are the volunteers of two Italian-Syrian humanitarian associations Onsur, Global Campaign to Support the Syrian people and Ossmei, Syrian Organisation for emergency medical services in Italy. Among them is Abdullah Dachan, a student: he delivers a box to a man who is there with his son; the shy little one peeking from behind a wall. He was blonde, like angels in paintings, he must have been no more than three or four.

The tiny boy stretches out his hand that is clutching a coin and says, “Please ammo – (in Arabic-uncle) take this money.”

The volunteer stops in disbelief: how much dignity, how much fairness, how much innocent spontaneity in that little man, who would want to pay for what he has received. Abdullah asks the boy’s father if he can pick him up: he then hugs him, gives him a kiss, holding back the tears … tears of emotion and anger – why, why do these children have to suffer all this – he asks himself. “It is I who have to thank you, little friend. You gave me something beautiful, your smile and your courage,” are the words he would like to say to him.

In addition to the residents who are driven to exhaustion by the bombings, there are thousands of displaced people in that area. They have all lost their homes, their jobs, their freedom. Among them there are a few survivors of the massacre of Banyas. Civilians fleeing the horrors of a genocide that does not give signs of abating, while the world remains unmoved.

From the stories of the sixth mission in Syria Onsur-Ossmei

Original: http://diariodisiria.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/zio-ti-prego-prendi-questa-monetina/

The ogre and the big bad wolf are raging in Syria

Posted: 07/04/2013 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Middle East Issues, Religion, Syria
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Still from the beheading video... Released by SyriaTruth, a proRegime "information" site, wonder how they got it, don't you?

Still from the beheading video… Released by SyriaTruth, a proRegime “information” site, wonder how they got it, don’t you?

By Lorenzo Trombetta, for Europa – Translated by Mary Rizzo

With a terrifying growl and a nasty sneer the self-styled “judge” of a group of fundamentalist Islamic criminals pronounce the sentence: condemned to death by beheading – indeed, having their throats slit – for having cooperated with the regime. One of the three condemned men, which, as we are shown in the amateur film, is slaughtered by a butcher with a beret like those used in Afghanistan, is according to the caption, Father François Murad, a Franciscan. But his killing, in north-eastern Syria, had been reported three days earlier by another Franciscan, who had said they had recovered the body of Murad but had not reported that the body was headless.

This is one of the first and most obvious inconsistencies of a news that has been shrieked by Radio France Internationale and immediately broadcast, in a more or less uncritical manner, by most of the Western media: “Three Franciscans were beheaded in Syria by armed militiamen.” The gruesome video had been released by the network SyriaTruth, which for at least two years has been working as a megaphone in the West to defend the cause of Bashar al Assad’s regime.

According to a Syrian source in the region of Idlib, heard by Europa, the three were not priests but instead are “collaborators” of the regime. About an hour after the publication of the video, even the denial of Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Franciscan Custodian of the Holy Land arrived: “None of this is true as far as we know. The monks in the region are all alive.” And it is again Pizzaballa on 24 June who did not hesitate to confirm, however, the news of the killing of the ‘”hermit” François Murad in Ghassaniye. This is a place near Jisr ash Shughur, in the north-western region of Idlib and inhabited until 2012 by a Christian majority. About a year ago Ghassaniye was conquered by Syrian insurgent fringes, which were replaced shortly after by militiamen of the Jabhat an Nusra Front, labelled as Al Qaeda – and considered by the U.S. as well as by Assad a “terrorist group” – more and more composed of mujahidin foreigners.

By their own admission, the militia of the Nusra Front are fighting for a cause unrelated to that of the rebels and anti-Syrian regime activists: the removal of the regime is only the first step in a much more challenging path towards the creation of a state entity dominated their interpretation of Islamic law. The link between the alleged beheading of the Franciscans and the Nusra Front is immediately established by many media, including Italian ones, based on the caption – where the agency Fides is cites – and on the fact that the crime in the film took place in Ghassaniye.

