On Sunday something happened that should have changed American public opinion, or at the very least the public opinion of progressives and Democrats (or any other member of the reality-based community). As reported by the BBC, a group of Palestinian refugees crossed a line that is in dispute between Israel and the rest of the World. After six hours of live fire that killed over a dozen people the IDF finally decided to use tear gas which ended up dispersing -- I hate to even call them protestors -- rather people who wanted to go home and who couldn't because they were the wrong ethnicity. At least on a progressive site like this I thought we could agree that this was clearly a thugs versus the people story like we have seen all year in MENA. But no. The why tripped my former Republican RADAR detecter.
On Sunday a rec-listed diary was posted about Naksa Day. I was looking for it because for anyone who closely follows the ME we knew something huge was going to happen that day. I commented about the use of live fire was happening along the frontier between occupied and unoccupied Syria in the comments.
But then there was coordinated pushback both here and throughout the Internet that tried to smear the victims of this vicious attack. There was a claim by the supposed opposition in Syria that these weren't refugees trying to return home but an attack on Israel by the brutal dictator, Assad.
Here's what it looked like here:
Reform Party of Syria statement ... should be considered in light of the daily anti-Israel festival at Daily Kos takes precedence over a balanced consideration of events.
Washington DC, June 5, 2011. The Reform Party of Syria has learned today, from intelligence sources close to the Assad regime in Lebanon, that Syrians storming through the Golan Height next to the Quneitra crossing are Syrian farmers who have migrated in recent years from the drought-stricken northeast Syria to the south. Estimates put the number at 250,000 impoverished migrants.
Information received cite the regime has paid hundreds of these farmers $1,000 each to show-up and $10,000 to their families should any of them succumb to Israeli fire. In Syria, an average salary is about $200 a month and to these impoverished farmers, such a one-time sum can keep them economically afloat for six months.
Such tactic was used in the past by another defunct Ba'ath Party in Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, to pay Intifada-driven Palestinians the sum of $25,000 to their next-of-kin should they die throwing stones. That measure had a worldwide impact and it seems the Assad regime is using the same play from a twin playbook.
It is obvious, with this action, Assad wants to divert the attention of the world away from his own massacres and brutality that resulted in some 70 deaths yesterday and about 30 today in Jisr al-Shoghour. RPS expects, on the basis of today's success, for these operations of incursions to multiply in scope in the near future for two reasons: 1) Divert the attention away from Assad's barbarism and savageries, and 2) Stand tall again in the eyes of the regime's supporters whose morale has taken quite a beating the last 3 months because of the violence perpetrated by Assad against unarmed civilians.
On this day of Naksa, RPS strongly believes in ownership and title of its Golan Heights. But unlike a regime bred on the use of violence, the Syrian people, demonstrating how peaceful they are as they endure one massacre after another, believe in peaceful negotiations to repatriate our lands. If Assad really wanted the Golan Heights, he would walk the same peaceful path Anwar Sadat walked long before him. But then, if he does, how can he justify his own existence as the "Commandant de la Résistance". For Assad, winning through peace means also losing the war against his own people.
http://reformsyria.org/...
Half truths are not truth, and half the story not the whole one.
WTF? This sounded like the typical neo-con BS from Ahmed Chalaby that was used to falsely justify the Iraq War. Remember that name. Furthermore, even though I am very plugged into the issues of MENA I hadn't heard of the Reform Party of Syria let alone being representative of the entire opposition. Since I got a whiff of astroturf I decided to do some digging.
I found this article in WaPo that talked about the Syrian Reform Party and the Bush Administration:
Some U.S. analysts and other Syrian Americans warned that the Syrian Reform Party and its allies are unrepresentative and too small to have any impact.
"Its membership is extremely thin and is not taken seriously. It's almost unheard-of in Syria," said Murhaf Jouejati, director of George Washington University's Middle East Studies Program.
OK. So, I'm not totally ignorant. But who was RPS meeting with back in 2005:
The Bush administration is reaching out to the Syrian opposition because of growing concerns that unrest in Lebanon could spill over and suddenly destabilize Syria, which borders four countries pivotal to U.S. Middle East policy -- Israel, Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey, U.S. and Syrian sources said.
In an interview, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the United States is talking to "as many people as we possibly can" about the situation in Syria, as well as in Lebanon, to ensure that Washington is prepared in the event of yet another abrupt political upheaval.
"What we're trying to do is to assess the situation so that nobody is blindsided, because events are moving so fast and in such unpredictable directions that it is only prudent at this point to know what's going on," Rice told Washington Post editors and reporters, citing "the possibility for what I often call discontinuous events, meaning that you were expecting them to go along like this and all of a sudden they go off in this direction, in periods of change like this. So we're going to look at all the possibilities and talk to as many people as we possibly can."
