So Many Syrian Similarities

at 12:04 AM Wednesday, June 22, 2011


An excerpt from Nick Cohen's column, "Face the Facts - Syria is an Apartheid State,"


in The Guardian:


I hope that liberals of my generation who beat their chests as they protested against racial apartheid in southern Africa will soon feel as outraged by religious apartheid in the Middle East. The Syrian opposition has as much right to our support as the African National Congress did because it has not targeted Alawites because of their religion. Indeed, it places its hopes on the Alawite-led army mutinying.

Nor does it want western military intervention. In a discussion of the opposition's needs, the pro-democracy think tank, the Henry Jackson Society, emphasised the modesty of the dissidents' requests. They need encrypted laptops and satellite phones and sim cards to circumvent the regime's media blackouts and so continue the documentation of atrocities, and support from western intelligence services as they seek to persuade sympathetic Syrian army officers to switch sides.

To date, little beyond token sanctions has been forthcoming. Western governments remain lost in the delusion that Assad is a potential reformer rather than an actual monster, on the sole grounds, as far as I can see, that he was once a student in London and that the drooling toadies of Vogue magazine hailed his glamorous wife as "the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies." They still cannot see him as an enemy.