The video shows a group of people, many of them with Central Asian, South-east Asian and North African somatic features, around at least three people kneeling on the ground, blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs. One can see two shady characters standing: the Executioner, wearing an Afghan paqul and speaking Arabic with a strong foreign accent (there are those who say he is a Chechen), and the “judge”, an older man who, for all appearances, seems to have just taken part, as the ogre, in the last film in the saga of the Lord of the Rings.

In the film there is no reference to the condemned parties as belonging to religious orders or as Christians. Neither does it state that they are executed as unbelievers – kuffar – but because they are “collaborators of the regime.” One of the reasons cited by the Executioner is that “in their mobile phones numbers of officers of the security services (of the regime) of Aleppo were found.” After the chanting of the classic Allahu Akbar (God is great) the execution begins.

There are many reasons to doubt the authenticity of the caption of the video, where a connection is made between the killing of Father Murad with the beheading of the three individuals who are as yet unidentified. And it is true that the denial of Pizzaballa, in itself, closes the discussion. But there are some confusing elements that recur – and that will continue to recur – in the context of a practice of disinformation aimed particularly at identifying these criminals as the rebels Syrians, with the all too evident  aim of pushing the news consumer to conclude that things were better when things were worse. That the regime of Bashar al-Assad, in the end, is the best guarantee for avoiding descent into this hell.

The first issue concerns the origin of these criminals: they are not Syrians. They do not speak as Syrians, do not dress as Syrians and do not follow accepted practices in Syria. The second point – as pointed out to Europa by Alberto Savioli, a scholar of tribes in Syria, granted some authority due to his many years in Syria – it is unlikely that these militants belong to the Nusra Front. “In the film you cannot see their militia insignia. While in all their videos their flags and their logo always are present.” Savioli also points out that “no one of the Nusra Front or some other similar group has claimed responsibility for the killing of father Murad or the beheadings of these three individuals. But the Nusra Front always claims its actions.”

Even Lorenzo Declich, a scholar of radical Islam, insists that “those of the Nusra Front do not have problems with Christians. At least at the rhetorical level, they have always claimed that their struggle is not directed against the Christians. These persons – continues Declich – seem more like Chechens.”

Amedeo Ricucci, Italian journalist who months ago, together with other colleagues, spent several days precisely in Ghassaniye as prisoner of members of the Nusra Front, expressed strong doubts about the fact that the authors of the crime recorded in the video the others present are “people present at Ghassaniye, which is a place presided over by Nusra Front and garrisoned by a brigade of the Free Syrian Army. In the Nusra Front nobody is dressed as those included in the clip,” Ricucci says, who well remembers Father Murad because he met him in person right in the village when it had a Christian majority: “I do not recognise absolutely that he is Father Murad – he says – and I would tend to exclude the possibility that he might be one of the two with their throats cut.”

For Father Paolo dall’Oglio, a Jesuit who has spent more than thirty years in Syria and who was expelled a year ago by the regime in Damascus, “it is clear that there are criminal groups that operate in Syria and that they are anti-Christian. But remember that these are the same groups that the Syrian regime has previously used in Iraq in a subversive sense.” Father Paolo, however, accuses some Italian and European media platforms for their activities in support of the Assad rhetoric: “There is an objective convergence between the work of disinformation of the regime and the receptors of information of Catholic identity that are always ready to take the bait of the hooks of the regime ,” says the Jesuit, who now lives in northern Iraq.

“The regime wants to show that the revolution is terrorism and persecution of Christians in order to obtain the paralysis of European democracies and the support of the Islamophobic Catholic identity areas.” Father Paolo calls for the creation of an “international court of justice for all these crimes. Because we cannot use these sectarian crimes committed by radical Islamist criminals to justify the crimes of the regime.”

And from Kfar Nabl, a town in central Syria known for the creativity of its activists who draw cartoons and invent slogans, came an answer – this one yes, entirely Syrian – to the “shock video” of the ” beheaded Franciscans”: “Those who help Assad to survive – reads the banner photographed and reproduced on the Facebook profile of the local coordination committee – produce slaughter videos that demonise our legitimate revolution, which denounces all brutal actions.”  (Europa Quotidiano, 28 June 2013)
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Original: http://www.sirialibano.com/siria-2/lorco-e-luomo-nero-imperversano-in-siria.html

Egypt comes full circle

Posted: 07/03/2013 by editormary in Egypt, Middle East Issues, People's Movements / Struggles
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what is in store in the coming hours for Egypt?

what is in store in the coming hours for Egypt?

