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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

How CounterPunch makes Syrians invisible, Again!

Re: Israeli Factor in Syrian Conflict, by Nicola Nasser published October 15, 2013 on CounterPunch

This is CounterPunch's latest attack on the Syrian Revolution. Unsurprisingly, it sees Israel and the United States as the main forces behind the conflict in Syria. The Syrian government and people are a victim of this sinister plot. As usual, the Syrian people are given no agency. There is no revolutionary movement, no Syrian movement against dictatorship and for democracy that should be recognized in its own right.

Because it is news to Nasser,
that the Israeli factor has been all throughout the conflict the main concern of both countries.[Israel and the US]
He thinks their "main concern" is the cause of the whole conflict. He sees them as the main force behind the conflict. To make his point he has to ignore the Syrian opposition or turn them into mere puppets of these powers.

To make their case, articles like this typically ignore the tens of thousand of Syrian army soldiers that have come over to the Free Syrian Army and also ignore Assad's wanton assault on civilian areas that has lead to massacre after massacre, much of it done from the air.
While the reality is that at the core of the Syrian conflict is a struggle between a mass popular uprising and a dictatorship, with many other forces opportunistically attaching themselves to one side or the other. This group, who are on the whole pro-Assad, like Assad, deny the existence of this mass popular uprising and see only the opportunists playing one side, Israel and the US, and they declare a proxy war as if the Syrians who are fighting the regime have no agency of their own and are only tools of another.

Of course he never gives us anything like a shred of evidence that the popular uprising that started the conflict was really a smoke-screen orchestrated by the US and Israel. The whole point of articles like this is to repeat the same themes over and over in the hopes they will be accepted as proof through repetition. For example, while I have always argued that "regime change" was never the goal of Obama in Syria, and offered a large amount of proof to that effect [see list at bottom], they have depended on repetition to make the point that the Syrian conflict has not been about the desire of a large number of Syrian's for regime change but a conspiracy by the US and Israel with the goal of "regime change." The Syrian people have no agency:
Their [US & Israel] “Plan A” was to enforce a change in the Syrian regime
Notice the "was?" Now that it is becoming obvious to one and all that Obama is not interested in ditching Assad, they are forced to claim that he was for regime change but now has made a "U-turn." According to Nasser, he has made this U-turn because Assad isn't going anywhere, but were is the proof that Obama ever did more than talk about regime change in Syria? He hasn't dropped one bomb or fired one bullet in Syria in more than 2 years of conflict although he has not been shy about using his drones and special forces teams many other places on the globe. He has never given Assad's opposition any heavy weapons, in fact, until very recently, he has never given them any weapons at all and that's not how you treat a "proxy."

CounterPunch then does on to complain about:
its purported inability to unite even the “opposition” that was created and sponsored by the U.S. itself and the “friends of Syria” it leads
The reason the opposition is not united is that it came up in the localities as a true grass roots movement with the various Local Coordinating Committees and brigades developing according to the local situation. Unity is something that has to be built over time. The opposition was created by many Syrians who organized themselves into local groups, it was not created by the United States.

CounterPunch denies this. The "opposition" was created by the US they insist. Just how they got millions to demand regime change after Friday prays starting in February 2011 or how they got so many SAA soldiers to defect and join the FSA is never explained. CounterPunch denies the agency of the Syrian people and with that it denies their revolution. Then it demands that the US put a stop to any Arab or Muslim countries that support the Syrian people's struggle to change the 40 year old Assad regime:
and to rein in the continued fueling of the armed conflict with arms, money and logistics by its regional Turkish and Gulf Arabs allies,
CounterPunch is calling for an the imperialist superpower to exercise greater control over certain Arab and Muslim countries. They should have no agency either.  As far as CounterPunch is concerned, all that we have in Syria is an attempt to overthrow a popular and legitimate government by Israel and the US:
The goal of this strategy has been all throughout the conflict to change the [Syrian] regime...

This strategic goal was smoke-screened by portraying the conflict first as one of a popular uprising turned into an armed rebellion against a dictatorship, then as a sectarian “civil war,” third as a proxy war in an Arab-Iranian and a Sunni-Shiite historical divide, fourth as a battle ground of conflicting regional and international geopolitics, but the Israeli factor has been all throughout the core of the conflict.
That is long hand for saying these things didn't happen, there is not a Syrian Revolution and it is all a Zionist plot.

No proof is offered because presumably none is needed. All that is really needed to to repeat this same old garbage for the hundredth and thousandth time, in the hopes that all will accept their assertions as facts.

That is the mission of this and most articles in CounterPunch on Syria.

Like I've been saying:
Obama's Real Syria Policy: Endless War
The Courtship Continues: Obama stopped French strike on Assad
The Courtship Continues: Obama's New Gift to Assad
How Obama Helped Assad Kill with Poison Gas in Syria
Win-Win for Assad as Obama Response to CW Mass Murder Put on Hold
Obama Denied Gas Masks to Assad's Victims
Obama's Dilemma and Assad's Opportunity
Barack Obama's Courtship of Bashar al-Assad
Barack Obama's Courtship of Bashar al-Assad Exposed!
Obama "green lights" Assad's slaughter in Syria
Assad's Redline and Obama's Greenlight!
Chemical weapons use in Syria, Has Obama's red-line has been crossed?
AP weighs in on Obama's Green Light for Assad's slaughter in Syria
Syria: Obama's moves Assad's "red line" back as SOHR reports 42,000 dead!
SecState John Kerry and his "dear friend" Bashar al-Assad
How Obama's 'No MANPADS for you' policy in Syria is backfiring
More thoughts on Obama's 'No MANPADS for you!' policy
Obama: Did the CIA betray Assad's opposition in Syria?

Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria


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