Those who  oppose both  the Assad regime and the Jihadists and all the imperialist powers,  need to focus on a glaring fact: Support for Assad and Putin has become a rallying cry for Western white supremacist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic organizations and parties.  We need to show that opposing the Assad regime’s war on the Syrian masses is absolutely necessary for fighting the growth of white supremacy in the U.S.  and other Western countries.   Indeed it is necessary for challenging the growth of capitalist authoritarianism around the world. Assad’s Syria could be our future.

Frieda Afary

February 24, 2018

There is no lack of evidence about the barbarity of the Assad regime.  Supported by  Putin’s Russia and the Iranian regime,   it is currently  massacring  400,000 innocent civilians in Eastern Ghouta,  a suburb of Damascus which it has kept under siege since April 2013 and  subjected to chemical warfare as well.   The intensified daily bombing and shelling of Eastern Ghouta which  started in November 2017 and has led to hundreds of deaths of innocent civilians in just the past few days,  is part of the Assad regime’s systematic destruction of the Syrian revolution since 2011.   Ghouta has also suffered from the practices of a reactionary Salafist movement,  Jaysh al-Islam, which has repressed  and killled democratic activists.

While the U.S. and European powers such as France shed crocodile tears over Ghouta,   by now it should be clear that neither the U.S.,  not any of the Western powers ever genuinely  supported the Syrian revolution or wanted the overthrow of the Assad regime.  At most,  they wanted the regime without  the person of Assad because they considered the regime necessary for  imposing “stability” in the region.     Even  in April 2017 when the Trump administration carried out a missile strike against a Syrian government airbase where a chemical attack was launched, its aim was to show the U.S.’s  imperial might.

None of these powers could ever have any genuine concern for the Syrian masses who rose up against an authoritarian and butcher regime.   The capitalist and imperialist foundation of these powers would not allow them to do so.

Need for a New Discourse of Solidarity

Those who oppose both  the Assad regime and the  J