By Afro-Middle East Centre (www.amec.org.za)

In a move reminiscent of the ouster of former president, Husni Mubarak, the Egyptian military on Tuesday issued a communiqué ordering protesters demands be met within 48 hours. That period ends this afternoon. Failure to do so, said the statement, would result in the enforcement of a ‘roadmap’ ‘under military supervision’. Despite the army’s assertion that coups are not part of its ethos, this is certainly threat of a coup. Ironically, the army’s message was well received by large parts of the crowds in Tahrir square, which a year ago were calling for the same military to relinquish power. The government under Muhammad Mursi subsequently expressed its opposition to the communiqué, saying that it risks deepening divisions between Egyptians, and, even if well intentioned, ‘may threaten the social peace’. Further, the administration reiterated its call for dialogue and reconciliation, and re-emphasised democratic legitimacy.

The protests and subsequent actions were largely instigated by a protest movement called ‘Tamarrud’ (rebel), founded in April by disillusioned Egyptians seeking Mursi’s ouster. It claims to have gathered twenty-two million signatures calling for Mursi to be replaced by its constitutional court president Adli Mansour. Initially, Tamarrud was ignored by Egypt’s main opposition groups. However, as the campaign grew in strength, political opposition figures began aligning with the campaign, and organising meetings to chart a postMorsi transition. Even Mubarak supporter Ahmed Shafiq signed the petition. Opposition leader Hamdeen Sabahi publicly said that if Mursi refused to resign, the military should oust him. Mursi’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and its supporters launched a counter campaign called ‘Tagarrud’ (impartiality), emphasising that the president was democratically elected, arguing that he be allowed time to implement his policies, and that remnants from the Mubarak era were involved in Tamarrud.

These events are a symptom of the existing and increasing political polarisation Egypt is experiencing, pitting ‘secularists’ against ‘Islamists’. To this end, the Mubarak-supporting judiciary has been utilised for political goals, and both sides have made charges against the other of ‘secularisation’ and ‘brotherhoodification’ respectively. This has filtered to the population, and has seen the hardening of these stances, increasing the chances of large scale violence.

The culmination was the massive (still continuing) 30 June anti- and proMursi protests, which brought the country to a halt. FJP offices have been burned down – an indication of Mursi’s tenuous control over the interior ministry; around twenty people have been killed and over 700 injured, and the prime minister and ministers of foreign affairs, communication, legal affairs, water utilities and tourism have resigned.

Tamarrud’s appeal is largely a result of two factors. First, its call for Mursi’s resignation has meant that disparate opposition figures have coalesced around the campaign, using it to regain ground lost over the past five electoral and voting processes which saw the FJP and other Islamists win a referendum; capture over seventy per cent of parliamentary seats; Mursi elected president; and winning a referendum to pass the new constitution with over sixty per cent of the votes. Second, the postMubarak Egyptian economy has weakened as a result of Mubarak’s ouster and lack of investor confidence. Tourism has decreased, the Egyptian pound has depreciated against the dollar, and the country’s foreign reserves have dropped by over half. This has meant that the Mursi administration has had to fight off ‘bread protests’, ensure wheat security, and sustain fuel purchases and subsidies. It has failed at the last, leading to fuel shortages and a virtual economic standstill. This has caused many in the ‘middle class’ to resent the administration, believing that its ousting will miraculously alleviate the problems.

The big questions are: what will the military announce this afternoon, and what scenarios are possible thereafter.

The army may force the administration and opposition into negotiations, but this now seems unlikely. It is more likely that the army brass will suspend the constitution, parliament and the president – effectively engineering a coup – and setting up a new leadership council to which a new prime minister – likely to be army head Abdel-Fattah Sisi – will report. Is it an accident that this ‘roadmap’ and the proposals of the new 30 June Front, led by Mohammed Elbaradei, are similar? This will result in fierce opposition from various Islamist groups and could result in violent clashes, possibly paving the way for a full military take over. A civil war, as suggested by many commentators, is, however, unlikely. Already the High Command has asserted that it will protect the country from ‘terrorists, radicals…and fools’ – words that echo many of Husni Mubarak’s previous speeches.

