Soros Open Society + "Anti-fascists" = Globalist propaganda

[tapitsbo]

I wasn't trying to imply Jobbik are good guys, and I'm not imagining left responses to various situations.

[Iamwhomiam]

I will disagree, Mr. WRex. They can no more be contained the we, the USA can be.

Crimea.

[Joe Hillshoist]

I would too, Joe, but we must be careful what we wish for. The quickest way to achieve pay parity would be to lower first world workers pay to the level of third world workers pay.

edit to remove "that equaling "

That is whats happening and all the excess cash is not trickling down its torrenting up.

[Joe Hillshoist]

[Iamwhomiam]

I agree, Joe. Did you see this video Grizzly posted in the Trump thread? I hadn't when I wrote that.

[82_28]

Damn, Perot would have been a godsend looking back. I was just in high school back then. I think my amateur mind back then just didn't like southern accents. Clinton was folksy and Bush sounded like the guy that would sell you camel cigarettes on TV. Perot being elected would have changed everything.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Dunno enough about everything else Perot said to know if would have actually been a Godsend, but he right on the money with that comment.

I'm not against globalisation either... depending on what it involves. I like the idea that we can extend our tribalist attitudes to include everyone on earth, that we can all communicate, travel freely and all the rest. Its a great ideal.

back to reality for a minute.

Seems one major difference between the sorts of globalism we (ie lefties like I was) supported and rejected in the 90s was simply how inclusive the consequences of that globalism were. Sharing the benefits was something we all agreed on. Any globalist will say this tho. Whether they mean it, and what they mean by "meaning it" is another thing.

[82_28]

I remember two things about Perot. My current events teacher coming into class asking us what we thought about Perot and my friend's Christian fundamentalist parents crying when Clinton won. I had no idea back then. But that's actually it. I was too young to know shit back then. I guess I was all in for Clinton because I was raised staunchly Democrat. However as you say, Joe, he may not have been a godsend but knowing what I know now I would have voted for him after seeing that statement.

I guess. . .

[General Patton]

crossposting:

https://linksunten.indymedia.org/de/node/169431

Open letter to Clausnitz

Dear Clausnitzers,

everywhere one reads that you are afraid, that you are insecure. You want a dialogue at eye level. On Thursday you showed, where your dialogue leads and we are happy to build on! We of the Antifa visited your village. A beautiful village. Even your local museum was much appreciated. Things can go broken, tractors can spontaneously combust - it would be a shame. Well, some of our other options would unsettle the population.

If you scare one more refugee, there will be consequences for you. We're watching you. Another attack on a refugee, a firecracker outside the property - and your village will be in ruins. We will drive up the price of your inhumanity as high as possible. Your hatred and your agitation will not remain unchallenged. We will not stand by the sidelines as you live out your authoritarian character. You live in a world in which "Being German" is worth more than being human. We will not tolerate that.



Dear Saxon police, In Clausnitz you have once again shown that you willingly execute, what the German mob wants you to. We did not expect anything else from you. You already showed in Heidenau and Freital what you stand for. By ignoring, connivance, downplaying and active support you promote a racist Saxon mob, which knows about your consent and strikes on a daily basis. You too will feel the consequences for your inhuman act.

Allegedly from German antifa. If so they are stepping up their act from burning down black metal clubs.

[jakell]

Not an unusual stance for some antifa types to take. It's pretty dodgy.

From the above article.

...Antifascists must crush AFP now before they are able to grow stronger. There are many ways that AFP can and should be confronted here in Portland. As militant Antifascists, we believe in taking the fight to them, which means not waiting to pounce on them when they have events. While they certainly should be confronted at their events, we believe that this strategy is insufficient for damaging and halting their organizing. Waiting until AFP stages demonstrations affords them control of the timeline and opportunities to prepare for confrontation. We therefore believe that other strategies need to be used in tandem with counter-demonstrations: specifically, that they should be deprived of income and peace of mind at all times until they capitulate.

In other words 'these folks are saying stuff we don't like and, even if they behave themselves, they must be crushed'. Notice that the last doesn't really apply to militancy, but individuals and families going peaceably (that word got slipped in there) about their business.

