NATO Supporters: Tunnel Vision and Moral Blindness

The warm welcome received by Syrian Ambassador Bashar Jaafari’s UN speech over the weekend, among those who reject the Syrian opposition’s armed wing and its calls for foreign intervention, was not restricted to Syrians only.

Within a few hours, video and voice recordings of his remarks at the Security Council were being exchanged among tens of thousands of activists online.

Even adversaries sought to add their comments. But these were weak, based solely on the propaganda themes employed by the majority of the Syrian opposition. These comments generally reflect either their links to external decision-makers, or a lack of capacity to think.

The more the regime takes steps, which many may see as slow and belated, the more these oppositionists stick to a dismal course that seeks to destroy Syria in order to occupy a patch of it in the name of freedom, justice, and equality.

Jaafari did not say anything different to what we have heard before from regime leaders in Syria. But he said it well, in language that gave the regime’s position a strong moral dimension. He also spoke forcefully, before the entire world, to the faces of those conspiring against his country and his people, earning reactions that reflected their sick state of mind.

There were smirks from those, like Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani, who thought Jaafari’s words were from a bygone age. There was also head-shaking a la Susan Rice. She seemed surprised that a day had come when someone in the chamber would remind her that the United States has routinely used its veto in matters relating to the rights of the Arab peoples, or of other peoples in this world.

Both reactions were weaker than one would have expected. So was the response of Arab League Secretary-General Nabil al-Arabi, who had no explanation for why the head of the Arab League Observer Mission was not at the Security Council, nor for why his report was repudiated. So he sufficed with saying that he was supposed to be present, along with the prime minister of Qatar. That was it. Yet al-Arabi knows that when it was proposed in the secretariat that the head of the Observer Mission should be part of the delegation to the UN, a Qatari official threw a fit.

Although it is forbidden for anyone except the Americans to use display screens, as Colin Powell did to justify the invasion of Iraq, our interconnected world makes it possible to expose what is fabricated.

In the past few days, the Arab public has sensed for the first time the scale of the media fabrications employed by those seeking to destroy Syria and not just topple the regime.

We at Al-Akhbar have had to put up with politically absurd accusations from opponents of the Syrian regime. They have said that we work for the regime in Syria merely because we have published facts, with audio, video, and text documentation, about gunmen, some of whom say they belong to the Free Syrian Army and others to al-Qaeda groups.

We are required now to deny the existence of organized armed men, each with tens of thousands of dollars in their pockets, who roam Lebanon looking for sophisticated communications equipment.

We are required to deny that they receive support from Lebanese groups with close ties to members of the March 14 coalition. We must also deny the mere possibility that there could be groups that share the ideology and methods of al-Qaeda, or may even be linked to that newly restructured international organization.

We are required, moreover, to say that every gunmen opposing the regime is a defecting soldier, and that they only fire at the military. Yet some of these have pictures on their cellphones in which they parade their pride at slaughtering regime loyalists in Damascus Countryside, Idlib, and Homs.

For their part, some intellectuals supporting the Syrian protesters seem to have decided to listen only to one side, abandoning any semblance of the professionalism that is supposed to characterize their work as academics, journalists, or members of human rights committees.

When they adopt the narrative of the gunmen or of certain opposition figures, they concede that they have no means of verifying it. Yet they reject the regime’s narrative in advance, precisely because they do not have a way to verify it. How can they do both things? Is there any explanation, other than zeal and moral blindness, for abandoning the objectivity on which positions ought to be based at this critical moment in the history of the region?

No one denies that the Syrian regime’s forces have carried out many killings and arbitrary detentions of opposition activists. No one denies the existence of a serious crisis in controlling the conduct of military and security forces in Syria.

But why is there not the slightest criticism, or mere questioning, of what the other side is doing in the “free world?” Didn’t tens of Syrians, both Muslim and Christian, who fled from Homs to Lebanon, give various accounts of sectarian crimes that were committed there. Does the opposition think that having major media outlets on its side – like those controlled by the US, France, Britain, Germany and the Gulf Cooperation Council states – is enough to present a different picture?

It might work on people outside Syria. Arabs and foreigners outside Syria might be influenced by this incessant outpouring. But don’t these people realize that Syrians – living their daily lives in Syrian cities, villages, rural areas, and institutions and on Syria streets – know and experience what is really going on? Don’t they see both what the regime is doing and what the armed opposition is doing?

Haven’t foreign embassy personnel heard from Syrian citizens about masked men who refuse to speak to anyone in some neighborhoods because they are not themselves Syrian?

Haven’t they heard the military ruler of Tripoli in Libya, Abd al-Hakim Belhaj, speak about his comrades who travelled to Syria via Turkey, denying he sent them himself, but saying they went there to “support their kinfolk,” as they put it?

Don’t foreigners residing here in Lebanon know that there are people from the Gulf now living in Turkish villages along the Syrian border and in Lebanese hotels?

Haven’t they heard of the hundreds of injured Libyans, recently brought to Jordan for treatment, who recount their experiences of being offered inducements go to “support their brothers” in Syria? Or of the special Turkish intelligence unit that has set up offices in hotels and rented apartments in Amman to deal with these Libyans, and with Syrians who fled from the south of their country or who have lived in Jordan for many years?

Stories of killing are no longer told by one side only. But the longer a political solution is delayed, the more that will whet the appetites of all of Syria’s enemies, and of the supporters of the US and Israel, for more criminality of the kind that many are preparing to spread to all the countries of the region.

Ibrahim al-Amin is editor-in-chief of Al-Akhbar.

This article is an edited translation from the Arabic Edition.