UK Syria vote: Who MPs should (and should not) be listening to

[Originally published by Now Lebanon on 2/12/2015]

British MPs should consult Syrians, not dubious Western ideologues, on whether or not to bomb ISIS in their country.

In Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, set in February 2003, the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is discussing the day’s big event — the million-strong march in Hyde Park against the coming invasion of Iraq — with his “newly adult” daughter, who’s just returned, flushed with righteous vivacity, from the jubilant scene.

The liberal Henry doesn’t, in fact, support the war, but when his daughter asks, slightly too judgmentally, why he hadn’t joined the enlightened masses on the streets, a friendly argument breaks out that then turns into a less-friendly argument, eventually leading Henry to realize what it is that makes him uneasy about the demonstrators:

“Let me ask you a question. Why is it among those two million idealists today I didn’t see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam?”

“He’s loathsome,” she says. “It’s a given.”

“No it’s not. It’s a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park?”

This has always struck me as an insight of the highest moral clarity, and it bears revisiting as the British parliament meets today to vote on extending Royal Air Force strikes against ISIS in Iraq (already approved by parliament last year) to include ISIS targets in neighboring Syria as well. Today, as in 2003, any serious consideration of whether or not to intervene must begin with the acknowledgment that both options are terrible. MPs voting against the motion put forth by David Cameron’s cabinet must understand that they are doing a favor to the rapists of children, the tyrannisers of Arab and Muslim civilians generally, and the butchers of British tourists, French concert-goers, and Egyptian Christians, just as MPs voting for the motion must concede that opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn is probably right to say “we are going to kill [innocent] people in their homes by our bombs.”

Both options entail further horror and misery for civilians. There will be blood on British MPs’ hands whether they vote for or against. Neither course should be taken, then, without the requisite degrees of discomfort and remorse — there can be no singing and dancing in the park. The people who must be morally distrusted right away, in other words, are those for whom the decision comes easily.

These include, on the (purported) left, the anti-war absolutists, who care not the slightest for the welfare of Syrian civilians, or even for their opinions. Perhaps best represented in Britain by the questionably-named Stop the War Coalition, they made this clear last month when they prevented Syrian activists from speaking at a panel discussion on intervention in Syria, heckling and then calling the police on a small group who turned up hoping to have a say on the fate of their own country. To call these groups ‘anti-war’ is in fact much too kind, for they have no problem with war in Syria per se as long as it can be used against Downing Street. They are the sort who would have told you (as indeed they might still) that the most dangerous man in Europe in 1939 was Winston Churchill.

A closely related faction are those who actively support war in Syria — who expend column inches and public speaking hours defending and advocating it — when it’s carried out by regimes Britain opposes. Of these there could be no better example than Patrick Cockburn, the journalist Corbyn invited to give Labour MPs a final pep talk before parliament opened this morning. When 10 weeks ago Russia began its own intervention in Syria — which has since killed a number of rebels and a higher number of civilians, but conspicuously few ISIS fighters — Cockburn penned an op-ed titled ‘Why We Should Welcome Russia’s Entry Into Syrian War.’ Moscow’s air strikes on rebel positions and residential homes “could have a positive impact,” Cockburn explained, even helping in “de-escalating the war.” Needless to say the prospect of Britain following Russia’s lead, however, is another matter entirely.

“Based on wishful thinking and poor information,” Cockburn said in his briefing Wednesday, Britain is stumbling into the unknown “without a realistic policy to win” against ISIS. What might a realistic policy involve? “If ISIS is really going to be destroyed, it is difficult to see how the US and UK can avoid having some degree of co-operation with the Syrian army,” Cockburn wrote two weeks ago. He further applauded the “clear-sighted” remarks by former British Army head Gen. David Richards that Assad and even “Hezbollah and their Iranian backers” should be welcomed into the Coalition’s fold. In this, the ostensibly left-wing Cockburn is on common ground with such right-wingers as UKIP leader Nigel Farage and the Conservative chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, MP Crispin Blunt, both of whom have opposed fighting ISIS without an accompanying entente cordiale with Damascus.

If these are some of the voices MPs would do well to ignore when voting Wednesday, where might they turn instead for valuable insight? A sensible starting place would surely be those Syrian civilians who stand to be most directly affected by the dispatch of Tornado GR4s to the skies above the caliphate.

