Mainstream journos coordinating Syria messaging with Saudi-funded think tankers? Inconceivable. pic.twitter.com/2IEjhNH0vJ

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 10, 2016

cars posted:

there is nothing funnier about writers like that to me than when they say black is white and then use crossword puzzle words to let readers of a certain class know it's time to turn their brains off and accept it.

concretely, in the final analysis,

aerdil posted:

that monthlyreview article is really good

if anyone wants heres the link since this site's auto-formatting murdered it:

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/allday131216.html

fape posted:

& http://www.upworthy.com/7-real-things-you-can-do-right-now-about-the-catastrophe-in-aleppo

been meaning to ask this for a while, if anyone has sources to enlighten me id appreciate it - was Doctors Without Borders ever good? without paying attention to them id always assumed they were genuinely neutral, their heavy involvement in the Last Hospital In Aleppo propaganda over the past year and now their inclusion in lists like this obviously give the lie to that impression

aerdil posted:

that monthlyreview article is really good ( http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/allday131216.html )

reproducing a chunk of this because I hadn't heard much about Robin Yassin-Kassab before, but now I'm seeing some trot/anarchist types who couch everything in terms of authoritarianism referencing Burning Country at length

Louis Allday posted:

One of the most vocal critics of Corbyn in this regard has been the writer Robin Yassin-Kassab, most widely known for his 2008 novel The Road to Damascus and his recent book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (co-authored with Leila al-Shami). Yassin-Kassab is regularly given a prominent platform from which to speak and write about Syria, especially in the UK. He refers to Corbyn as “pro-Putin, pro-Khamenei” and a “Stalinist worm” and has even gone so far as to call for the Labour leader to be “put to sleep” on account of his supposed “Stalinism (or Putinism, or Assadism, whatever you call it)”. Similarly, he has attacked Jill Stein (the US Green Party’s presidential candidate) as a “ridiculous piece of shit” and has accused her of “cuddling up to the criminal imperialist Putin”.

In addition to these outrageous comments, Robin Yassin-Kassab has taken a number of extremely problematic stances that call into question his credibility as an unprejudiced voice on Syria. Yassin-Kassab has openly and vociferously called for the West to arm the opposition in Syria and has labelled the idea that the US is interested in regime change in Syria as a “false notion” that Western leftists are “obsessed” with. In February 2013, during a Q&A after a performance of the play Sour Lips by Omar el-Khairy, I heard him speciously argue that the situation in Syria was directly analogous to that in Palestine, a conflict between colonisers (Israel/Assad) and the colonised (Palestinians/Syrians). Yassin-Kassab has also praised Turkish military aggression in Syria several times and even offered his thanks after Turkey shot down a Russian plane in November 2015. Disturbingly, in April 2014, he praised the “brilliant” Lattakia Offensive and specifically thanked Erdogan and Turkey “for the supply lines” that facilitated it. This offensive, which was led by a coalition of rebel groups including Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria), attacked civilian areas and, when it took the town of Kessab, looted Armenian-owned shops and homes, took Armenian families hostage, and desecrated the town’s three churches, forcing around 2,000 ethnic Armenians to flee.

Perhaps most worryingly, in addition to those already detailed above, Yassin-Kassab has staked out some astonishingly reactionary positions in relation to events in Syria that illustrate just how extreme the views of many of these campaigners truly are. For example, in December 2015 when Zahran Alloush, leader of the Saudi Arabia-backed group, Jaish al-Islam was killed in an airstrike, Yassin-Kassab publicly called for his “murder by Russian imperialists” to be “avenged”. Alloush was a Wahhabi extremist implicated in a host of brutal human rights violations including torture and assassination as well as selling aid and food at inflated prices. In 2013, Alloush -- who was strongly opposed to democracy in Syria -- actually announced the re-establishment of the Ummayad Caliphate and declared that “(w)e will bury the heads of impure Shiites in Najaf, God willing”. Yassin-Kassab could not very well have been ignorant of this, which makes his call for the death of such a violently sectarian warlord to be “avenged” a serious concern. This is notably so as -- in a sectarian line of thinking that Alloush himself would likely have agreed with -- Yassin-Kassab has stated that “Iranian-Shia expansionism is a main cause of rising Sunni jihadism” and argued that “Iran’s trans-national Shia jihadist militias are currently the greatest driver of sectarianism in the region”. In this context, he has even stated that “(m)ost Syrian people would probably say, ISIS is better than Assad”. That a man with such extreme opinions is regularly hosted at literary festivals, cultural institutions, UK/US universities, and even human rights organisations is indicative of just how skewed the mainstream narrative on Syria is.

In common with so many figures who argue for further military intervention in Syria, Yassin-Kassab also appears to be in denial about the reality of events in Libya. In May 2016, he argued that in Libya, a “popular revolution” against a “fascist” who was slaughtering his own people had taken place, and that it was “West-centric” to argue that the reason Gaddafi fell was because of intervention by France, the UK and the US. This stance has been echoed by many others including Ayoub, who has argued that to observe that Libya was destroyed “utterly strip(s) Libyans of agency” and described Libya as a “paradise” compared to Syria. This interpretation of events in Libya has been thoroughly disproved by several sources including a report by the UK Foreign Affairs Committee that is discussed in greater detail below.

I was reading the In These Times interview mentioned above and this jumped out at me:

Why do you think America should have armed the Free Syrian Army when we look at Libya where the United States along with NATO, in effect, backed the ousting of Gaddafi? Things haven’t turned out well.

L: If Gaddafi had not fallen, Libya now would look very much like Syria. In reality, the situation in Libya is a million times better. Syrian refugees are fleeing to Libya. Far fewer people have been killed in Libya since Gaddafi’s falling than in Syria.

Gaddafi being ousted was a success for the Libyan people. The reason that there are problems in Libya now is not because Gaddafi is gone. It’s because Gaddafi was in power for decades in which all political participation was completely suppressed. All civil society was completely suppressed. The idea that from that situation people could create a perfect democracy is fallacy. It takes people time to build that.

R: It’s so West-centric, this notion that British and French intervention primarily, with a bit of American backing, is why Gaddafi fell. What the Libyan people did was irrelevant. There’s chaos in Libya now and wouldn’t it have been so much better if this fascist was still there able to slaughter his people. What happened was there was a popular revolution in Libya. This happened months before Britain and France got involved. There was going to be a civil war in Libya whether or not Britain and France chose to get involved.

L: If Gaddafi had not fallen, Libya now would look very much like Syria.

I feel like I've heard something like this before...

"Western propaganda", said Archbishop Hindo "keeps talking about moderate rebels, who do not exist". According to Syrian Catholic Archbishop, "there is something very disturbing about all this: there is a superpower that since September 11 protests because the Russians hit the militias of al-Qaeda in Syria. What does it mean? Al-Qaeda is now a US ally, just because in Syria it has a different name? But do they really despise our intelligence and our memory?"
In the interview with Fides, Archbishop Hindo repeats that "the Syrians will decide if and when Assad has to go away, and not the Daesh or the West. And it is certain that if Assad goes away now, Syria will become like Libya".

taken together they evoke a kind of hopeless fatalism: life in post-2011 in Syria or Libya must face a hell protracted to the present, whatever its form of appearance.

but in fact the meanings behind the two remarks are starkly opposed, which of course leads us to wonder whether we're better off taking UK-raised anarchists or leaders of a threatened Syrian minority group as guides to the situation.

also:

Ladies and gentlemen: Robin Yassin Kassab on Libya pic.twitter.com/ybLGEIaHl6

— Taryn Fivek (@fivek) May 5, 2016