******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
On 2/17/15 4:29 PM, Ron Jacobs wrote:
And Moses Brown collaborates with Human Rights Watch...so what?
I have one more thing to say about this. Compared to Phil Greaves, a Stalinist hack who asks us to take Russia's word that the Syrian rebels were using sarin gas and not the military whose bullets they pay for, Human Rights Watch is pure as the driven snow. In places like Cuba and Venezuela, their dice is obviously loaded but in Syria, where there are no commies to be seen at least within the country, they have been fairly scrupulous. Here's an example:
“Samih,” another Syrian activist who said he has worked closely with the FSA in Saraqeb, told Human Rights Watch that while he was there he saw residents of Saraqeb complain to the FSA on more than one occasion that the Al-Nur battalion, a Salafist group that is not part of the official FSA structure, was kidnapping civilians for ransom. He said, “The people in Saraqeb were fed up with the battalion and asked the FSA to intervene but the Al-Nur battalion did not respond to the FSA.”
“Samih” also told Human Rights Watch that members of the FSA were kidnapping soldiers:
They would kidnap them and ask their parents to pay a ransom to let them go. One time, the FSA in Saraqeb kidnapped a colonel from the Presidential Guard. In return, the military kidnapped two children from Saraqeb. The children were 15 and 16-years-old. I was working with the FSA members and local government officials to negotiate a trade. At one point, the family members of the two kids called me pleading that I speed up the negotiations as much as possible. They said that they got a call at home from the captors and that they could hear their kids being tortured. They told them their kids would be released when the FSA released the colonel. We were able to negotiate a trade for the colonel and the kids have now been released.
full: http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/03/20/syria-armed-opposition-groups-committing-abuses
Frankly, when it comes between Phil Greaves and "Who Ghouta", I'll stick with HRW and Brown Moses. Ron is free to drink the Greaves kool-aid if he wants. After all, it is a free country.
_________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
