Thread by @dickgregory2011

"All they ask about is ISIS & al-Qaeda."
Sometimes I worry I rant too much about how people, especially left-wing people, are acting as genocide enablers over Syria. And then I go to listen to some Syrian revolutionaries, as I did at an art gallery in King's Cross last Tuesday
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and the greatest pain they feel every day is that people ignore the suffering Assad has put them, their friends and relatives, and their country through. They are not grateful to those who have said the international community should do nothing to stop Assad.
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They are angry every day that we allow Assad to continue his crimes against them, while either ignoring them completely, or going out of our way to cast doubt on whether bombs really are dropping on them, whether they are all al-Qaeda, and so on.
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The sort of thing Diane Abbott does when she says we would be acting as an air force for jihadis if we bombed Assad's chemical facilities. Or when Jeremy Corbyn writes to Theresa May and says the Free Syrian Police are linked to al-Qaeda.
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I listened to one of the founders of the opposition newspaper Enab Baladi talk about how her hometown of Daraya was invaded by Afghan militias and Hezbollah under the orders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and 1000 people massacred,
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and she was part of a team that tried to identify the victims, only they had been so badly mutilated and mixed up that they could only say who 750 of them were (this was a massacre Robert Fisk lied about, saying they were accidental deaths in a botched prisoner exchange,
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which is one reason Syrians hate him). I get home to see people protesting that the US has designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terror group, and I fume at the ignorance and acceptance that the IRGC can terrorise Syrians and people want them to get away with it.
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Sometimes I see people virtue signalling by posting one article about Syria to justify their backing for pro-Assad politicians, usually Jeremy Corbyn. I am torn between scorn and gladness that at least something is being said about Syria.
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It was very interesting to see Hamza, the doctor from East Aleppo, talk about how it had taken a while to see through the fake news of the régime, but then to see the murder of three medical students in Aleppo be blamed by state media on terrorists
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when their burned bodies were found, when the family knew that they had been in régime jails because they had had to pay money to middlemen with contacts in the security apparatus to find out where their sons were.
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A direct line to the fake news operation about all of Assad's atrocities, that gets fed directly through the alternative and Russian media, and given at least equal billing by the BBC.
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