Syria's democratic revolution is not that all-encompassing Arab Spring the West refers to, but more the take-over by Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood. Sort of an Islamic Winter, as it were, with no clear weather in sight. It is a shame Western leaders still don't get the big picture, and insist that democracy as we know it will break out any moment now. The longer we deny the reality that there will be no democracy, only Islam, the worse we will get bit when it finally comes.
From Tehelka June 27 by Prem Shankar Jha
Arab spring could become an Islamist winter
The Salafi-engineered uprising in Syria offers a cautionary tale for the rest of the region
IN COLD countries, spring brings a renewal of hope, even a touch of abandonment. The western media’s christening of the uprisings in the Arab world as an Arab Spring, contains both of these elements: hope that a transition to democracy will automatically bring these countries closer to the West and weaken the attraction of fundamentalist Islam, and an impatience, born perhaps of spring madness, to make it happen as soon as possible. This is the sentiment that made NATO go precipitously into Libya and is now egging it towards regime change in Syria.
In the past three months, the international media has heaped abuse on President Basher al-Assad’s government with a lack of objectivity that has not been witnessed since the buildup to the Iraq War. With few, if any, correspondents in Syria, and almost none in the disturbed areas, the international media has, in the words of al Jazeera, “trawled social networking websites” and used their estimates of casualties and amateur videos with the barest of caveats about the reliability of their sources. They have ignored Syrian assertions that the uprising is not spontaneous but carefully engineered by Salafi Islamist elements spearheaded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood living in exile. And lastly, it has treated Assad’s efforts to meet the demands of genuine civil society activists for political liberalisation as window dressing by a government desperate to buy time in the hope that the movement will run out of steam.
As happened before the Iraq War, the media has again donned the mantle of a crusader for democracy. The Assad regime has been in power for 42 years, so it must therefore be brutal, oppressive and unpopular and therefore has to go. Its messianism is pushing the West towards a mistake that could be even more costly than the Iraq invasion.
The evidence that the Syrian uprising is not spontaneous but engineered has been staring us in the face from the beginning. It is the long gap between the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen, and the first trouble in Dera’a. From the death of Mohammed Bouazzizi, the roadside vendor who immolated himself in Tunis on 4 January, it took only 21 days for the popular upsurge to spread to Egypt, only one more day to spread to Jordan and another to spread to Yemen. By contrast, nothing at all happened in Syria until 18 March. This was a full 10 weeks after the start of the Tunisian uprising.
A second indication is the location of the protests. Insurgencies need publicity to thrive. In Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan, the Arab Spring began in the capital. But in Syria, virtually all the protests have occurred in towns and villages at the edges of the country — in Dera’a on the Jordanian border, Tel Khalaf on the Lebanese, Deir Ezzor on the Iraqi border and Baniyas, Lattakia and Jisr Shugour, close to the Turkish border. The lone exception, Homs, is also located a stone’s throw from Lebanon at a point where a gap in the ante-Lebanon mountains makes access easy. By contrast, Damascus, the capital, and Aleppo, the second largest city, have remained calm.
But what is most important is that there is an abundance of evidence that while the Assad regime is authoritarian and rife with cronyism, it is not unpopular. The Bush administration was the first to learn this. In January 2005, President George Bush withdrew the US ambassador from Damascus, imposed a number of unilateral sanctions and started a $5 million programme to activate opposition groups within Syria. But a year later, the US embassy was forced to report, in a cable posted by WikiLeaks this year, that it had found no “legitimate groups” within Syria that were prepared to take the money.
Undeterred, it shifted money to exile groups outside Syria. In 2007, the State Department gave $6.3 million through a series of dummy foundations to a London-based expatriate Syrian organisation called the Movement for Justice and Development (MJD). This, in turn, set up a TV station called Barada TV (after Damascus’ fabled river), which began beaming anti-Assad programmes to Syria in April 2009, and is now a principal source of ‘information’ on the current uprising.
What the Bush administration chose to overlook was that few of these exiles were externed democrats. According to a US embassy cable hacked by WikiLeaks, they were “moderate members of the Muslim Brotherhood”. To Indians, the wording should have a familiar ring, for it is identical to that used by the State Department to justify military aid to Pakistan.
