Free Syria Palestinianists - that means all of you - know this: I have heard your voices.
I understand what I have done to your movement. I have, in your eyes, dealt tremendous damage to it by making others think your “revolution” is anything more than a second rank of spears behind a fascist, anti-Semitic Palestinian vanguard.
For this reason, I will do as you wish: after ten years, I hereby renounce any and all support for the “Syrian Revolution.”
Yes, it’s true that every single “anti-Assad leftist” who has glommed on to Syria, most within the last two years as I said would happen after the fall of Daraa, once the potential of a dreaded “US intervention” to save Syrian lives was completely taken off the table, has demonstrable connections to Assadism. This is evident through their friends or the Islamomismic discourses they perpetuate about the Revolution. Pick any one and I will explain how they are an Assadist.
Yet, it’s clear that these people are more valued by Free Syrians than me or Brett for one simple reason: they support the mass murder of Jewish people and we don’t.
There have been zero - zero - attempts to defend either me or Brett by “Free Syrians” against malicious attacks by their own and their Assadist “anti-Assad leftist” allies. No, our fragile egos don’t need your support or validation. This lack of support matters because these attacks serve one distinct political purpose - to fully “Palestinianize” the “Syrian” Revolution.
This absence of a defense of us is perhaps even more outrageous since the attacks are entirely malicious usually include blatant lies (such as one about me calling a “P*lestinian” a ‘race traitor,’ which never happened, or by a certain Peter Soeller/Sadie Farrell calling me a rapist, or by one of their newer hangers-on who maintains that I “support ISIL” - which is something you think even people as inept as “Free Syrians” would want to contradict). But it’s clear that these are the types of people “Free Syrians” want in their movement, not someone like me or Brett, who simply don’t want to mass murder Jewish people or provide cover for a force that does.
By the way, I’ve never felt compelled to play the heritage card, but as to the constant victimization by my attackers and subsequent portrayal of me as a “white” interloper with a savior complex, there’s a reason why I was “randomly” chosen to be searched every time I boarded a plane for several years, and it has to do with a last name that’s very popular in a certain geopolitical hotspot. And I never did this to “save” anyone. I did it because I saw Syria as the new fount of fascism before all of you did, especially the Syrians who thought Assad wouldn’t gas them to death to keep power.
I actually expected more gas. Much more, and much earlier. You got off lucky.
But I digress. And it doesn’t matter - even if I were a “white interloper,” everything I say would still be true.
As there has been zero pushback against these political attacks, it’s clear that this Palestinianization is what “Free Syrians” want. As “Palestine” is a Nazi cat’s paw created solely to “throw the Jews into the sea,” in the words of the first PLO Chairman Ahmed Shukeiry, a fervent admirer of the Third Reich, antifascists can make a simple deduction: the “Syrian Revolution” is simply an uprising by one Nazi faction against another. We were mistaken to have ever supported it.
Of course, the signs were always there, from the anti-Semitic chants at the beginning of the “Revolution” to the insistence that Israel was truly to blame for your ills. Yet we thought maybe this could be overcome by the material conditions of your movement.
We could not have been more wrong.
Syria is the mirror test for you “Free Syrians,” and like gorillas in the wild, you fail it spectacularly. After ten years of being gassed, bombed, and shot to death, you still believe you are just like your beloved Palestinians - a spent Nazi force created exclusively to kill Jewish people. And you by and large still blame Israel for the fascist regime you kept in power for forty years.
If this is who you truly identify with, then we would be doing the cause of antifascism a disservice by continuing to provide you with ideological cover. Your cause has no moral standing above that of a bread riot by Third Reich hausfrauen. Any violence done to you should be seen as that done by one group of fascists to another - something to observe with total indifference.
That of course is not to say that we side with Assad. Indeed, we’re the only force that truly breaks with Assadism and the Nazism that underlies it. Actually, we wanted to topple Assad long before most “Free Syrians” ever wanted to. We simply have no home in a fascist uprising.
And no, this isn’t a reference to speculation that Bush would invade in 2004 - the lie that we are “neoconservatives” asserted by your perfidious allies is another prime vector of Palestinianization and one you’ve seen fit to run unchecked.
To be clear, this was always one of the potential outcomes of the Arab Spring. It was always possible that we were not seeing a true movement toward democratization, or that it would only move partly in this direction but would eventually need to be put down via war as it degenerated into yet another pan-Arab pogrom against Israel.
Even in Daraa, where anti-Israel sentiment is likely weakest in all of Syria due to occasional cross-border cooperation between rebels and Israelis, the people there would rather die from Russian bombing runs than live under Israeli jets. Hence their eagerness to negotiate with Russia and to treat them as a buffer between the regime and Iran and their refusal to request a no-fly zone from Israel.
Yes, there are some Syrians who aren’t rabid anti-Semites and who have no problem with Israel. By the estimates of the hegemonic Palestinianists, this is no more than a fraction of a percent. If rumors are to be believed, there are about 100,000 of them living in Idlib right now. But this sounds like something of a modern Prester John myth. Perhaps your entire Revolution is one. Of course we desperately hoped for there to be a great antifascist power in the East to open another front against a surging Axis. So we clung to a fantasy that fed this delusion. In truth, antifascists are alone.
Even if these numbers are to be believed, it’s still a fraction of the overall population of Idlib. Nazi Germany likely had a greater proportion of “anti-Nazi” Germans and it was still slated for carpet bombing by antifascist forces. But that isn’t to say that such a fate should befall Idlib.
At least not yet.
With that, I will do as you wish and will speak no more of your Revolution. I wish you Free Syrians a future as bright as that of the Palestinians you aspire to be.
BAPPY, I miss you so much! Please give us your commentary on the news from Afghanistan, thank you
Hi wasbappin,
I disagree with you on many things, but I believe you are a lodestar for a certain mode of thinking which is interesting to me. If I may suggest a few future article topics based on things you've previously discussed on twitter:
1. Could you elaborate on this concept you put forward: "Turkic people occupy inconvenient geographies"?
2. What is Axis magic, who are its magicians and intellects, what is its goal?
3. You seem to have a particular affinity for Sunni Islam. Why? And how does the Tawhid factor into this affinity?
Thank you.