A few reflections on two events for Syria in Rome

Posted: 06/17/2013 by editormary in Europe, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Middle East, Palestine, People's Movements / Struggles, Syria
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A woman showing her devotion in the Pro Assad rally in Rome

A woman showing her devotion in the Pro Assad rally in Rome

WRITTEN BY MARY RIZZO

When one has the opportunity of having two events in Rome on the same day concerning Syria, it provides an chance of seeing not only the focus of our campaigning and the current state of the “narrative” in our relationship to what everyone can agree is a debacle, but it crystallises the strengths and weaknesses that we have as activists.

Even with a war going on, with the crackdown against protests in areas that are still under control of the regime, and with the enormous dangers and risks that protesters in liberated areas face, we can’t seem to truly mobilise the European public to come anywhere close to making a mass  solidarity movement that will have any kind of echo. We have to deal with perhaps a bit of expense or inconvenience, but we pretty much can be assured there is no one that might kill us for going to protests. We have to follow a procedure to get the permits and do some work to mobilise people, but in comparison, we have nothing to hinder us, so our turnouts should reflect our effectiveness in reaching a critical mass in the public opinion. We have of course had some great marches, there have been countless events, conferences, exhibits, but we have not really engaged the general public that is not already highly politicised or directly involved  into any kind of meaningful action. There are a very few people expending a great deal of energy and in essence, singing to the choir. And this is true ON BOTH SIDES.

So we take into consideration Saturday, 15 June. Back in April, a group labelled “European Front for Syria” called for an international march in Rome, the poster reading (in screaming capital letters): DON’T TOUCH  SYRIA! EVERYBODY TO ROME / 15 JUNE RALLY. In the call to the event, they prospect that there will be thousands of lions to sustain their President and Army (and if we trust their promotional videos, their Secular Socialist State) against those they label as Rats. Yes, they actually do make a long list of who the Rats are, and of course they don’t forget who their friends are: beacons of freedom Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, Venezuela and Cuba, and naturally, a party that is anything BUT Secular or Socialist, Hezbollah. Who exactly is the European Front? I don’t know, but they “joined Facebook in January of 2013”, evidently after 2 years of war and probably combining parts of various pro Assad groups.

Given that in a free society, such as is the Italian one, the right to assemble is guaranteed by the constitution, and all opinions are constitutionally protected. However, given that in order to achieve this free society, Italy was forced to undergo the a long and painful war to overthrow two decades of Fascism (a totalitarian system with no tolerance of dissent and no guarantee of rights). Therefore, a Constitution was written by the constituent entity that had to build a democracy from the ground up, incorporating segments of provisions that place some limits on rights that would be essentially a threat to democracy. Thus, in Italy, our constitution prohibits the reorganisation of the Fascist party, and the Scelba Law (known as the law against the crime of Apology of Fascism L. 645/1952) was introduced to implement its enforcement. The text of the law punishes “whoever constitutes an association, a movement or a group having the characteristics and setting the objective as the reorganisation of the defunct Fascist party, or whoever publicly exalts the exponents, principles, facts or methods of Fascism, or its anti-democratic objectives.”

moment of the Anti-Assad rally

moment of the Anti-Assad rally

One can and should ask if this provision though present in the Constitution, and subsequent Law place limits on freedom assembly and expression, actually violating constitutional legitimacy, given that freedoms of opinion are guaranteed by the articles of the Constitution and this constriction does not regard any other ideology, since in modern times, no other ideology had been effective in undermining freedoms and pluralism in Italy. But, leaving the rhetorical question to the side, the Italian government, given that it protects our rights of assembly must however guarantee that assembly meets constitutional and legal requirements. Any assembly in a public space, a rally, a march, even the setting up of a stand to sell oranges, requires the obtaining of permits. In the case of a political rally or demonstration it requires the approval not only of the Municipality but of the State Police. Whoever has organised any event in Italy has spent time at Police Headquarters and contacted the Cabinet of the Mayor. The state provides permits and public security (in many cases escort, officers in riot gear and a motorcade). Most marches in Italy have a massive presence of police, and like it or not, they help with the traffic flow for the streets being closed off, they serve as a barrier in case there are elements that threaten the public safety; at times they are discreet and at others, they are omnipresent.

