Waiter, this isn't the Jihad I ordered
The western Axis of Resistance support network is having to justify a lifetime of excusing Assad's crimes while also pretending they didn't support jihadists elsewhere.
It took less than a minute for Jeffrey Sachs to finger the culprit for the collapse of Bashar al-Assad for his interviewer Tucker Carlson: it was Israel, having steered US foreign policy for the last 30 years. For me, this was the latest indication that Carlson had completely drank the Kool-Aid and is on board with a network of influencers that have been hard at work for years using the wrongs of US foreign policy and the cloak of religion to excuse the crimes of third world tyrants. As events have transpired since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks against Israel and the warfare that has ensued, their message has gotten increasingly more aggressive and sophisticated. In April I detailed the gross inaccuracies and misrepresentations from Carlson’s interview with Rev. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Lutheran pastor and activist. I used to have a lot of respect for Tucker Carlson, and felt he provides a voice of real common sense on the news, but no longer. This is not his first interview of Sachs, but it represents the further convergence of Carlson with a new set of viewpoints and a much different cast of friends.
The fall of the regime was not just a moment that changed Syria, ending 54 years of rule within his family and a civil war that had been frozen but was ongoing since 2011. Over the last period especially the dictator had to rely on military and financial support from Iran and Russia for his regime to remain afloat. But aside from their hard power, Assad also had the support of a select but varied group of journalists and social media influencers who would whitewash his actions to the West. The messaging was very simple:
Assad was an autocrat, but the alternative to him was a jihadist terror state.
The rebels were all extremists, with even the moderates concealing their true fanaticism.
The goal of overthrowing the regime was to construct a Qatar-Turkey pipeline that would convey natural gas and petroleum to Europe and circumvent Russia.
And besides he is just “protecting Christians” in Syria.
As someone who opposed intervention in Syria during the Trump presidency and afterward, I saw Russia’s presence there as the biggest reason to steer clear of Syria. It had nothing to do with whether or not Assad was a good leader or which side was more oppressed in Syria. I did not want the US facing Russia in any proxy conflict, and I maintained the same position with respect to the war in Ukraine which I have and still do oppose. On these positions I agreed with Tucker Carlson. I didn’t change, but I think he did becoming not an advocate for neutrality but a partisan enabler of horrible state repression.
During his interview with Sachs Carlson said “apparently he’s [Assad] protected the Christians so I’m grateful for that, as a Christian”. He also called him an “ophthalmologist from London”, which is somewhat true because prior to returning to Syria in 1994 after his brother Bassel’s death he was in post graduate training to become an ophthalmologist.
So how does one address these points in defense of Assad? By revealing the more complete story. It is true that Assad, relative to ISIS and many other rebel Islamists, provided safety for Syria’s Christians and other non-Sunni Muslim religious minorities. This was however conditional on their utter and total obedience to his rule and even invocation of blasphemous slogans proclaiming “do not kneel for G-d, kneel for Bashar”. Those who would not conform were ruthlessly dealt with, such as Lebanese Christian Suheil Hamawi who was imprisoned for decades until recently being released from Sednaya Prison in Damascus. And Assad was also partly responsible for the rise of ISIS, Al-Nusra and other jihadist groups because he released several of their leaders from prison in 2011 just as a popular protest movement was developing against him.
The narrative of Assad being a protector for Syria’s Christians helped to sell a corrupt venal tyrant to conservative westerners as being the most hospitable option, but it was always just a fig leaf for his brutal repression of his country’s Sunni Muslim majority and Palestinian refugees who overwhelmingly belong to that sect. Dr. Rashid Khalidi, the most well known Palestinian historian in the world, recalled recently how Hafez al-Assad’s forces shelled the Tel al-Za’atar refugee camp in 1976 when he was living in Beirut and would kidnap, imprison, and kill Palestinians in Lebanon.
A full accounting of the horrors of the Assad regime may take years to emerge. But one doesn’t have to wait for it to come out to know that the image portrayed by Sachs and Carlson is a construction that is meant to fool westerners. Most Syrians and other Arabs who have lived through the real thing know Assad as a self-serving tyrant who profited off of the misery of his people while relying on powerful friends to stay in power until they decided to cut their losses.
But Carlson is not alone in pushing this charm offensive. If you want a breakdown of the pro-Assad influencer network and its reaction to his downfall, CJ Werleman (himself an anti-Israel activist) epically skewers members of it such as Scott Ritter and Max Blumentha.
Werleman accurately shows how some pro-Palestine bloggers like Blumenthal had once been Syrian opposition supporters but flipped in 2015 after visiting Moscow for a conference at the state-run RT network. In 2012 Blumenthal had quit the Lebanese pro-Hezbollah outlet Al-Akhbar in protest of its support for Assad and told interviewer Paul Jay that Assad’s crimes made Israel look like “a champion of human rights”.
Finally, I wanted to dispel one other myth put forward by Assad supporters: the Kurdish separatists in Syria’s northeast are just CIA pawns. Recently I heard the pro-Palestine blogger Laith Marouf say this as a guest to interviewer Jamarl Thomas on Sputnik. Marouf happens to be a well paid diversity consultant for the Canadian government. Indeed nowadays the Kurdish forces PKK/YPG in Syria are closely aligned with the US, but it wasn’t always so. Until the 1990s the Syrian government had hosted their camps and provided a safe haven for them under Hafez al-Assad in their war against Turkey over its Kurdish majority areas in the east. It is important to keep unearthing these issues, because such propagandists always harp on the true lesson of US intervention in places like Iran and Libya that have led to “blowback” from extremists, however they are reluctant to acknowledge their own side’s similar behaviour.