Leftists and Islamophobes: Faux moral outrage at Syria strikes

Leftists and Islamophobes: Faux moral outrage at Syria strikes
From the far-left to far-right, a list of well-known politicians and celebrities have spoken out against a US air strike on a regime airbase in Syria.
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The New Arab Staff

The New Arab

08 Apr, 2017
Stop the War saw a small protest in London on Friday [AFP]
From the hard-left to far-right, apoligists for Syria's Bashar al-Assad have found myriad ways to defend the brutal dictator.

French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen spoke of her outrage at the US strikes on an abandoned Syrian regime airfield on Saturday.

She had little to say about the dozens of children who choked to death from the regime gas attack on Khan Sheikhun. 

From spurious portayal of Assad as the vanguard of secularism to an equally ridiculous claim that he is leading the fight against the Islamic State group, views such as these are embedded in ideology and fiction rather than fact or reason. 

The lionisation of Assad is something that unites the far-left and right probably more than any other issue in contemporary politics.

When news filtered out of US strikes on the Homs' airbase far-left, anti-imperialist elements were quick to display their anger at a demonstration outside Downing Street. 

Some Syrian activists joked that the Stop the War Coalition were there in solidarity with the barrel bombs and MiG fighter jets "injured" in the missile strikes, given Washington's prior warning to Russia before the offensive.

Some of the protesters attempted to drown out the voice of another Syrian activist in the crowd who wanted to tried to tell the crowd they were misinformed on the situation.



The message of the Socialist Workers Party activists who protested outside parliament found an unlikely ally with staunch Trump supporter and architect of Brexit Nigel Farage.

He argued the right-wing Islamophobic trope that Assad is "secular" and "fighting Islamism", ignoring or ignorant to the fact that the regime has fine tuned sectarianism during the Lebanon occupation. 

"Yes, the pictures [of the chemical attack] were horrible, but I'm surprised. Whatever Assad's sins, he is secular," he said.


Across the Atlantic in the US, even more right-wing and powerful voices were making their support for Assad clear, some outspoken backers of Trump before Friday's missile strikes.

Pro-Putin, alt-right leader Richard Spencer changed added the Syrian regime flag to his Twitter profile and said he was organising a protest in support of Damascus.

"This is a huge moment. We can't risk World War III. Everyone against the war is welcome," he tweeted.


Former Ku-Klux Klan leader David Duke went on a long, deluded and often anti-Semetic rant against Trump's decision to strike the Russian regime air field.



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