‘Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently’ (RBSS) is a group of extraordinary media activists working surreptitiously from inside ISIS’s Syrian capital to bring the reality of life under the jihadists to an outside world that would otherwise have no information beyond the meticulously-doctored propaganda released by the caliph’s media team themselves. Living under perennial threat of discovery and death (two of their colleagues in south Turkey were tracked down and beheaded by an ISIS agent in October), RBSS have the most to gain from an effective intervention against ISIS and, equally, the most to lose from a botched one. One of their members, going by the pseudonym Tim Ramadan, told me Wednesday he was prepared to take a bet on the former outcome.

“We’re for any decision to eradicate Daesh [ISIS] and Assad, and to protect civilians,” said Ramadan. “We have trust in the British government, from its stance alongside the Syrian revolution, that it will place the protection of civilians among its priorities.”

When I replied that others, such as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’ Rami Abdulrahman, object to strikes on the grounds that ISIS operates among the civilian population, making the killing of innocents inevitable, Ramadan disagreed.

“There are Daesh camps and warehouses and convoys that move in broad daylight, far from civilians. For example, France carried out almost 30 strikes in a single night that didn’t hit any civilian; all of them focused on Daesh targets. Britain, too, has the capability to do that.”

Which is not to say Ramadan’s opinion is universally shared. Other Syrian democracy activists on the ground, such as the Aleppo-based Zaina Erhaim, have come out against British strikes. The Syria Campaign, a group that works tirelessly to remind the world that Assad remains by a considerable margin the greatest killer of civilians in Syria, argues that “Bombing ISIS is not the answer” — a view shared by some leading Syrian analysts, including Hassan Hassan.

None of these people are pacifists or Corbynistas. What they typically object to is not the principle of intervention, but rather the prospect of a strategically stunted intervention that fails to account for Assad’s role in getting ISIS to where it is today.

“If I went to the UK parliament to make a speech, the first thing I would say is ask them to remove the cause, which is Assad, not the symptom which is ISIS,” an exiled Raqqa resident told the Guardian last week. “Hundreds of thousands of people died in the last few years, and no one came to bomb Damascus.”

That, of course, was in small part because of a British parliament decision against punishing Assad for murdering over 1,000 men, women and children with weapons of mass destruction (which, incidentally, he has “continued to use” as a matter of “routine,” according to delegates at this week’s Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons annual meeting). Today MPs face another decision, and if the one they make turns out in the course of time to be the wrong one, they will at least be able to say they took it in good conscience if they listen — rather than close their ears — to the voices of what ought to be their Syrian allies.

From Beirut to Britain, bigots are on the march

[Originally published by Now Lebanon on 29/6/2016]

In one sense, you have to hand it to Lebanon’s Free Patriotic Movement. Long before Britain’s fruitcake xenophobe Nigel Farage grew powerful enough to initiate the breakup of the European Union, and many years prior to Donald Trump dreaming up his Muslim bans and Mexico walls, the party of General Michel Aoun was pioneering the kind of scaremongering and demonization of refugees that, until really only very recently, would have condemned a politician in a Western democracy to an inglorious life in the electoral wilderness. Now that the tactic of blaming war-ravaged women and children for the corrupt misrule of the elite has gained worldwide currency, the FPM’s years of innovation ahead of the curve deserve acknowledgment.

The efforts, in particular, of Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, Aoun’s son-in-law and nominal head of the Movement, warrant special mention. As far back as 2012, when refugees were still just arriving from the uprising-turned-civil-war next door, Bassil was calling for denying them entry at the border, which among other things would have entailed the violation of international law. This he followed up with periodic outbursts about the “danger” of the defenseless exiles, who were agents of a “pre-planned” conspiracy to “transform the political and demographic reality” of Lebanon. By September 2013, he was demanding they “be deported” back to Syria outright – this just one month after the Assad regime committed mass murder with chemical weapons on the outskirts of its capital city.

So it almost wasn’t surprising to see Bassil raise (or lower) the bar yet further on Sunday in his address to the FPM’s municipal officials, even if the complete shamelessness with which he did it still draws a whistle. Warming to his favorite theme, and almost literally pounding the pulpit, he instructed all Free Patriotic mayors to cleanse their territory of the “existence” of Syrians. “The existence of camps and gatherings of Syrian refugees in the hearts of our towns is forbidden,” he intoned, to applause. Also “forbidden” in “our towns” was the opening of shops by Syrian refugees. Should any prohibited “gatherings” of Syrians be discovered, they must be “searched” by the municipal police, he added.