A meeting Thursday, hosted by new State Department "democracy czar" Elizabeth Cheney, brought together senior administration officials from Vice President Cheney's office, the National Security Council and the Pentagon and about a dozen prominent Syrian Americans, including political activists, community leaders, academics and an opposition group, a senior State Department official said.
The opposition group comes from the Syria Reform Party, a small U.S.-based Syrian organization often compared to the Iraqi National Congress led by former exile Ahmed Chalabi. The INC, which led the campaign to oust former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, had widespread U.S. financial and political support from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, as well as Congress.
TNR reported at the time about Ghadry the head of the "party":
"Less than one week after the United States accused Syria of allowing terrorists to enter Iraq and Saddam Hussein's henchmen to leave it, Farid Ghadry informally unveiled his Reform Party of Syria. He used the occasion of the American Enterprise Institute's second to last weekly briefing on Iraq—a series the institute organized to coincide with the war—to go public with his opposition efforts. Ghadry—who plans to announce a Syrian government in exile in the coming months—asked the panel of Washington hawks, from the audience, the question on everyone's mind: 'What about regime change for Syria?'"
Then there was the Boston Globe article showing the direct link between Chalabi and Ghadry and their similar disconnectedness with their respective communities:
MY HEART SANK when I read that Syrian exile Farid Ghadry met recently with Ahmed Chalabi, Iraq's deputy prime minister, in a Washington suburb. Ghadry heads something called the Syrian Reform Party. The party was formed three years ago, and is made up almost entirely of exiles, such as Ghadry, who left Syria when he was 10. ''Ahmed paved the way in Iraq for what we want to do in Syria," Ghadry told The Wall Street Journal.
The real heart-sinker was that the two met in the living room of Richard Perle, whom George Packer, author of ''The Assassins' Gate," calls the ''impresario of the neo-cons." Perle was among the leading intellectual lights urging forceful regime change in Iraq.
Perle told the Journal that ''there's no reason to think engagement with Syria will bring about any change," and he is worried that the conquistador zeal to spread democracy is diminishing within the Bush administration. Syria's strongman Bashir Assad ''has never been weaker, and we should take advantage of that," according to Perle.
And then there's this:
As for Chalabi, he is often accused of seducing the administration with false intelligence into invading Iraq. But the fact is that the Bush administration desperately wanted to be seduced. If you are feeling charitable, you can say that Chalabi, having lived in exile for so many years, may just have been out of touch with the real situation in Iraq. But one suspects that Farid Ghadry may be no better informed about his homeland than was Chalabi.
The Israel connection for Chalabi:
One remembers that Perle was involved in the writing of a paper for Israel's Likud Party that said getting rid of Saddam Hussein should be a big priority. That same paper recommended doing damage to Syria as well.
One also remembers that Chalabi, in 1997, promised the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs that a new Iraq, with him in charge, would have friendly ties to the Jewish state. Yet when Chalabi ended up with a modicum of power in Iraq, and when one of his party members, Mithal al-Alusi, actually did visit Israel and advocated friendly relations, Alusi was thrown out of Chalabi's party. Several assassination attempts followed. But even Chalabi's detractors admire his skillful opportunism and his ability to reinvent himself -- the ''Jay Gatsby of the Iraq War," as constitutional adviser, Noah Feldman, called him.
For Ghadry the connection to the Israel Lobby is more direct. According to SourceWatch:
Ghadry is a member of AIPAC. On May 15, 2003, Eli J. Lake wrote in The National Review: "His organization is only now getting off the ground," and "a Syrian who belongs to one of Israel's main lobbying groups is not exactly a strong political candidate in a country that remains one of the most rabidly anti-Israel in the region. As Ghadry himself admits, 'The Syrians are not ready for someone who wants to make peace with Israel.'"
Ghadry also has strong ties to Elizabeth Cheney. Mention of Ghadry's meet-ups with Elizabeth Cheney at the World Economic Forum and elsewhere can also be found here, here, and here.
While the neo-cons argued that they we're promoting democracy in the ME what they really promoted was an Israeli-centric program of war and being on the wrong side of history. We're doing it again. Now that we have a real pro-democracy revolution in MENA we again are in the U.S./Saudi/Israeli axis of counter-democratic-revolution. The same neo-cons are promoting this. During the Egyptian protests I head one Egyptian that summed up why we are hated there:
"We don't hate you because we hate your freedom. We hate you because you hate ours."
