**see Syria Solidarity Movement and Global Research for news on Syria
Elections in a time of civil war: America 150 years ago, and Syria today, Apr 25, 2014, RT.com
Syria is scheduled to hold its presidential elections on June 3. The media is prepared to discount the overwhelmingly expected election result, that Bashar Assad will be re-elected.
The Syrian Arab Republic faces a brutal insurgency, bankrolled by many wealthy billionaire interests in Wall Street and London, in addition to autocrats in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. With foreign money and guns pouring in, the “Free Syrian Army”, the Al-Nusra Front, and a slew of other armed groups are beheading people, forcibly recruiting children, kidnapping for ransom, and committing other horrific war crimes. The insurgents control large sections of the country, and doing their best to abolish the religious freedom and diversity that have defined Syria for the last several decades.
Unlike the Civil War in the United States, the majority of the insurgents in Syria are not citizens, but imported foreign fighters. The Syrian Arab Republic has stood up for the Palestinian people, and aided their fight against the crimes of the Zionist Israeli settlers. Syria’s economy is largely state-controlled, with western corporations not being allowed the neo-liberal “free rein” they desire to maximize profits. The Syrian government provides free healthcare and education for the population. In Syria, Christians, Sunnis, Shias, and Alawites have long lived side-by-side in peace. All of this has made the Syrian Arab Republic a target for the Wall Street imperialists, who are seeking to transform Syria into another Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or Bahrain, where the will of the West can be forced by an autocratic puppet regime. The insurgents wage a campaign of terror and violence to destabilize the country, and to tear down the Syrian Arab Republic, so Wall Street and London can take over.
Syrians are rallying around their president as they resist foreign-backed insurgents’ campaign of terror. In addition to the Syrian Army, community militias have been formed. The country is coming together to defeat the campaign of violence against it.
When the United National Anti-War Committee and the International Action Center called a protest in front of the White House, nearly 1,000 Syrians gathered to unfurl their flag. Many placards with the face of President Assad were unfurled as well. Syrian Americans from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, and other parts of the country chanted “We love our President Bashar Al-Assad! We need our President Bashar Al-Assad!”
*****
The Evolution of the War in Syria, Eric Draitser, May 4, 2014, Stop Imperialism.org
Draitser examines the recent statements by FBI Director Comey regarding jihadists from the US and other Western countries going to fight in Syria. Draitser explains that the changing nature of the jihadi recruits indicates the fizzling out of the terrorist war on Syria as the stream of fighters from Muslim countries has slowed to a trickle. He also discusses the larger geopolitical issues at play, noting that Syria, like Ukraine, is a point at which the Western imperial system and its opponents come into conflict. This and much more…
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN
*****
Hacked E-mail Reveals Qatar’s Devious Plans to Smuggle Chemical Weapons to Syria Terrorists, May 6, 2014, al Ahed News
Earlier this year, a news report revealed an email in which Qatar asked Britain’s arms contractor, BRITAM to transport chemical weapons to the Syrian town of Homs.
The email was revealed after BRITAM servers were hacked and megabyted of classified internal files were released to the public.
From the hacked documents, an e-mail revealed startling facts. The mail is written by Britam Defense’s Business Development Director David Goulding to Dynamic Director of the firm Phillip Doughty, who is a former SAS officer.
In the mail, Goulding is seeking advice about a proposed shipment of Chemical Weapons requested by Qatari meant for Syrian city of Homs.
The transcript of the hacked E-mail:
“Phil
We’ve got a new offer. It’s about Syria again. Qataris propose an attractive deal and swear that the idea is approved by Washington.
We’ll have to deliver a CW to Homs, a Soviet origin g-shell from Libya similar to those that Assad should have.
They want us to deploy our Ukrainian personnel that should speak Russian and make a video record.
Frankly, I don’t think it’s a good idea but the sums proposed are enormous. Your opinion?
Kind regards David.”
The demand of a Russian speaking personal could mean that ‘unknown elements’ wants to put the blame on Russia for the use of Chemical weapons.
Recently, Barack Obama warned that any attempt made by Syrian President Basher al-Assad would mean a ‘red-line’, authorizing US to intervene in the troubled Syrian conflict.
The plotted operation, if successful would provide an ideal platform for attack on Syria….