The US continued to fund the MJD and Barada TV even after Barack Obama was elected and reversed Bush’s policy towards Syria. In all, it has spent an estimated $30 million on the project. This is the money and moral support that the Muslim Brotherhood uses in its attempt to stage a comeback in Syria.
Read it all
From Tehelka June 27 by Prem Shankar Jha
Arab spring could become an Islamist winter
The Salafi-engineered uprising in Syria offers a cautionary tale for the rest of the region
IN COLD countries, spring brings a renewal of hope, even a touch of abandonment. The western media’s christening of the uprisings in the Arab world as an Arab Spring, contains both of these elements: hope that a transition to democracy will automatically bring these countries closer to the West and weaken the attraction of fundamentalist Islam, and an impatience, born perhaps of spring madness, to make it happen as soon as possible. This is the sentiment that made NATO go precipitously into Libya and is now egging it towards regime change in Syria.
In the past three months, the international media has heaped abuse on President Basher al-Assad’s government with a lack of objectivity that has not been witnessed since the buildup to the Iraq War. With few, if any, correspondents in Syria, and almost none in the disturbed areas, the international media has, in the words of al Jazeera, “trawled social networking websites” and used their estimates of casualties and amateur videos with the barest of caveats about the reliability of their sources. They have ignored Syrian assertions that the uprising is not spontaneous but carefully engineered by Salafi Islamist elements spearheaded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood living in exile. And lastly, it has treated Assad’s efforts to meet the demands of genuine civil society activists for political liberalisation as window dressing by a government desperate to buy time in the hope that the movement will run out of steam.
As happened before the Iraq War, the media has again donned the mantle of a crusader for democracy. The Assad regime has been in power for 42 years, so it must therefore be brutal, oppressive and unpopular and therefore has to go. Its messianism is pushing the West towards a mistake that could be even more costly than the Iraq invasion.
The evidence that the Syrian uprising is not spontaneous but engineered has been staring us in the face from the beginning. It is the long gap between the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen, and the first trouble in Dera’a. From the death of Mohammed Bouazzizi, the roadside vendor who immolated himself in Tunis on 4 January, it took only 21 days for the popular upsurge to spread to Egypt, only one more day to spread to Jordan and another to spread to Yemen. By contrast, nothing at all happened in Syria until 18 March. This was a full 10 weeks after the start of the Tunisian uprising.
A second indication is the location of the protests. Insurgencies need publicity to thrive. In Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan, the Arab Spring began in the capital. But in Syria, virtually all the protests have occurred in towns and villages at the edges of the country — in Dera’a on the Jordanian border, Tel Khalaf on the Lebanese, Deir Ezzor on the Iraqi border and Baniyas, Lattakia and Jisr Shugour, close to the Turkish border. The lone exception, Homs, is also located a stone’s throw from Lebanon at a point where a gap in the ante-Lebanon mountains makes access easy. By contrast, Damascus, the capital, and Aleppo, the second largest city, have remained calm.
But what is most important is that there is an abundance of evidence that while the Assad regime is authoritarian and rife with cronyism, it is not unpopular. The Bush administration was the first to learn this. In January 2005, President George Bush withdrew the US ambassador from Damascus, imposed a number of unilateral sanctions and started a $5 million programme to activate opposition groups within Syria. But a year later, the US embassy was forced to report, in a cable posted by WikiLeaks this year, that it had found no “legitimate groups” within Syria that were prepared to take the money.
Undeterred, it shifted money to exile groups outside Syria. In 2007, the State Department gave $6.3 million through a series of dummy foundations to a London-based expatriate Syrian organisation called the Movement for Justice and Development (MJD). This, in turn, set up a TV station called Barada TV (after Damascus’ fabled river), which began beaming anti-Assad programmes to Syria in April 2009, and is now a principal source of ‘information’ on the current uprising.
What the Bush administration chose to overlook was that few of these exiles were externed democrats. According to a US embassy cable hacked by WikiLeaks, they were “moderate members of the Muslim Brotherhood”. To Indians, the wording should have a familiar ring, for it is identical to that used by the State Department to justify military aid to Pakistan.
The US continued to fund the MJD and Barada TV even after Barack Obama was elected and reversed Bush’s policy towards Syria. In all, it has spent an estimated $30 million on the project. This is the money and moral support that the Muslim Brotherhood uses in its attempt to stage a comeback in Syria.
Read it all
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