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«Where are the secular rebels?» wonders one apprehensive Western «leftist», whose main task has become to emulate his Islamophobic counterpart on the right by counting the number of beards he sees in a YouTube video and the «Allahu Akbars» the fighters and demonstrators shout out.
«Why did Syrians not pack central squares like Egyptians, creating a Tahrir Square of their own?» laments another remarkably keen observer (so keen, in fact, that he managed to miss the huge anti-regime sit-ins in Homs’s Clock and Khaldiyeh Squares and Hama’s Assi Square – to name but three – all of them ruthlessly dispersed by the Syrian regime’s security forces and army).
«The situation in Syria is too complex. It’s a sectarian civil proxy war. Let us just hope for peace and refrain from taking sides», comments he who bombs us with quotes by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King on the duty to abandon neutrality in times of great moral conflict.
Repeating the basics about the Syrian revolution time and again has become exhausting. And Syrian revolutionaries, the oppressed, should not have to bear the burden to prove the justice of their cause while Bashar Al-Assad continues to enjoy full impunity and treatment as a legitimate president. Nor do Syrians owe explanations and justifications to those who dismiss their sacrifices and insist on supporting and even glorifying armed resistance revolutionary violence everywhere except in Syria.
Because of the countless checkpoints tearing the city apart and a security presence unmatched by any other Arab country in heft, Syrians never had the ability to fill a central square in Damascus. The main social bulwark of the revolution exists in conservative working class communities in the suburbs and the periphery because these communities have suffered the most damage at the hands of both Bashar al-Assad and his father. The same people who shout Allahu Akbar—that phrase that somehow manages to frighten the civilised world more than the regime’s SCUD missiles, fighter jets and cluster bombs— also sing revolutionary songs in mosques and turn funeral processions of martyrs into wedding-like protests. Even while besieged, shelled and starved to death by the regime, they miraculously remain defiant and teach life to a dead world.
Never mind that first people who took to the streets demanding the overthrow of the regime also took to the streets protesting against Islamist extremists. Never mind that they are forced to fight several battles on several fronts at once and by themselves. Perhaps, if regime supporters or those who claim neutrality were a fraction as critical of the regime as supporters of the revolution are critical of armed resistance and political opposition, we would have been spared most this bloodshed.
full: https://budourhassan.wordpress.com/2013/10/13/portrait-of-a-revolution-the-journey-of-faiek-al-meer/
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