Shed no tears for Bashar al-Assad. But if, as British charities sending aid to Syria have been warned in the past, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham is a proscribed terrorist organisation, then how can the expression of support for it be anything other than a criminal offence?
Turkey, the Islamist lynchpin of NATO's strategic purpose in its own terms, is the force behind this ragbag of Chechens and Uzbeks, Kyrgyz and Uyghurs, Tatars and Bashkirs, Albanians and Afghans.
And which Afghans would those be? Which do you think? #NoToTaliban has been trending today, in righteous protest at the treatment of women in Afghanistan. Yet there seems to be no such concern about Syria. Saddam Hussein won United Nations awards for girls' education. None will be awarded once, having understandably ignored the Sykes-Picot line, "our" side had marched on to Baghdad.
HTS has pronounced tafkir against Hamas, so we can all see the bigger picture. The Golan Heights, and possibly a bit more, will be ceded to Israel, which gave IS the field hospital there to which Priti Patel tried to divert British public money, leading to her sacking. She is very close to Nigel Farage, who has no apparent position on Syria, although even that is marginally better than all three main parties' active support for HTS. But shed no tears for Assad, either.
The awful George Galloway once described Assad's vile regime as a "castle of Arab dignity" and we can all see on the streets of Damascus, exactly what the Arabs thought of that. Christopher Hitchens once described Assad as "the slobbering dauphin who they (the Syrian people) got because he's the son of the slobbering dauphin who came before him."
ReplyDeleteGeorge has not been to Syria in decades, and would not have been welcome if he had tried to go there. He had sided with Iraq when the Ba'ath Party had split.
DeleteChristopher was the Hitchens brother out of his depth on these matters.