Does anyone not find this sort of thing even a little bit worrying?


ETA: What exactly would this capitulation comprise of, how would such a thing be measured seeing as it is a condition of not being targeted?
ETA2: Those children have now acquired blobs over their faces (didn't notice 'em before). Will this dehumanisation make it easier to crush them I wonder?

ETA: noticed you mentioned black metal clubs above.

It's a scene I've never taken any interest in, recently though, AD pasted a piece from antifascistnews about this which turned out be highly innacurate.

The inaccuracy is not so important as much as the fact that they don't seem to care about it (same goes for our local enthusiast). If we marry inaccuracy with apathy and the sort of actions described and hinted at above then we have the potential for innocent people getting harassed and even hurt (I notice the venom is aimed at something as broad as a village)

[AlicetheKurious]

I normally don't bother deconstructing and responding to this sort of garbage, but in this case it's worth it.

There's money lubricating the wheels of Team Putin, and many players from the far right are creaming in their jeans over the prospect of getting paid some Russian coin for joining up with the team:

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-life/the ... eople#full


A Syrian man comforts a boy following a reported air strike on the rebel-held neighbourhood of Al Kalasa in Aleppo on February 4.


The long read: What does the future hold for Syria’s people?

The revolution, counter-revolutions and wars in Syria are terribly misunderstood, particularly in the English-speaking West, by politicians and publics alike. There are many shining exceptions, but in general, poor media coverage, ideological blinkers and Orientalist assumptions have produced a discourse which focuses on symptoms rather than causes, and which is usually unencumbered by grassroots Syrian voices or any information at all on Syrian political and cultural achievements under fire.

Cheap, manipulative ostensibly progressive and leftist catch-words to trigger the reader into believing that this article is anti-imperialist, instead of its opposite. The use of "grassroots" to describe what are, in fact, mercenaries on the payroll of foreign predators is particularly odious. The real Syrian "grassroots Syrian voices" have been loud and clear in the massive, unprecedented rallies to declare the Syrian people's support of their government and of their army (which have received zero coverage by the Western media even though they've been much, much bigger and more representative of the Syrian grassroots than the anti-government demonstrations so beloved of the Western media), and in the voter turnout during the last presidential elections, in which President Assad received a strong majority of votes both inside and outside Syria. This despite the fact that Syrian voters in Turkey, Germany, France, Belgium and the UAE were forbidden to vote by the "democracy-promoting" governments of those countries. The hypocrisy and duplicity are simply staggering.

The consequent incomprehension is disastrous for two reasons – one negative, one positive.

First, the exponentially escalating crisis in Syria is a danger to everybody – Syrians and their neighbours first, but Europe immediately after. Russia’s bombing is creating hundreds of thousands of new refugees.

Before the Russian bombing, the Western-sponsored Islamist "opposition" was rapidly taking over Syrian cities and towns and villages, where they were proceeding to smash and loot the country's wealth (much of it ending up filling the pockets of the Western democracy-promoters), literally enslave the people, rape the women, murder the men, and generally transforming the formerly beautiful, diverse and prosperous country into a nightmarish hell. The Syrian refugees have not been coming out of Latakia and Damascus, or other government-held territory, but from regions that had been taken over by the Western-sponsored Wahhabist armed militias. Russia's bombing, along with the Syrian Arab Army and Hezbullah on the ground, is forcing the terrorists out, and preventing their access to the steady flow of weapons, money, and recruits that the West had been supplying them through NATO's Turkey.

Meanwhile there’s good reason to believe Russian president Vladimir Putin is funding far-right, anti-immigrant parties across Europe. It is very possible that this year’s flood of refugees will re-establish Europe’s internal borders, destroying the “Schengen” free movement area, seen by some as Europe’s key political achievement since the Second World War.

What "good reason"? We do know for a fact that the US is funding far-right, in fact Nazi, parties in the Ukraine, at least.