It’s not every day Al-Akhbar, the Pravda of the FPM’s ally Hezbollah, has a chance to occupy the moral high ground. But even it found Bassil’s casual decreeing of 21st-century Jim Crow laws beyond the pale, saying it “approached the racism of the new fascist parties on the rise in Europe.” (That those same fascist parties share Al-Akhbar’s enthusiasm for the dictatorship in Damascus is of course the sort of Molotov-Ribbentrop contradiction on which its writers prefer not to dwell.)

This is not necessarily overstating it. The climate of hate fostered by Bassil and his cohorts has already led to habitual pogroms against refugees in recent years – some of them fatal – and it was inevitable the same would happen after Monday’s suicide bombings in Al-Qaa. By the time the interior minister announced Tuesday afternoon that the culprits had actually entered from outside Lebanese territory, and had “no link” whatsoever to Syrian refugee camps, it was already too late. Marauding thugs had left random Syrians bleeding in the streets, to the indifference of local police forces. The army, meanwhile, had stormed camps across the country, arresting over 200 refugees by way of ‘response’ to the bombings with which they had nothing to do. The FPM, in its parallel universe, issued a statement congratulating Bassil for having “anticipated the threats” and demanding authorities do yet more to “confront the threat of the Syrian refugee influx.”

Now, if such irrationality and cruelty might once have seemed unthinkable in post-Berlin-Wall Europe, recent history has put paid to that. No longer is it uncommon to read of refugees being tear-gassed or even shot with rubber bullets on European soil, and the deportation of asylum seekers to Turkey, an increasingly unsafe country sharing an 800km-long border with Syria, today forms part of official EU policy. So poisonous and hysterical has hostility to immigration grown that two weeks ago the UK saw its first assassination of a politician in 26 years. “Britain first!” is what the Nazi enthusiast Thomas Mair is said to have cried out before he shot and repeatedly stabbed MP Jo Cox, a 41-year-old mother of two.

That Cox was not only a tenacious defender of immigration and advocate of Britain remaining in the EU, but also Westminster’s most principled and eloquent opponent of the Assad regime, feels tragically fitting. Across continents today, a war both political and physical is being waged against those who still believe in internationalism, in solidarity, in a common lot shared with one’s fellows of all colors and languages and birthplaces. The urgency of preventing the small-minded mediocrities leading this war from emerging victorious simply cannot be overemphasized.

A grotesque attack on a brilliant writer

[Originally published by Now Lebanon on 18/8/2016]

Why have a Pulitzer Prize winner and a NYT bestselling author, among others, promoted a hideous racist screed this week?

A persistent dilemma, in our social media-centered age, in which any fool can (and will) voice their opinion on any given topic on an essentially equal footing with people who actually know something of what they’re talking about, is how to deal with the ignorant, fatuous, hostile and/or dishonest detractor, also known as the ‘troll’. 

The sensible policy has long seemed to me to be simply to ignore them, especially where they decline to identify themselves by name and/or photo. A thoughtful reader or correspondent with an intelligent criticism is more than welcome to get in touch, and fully deserves a considered response, but a cretin looking for nothing more than a rise out of you must never be engaged. The same goes for the crackpot who elevates his toxic emission to the more elaborate media of the blog post or full-length column. It isn’t just about denying them the airtime and platform they don’t remotely deserve. It’s about not paying them the compliment of taking their writing as though it were serious enough to merit attention. It’s a question, in the end, of self-respect.

By that standard, this article published Monday on the far-right website ‘The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection’ should have been safely ignorable by all people of discriminating taste. As a general rule, one should think of the concept of ‘alternative’ media much the same way one does ‘alternative’ medicine: if it worked, it would just be called medicine. As a particular rule, one should steer clear of websites that publish articles beginning with such sentences as “The Jews can be a formidable enemy: devoid of scruples, they hunt in packs.”

