Where are the secular rebels? - wonders one apprehensive Western Leftist whose main task has become to emulate his Islamophobic counterpart on the Right by counting the number of beards he sees in a YouTube video and the Allahu Akbar’s the fighters and demonstrators shout out. Repeating the basics about the Syrian revolution time and again has become exhausting. And Syrian revolutionaries, the oppressed, should not have to bear the burden to prove the justice of their cause while Bashar Al-Assad continues to enjoy full impunity and treatment as a legitimate president. Nor do Syrians owe explanations and justifications to those who dismiss their sacrifices and insist on supporting and even glorifying armed resistance revolutionary violence everywhere except in Syria. The same people who shout Allahu Akbar—that phrase that somehow manages to frighten the civilised world more than the regime’s SCUD missiles, fighter jets and cluster bombs— also sing revolutionary songs in mosques and turn funeral processions of martyrs into wedding-like protests. Even while besieged, shelled and starved to death by the regime, they miraculously remain defiant and teach life to a dead world. Never mind that first people who took to the streets demanding the overthrow of the regime also took to the streets protesting against Islamist extremists. Never mind that they are forced to fight several battles on several fronts at once and by themselves. Perhaps, if regime supporters or those who claim neutrality were a fraction as critical of the regime as supporters of the revolution are critical of armed resistance and political opposition, we would have been spared most this bloodshed.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 03:40:21 +0000
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