Might does not make Right

Maysaloon

"......Last night's Israeli attack against an Assad regime research facility in Damascus has brought out of the wood work all sorts of individuals who, silent in the face of the massacre in the coastal city of Banyas for the past three days, have suddenly found their voices. The similarity in the pictures we saw coming out of Banyas this past few days were truly horrific, and reminiscent of the images we saw from the Sabra and Chatilla massacres during the Lebanese civil war. Yet these self-styled anti-imperialists did not retweet and angrily condemn these murders. They chose silence and wilful ignorance instead.

Today they are trying to portray the Israeli air raids last night as an attack on Syrian sovereignty, as if that is not what Assad has been doing to Syrians for the past two and a half years. Apart from the evident hypocrisy of this position, there are also two fallacies underlying their argument. Firstly that the Syrian regime represents Syria, and that an attack on it is an attack on the country and its people, and the second is that Israel did this in support of the Syrian revolution.

With regards to the second point most Syrians, including those who support the revolution, are missing the fact that Israel hasn't got the slightest concern about the Syrian revolution or the Syrians who are dying. It is focused first and foremost in its battle with Iran and Hezbullah, and has consistently stated that it will not let the more advanced weaponry in Syria's arsenal falling into Hezbullah's arms. When it attacks Assad's bases and arsenals, it is doing so with a clear strategy.

Syrians supporting the revolution should neither cheer nor lament the involvement of Israel's attacks on Assad's arsenal. From a practical point of view it is very much an advantage to the revolution (armed as well as peaceful), as it is far better for the regime's arsenal and advanced divisions to be obliterated than that they be used against Syrian towns and villages. We have seen the piles of bodies in Banyas and countless Syrian villages and cities, on a week so close to the anniversary of the Houla massacre perpetrated by Assad regime thugs, and these images will forever be engraved in the collective memory of Syrians. Never again must we allow ourselves to be in such a position, that Syrians be slaughtered like sheep in an abattoir......."