With 11 million homeless, traumatised people on the eastern Mediterranean, terrorism is sure to increase. And the long-term geopolitical consequences of allowing, even facilitating, Russia, Iran and Syrian president Bashar Al Assad to crush the last hopes of democracy and self-determination in Syria will create a still more dangerous world for our children. Yet European heads are being buried in the sand. Some still imagine a peace process is underfoot.

The CIA- and Soros-sponsored "color revolutions" and the West's relentless violations of other countries' sovereignty and its determination to impose terrorist militias as a substitute for those countries' governments and armies is the direct cause of the "11 million homeless, traumatised people". How Orwellian for the West to describe its wars of aggression and sponsorship of fascist, armed terrorists and mercenaries as "the last hopes of democracy and self-determination".

And the positive reason. Amidst the depravities of war, Syrians are organising themselves in brave and creative ways. The country now boasts more than 400 local councils, most democratically-elected, as well as many free newspapers, radio stations, women’s centres, and an explosion in artistic production.

Doesn't that sound like fun? Give us your national sovereignty, allow us to destroy and sell off your priceless ancient heritage and cultural memory, forcibly divide and weaken you, rob you of your resources, annihilate your national army and replace it with our militias, and maybe we'll let you run some "newspapers, radio stations, women’s centres" and maybe even draw some pictures. How very Leftist and heart-warming.

We shouldn’t just be feeling sorry for Syrians, but learning from them too. Their democratic experiments are currently under full-scale international military assault. They may be stamped out before most non-Syrians have even heard of them.

Ok, maybe we won't let you have your little sewing circles instead of a nation state. But if you don't have those newspapers and women's centres, etc., it's the Russians' fault. As we all know, the Western-sponsored militias are all about letting people express themselves creatively.

These factors spurred me, a British-Syrian novelist, and Leila Al Shami, a British-Syrian activist, to write our book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War.

In place of inaccurate grand narratives we have amplified the voices of Syrian revolutionaries. Instead of sensationalism we have tried to provide context (for without context all we are left with is ideology and assumptions). This means that we also seek to explain the perspectives of those we disagree with – the different varieties of extremists, for instance, or pro-regime Alawites, who are often reluctantly driven to loyalty by fear and a lack of alternative leadership.

Hahaha. The "Syrian revolutionaries" whose voices you "have amplified" are driven by the loftie$t of motive$, while the vast majority of Syrians, who are standing in solidarity with each other and their government (who are not just Alawites -- Alawites only constitute around 8% and Sunnis constitute nearly 75% of the population -- and 80% of the Syrian Army -- while 10% of the population are Christian) are driven "to loyalty by fear and a lack of alternative leadership" (despite your best efforts to supply that "alternative leadership"). No ideology or assumptions there, only the sleaziest and cheapest imperialist propaganda candy-coated with 'progressive' catch-words. Naturally, it's not possible that most Syrians love their country and want it back, and want the right to speak and choose for themselves, rather than paid shills in Riyadh or London or Washington speaking and choosing for them.

The following extract is taken from our chapter entitled ‘Scorched Earth: The Rise of the Islamisms’:

“We used to laugh at the regime propaganda about Salafist gangs and Islamic emirates. Then the regime created the conditions to make it happen.” – Monzer Al Sallal

Yeah, the "regime" forced the US and Turkey and Qatar and Saudi Arabia to recruit, train, finance and arm Wahhabist maniacs, and to transport them into Syria, and to keep supplying them with ammunition and supplies, and to buy the oil and antiquities they stole under the cover provided by NATO.

Tormented, bereaved and dispossessed, the Syrian people turned more intensely to religion. This doesn’t mean they became advocates of public beheadings and compulsory veiling; almost all were horrified by the appearance of these phenomena and most still expressed the desire for a civil rather than an Islamic state. A minority, disgusted by the uses to which religion had been put, questioned it more intensely than before. But in general religious emotions were enflamed, religious references were reinforced.

The first cause was the same one which powered militarisation – the brute fact of extreme violence. In most cultures the proximity of death will focus minds on the transcendent – there are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes – and more so in an already religious society like Syria’s. Faith is intensified by death and the threat of death, and by the pain and humiliation of torture. And when the nation is splintering, sub-national identities are reinforced. In death’s presence, people want to feel like we, not like I, because I is small and easily erased.