So, with all of that in mind, if a march/rally is called, with the cost and inconvenience it is going to bring to the general public, it is conditional upon being within the law.

In the call for the Pro Assad rally, the associations that supported it were the bulk of the extreme right of Europe, and this could never have surprised anyone that took even the most random of glances at any of their publications, promotional material or the sites where they held their meetings. Some Romans active for the rights of the oppressed people in Syria and Palestine came to the conclusion that the organisers are part of groups that perhaps are not reforming the Fascist party, but certainly are proud of their roots in Fascism and make no secret of it. It is time to face the fact that while not ALL those who support Assad are Fascist sympathisers, ALL Fascist sympathisers support Assad. Would there be a danger of a march turning into a Fascist rally? Indeed, the supporters of Assad sought confrontation during a pro Revolution march in April in Rome, with the police (upon their own initiative) identifying  19 of them and a pile of stones at their feet, documented by independent photographers, were what was left behind as they were asked to leave the premises. With such precedent, the activists in Rome issued a petition which was signed by hundreds of people, Italians and internationals, and presented to the authorities:

“Called for Saturday, June 15 in Rome is a gathering of European nazi-fascist movements that support the criminal regime of Syrian dictator Assad. The Italian organisations involved are the most well-known groups of the extreme right-wing, from Casa Pound to the archipelago of neo-Nazi movements and apologists of Fascism.

The support of the nazi-fascist movements towards the Syrian regime is the consequence of the shared identity of views with a repressive, murderous and corrupt system; one that has been oppressing the people of Syria for decades and has responded with unprecedented ferocity to the demand for freedom and dignity advanced two years ago with demonstrations and peaceful demonstrations. The current military drift is the result of the regime’s brutal repression against a movement that remained peaceful for many long months, despite the assaults, murders, arbitrary arrests, the widespread use of torture.

We believe that the Syrian people has the right to live in peace and freedom to determine their own future and that, to achieve these objectives, they have the right to resist oppression, just as the Palestinian people and all the peoples of the world. For this reason, we stand against the dictatorship of Assad and any imperialist military intervention, including intervention from the States of the region.

We are on the side of the Syrian people, the Palestinian and all the peoples who struggle for dignity and freedom, against the occupation, repression, torture and massacres, this is why we are anti-fascists.

A rally of rogue Nazis from across Europe in support of the dictatorship of the Assad clan is an insult to Rome, the Gold Medal in the Resistance, and an insult all freedom-loving people. Do not let this shame pass in silence, let us build solidarity with the Syrian people.”

In addition to the petition, a counter-rally was organised in a public square just outside the historical centre to express dissent with the issuing of the permits and to give another voice to the Syrian struggle, that which seeks the end of the Assad Regime.  It added as a second theme the rights of Palestinian to self-determination and freedom. It certainly did not have 3 months to be planned, nor could it mobilise “thousands” from all over Europe to come, given the short notice during high season, when finding accommodation or economic transportation to Rome is nigh impossible. It had to adopt a local character, at the most people from the nearby regions could make it, and yet, calls were made through some posters and some messages on Facebook to bring activists and the general public to convene, no matter where their point of departure was.

Pro Assad rally in Rome

Pro Assad rally in Rome

Then…. The unexpected happened: two days before the Pro Assad rally, both the City of Rome and the State of Italy withdrew their permits to allow this event to take place in a public square. Not defeated, the group simply moved the rally into their Clubhouse, which is the space that is occupied by Casa Pound, a well-organised group of the extreme right, certainly not neutral or apolitical terrain! Definitely that would exclude that the message would reach the general public that did not already have an opinion on the matter, and definitely would restrict its scope. Any way one looks at it, it lost its character as a Roman Rally, and the hopeful descent of thousands of lions would just have to be more folklore along the lines of the popular mandate of Assad and the “millions” of lions in the streets of every city of Syria to support his regime.

