Mulla Jawad of Anti-Orientalist.com argues that Muslims and the entire world have been sold a lie about what is happening in Syria by the corporate media.
Even though the people of Syria had many legitimate grievances against the previously unelected regime, the corporate media has hijacked the narrative of events in Syria and declared a “revolution” on behalf of the Western-backed opposition. The narrative was of a democracy-loving populace fighting for their freedom against a “tyrant.” Of course they did that while mostly avoiding a similar chronicle when covering Bahrain, Yemen and even Egypt.
Almost six years later and with the “revolution” proving that it was and is in fact just another proxy war, and the “revolutionaries” having a mixture of organ eating and children beheading militias in their ranks, many people still display dangerous naivety when evaluating the ongoing crisis in Syria.
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NATO proxy war
5Pillars has published several articles about Syria which prove that even well-informed people have swallowed the narrative of NATO governments and their media machinery about the events in Syria.
Some people seem to think that the West is all-powerful and if they failed in their bid to unseat a dictator that must mean that they weren’t serious about doing it in the first place.
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But this falls into an inferiority complex which refuses to accept the fact that Zionist and imperialist designs can be successfully resisted and aborted. There are numerous historical examples of this; let’s list the two most obvious ones – Vietnam’s resistance against the US invasion and Hezbollah’s successful expulsion of Zionist forces from Lebanon in 2000.
The fact is that the Syrian opposition are puppets of imperialism. Aside from the Western-backed Free Syrian Army, the so-called “Islamist” militias in Syria receive financial, military and political support from NATO regimes and their regional surrogates (Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar).
In September 2016 US Justice department lobbying records revealed that the British government alone paid $1.4m for the lobbying work of the Syrian rebel coalition in Washington DC and the United Nations.
There are even widely available news reports of certain Syrian militants receiving medical aid in Israel.
Even the White Helmets organisation in Aleppo – from which the Western media seems to get most of its information – is funded by Western governments.
Yet it seems that all these publicly available facts – which explicitly show vast Western and Turkish, Saudi and Qatari support for the anti-government militants in Syria – are not enough to dismantle myths about the ongoing crisis in Syria which the corporate media has managed to construct in many people’s minds.
For far too many the narrative is clear – Assad, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Shia militias are uniquely to blame; a narrative which neatly chimes with takfiri rhetoric expounded by Saudi Arabia, which feeds into the corporate media’s Sunni-Shia war narrative, and which subtly provides an Islamic legitimacy to the ISIS/Saudi-minded groups.
Iran
Of course an article on Syria by the corporate media would not be “complete” if Iran were not attacked.
But why should Iran back forces which do not recognise it as a Muslim country, let alone an Islamic governing system? We all know that the centuries-old takfiri creed of most of the Syrian opposition views Shia Muslims as “kaafir” and their blood as “halal.” So do you really think Iran is going to support these forces? That would be a bit like turkeys voting for Christmas.
No, Iran is fully aware that there is a NATO and regional plan (led by Saudi Arabia) to destroy it. The proof of that is a devastating war launched against Iran in the 1980s, and more than three decades of economic warfare, military threats and internal destabilisation attempts. For Iran, the road to Tehran starts in Damascus.
Iran also has treaty obligations with the Syrian government which is takes very seriously. Syria was the only Arab government that supported Tehran during the US-imposed Saddam-Iran war in the 1980s. From Iran’s perspective, the Islamic theory of international relations is very strict on not violating treaties with parties that have not broken their obligations. From the Iranian point of view, the Syrian government has not only upheld its side of the bargain, but outdid it by providing logistical support to Hezbollah during the 2006 war with Israel.
Also Tehran clearly follows the reality that treaties can be made with non-Muslim powers on mutually-beneficial terms as Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) treaty with the polytheist tribes of Juhaynah, Damrah and Muzaynah show.
Naivety on the AKP
Many Muslims also naively allocate a special status to the current Turkish government and evaluate it within Islamic parameters by assuming that the current ruling elite in Turkey is genuinely concerned with Islamic public policy and shaking up the regional status quo.
But at the height of Turkish-Israeli “hostilities,” a study on Turkish-Israeli trade relations conducted by the neo-con think-tank, Washington Institute for the Near East Policy (WINEP), showed that Turkish-Israeli trade in 2011 increased by 30.7 percent from the previous year. And in 2011, bilateral trade totaled a record $4.44 billion.
Back in April 2012 one of the most influential Sunni scholars of a leading Islamic movement in Turkey Furqan Vakfi, Imam Alparslan Kuytul, underlined the fact that Erdogan’s projection onto the world stage after his argument with Israeli President Shimon Peres at Davos in 2009 was a calculated Machiavellian move.
In a lengthy sermon Imam Kuytul classified the events in Davos as a theatrical act that was utilised by outside forces to create a managed “Islamic” leadership to pacify the Muslim masses in Turkey.
Erdogan’s numerous rapprochement steps with Israel and his zealous support for armed groups in Syria that act as the best anti-Islamic global PR tool shows that Imam Kuytul had a point.
The reality
In July 2003 prominent author and journalist Charles Glass published a lengthy article in the London Review of Books titled “Is Syria Next?”
Glass made a reference to a now conveniently “forgotten” trip to Syria by then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell. According to Glass and many others during that trip, Powell named the price of Baathism’s survival in Syria: ending support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, and closing the Damascus offices of Palestinian resistance organisations and deporting their leaders.
He also told President Assad not to allow Palestinian spokesmen in Syria to speak to journalists.
The current situation in Syria is pretty much the continuation of objectives of Colin Powell’s trip to Syria in 2003.
Anti-Orientalist.com is an independent Canadian-based blog managed by academics, intellectuals and journalists which aims to project an unaltered analysis of the Orient.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of 5Pillars.