The sung slogan ‘Ya Allah Malna Ghairak Ya Allah’ (O God We Have Nothing But You) became ubiquitous amongst protestors facing bullets. An intense relationship with God became a survival framework for the detained. Religious slogans became cosmic rallying calls for the fighters. In the Syrian context, radicalisation is better named traumatisation.

Islamism – in both moderate and extreme forms – flourished. The trend was more pronounced amongst the fighting formations than among the people in their committees, liberated towns and villages, and refugee camps – and there were concrete reasons for this, to do with arms supply, funding and discipline. The most serious consequence for the course of the revolution was the hardening of divisions between the Sunni Arab majority and the rest, and foremost amongst them the Alawites. By 2014, battlefield events (and certainly media reports) were often dominated by the acts of the most extreme Sunni Islamist militias – either the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat Al Nusra or the even more extreme Daesh. But at first these organisations were by no means the most important Islamist actors.

The persistence of sectarian resentment in secular, even unbelieving countries such as Ireland or Scotland reinforces an obvious point – these conflicts aren’t about theology but concern group fears and resentments, and their exploitation by power. Communal tensions, in other words, are the result not of ancient enmities but of contemporary political machinations. Communities engaged at one moment in seemingly unforgettable strife are, at another, busily engaging in intermarriage or political alliance. In Lebanon, for instance, the main civil war cleavage was Christian-Muslim, but now tends to divide Sunni-Shia, with Christian groups allied to both sides. And in Iraq, before the 2003 invasion, a third of marriages were cross-sect Sunni-Shia.

There was nothing fated about the sectarian breakdown in Syria. It was deliberately provoked and manipulated, by a host of secondary actors, but primarily by the regime.

This is borne out by the fact that the pro-government forces in Syria comprise Christians, Alawites, Druze, Sunnis, Ismailis, and Shi'a, while the Western-sponsored "opposition" is overwhelmingly Wahhabist and identifies itself as "sunni". Oh, that's one of the many "facts" that don't make it into the warmongering "progressive" narrative.

Why would the regime provoke first armed resistance and then a fierce sectarian backlash? Because Assadist policy under father and son, at home and abroad, is to present itself as the essential solution to problems it has itself manufactured – a case of the arsonist dressing up as a fireman. The double aim of the counter-revolutionary strategy was to frighten secularists and religious minorities into loyalty, and the West into tolerance of the dictatorship’s violence. The first goal has been partially achieved, the second – at the time of writing – more so.

How did the regime undertake its project? To start with, it targeted Sunni areas for collective punishment and sectarian provocation, as Marcell Shehwaro saw: “The sensation of Sunni identity is based on something real – I can’t pretend that the regime isn’t sectarian, that there haven’t been sectarian massacres. Look, there were stages on the way. When they started killing Sunni civilians randomly as opposed to just those protesting – this increased it. People asked ‘Why are they killing my children when none were carrying arms, and while they’re sending provisions to the nearby Shia village?’ When they played Shia songs at the checkpoints in all-Sunni neighbourhoods. Then my atheist friends began asserting their Sunnism, which is now more of a social than a religious identity.”

Add to this a symbolic assault against Sunni sacred sites. Regime forces fired anti-aircraft guns at minarets until they crumbled. The Umayyad mosque in Aleppo burnt, its thousand-year-old minaret fallen, and the minaret of Deraa’s Omari mosque, erected in the seventh century by Caliph Omar bin Al Khattab. The Khalid bin Al Waleed mosque in Homs, built around the mausoleum of the famous Muslim general and companion of the Prophet, was shelled and burnt. In the regime’s cells, meanwhile, in a parody of the Muslim profession of faith, detainees were forced to swear that there was no god but Bashar.

Writer Samar Yazbek describes the provocation: “When the uprising began, they attacked or destroyed symbols of the Sunni religion. In Kafranbel in August 2013, every day for 20 days, when people broke their fast during Ramadan, the Assad forces used to shell them at that moment, when they were about to eat, when they were saying their prayers. They used to hear the people in the planes on the telephones saying to each other, ‘We want to make them eat death. We want to make them break their fast with death.’ And they did. This is where extremism comes from – from violence and brutality. I am sorry, but anybody who has had ten of their children die is going to become an extremist.”