However, the piece in question – ‘Michael Weiss and the Iran-U.S. Hardline Nexus That Led Iranian-American to Evin Prison’ by Richard Silverstein – has become a special case, owing to its rapid circulation far beyond the neglected neo-Nazi gutters of the Internet to something alarmingly close to the high table of polite society. Yesterday, WikiLeaks shared it with their 3.4 million Twitter followers. The writer Glenn Greenwald beamed it out to his 723,000 Twitter followers, by means of re-tweeting one Trita Parsi, who described it to his own 43,000 followers as a “MUST READ” [his capitals]. The author Reza Aslan re-tweeted the same to his 182,000 followers.

These are big names, and big numbers. Greenwald is a Pulitzer Prize winner, while Aslan’s 2013 book Zealot debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. So just what is this article they agree is such a “MUST READ” all about? The kindest thing that can be said for it is it’s a nasty work of racist conspiracy theorizing. Its subject, the author and The Daily Beast editor Michael Weiss, is portrayed as a bloodthirsty Muslim-hating warmonger bent on manipulating American foreign policy at the behest of Israel, in the mould of what Silverstein calls the “court Jews” of “European rulers [in] the Middle Ages.” You read that right – Weiss, an atheist of partial Jewish descent, is likened by the article’s author to a medieval “court Jew.” In a tweet clarifying this terminology Thursday, Silverstein explained, “Weiss does the bidding of oligarchs & the powerful much like court Jews once did for rulers.”

It’s extremely tempting to leave things there. Need any more time be wasted on a piece so nakedly manured with textbook anti-Semitism? Will anyone be prepared to stand up and say, ‘Sure, some passages rather whiff of the Protocols, but otherwise it’s a cogent critique’? Actually, it turns out they are, yes. Someone named Kevin Rothrock, editor of a website called RuNet Echo, who tweeted the article more than once to his nearly 9,000 followers, found himself able to declare that, “The “court Jews” comment is disgusting, but my Twitter interest is in media focused on Russia, hence my focus in [sic] the funding rumor.”

Very well, then. Welcome to 2016. Degrading – no, humiliating; revolting – a task as it may be, let’s briefly consent to set aside the fascist innuendo and address the piece’s key arguments, such as they are.

It begins with an artless, hysterical caricature of Weiss as a “military interventionist gun-for-hire” and “leading neocon propagandist.” [Disclosure: Weiss was a regular NOW contributor between March 2013 and April 2015, and while he and I have never met, I believe I may describe him as a friend. I have also written three times for The Daily Beast, where he is an editor.] The words “neocon” and “neoconservative,” indeed, appear no fewer than sixteen times (for the authoritative definition of this protean term, look no further than Weiss’ own indispensable lexicon). Hand-in-hand with this is a continuous effort to paint him as an ultra-Zionist Kahanist with an implacable loathing of Palestinians and “anti-Muslim […] sympathies” more broadly. Here, in no particular order, are some facts I happen to know about Weiss that would make all this laughable if it weren’t so malicious:

• About half a year ago (as best as I can remember), he declared on Facebook he was backing Bernie Sanders for president, and would vote blank in the event of a Hillary nomination by the Democrats. If he has since, very grudgingly, come round to the idea of a Hillary presidency, it’s only because (unlike Silverstein’s colleague at The Unz Review, Pat Buchanan) he finds the Trump alternative so absolutely unconscionable
• Though supportive – like almost every foreign policy analyst on earth – of military action against ISIS, Weiss has been at the forefront of those warning that force alone is useless, even dangerous and counter-productive, without  parallel non-violent efforts to address the political grievances of the communities living under ISIS’ control – almost all of whom happen to be Muslims. This is the polar opposite of the sort of vulgar militarism espoused by, say, Ted Cruz, who vowed to “carpet-bomb” ISIS till he found out “if sand can glow in the dark” (and who, unlike Weiss, thought kindly of Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of half a million Syrian Muslims. It’s interesting to see Silverstein describe Assad as “a Weiss bete noire,” as though there were something peculiar, even sinister, about disliking the 21st-century’s leading mass murderer)
• Weiss is on record supporting the creation of a Palestinian state, and is no admirer of Benjamin Netanyahu. These stances have caused him some professional headaches over the years 

Much else in the piece is gallingly ignorant, or cheap, or both. Weiss is attacked for having co-written a piece with Elizabeth O’Bagy, as though he should have personally demanded to see her PhD dissertation before agreeing to do so. He is briefly praised for being “glib and articulate,” which Silverstein apparently doesn’t understand is a contradiction. Silverstein appears greatly amused that Weiss should simultaneously admire Karl Marx and oppose Communism, which suggests nothing more than that Weiss understands left-wing politics much better than Silverstein does. At one point, Silverstein raises the possibility, without any substantiation at all, that an interview Weiss published with an ISIS defector in November was a fabrication.