So, absolutely, efforts made by those dissenting from the public rally were fully successful. Free speech was preserved, but NOT the violation of our spaces with the blessing of the authorities.

Our rally, as scheduled, continued and the speakers would also comment upon the successful efforts, as well as explaining the situation in Syria to the general public.

One can look at both rallies and one can make some observations: the first is, both of them were successful in some ways, and unsuccessful in others. The Pro Assad rally, while not drawing thousands, and most likely not a massive presence of Europeans, in the arc of an entire day it did several hundred, they claim on their page 400, maybe half of them were hidden since they certainly don’t appear in photos or videos, yet, in spite of that, whether 200 or 400, it is not a bad number. The Anti Assad rally, while not aiming at an international presence and in concomitance with some other major events for Syria the same day, drew around 100. There were many organisations that gave their moral support and adhered to the call, though they did not bring their numbers to the square.

The Pro Assad rally was highly professional, and it should not surprise anyone! As a matter of fact, in 2 and a half years of war, it is rare (and perhaps it does not exist at all) that these people have been engaged in any efforts to support anything but the permanence of Assad. While decrying specific horrors and lamenting of massacres and destruction at the hands of the rebels, these groups NEVER organise to bring any kind of humanitarian aid in. You will never see them raise funds for ambulances, clothing, medicine, food, blankets, tents and even water. Any efforts they make are solely and exclusively to support their own propaganda. In fact, their Facebook pages included all kinds of information so that people could donate to the Roman event. That, as you see, is the extent of their work, to win the information war with private donations. And they DO invest!!! They provide themselves with a fancy set, organise entertainment, video presentations, bring in TV troupes, have an infinity of gadgets, most of them bearing the face of Assad, organise press conferences and posters… they get loads of posters and banners out there! Definitely, they have economic leeway for these things. Which is what is the problem with the Anti Assad activism. Most activists are not just doing information work, but they are constantly raising funds for humanitarian relief. They are giving sometimes all the money they have to send a bit of goods here, a bit of money there, spreading it out to many projects, so that all the projects have some level of success and serve the Syrians in the refugee camps and the internally displaced. They are building field hospitals, supplying the Syrians with the basics that their own government does not supply them with.

You can watch some of these Pro Assad people go on and on about how Assad provides all, like a good father. They must certainly believe it, because they only open their wallets to find more ways to repeat those myths. Those against Assad are aware of the reality, and not only do they not “get paid” to go to rallies, as was the case with the sixteen models suing an agency that did not pay them for their participation in a march in a public square where they were to chant slogans praising Assad in Arabic and hold his picture and a Syrian loyalist flag. No, those against Assad open their wallets again to bring themselves to marches and rallies. They open their wallets to get a sound system, the minimum things necessary for a public assembly. Things are often on a shoestring budget, and often, met with resistance by others who are in the movement for the simple reason that, “our money has to go to the people who are suffering, not in marches”.

And, this is why, on a date when there was a fundraiser, most of the Syrian community attended that. This is why, while the political paradigm for Assad is almost the property of the extreme right, for their sharing of a common worldview, it also is shared by some in the extreme left who undersign the paradigm, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”: forgetting that whoever kills his own people is by definition an enemy of the people, whoever engages in arbitrary arrest and torture is an enemy of the people, whoever kills Arabs is an enemy of the Arabs and a danger for the entire Mediterranean.

Those misguided people probably didn’t go to the Pro Assad rally, as most of the pictures showed some families, with kiddies in strollers and grannies kissing the picture of Assad on a paper fan. The self-declared leftists perhaps would have felt more comfortable with the Revolutionary Socialists who were a large part of the Anti  Assad rally than with those dressed up in military fatigues and praising the army. They perhaps don’t even notice that while they are screaming against the “Salafis”, they are praising the theocratic State of Iran, taking the words of a Nun and a Priest with regime links as gold dripping from heaven and raising Nasrallah up as some kind of resistance icon. They probably even think he runs a secular party!