This is where the imperialist West's pet NGO's earn their pay, by totally turning reality on its head, and being granted a virtual monopoly in the Western media: in fact, the core strategy of the so-called "revolutionaries" from the very beginning was to deliberately stoke sectarian hatred among Syria's Sunni majority, against all the country's other sects. It was in fact the salafist revolutionaries who attacked and destroyed even ancient Sunni shrines (as they did in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere). It's no accident that the "revolution" began in outlying regions along Syria's border with Turkey and with Lebanon's Tripoli region, where Saudi and Wahhabist influence and spending have been strong for years.

The video below shows one of the earliest anti-government demonstrations in Syria, in the Spring of 2011: the demonstrators are chanting: "Peaceful! Peaceful! Until we exterminate the Alawites"; "Let us say it loud and clear, no more Alawites do we want to see". It shows demonstrators proclaiming their loyalty to a Wahhabist televangelist cleric, Adnan Arour, who regularly appears on Saudi tv to incite Syrian Sunnis to attack their fellow Syrians from other sects and religions. In the video, they're chanting, "Oh Arour, don't worry, behind you are men who drink blood," (that's a good thing, in this lovely, delightful progressive revolution.) This is followed by chants of support for Arour and for his fellow nutcase, the Muslim Brotherhood's preacher Youssef El-Qaradawy:



More false propaganda and outright lies:

Then the drowning tyranny threw its arms around the neck of the Alawite community, advertising its complicity in its crimes and making it a potential target for revenge. The Zahra neighbourhood of Homs, for instance, was a visible affront to the besieged and shelled areas surrounding it. An Alawite community overbrimming now with soldiers, with rocket launchers set up in the square, the whole area was lit up while the rest of the city was dark. There were goods in Zahra’s shops, and very cheap furniture, clothes and electronics on sale in the ‘Sunni market’ – all looted from opposition homes. Alawite women too were encouraged to join in the repression of their neighbours – eliciting a predictable response. “They come into people’s houses and take money if they find more than a little,” complained one Sunni woman. “They steal mobile phones. They kick and punch. And what have we done to deserve this? Is it because we’re Muslims? Because we say there is no god but God? Is that why we lost our youth and our homes?”

Collective punishment for Sunnis; the collective tarring of Alawites. The most crucial of all mass-implications, and another bloody turning point in the conflict, was the series of state-directed sectarian massacres on the central plain between Homs and Hama through summer 2012. On May 25, 108 people were murdered at Houla, a Sunni population surrounded by Alawite and Shia villages. The victims – almost half of them children – had their throats cut, their skulls split open and were riddled with bullets. On June 6, between 78 and 100 were similarly murdered at Al Qubeir, again a Sunni farming area surrounded by Alawi villages. On July 10, between 68 and 150 – both civilians and rebel fighters – were killed at Tremseh.

In these and many smaller incidents, it was the shabiha militias accompanying the army who did most of the killing. In Aleppo and Damascus the shabiha militias are manned by thugs of all backgrounds, but in the Homs, Hama and Latakia regions they are exclusively Alawite and Shia. Using locally-recruited gangs as death squads transforms neighbouring communities into bitter enemies. The strategy is coldly intelligent; it incites the victim community with a generalised thirst for revenge, while exploiting the spectre of this revenge to frighten even dissenting members of the ‘perpetrator community’ into redoubled allegiance.