Must I continue? He claims, falsely, that Weiss “recruited” Maajid Nawaz to write for The Daily Beast, for whom Nawaz was already writing before Weiss joined. He accuses Weiss of destroying the career of one John Rosenthal, who by the sounds of it did the destruction all by himself when he began denying Assad’s very-well-documented culpability for the massacre of Syrian civilians. Silverstein correctly notes that Weiss opposes the Vladimir Putin regime, a position which, in conjunction with his “anti-jihadism,” Silverstein asserts “makes for a supremely ambitious, geopolitically sweeping, and exceedingly dangerous stew.”

Finally, Silverstein throws in the story of Siamak Namazi, an American-Iranian dual national currently incarcerated in Tehran, which he imagines to be his ace-in-the-hole; the nail in Weiss’ coffin. Namazi’s unfortunate history is as follows. In July 2015, his passport was confiscated by the Iranian authorities during a brief visit to the homeland. He was repeatedly harassed and interrogated by regime officials from that moment onward. Two months later, in September, The Daily Beast – which knew nothingof Namazi’s circumstances, nor even his presence in Iran – published an article criticizing his alleged lobbying in Washington in favor of the historic Iranian nuclear deal that had just, two months previously, been signed by all parties including Iran. One month later, Namazi was arrested and imprisoned, and hasn’t been heard from since.

This is, obviously, a terrible state of affairs, but Silverstein doesn’t demonstrate why it should in any way implicate Weiss. For starters, Weiss was neither the author of the piece, nor the final editor responsible for it (he’s told me this personally). Should anyone take any issue with its content, the proper people to consult would be the Beast’s editor-in-chief and lawyer, both of whom gave it their approval. 

Second, there’s no evidence beyond the merely circumstantial linking the publication of the Beast report in September and Namazi’s arrest in October. As noted above, the regime had already been on Namazi’s case since July, two months before the piece saw the light of day. Since the Iranian judiciary won’t reveal the charges for which Namazi was arrested, any comment made on the topic cannot be other than speculative. Silverstein is free to speculate, if he wishes, that an article published in English on an American website was the determining factor in the authorities in Tehran snatching a target they already had squarely in their sights. Others would be equally free to speculate that Namazi’s arrest fits coherently with the now-well-established pattern of dual-nationality Iranians being imprisoned in Tehran for the purpose of their subsequent exchange for Iranians incarcerated in foreign countries. Namazi’s former business partner of nine years, Bijan Khajehpour, wrote a whole article in March speculating as to the reasons for his friend’s arrest, which he narrowed down to “three possible explanations,” none of them connected to the Beast report (which he did not mention). One can only hope Namazi will be released as soon as possible and given the opportunity to voice his own thoughts.

And there, mercifully, 6,200 words later, the article ends. I must say I feel rather unclean at this stage, and I suspect any readers who’ve made it this far will too. And perhaps we should, though not nearly as unclean as the public figures who lent their names and reputations to the promotion of a hideous racist screed, and a grotesque attack on a brilliant writer.

In south Lebanon's last Communist holdout, alcohol sale under threat

[Originally published by Now Lebanon on 15/1/2016]

A petition decrying alcohol as “a violation of the shari`a of Islam” demands shops selling alcohol in Kfar Rumman be closed.

Not for nothing has Kfar Rumman long been nicknamed Kfar Moscow (NOW/Alex Rowell)

KFAR RUMMAN, Lebanon – In most respects, Rony Market could be any grocery store in south Lebanon. Sitting just off an intersection at the edge of the village, its modest-sized interior stocks the same basic food and household wares one would find in any so-called dikken across the country. As a handful of customers trickle in and out to buy phone recharge cards or packets of mixed nuts, two middle-aged men in leather jackets stand bantering with Rami Saleh, the shopkeeper, while smoking cigarettes.

