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Sunday, March 9, 2014

UN: Assad sarin used in attacks | The Left's response?

Flying under the headlines this week, while all eyes are focused on the clouds gathering over Ukraine, the United Nations published the 7th report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. This report was published on 5 March 2014 although it is dated 12 February 2014. This report goes further than the UN has ever gone before in placing the blame for the use of poison gas in Syria squarely on the Assad Regime. Specifically, on page 19, it says:
128. In Al-Ghouta, significant quantities of sarin were used in a well-planned indiscriminate attack targeting civilian-inhabited areas, causing mass casualties. The evidence available concerning the nature, quality and quantity of the agents used on 21 August indicated that the perpetrators likely had access to the chemical weapons stockpile of the Syrian military, as well as the expertise and equipment necessary to manipulate safely large amount of chemical agents. Concerning the incident in Khan Al-Assal on 19 March, the chemical agents used in that attack bore the same unique hallmarks as those used in Al-Ghouta.
And while they do later add an obligatory "In no incident was the commission’s evidentiary threshold met with regard to the perpetrator," that shouldn't stop ordinary people from drawing logical conclusions from the evidence presented.


Its been the Assad Regime all along. It was the Assad Regime that has had Al-Ghouta under siege for well over a year now, and still they remain unconquered! It was the Assad Regime that bombed and shelled the people of Al-Ghouta for months before the chemical attack. It was the Assad Regime that started shelling again within hours of the chemical attack and continues even till today, it is the Assad Regime that is refusing to allow food into the besieged sections of Al-Ghouta in an attempt to starve the residents into submission, and there should be no doubt that it was the Assad Regime that killed over a thousand Syrians with sarin gas in Al-Ghouta on 21 August 2014.

Bashar al-Assad committed mass murder with banned chemical weapons that had not been used on such a massive scale in decades and he has essentially gotten away with it. By all laws of social justice, this man should be in prison or dead, and yet he is still negotiating for a future role in governing Syria and still killing big time. He is even stalling on his promise to give up chemical weapons. He keeps missing deadlines and has so far given up less than 10% of his chemical agents. Given that about a dozen sarin attacks of various sizes have been documented in Syria over a period of more than eight months, and the evidence in all of these cases points to the government as the perpetrator (in one case the sarin was dropped from a helicopter), there can be little doubt that Bashar al-Assad did not personally approve of its use. And there is something else that now must be taken on board in light of the recent Russian invasion on the Ukraine, It is very likely that Putin also knew of, and approved of, the use of sarin in Syria. If you want to know what Putin is capable of, just look at what Assad has done.

I find the response of the Left to Assad's use of sarin to be absolutely shameful. Consider that poison gas may be the perfect capitalist weapon because it kills people without destroying property. Consider that the people of the world had waged a largely successful struggle to see it banned after the first world war, and now it is reintroduced as a weapon of indiscriminate mass murder in the suppression of a popular rebellion against a brutal dictator, and the Left does nothing?

I have not heard of one action organize by the Left to protest the gassing of civilians in Syria, so I don't think there have been very many. What I have heard from the Left, when it was not silent on the sarin question, has been a fantastic defense of Assad in which they present one crack-pot theory after another about how the rebels gassed their own people, just as many of these same "leftists" are now asking us to believe it was snipers from the protest movement that were shooting protesters in Ukraine.

The evidence of the Assad Regime's culpability for the use of chemical weapons was overwhelming even before this most recent UN report. I've certainly written much on it:  

 
Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria

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