The Houla massacre, like so many others, is one of many examples of deliberate false-flag massacres perpetrated by the so-called "revolutionaries" to provide their sponsors with a pretext to invade Syria and to engage in regime-change. While progressive warmongers such as American Dream acknowledge only Western propaganda as reality, the facts on the ground tell a very different story, one that is all too familiar for those who have experienced the so-called "Arab Spring". Below are some excerpts from The Houla Massacre Revisited: “Official Truth” in the Dirty War on Syria:

German journalist, Rainer Hermann, who speaks Arabic, interviewed witnesses from Houla within days of the massacre. His sources included Syrian opposition members who had rejected violence, whose names he withheld. They said Islamist rebels had attacked three army checkpoints. His sources told him:

‘The massacre took place after Friday prayers … dozens of soldiers and rebels were killed … [in fighting of] about 90 minutes … those killed were almost exclusively families of the Alawite or Shia minorities … [including] several dozen members of a family which had converted to Shia Islam in recent years … and the family of a Sunni member of parliament, because he was considered a collaborator … after the massacre, the perpetrators filmed their victims, presented them as Sunni victims and spread their videos’ (Hermann 2012).

Hermann gave names to the gang leaders:

‘more than 700 gunmen under the leadership of Abdurrazzaq Tlass and Yahya Yusuf [Farooq leaders] came in three groups from Rastan, Kafr Laha and Akraba and attacked three army checkpoints around Taldou. The numerically superior rebels and the soldiers fought bloody battles … the rebels, supported by the residents of Taldou, snuffed out the families … [who] had refused to join the opposition’ (LRC 2012).

German journalist Alfred Hackensberger spoke with a man who had been given refuge in the Qara monastery headed by Mother Agnes Mariam. This man called ‘Jibril’ said:

‘The fighting began around noon, when the rebels, coming from Ar-Rastan and Saan, attacked the checkpoints … the rebels went to the hospital and killed patients there … several teams targeted and went in selected houses and started to shoot all of the inhabitants. He knew the Sajid’s personally. ‘They were Sunni Muslims, like all of us’, he says. ‘They were killed by them because they have refused to join the revolution. They’ve even murdered a Member of Parliament who … had refused the boycott of the FSA’.

Asked about the ‘regime loyalists’ claims, Jibril responded derisively:

‘Nonsense … Houla is in rebel hands since December 2011 … the Army would like to reclaim Taldu, but it has not been done … many people know what really happened … who’s there … can only replay the version of the rebels. Everything else is certain death’ (Hackensberger 2012).

The Arabic speaking Dutch writer Martin Janssen constructed his view from three sources: the Catholic Fides news agency, information from refugees at the Qara monastery and the accounts of Russian journalists Musin and Kulygina. He questioned the shabiha story because many victims were Alawi, who are almost all pro-government. Fides had reported that ‘large groups of Syrian Alawites and Christians were fleeing to Lebanon to escape the violence of armed gangs’, after the events at Houla (Janssen 2012). The Qara monastery told him witnesses said the army was absent in the region, with ‘Rastan and Saan … under full control of the Free Syrian Army’. The armed groups attacked the al-Watani hospital and killed the guards. ‘Then they invaded the hospital where armed rebels killed all present and … put the hospital on fire’ (Janssen 2012). At Tal Daw, near Houla, armed groups murdered all the Alawite families. The report from the monastery described the area around Qusayr as ‘in turmoil’ and wracked by sectarian violence (Janssen 2012).

Those Russian journalists, Marat Musin and Olga Kulygina from the Abkhazian Network News Agency (ANNA-News) had a camera crew in Houla on 25 May and took a number of witness interviews. Their sources make it very clear the murderers were Islamist ‘rebels’. An old woman called

‘The grandmother of Al-Hula’ said: ‘Checkpoint positions were attacked … All the soldiers were killed, then they attacked our villages, torched a hospital … Bandits killed our pharmacist … [because] he had treated a wounded soldier Nobody but the army will help us … They say there have been airstrikes! Lies, lies, lies. Liars, all of them come from Ar-Rastan’ (ANNA 2012).

Taldou resident Syed Abdul Wahab, said: ‘The terrorists want to come here … to take power. We have always lived in peace. We cannot leave the house’. A local woman from Al-Gaunt, next to Al-Houla, said ‘Nine terrorists killed my relatives in the field. The bandits set fire to our houses and we fled … we have a martyr, who was burned alive. Why, by what law did they die? Is this Islam? Is this justice?’ (ANNA 2012).