In one crucial regard, however, Rony Market is highly unusual for a dikken in these predominantly Shiite Muslim, pro-Hezbollah provinces: its shelves also stock a (fairly extensive) range of wines, spirits, liqueurs, and araks. Two tall, glass-front fridges, moreover, are packed top-to-bottom with bottles of beer, both local and imported. For residents of Nabatieh governorate – whose eponymous capital lies just a kilometer and a half away to the southwest – Rony Market is one of the very few places where refreshments of the Dionysian variety may be sourced.

To a large extent, this is a product of the peculiar history of Kfar Rumman, the wartime headquarters of the leftist Lebanese National Resistance Front (LNRF) militia and still one of the last holdouts of Communism in the country. On the drive into the village, which boasts a large hammer-and-sickle monument just across the street from Rony Market, NOW encountered a bright red truck with a debonair Leon Trotsky painted on the side: not for nothing has it long been nicknamed Kfar Moscow. Today, though, the flag most visible on Kfar Rumman’s lampposts and balconies is not the red-and-yellow of the USSR but the yellow-and-green of the militia that helped crush the LNRF in the mid-1980s: Hezbollah.

And while the godless comrades and Partisans of God have largely made peace today, events this week demonstrate the tension remaining under the surface between the village’s secular-minded residents and their Islamist neighbors. On Wednesday, a petition written by “Sons of Kfar Rumman” surfaced online listing eight shops in the village that sell alcohol – including Rony Market. Citing a Quran verse critical of alcohol (“Verily, intoxicants, gambling, [sacrificing at] stone altars, and divining arrows are an abomination from among the works of Satan, so avoid them” – 5:90), the petition decried what the early Islamic poets fondly dubbed “the daughter of the vine” as a bane that “leads to the spreading of iniquity and evil and the violation of religious sentiment and the shari`a of Islam,” concluding with a demand that the governor of Nabatieh close the eight shops.

Talking to NOW in Rony Market Thursday, the shopkeeper Saleh spoke the words of a defiant man, though his demeanor at times appeared uncomfortable.

“No official, whether from the municipality or the governorate, has ordered us to close,” he told NOW. “On the contrary, the municipality has confirmed to us that we’re a legal business like any other […] I don’t accept anyone coming to say ‘I will close your shop’. I follow the law.”

Municipality head Kamal Ghabris did indeed confirm the same to NOW, saying he himself had received no request to close the shops, and there was no legal or other reason why they couldn’t continue to sell alcohol.

“We belong to the Lebanese republic, and we abide by the laws and constitution of this republic […] we want to keep our democracy, freedom and pluralism,” Ghabris told NOW.

Legal or not, though, alcohol shops have been the targets of similar campaigns in south Lebanon in the past, in some cases even being burnt down. Were there not fears, NOW asked another man in the shop, that something comparable could happen to Rony Market?

“Those arson attacks were probably done by [Islamist] Palestinians, who don’t exist here,” he replied. “If Hezbollah wanted these shops closed, it wouldn’t have to burn them down, it would just” – he gestured with his cell phone – “make a call, and they would close. But they haven’t made any such call.”

Indeed, Saleh, like the others in the shop, was very adamant on emphasizing that he didn’t blame Hezbollah for the petition.

“We don’t fear Hezbollah; they haven’t done anything against us,” said Saleh. “There are just individuals, certain religious zealots, who are against us. From time to time, some people get annoyed that we sell alcohol. We’re used to it here.”

Whether Saleh genuinely believed Hezbollah had nothing at all to do with the petition, or was simply exercising prudent diplomacy, is a matter about which one could only speculate. At any rate, Hezbollah involvement has been suggested by some local media. The south Lebanese news site Janoubia, which called the petition “ISIS-like,” cited an anonymous “exclusive source” as claiming a draft of the document had been prepared by “a number of clerics affiliated with Hezbollah.” Other analysts suggested any role played by the Party was likely to be of an indirect nature.

“I don’t think the Party is directly responsible for issuing the petition,” said Ali al-Amin, a columnist from south Lebanon often critical of Hezbollah. In Amin’s view, the issue began when a relative of Saleh’s wrote a widely-shared anti-religious Facebook post – for which he received death threats– in light of Hezbollah’s participation in the siege of the Syrian town of Madaya. This angered “young people” among Hezbollah’s supporters in Kfar Rumman, said Amin, who then wrote the petition of their own accord.

