Article

2012-07-28 Syria-Lebanon-Iran

Analysis: The Myth Of Palestinian Neutrality In Syria

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Posted by trailing wife 2012-07-28 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11 views ] Top

#1 Secularists are siding with the regime, and Islamists are siding with the opposition.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2012-07-28 00:18|| 2012-07-28 00:18|| Front Page Top

#2 Secularists are siding with the regime, and Islamists are siding with the opposition.

I beg to differ.

For the last sixty years the Assads, the so-called "secularists," have worked to keep the Palestinians a) deprived of rights, b) more or less limited to refugee camps, in both Syria and Lebanon, and c) used anti-semitism as the scapegoat for the suffering they themselves inflict in the here-and-now on the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the refugees of 1947.

They've been fed a steady drumbeat for the last sixty years of "Look at the misery around you! It's all the Jews' fault! You will be able to have the rights of normal people and normal lives once we deal them a harsh enough blow and they give up on Israel and move back to Russia, or Poland, or Long Island!"

That's what the "secularists" have done. To a very large extent they fed and nurtured the monster they use as justification for their present oppressive measures, much the same as Mubarak fed the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt as part of his "Apres Moi Le Deluge" strategy.

You can't expect all of them to have been happy with this abuse, and it's not necessarily an islamicist plot if they don't always believe the propaganda from the people who have fed them a shit sandwich their whole lives.

Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain 2012-07-28 10:14|| 2012-07-28 10:14|| Front Page Top

#3 The Palestinians don't need Assad to tell them to hate Jews. Muslims across the world who have never met either Jew or Palestinian hate Jews, a hatred that has been handed down from father to son for 13 centuries among the ummah. Assad merely caters to their inclinations - a wise decision, given that the Sunni Arab majority has traditionally viewed Alawites as pests to be killed on sight. Any softness towards Israel would certainly be viewed as evidence that Assad is a closet Zionist and an enemy of Islam which, as a follower of a minority heretical/apostatical sect relying on a modus vivendi with both Sunni and Shiite Islam to keep the internal peace, he really cannot afford.

The question isn't whether the secularists or the Islamists will hate Jews - it's which side is more likely to fund, train and arm Islamist rebels across the Arabia in order to realize their dream of a unitary Muslim caliphate, at least in the Middle East. An Alawite-ruled Syria will never be part of that caliphate.

It's the same reason it is preferable for us to have the al Saud royals remain in power as opposed to yielding power to democratically-elected Muslim Brotherhood and/or other Salafist political parties. The one thing all Muslims have in common is Jew-hatred, regardless of race, ethnicity or nationality. Note it's actually a pretty generalized hatred of non-Muslims, but an expression of genocidal intent against any other group would have very powerful countries lining up against the ummah. Why alert the infidel world to troglodyte Islam's dream of universal empire?

The problem with neo-cons is that they view the world as blank slates waiting for us to write on. In practice, foreigners tend to perpetuate the beliefs and prejudices handed down from generation to generation. It's the way of the world, and no amount of wishful thinking will change that.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2012-07-28 19:29|| 2012-07-28 19:29|| Front Page Top

#4 For Muslims (or any other group of foreigners), it comes down to this - who are you going to believe, your direct kin or nice-sounding words from the descendants of the people who fought your ancestors?

Posted by Zhang Fei 2012-07-28 19:33|| 2012-07-28 19:33|| Front Page Top

#5 People who come to power, dictator or democrat, take power under a very specific set of circumstances. Shift a single condition another way, and they might be out of power. This is why governments change all the time, whether dictatorship or democracies. The fact is that no leader has a complete understanding of what holds his regime together. In dictatorships, the alternative to continued rule is often death or exile, generally for their entire extended families. This is why many of them have extremely strong reactions to internal dissent and simultaneously attempt to mirror exactly the prejudices of their populations. For Assad to pivot and stop parroting his populace's Jew-hatred is an invitation for some rabble-rouser inside or outside of his clique to brand him as a traitor to his people, and a "Zionist lapdog".

Given the way in which his own father took power, it's pretty obvious that the people he rules are not drones who parrot his every thought, they are just biding their time. Again, neo-cons have to get this illusion that rulers control what their populations think out of their minds. Yes, we had to make up the lie that ordinary Germans and Japanese were misled by their rulers in order to make a soft peace more palatable to Allied electorates, in spite of the fact that those Axis populations were whole-hearted participants in the wars and atrocities they unleashed up to the point defeat became a certainty. But Muslims aren't defeated - we haven't killed 5-10% of their populations or burned their cities to the ground, and they certainly haven't groveled before us and admitted the injustice of their cause. It's way too early to make up these comforting lies about them, when we haven't even begun to fight them, let alone defeat them.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2012-07-28 19:51|| 2012-07-28 19:51|| Front Page Top

23:18 swksvolFF
23:16 gorb
23:04 past master of the obvious
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22:08 JosephMendiola
21:49 Barbara
20:59 Redneck Jim
20:02 Dale
20:02 European Conservative
19:51 Zhang Fei
19:33 Zhang Fei
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