Another woman from Taldou they call Arifah told them she listened to the radio chatter from the ‘bandits’, before the massacre (Musin 2012a). They began by firing at the main checkpoint while a group from the al Hassan clan, led by Nidal Bakkur, attacked a ‘second checkpoint’ outside the village. The bandits lost about 25 people but after about two hours they had taken over both check-points. ‘They then proceeded to murder the Al-Sayed family which lived across the street from the police station’. Three families including about 20 children were murdered, along with another 10 from the Abdul Razaq family. That afternoon Abdul Razak Tlas, leader of the Farouq Brigade, arrived with 250 men from Ar-Rastan, Aqraba and Farlaha (Musin 2012a). The city of Ar-Rastan had been abandoned by most civilians for some time, taken over by Islamists from Lebanon (Musin 2012b). Arifah said that by 8pm the murdered civilians and dead bandits had been taken to the mosque. They then filmed for the Qatari and Saudi television stations. On Saturday morning, when the UNSMIS observers arrived, ‘The fallen rebels involved in the action were presented as civilians, while the conquering rebels dressed in army uniforms posed as defectors. They were surrounded by their family members who told the story of a government attack with heavy shelling and posed as victim’s relatives, while the relatives of the real victims were nowhere to be seen’ (Musin 2012a).

Violence continued after the UNSMIS visit. Musin and Kulygina later interviewed two wounded soldiers, a wounded policeman and another resident, who gave more detail of ‘rebel’ sniper attacks and murders, and of the ‘rebel’ escorts set up for the UN observers. They continued to identify attackers and victims. A group from the Al Aksh clan had been firing mortars and RPGs at the checkpoints. All checkpoint prisoners were executed: a Sunni conscript had his throat cut, while Abdullah Shaui of Deir-Zor was burned alive (Maramus 2012; Musin 2012b). The police officer said ‘the attackers were from Ar-Rastan and Al-Hula. Insurgents control Taldou. They burned houses and killed people by the families, because they were loyal to the government’ (Musin 2012b). The resident saw the clashes from the roof of the police station. ‘Al Jazeera aired pictures and said that the Army committed the massacre at Al Hula … in fact, they [the gunmen] killed the civilians and children in Al-Hula. The bandits … steal everything … most of the fighters are from the city of Ar Rastan’ (Maramus 2012; Musin 2012b). The second UN inquiry ignored these 15 witnesses, who told of specific perpetrators with clear political motives.

Next, the entry of Lebanon’s Hizbollah and other Iranian-backed militias gave the conflict a Sunni-Shia flavour and fitted it into a regional struggle which had flared since the American occupation of Iraq. The Shia were by no means a natural target for Syrian Sunni enmity – they constituted only one per cent of the population, and before the revolution were not particularly associated with the regime. When Hizbollah was perceived as an anti-Zionist resistance force, it was wildly popular amongst Syrians, Sunnis as much as everyone else, and in 2006, when hundreds of thousands of southern Lebanese – most of them Shia – fled Israeli bombs for Syria, they were housed in private homes. Several thousand were welcomed in the border town of Qusayr.

In any case, orthodox Shia like orthodox Sunnis tend to consider the Alawites heretics. The alliance between Assadist Syria and Shia-theocratic Iran is political, not religious – but that’s not the way it felt on the ground. By word and action, Iran and its clients seemed to confirm the discourse of the wildest anti-Shia propagandists. Hizbollah’s role in Assad’s recapture of Qusayr was followed by the regime burning the Homs land registry, and then reports that Alawi families were being invited to take over Sunni homes. Sunnis feared an agenda linking Alawite tyranny and ethnic cleansing to Shia regional expansionism. The results soon began to emerge. Hizbollah secured Qusayr on June 5, 2013; and on June 11 there was a savagely sectarian response at Hatla in Deir Ezzour, where 60 Shia – some shabiha but at least 30 civilians – were murdered.