But then again: the Pro Assad folks know how to fight their information war. That is because they do not need to disperse their personal resources in aid. They apparently either do not care about the humanitarian crisis, or since the millions of victims who have lost their homes and possessions are probably persons the regime would be happy to exterminate, they can feel legitimated in claiming to be pro Syria, but ignoring the suffering of the Syrian people. They can’t teach us any lessons about humanitarianism, or even about resistance. But they can teach us how to promote themselves professionally, despite the gigantic downsizing of their event.

CONCLUSION: The Pro Assad people have a different focus, it is on “winning the information war” and to hell with the humanitarian disaster in Syria. The Anti Assad people throw most of their energy into raising funds to provide Syrians with the basics of survival. The Pro Assad people, despite all that work and economic investment that crosses borders to create a massive international event, managed to gather together a very small crowd. The Anti Assad people didn’t have the same mechanisms and certainly haven’t got a political space to fall back on. We have to work harder at convincing people that these events are ALSO important to attend, by Syrians and anyone who is a freedom lover. They present us a chance to stand in solidarity with the Syrians, to discuss among ourselves and with the general public and to in that way build the movement so that the sole beneficiaries of ALL efforts are the Syrian people seeking their rights and freedom.

the two posters of the events:

siria poster 2

don't

16 Italian models hired to protest for Assad and never paid, they file a complaint against the agency for fraud

Posted: 05/30/2013 by editormary in Europe, Internet and Communication, Middle East, Syria
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rep syrBy GIUSEPPE SCARPA translated by Mary Rizzo

PAID MARCHERS. Young, attractive, disinhibited. And ripped off. Women who are very Italian in favour of the blood-thirsty Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad. It’s a little bit strange to quite understand. At least the Italian nationality of those protesters, that itself would have been hard to comprehend, given that these young women were asked to shout slogans in Arabic.

The date was 22 November 2011, and in Piazza Santi Apostoli, there was a sit-in in favour of the regime of Damascus. A flop. Only fifty people and nothing more. Most of the sympathisers of Assad were even recruited for money, by who knows what client, from the ranks of an agency that hires attractive young ladies to appear at organised parties in discotheques.

An episode, that of the pro-dictator march in Piazza Santi Apostoli, which emerges from within the details of a suit for fraud filed against the manager of that agency. Accused, by 16 women in their twenties, of never having paid one cent for the services of the “image girls” rendered by the young women who work for most of Rome’s discotheques. Including naturally, the performance in Piazza Santi Apostoli.

“Usually, one works from Thursday until Sunday (in the discotheques, ed. note). On one special occasion – it is written in the claim  presented by the women to the court – we worked on Tuesday from 2 pm to 3:30.” The special occasion was the sit-in in support of the regime of Damascus in Piazza Santi Apostoli on 22 November 2011. In Syria, in fact, from 14 March 2011, the civil war broke out. In the protest, “my job was to stay in the square, holding the flag high and shouting words in Arabic.” A well-paid service: the manager of the agency “told us that we would have been paid double.” But that is not all: because the manager of the agency also asked the same women to bring other protesters in the square. Naturally, with the promise of paying them more money. “For each person that we brought, there would be an additional 25 Euros.” The pact was that for no reason at all would the women reveal that they were “paid protesters”. “The manager of the agency told us,” continues the claim filed, “that no one should come to know that we received money to participate in that protest.”

The claim for lack of payment to the women had been archived by the PM however. Legal measures are being pursued by three of the sixteen women who were victims of this fraud. “I am certain,” explains the Attorney Valerio Vitale, “that Justice will follow its course and that the responsibility of the interested subjects will be ascertained.”

THE EPISODE:

The protest in favour of Assad, the Syrian dictator was organised for 22 November of 2011 in Piazza Santi Apostoli.

THE FLOP:
The protest in favour of the dictator was however a flop. The square was filled only with about fifty persons.

THE RIP-OFF
The 16 Italian women who normally work in discotheques had never been paid by the agency that recruited them.

thanks to Fouad and Germano for the find.

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