That, if correct, could explain the timing, which is also interesting for coming two weeks after Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary-General, Sheikh Naim Qassem, raised eyebrows by telling an interviewer the Party was still committed to its ambition of creating a Shiite Islamic state in Lebanon. “As an Islamist, I can’t say, ‘I’m an Islamist and I propose Islam, but I don’t propose the establishment of an Islamic state,’ because that’s part of the project that we believe in, on the doctrinal and cultural level,” Qassem told Al-Mayadeen TV. “We believe the application of Islam is the solution to mankind’s problems, in all times and places.” While Hezbollah has never renounced its goal – formally articulated in a 1985 open letter – to one day establish an Islamic state, a speech given by Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in 2009 outlining the Party’s political program was seen by some as a relaxation on the point.

To what extent Qassem’s remark may have given further encouragement to the “religious zealots” Saleh blamed for the petition may never be determined. In the murky circumstances of the incident, perhaps all that can be said with confidence is it would have been unlikely to happen if Communism were still the prevailing ideology in the town.

Amin Nasr contributed reporting.

An autobiography of Syria's revolution

[Originally published by Now Lebanon on 17/8/2016]

Can it really be three years this month since the enormous sarin attack on Damascus’ East Ghouta? Events move at such dizzying pace in Syria that a massacre in the morning is already forgotten by nightfall, while last week’s atrocity is ossified history. The British novelist Martin Amis says we each become different people with every decade that passes. If so, we’re only 50% at most of who we were when demonstrations broke out across Syria in March 2011, and for many of us our perceptions of what happened have since undergone equally pronounced transformations.

It’s bad enough that we forget details; worse is the way facts registered at the time get clumsily fused with information (and misinformation) acquired later on. We now know, to take an example at random, that Al-Qaeda was actively involved – albeit on a microscopic scale – in the armed insurrection from as early in the day as August 2011. Even those who are still perfectly certain Assad is a heinous war criminal can now increasingly be heard contemplating the state of the rebel movement today and asking: was there ever really a ‘moderate’ Free Syrian Army? And, while we’re at it, just how democratic was the initial civilian uprising, anyway?

If you’ve ever caught yourself even momentarily entertaining such revisionism, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War will make for deeply embarrassing reading. One opens its pages and steps into the spring of 2011 and suddenly it’s all there once again, just as it was: the “crowds of hundreds of thousands – men and women, adults and children,” dancing the dabke to the beat of the dirbakkeh; Christians in Homs’ Hamidiyeh throwing rice affectionately onto mostly-Muslim demonstrators in the streets below their balconies, chanting “Muslims and Christians, we all want freedom” (it rhymes in Arabic) and “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one.”

In fact, the authors Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami recreate the scene in much higher-definition than one watched it at the time. Among many things that make this the Syria book we’ve all been waiting for is the incredibly extensive and eclectic dramatis personae interviewed and quoted in its pages. Here we meet Sunni Marxist rappers organizing demonstrations with Alawite anarchists in Tartous; atheist supporters of the Free Syrian Army; and Christian women protesting in Damascus’ “conservative Muslim neighborhood” of Maydan wearing “skimpy top[s];” inter alia. Many interviews have in fact been conducted inside Syria, where the Syrian-British authors have traveled repeatedly since 2011. The result is the most vivid ground-level account of the revolution through the eyes and mouths of its own protagonists yet compiled in English.

Not, however, that this is remotely a sentimental stroll down memory lane or nostalgic lament for the golden days. Committed revolutionaries that they are, Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami are also analysts of the first rank, and they set about diagnosing where it all went wrong with a remarkably Orwellian power of facing unpleasant facts. Where the opposition has erred, the authors are unsparing. Ahrar al-Sham, the “largest” rebel brigade and also the “most extreme” save for ISIS and the group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, is rebuked for its slaughter of Alawite civilians, and described as “undoubtedly led by jihadist extremists who oppose the revolution’s original democratic aims.” Jaysh al-Islam, kingpin of the rebel-held Damascus suburbs, is taken to task for its Islamist authoritarianism, best exemplified by its “likely abduction and perhaps murder” of the human rights lawyer and activist Razan Zaitouneh (along with her husband and two colleagues), a figure of peerless importance in the secular, democratic, grassroots opposition, and the dedicatee of the book. The political opposition in exile is pasted for its failure to sufficiently reach out to Alawites, Kurds, and other minorities in the crucial early days when it might have made the difference.