More malicious spin. In fact, the Western-sponsored terrorist militias were advancing towards the Lebanese border, and had violently taken over Qusayr, a Syrian town overlooking Lebanese territory. It was rapidly becoming a terrorist stronghold, in preparation for the terrorists' expansion into Lebanon. In 2013, the Syrian Arab Army liberated the town with help from Hezbullah, and it was this action that marked the entry of Hezbullah into the Syrian conflict, at the request of the Syrian government. One of the main reasons why the West is so determined to destroy and fragment Syria, and to get rid of its government, is that Syria is the crucial land-bridge for Iranian supplies to the Lebanese Resistance, which is Lebanon's only defense against Israeli invasion and occupation. This is why ensuring a Western/Israeli terrorist stronghold in Qusayr that would literally cut off Syria from Lebanon, was such an important strategic objective.

*****

With ISIL building a totalitarian ‘Sunni’ state in the east, and tens of thousands of transnational Shia troops on Assad’s frontlines, Syria’s sectarian dynamic has never been stronger than today. Russian bombing is leading towards a sectarian partition of the country that would immeasurably strengthen both forms of jihadism. Yet very many Syrians still refuse this fratricidal logic and remain aware of how sectarian hatreds have been fanned and exploited by tyranny. If these people are listened to, empowered, and involved in any real settlement, it may not be too late to avoid the very worst. Our solidarity is required. And before solidarity must come real knowledge.

In fact, Russian bombing of the foreign-backed Wahhabist terrorists has produced the opposite effect: the non-sectarian, secular government and army, which enjoy the support of the vast majority of Syrians, are advancing and liberating Syrian towns and villages and cities so that the citizens of Syria can go back to their homes, thanks to the Russians and no thanks at all to the Zio-American sponsors of the terrorists and their Wahhabist vassals.

Stripped to its essence, this supposedly progressive, Leftist narrative is nothing more than malice, lies and warmongering in service of empire. How sickening that there are still people who fall for this crap, even as the bodies pile up and chaos reigns, and the elites who own the Western media and walk the halls of power fill their pockets with bloody stolen loot.

[kool maudit]

Do not think for a second that your analyses are not appreciated to a degree commensurate with the effort it doubtlessly takes to share them. I would pay good money to subscribe to a newsletter of things like the above.

[Sounder]

kool maudet wrote...

Do not think for a second that your analyses are not appreciated to a degree commensurate with the effort it doubtlessly takes to share them. I would pay good money to subscribe to a newsletter of things like the above.

It is so cool for AD to have inserted globalist propaganda in the globalist propaganda thread. We are so fortunate to have someone like Alice that is able to deconstruct the bullshit so well. Personally i avoid reading AD articles, and am sometimes sorry for it, but information overload, especially bad information can fuck you up. So the kind of spirit that drives Alice is the heart and soul of RI. I salute the folk that endure the propaganda in the hopes for the occasional poster to nail the nature of the propaganda and beat it back, if only for a moment.

Thanks Alice for that post, and great finish here.

In fact, Russian bombing of the foreign-backed Wahhabist terrorists has produced the opposite effect: the non-sectarian, secular government and army, which enjoy the support of the vast majority of Syrians, are advancing and liberating Syrian towns and villages and cities so that the citizens of Syria can go back to their homes, thanks to the Russians and no thanks at all to the Zio-American sponsors of the terrorists and their Wahhabist vassals.

Stripped to its essence, this supposedly progressive, Leftist narrative is nothing more than malice, lies and warmongering in service of empire. How sickening that there are still people who fall for this crap, even as the bodies pile up and chaos reigns, and the elites who own the Western media and walk the halls of power fill their pockets with bloody stolen loot.

It is sickening, how easily people are fooled by propaganda in a progressive dress.

[AlicetheKurious]

It is so cool for AD to have inserted globalist propaganda in the globalist propaganda thread.

[General Patton]

The inaccuracy is not so important as much as the fact that they don't seem to care about it (same goes for our local enthusiast). If we marry inaccuracy with apathy and the sort of actions described and hinted at above then we have the potential for innocent people getting harassed and even hurt (I notice the venom is aimed at something as broad as a village)

It's somewhat pointless to compile a list of antifa arsons, threats, beatings, ect because they are not-so-subtly government backed in Europe and rarely get punished for them. Though locals do have a memory of their willingness to attack anyone that doesn't follow the party line. The oral history of their actions will live on long after they lose their government backing.