Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: chi lavora per impedire l'intervento in Siria

http://hurryupharry.org/2013/09/09/the-pro-assad-antiwar-movement/
 
 
The pro-Assad “antiwar” movement
 
Gene, September 9th 2013, 2:42 am
 
As has been noted countless times, Britain’s Stop the War Coalition has no real interest in stopping war– only in stopping Western countries and Israel from ever using military force for any reason.
 
The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan writes that the StWC played a “key role” in persuading Labour members of Parliament to reject British military action against the Assad regime in Syria.
 
Labour MPs spoke at a Stop the War meeting at Parliament last week.
 
    “Hundreds of Syrians are alive today because we stopped the military attack last weekend,” said the Labour frontbencher Diane Abbott.
 
    Peter Hain, the former cabinet minister and deputy leadership contender, attacked the Government’s demand for regime change.
 
    “The fundamental flaw in the position of the Government is to see Syria as a battle between a barbaric dictator and a repressed people,” he had written the day before.
 
    MPs hadn’t, of course, stopped the war. In fact, they had decided it should continue unchecked indefinitely. But Stop the War’s role in their decision was real enough. It was the Labour leader Ed Miliband’s last-minute change of position which made the difference — and Stop the War and its supporters which did some of the pushing.
 
    …[F]our of Mr Miliband’s biggest donors are also key members of Stop the War: the Communication Workers’ Union, whose head of policy, Steve Bell, is Stop the War’s treasurer, Unison, the TSSA union and Unite, whose chief of staff, Andrew Murray, is Stop the War’s deputy president and former chairman.
 
    … Of course, those who opposed military action last month cover a vast political spectrum from the hard Right to the far Left. The great majority, including many members of Stop the War, did so from perfectly respectable motives.
 
    But at the heart of Stop the War lies a number of much more questionable groups. It turns out that the campaign itself, and several of Mr Miliband’s new allies, are closely associated with bodies which explicitly support the Assad dictatorship and oppose any action whatever against the regime, even after the chemical attack which killed hundreds on August 21.
 
    Stop the War’s vice-president is Kamal Majid, a veteran communist and founding member of the Stalin Society, created in 1991 to “defend Stalin and his work” and “refute capitalist, revisionist, opportunist and Trotskyist propaganda directed against him”.
 
    Speaking at a meeting last year of the New Communist Party, Mr Majid described the Assad family as rulers “with a long history of resisting imperialism” who must be supported “because their defeat will pave the way for a pro-Western and pro-US regime”.
 
    The uprising against Assad, he said, was part of an “imperialist plan to replace the Syrian government with a puppet state, à la Libya, which will do the bidding of the Americans and Zionists”. Mr Murray, Stop the War’s deputy president and Unite chief, is a member of another group, the Communist Party of Britain, whose leader, Robert Griffiths, only last week opposed “tipping the military balance against President Assad’s regime” on the grounds that it would “remove a critic of US foreign policy and the illegal Israeli occupation of Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese land”.
 
    The party’s international secretary, John Foster, has demanded “respect for the sovereignty and independence of Syria” and “an end to the arming and financing of terrorist groups”, which is what the regime calls its opponents. The Communist Party of Britain is formally affiliated to Stop the War.
    …..
    In May, Stop the War gave a platform at one of its public meetings to a leading pro-Assad Syrian in London, Issa Chaer, who spoke alongside the group’s Stalinist vice-president, Mr Majid. Mr Chaer, a lecturer at South Bank University, runs the “Syrian Social Club”, a regime supporters’ group, and has regularly appeared on Assad-friendly TV channels to defend the dictator. Last year, on the Iranian government’s Press TV, he described Assad as “the person who is now uniting the country. The Syrian people have confidence in President Assad and this confidence gives President Assad the strength to carry on”.
    …..
    Under the influence of such individuals, Stop the War has hardened its position on Syria, opposing not just military action but also any form of sanctions against the regime. The group’s statement in response to the Commons vote called on Britain to develop a Syria policy based on “the rights of national sovereignty,” itself not too far off an explicit endorsement of Assad’s right to remain in power. For perhaps the first time ever, Stop the War’s collection of activists from the further shores of the British Left has had a real impact on a major national decision, and they still can’t quite believe it. “Never let them say demonstrations don’t work – our demonstration has worked,” said Lindsey German, Stop the War’s convener, hailing the “victory” for the anti-war movement at a special “Hands Off Syria” demonstration last weekend.
 
(Nick Cohen says what needs to be said about Miliband’s failure of leadership.)
 
I can’t say I’m surprised about the pro-Assad sentiment among the Stoppers. But if Gilligan is right about them influencing Labour’s decision to let the Syrian regime get away with using poison gas to commit mass murder, that should disturb anyone on the Left with a historical memory extending back to the 20th Century.


 
Minchia che genio, e' da due anni che urlano che Assad deve andarsene.
 
Dalle prime manifestazioni.  Questo e' proprio da pensionare. 
 
 

 Am.
 
io sono proprio curioso di vedere come va a finire...con il duo Obama e 
Kerry...