Some perspective, however, is called for here. Bashar al-Assad’s regime remains primarily, overwhelmingly, incomparably at fault for the disaster Syria has become. In his 1993 book Cruelty and Silence, the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya wrote that as much as he willed every moment of every day for the fall of the Saddam regime, he feared the profound damage done to Iraqi society by decades of Baathist totalitarianism would all but guarantee a nightmare of sectarian bloodletting in its wake. He could just as easily have been writing about Assad’s Syria. Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami demonstrate ably how a great portion of the opposition’s faults bear the genetic imprint of regime parentage.

Take religious sectarianism. While today often unthinkingly seen (by Arabs no less than Westerners) as a permanent, ineradicable feature of Middle Eastern society since time immemorial, the authors argue persuasively it is chiefly the bastard child of the region’s utterly unscrupulous contemporary regimes. Syria, they write, was “set on a secular trajectory similar to Europe’s” in the 1960s, when left-of-center politics dominated and the hijab (for example) was worn by fewer women than ever.

That all met a swift death with the advent of the Assads père et fils, whose approach to governance combined colonial divide-and-rule strategy with the mobster’s tactics of blackmail and extortion. It wasn’t just that Alawites were showered with socioeconomic patronage and other inducements to purchase their sympathies. Sunnis, while forbidden on pain of death from joining the Muslim Brotherhood, were permitted and even encouraged to become Salafists, the better to convince both Alawites and Western governments that the Assads – ever the arsonists and firemen at one and the same time – were all that stood between them and baying masses of fanatic lynch mobs.

At its most flagrant, this took the form of grooming fighters to join Al-Qaeda in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, facilitating their training and transport to the border. The regime’s direct collaboration with the group that would go on to spawn both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra continued until at least 2009, according to a Guardian investigative report. Famously, Assad also released a legion of violent Islamist prisoners from their cells in 2011 (at the very moment he was arresting, torturing and murdering non-violent secularists), including Ahrar al-Sham’s Hassan Abboud, Jaysh al-Islam’s Zahran Alloush, “as well as founding members of Jabhat al-Nusra [and] important figures in ISIS,” write the authors.

More generally, the complete lack of free speech, civil society, independent media, apolitical education, and cultural space stretching back four decades drained the air of the oxygen necessary for healthy communal coexistence. “What Syria needed was a national conversation about historical fears and resentments aiming towards greater mutual understanding,” write the authors of the pre-2011 state often dubbed the ‘Kingdom of Silence.’ “Instead people discussed the other sect in bitter secret whispers, and only among their own.” Baathist monopolization of politics had a further ruinous effect – in one of their most original insights, the authors note, “The elimination or co-optation of the left removed one of religion’s natural competitors.” (To this day, the godless whisky-guzzlers of the Lebanese Communist Party stand as the last remaining obstacle in certain Shiite towns and villages to Hezbollah’s Islamization.)

The wonder, given all this, is that the revolution was ever as democratic and pluralist as it was, and that so many Syrians were so readily able to break, spontaneously and entirely of their own accord, with a lifetime’s worth of conditioning. That their experiment – carried out in unfathomably dangerous conditions – was too often met not with encouragement and support from the democratic world but with ambivalence and even hostility is one of the great tragedies of the 21st century. In the final chapter, the authors write with cold contempt of all the segments of the so-called international community that failed Syria, from the UN to Western politicians to establishment pundits to dishonorable journalists to far-right nationalists to fatuous hard-left pseudo-anti-imperialists.

The lessons, as world leaders inch closer by the day to a long-term (re-)accommodation with Assad, should need no spelling out. It’s not just that he’s incapable of unifying the country, in the preposterous euphemism of diplomats, or that the ‘stability’ he would supposedly usher in would come at a rather unsavory humanitarian price. He isn’t merely not the solution; he is the walking, breathing personification of the problem; the radix malorum of the entire catastrophe. He’s the ‘devil we know,’ all right, and he’s an agent not of stability but of cataclysmic instability. ‘We’ may have already forgotten what the revolution was about – or that a revolution happened at all – but the millions of Syrians who continue to live day and night at the capricious pleasure of Assad’s homicide machine certainly haven’t, and won’t. By reminding us of this, and how we got to where we are, Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami plainly illuminate for us the necessary path ahead.

Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami was published by Pluto Press in January 2016.