With Israel or with Syria? (Zvi)

From Zvi:

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Al Arabiyya general manager Abdul Rahman al-Rashed writes an interesting commentary in Asharq alawsat:

Opinion: Are you with Israel or Syria?

There is no need to support either. When Israel attacks the Syrian regime, it is defending its security and its interests. We are willing to accept that Assad’s forces and their storage facilities have been attacked, since this helps disarm the regime and accelerate its collapse.

Only Iran’s supporters condemned the attack. They did so out of fear for Tehran’s allies, including Hezbollah and Assad—not because of their hostility towards Israel.

Two years of massacres against unarmed Syrians has unveiled the greatest lie in the history of the country—the lie of resistance and opposition. The Syrian regime has never truly been against Israel, nor has it really defended Palestine: that was pure propaganda.

Only a few knew this truth, while we were seduced by the lie.

It's not clear whether he really thinks that Syria colluded with Israel all these years, but he certainly realizes that the Assad regime used everyone else's kids to fight Israel instead of doing it themselves.

Hezbollah and its operations against Israel have no interest in protecting Lebanon or defending Palestine. It is merely an Iranian brigade that was founded more than 30 years ago in order to secure the interests of the ayatollah in Tehran. Over the years, Iran and the Assad clan, have sought to hijack the Palestinian cause in order to dominate Syria, occupy Lebanon and serve Iranian interests.

Other groups and their leaders also did this—leaders like Abu Nidal, the founder of Fatah, and Ahmad Jibril of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command, as well as assorted other figures claiming resistance against Israel. All of them aimed to confront and assassinate the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s leadership under the late president, Yasser Arafat.

Yasser Arafat used the Palestinians too, of course.

Both Mohammed Mursi’s Egyptian government and Iran have essentially supported Assad by denouncing the Israeli air strikes. The stance of Mursi’s cabinet—which is biased towards Iran, and thus in turn biased towards Assad—would have been excused if it had played an effective role in supporting the Free Syrian Army.

So far, however, its public stance has been with Iran and Russia, which explicitly support Assad.

Mursi’s cabinet joined Moscow and Tehran in calling for what it referred to as a “political solution” to the Syrian crisis, and for national reconciliation between Assad’s regime and the opposition. This is not only a shameful stance but also impossible to achieve, considering the two years of slaughter and destruction carried out by Assad’s forces and his Shabiha (thugs).

Despite Egyptian and Iranian condemnation, it is certain that the Syrian people were happy that Assad’s warehouses and forces were shelled—regardless of Israel’s reasoning. The Syrians will be even happier if Turkey responds to the violations of its sovereignty and attacks the forces instead of merely issuing condemnations and statements.

Syrians are fed up with statements, which in fact anger them a lot more than they grant them hope. And they are not concerned about regional political calculations regarding who shells Assad, whether they are Israelis, Westerners or Arabs. What matters the most for them is that this war machine—publicly supported by the Russians, the Iranians and Hezbollah—be destroyed.

Alas, he spoke too soon... .

Erdogan and Saudi Arabia have now condemned the air raid.

Erdogan's condemnation is somewhat bizarre, as he appears to think that the big problem with the air raid is that Israel upstaged his vitriolic verbal attack on al-Assad, in which he accused al-Assad of genocide. 

Erdogan reveals his narcissism to a greater extent than ever before.

The Saudi regime simply succumbed to conventional Arab anti-Israel sheepthink.

Syrian Rebels in Fantasy Land

National Public Radio (US) published a bizarre interview with a Syrian "Revolutionary Command Council" spokesperson in which she claimed that Assad colluded with Israel to bomb his own military.

BLOCK (interviewer): Well, let's go back to the attacks that you were talking about yesterday. The big explosion that you heard. Could you pinpoint exactly what the targets were from those Israeli airstrikes?AHAMD: They were to the weapons store between Maraba and Ed Draij. They put many weapons, they stored many weapons there.BLOCK: Do you have any sense of how much of that airstrike might degrade Syria's military capability?AHAMD: Oh, God. I can't tell, like, precisely. But I know that it will harm it very, very much. So it's not really good. Maybe if you want to be optimistic, we can think that it's OK that we got rid of these weapons, so Assad won't use them against us. But at the same time, Syria's losing because we paid for these weapons. And now we have two enemies. We have to face Assad inside Syria and Israel is going to attack us.BLOCK: So, you now see Israel as the enemy even though Israel was targeting the Syrian regime that you're fighting against.AHAMD: It is an enemy actually. Let me tell you something. I don't think that Israel is going to do us a favor. We have been like fighting the regime for two years, and this is the first time Israel do such a thing. So it is not for the sake of the Syrian people.And something else, for many years we thought that Assad regime is, let's say, the enemy of Israel or the first one who resist the occupation (unintelligible) and so-and-so. We were like fool - actually they were just fooling us. It seems though that Assad is the best ally of Israel, because he always kept the Israeli borders safe.BLOCK: Wait a minute, Ms. Ahmad, let me stop you there. Are you saying that the Israelis colluded with President Assad to bomb his own military?AHAMD: It is one of the options actually, yes.BLOCK: Let me ask you this, Ms. Ahmad, if the Israeli attack degrade Syria's military capability, why would that not be a good thing for the rebel side, for your cause?AHAMD: Because when I am thinking, actually, I think like a Syrian, I don't think like an opposite person or from the rebels or whatever. Assad is not going to live forever. We are going to get rid of him. So after that, we need to rebuild the whole country. So having a very, very big country so (unintelligible) just to protect our country against anyone who wants to come and take part of this cake, because they see Syria now as a cake, you know. Like Iran is ready to take its parts. Iraq as well. We know don't know other.

She can't get past the fact that Israel bombed those weapons caches; it doesn't matter that Hezbollah could have used the Fateh 110s against Syrian towns just as easily as it could have used them against Israel; or that the weapons being stored there could easily have included other arms used by the regime to kill her friends and allies.

As for having weapons for "after the war", 1. many of those weapons were being shipped to Hezbollah, or would have been moved to some future "Alawia", and would not have been in the hands of a future Syrian regime at all, but rather those of their enemies and 2. the remainder would have boosted only Assad's forces, and nobody else. Every one of the explosives would have been used to blast Syria further back into the stone age, not "rebuild" it.

None of that matters to Ms. Ahamd. Israel did it, so it's automatically bad. "Two legs baaaaad, four legs good."

Conventional Arab anti-Israel sheepthink.