*****
No Red Line Requiem for Dead Syrian Soldiers, Jeremy Salt, Palestine Chronicle, May 4, 2014
The latest evidence of a chemical weapons attack in Syria has emerged in the form of a video proudly filmed by the perpetrators themselves, the so-called ‘lions’ of Jabhat al Nusra, Al Qaida’s Syrian franchise, listed by the US as a terrorist organization yet used by the US and its allies in their continuing campaign to destroy Syria in the process of destroying the Syrian government. Wandering across open fields in the southern Dara’a province, they move from body to body of Syrian soldiers, occasionally prodding them with the toes of their shoes or flipping over name tags to see who they are. The soldiers are young, most in their late teens or early 20s. Perhaps they are conscripts. Some are huddled in groups. Others are scattered where they fell. There must be 40 or 50 of them, maybe more, hard to tell because the camera is moving all the time.
Not one of these dead young men has a wound on his body. They are completely unmarked. Except for their absolute stillness and wide open staring eyes they could be sleeping. Some are still clutching gas masks and if not, masks lie close to the hands of others, as if they were overwhelmed before they had time to put them on. The scattered nature of the bodies suggests that the soldiers were running away when they fell. These men were not fighting but escaping something terrible – something they could not fight.
That they were not killed by conventional weapons is clear. The blistered faces of some suggests the use of mustard gas but without inspection of the site or the bodies it will be impossible to determine exactly what was used to kill them. Almost certainly the answer lies somewhere in the realm of chemical weapons. There is no conflicted narrative here. This is the clearest untainted evidence so far in Syria of a chemical weapons attack yet not only will there not be an inquiry, the mainstream media has completely ignored what has happened.
Israel, of course, treating wounding takfiris in its hospitals and providing them with battlefield equipment, is deeply involved in the campaign against Syria and is supporting the takfiris but not to the point where they can get their hands on unconventional weapons that might one day be used against their Zionist sponsors.
In the past two years the media has done its best to suppress or twist the evidence linking the takfiri groups to chemical weapons attacks. It ignored the film of these people experimenting on rabbits before deploying chemical weapons in the field. It ignored the video evidence of these weapons being loaded up and fired. It ran the line that the chlorine-based chemical weapons attack on the Syrian army outpost at Khan al Assal last year was probably the work of the Syrian military. It heaped blame for the chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus on the ‘regime’ when it was completely unlikely from the start that it was in any way responsible. It refused to look at the holes in the evidence even when the UN inspectors had exposed them. It refused to look at the evidence that bodies had been moved around and neither did it ever attempt to find out who these dead children were and where they came from (Alawi children kidnapped from Latakia remains one possibility). All it could do was snigger at the Syrian nun who showed them what journalism should be about. So-called ‘human rights’ organizations took up the call, peddling false information and adding to the momentum for a direct military attack on Syria.
The ‘evidence’ on which these governments, newspapers and human rights organizations based their accusations against the Syrian ‘regime’ has long since completely collapsed. The work of two leading US scientists on the probable trajectory of the chemical weapons indicates that these weapons were fired by the ‘rebels’ themselves. The counter and more compelling narrative has been fortified by Seymour Hersh’s two reports. The first showed that Barack Obama suppressed evidence from his own intelligence agencies indicating that the ‘rebels’ were most probably responsible. It also showed that the sarin apparently used in the attack was not stocked by the Syrian military but was of the lower grade ‘kitchen’ sarin known to have been produced or sought by the takfiri groups. His report also showed that the Israeli and US military intelligence had been keeping a close watch on supplies of chemical weapons in the hands of the Syrian military. Neither reported any movement of this material in the period before the attack.
All the evidence points to the takfiris, shopping for chemical weapons material in Turkey, being found with cylinders of the stuff in Syria, filming themselves while they experiment on rabbits, using a chlorine-based chemical weapon at Khan al Assal, almost certainly using chemical weapons around Damascus last August and now using some kind of chemical weapon against Syrian soldiers in Dara’a province on or about April 25.
Sharing common ground with the media, the human rights organizations have had nothing to say about this latest attack. Neither has Mr Ban Ki Moon, the hand-wringing grand arbiter of peace and justice around the world. Neither has the UN Human Rights Council, pumping out its own anti-Syrian propaganda reports at regular intervals. They are all quiet for one simple and central reason: in their own way, all of them have been complicit in the attack on Syria, the most determined attempt made in modern times to destroy a government in the Middle East.Filed under: Syria