Al Qaeda solidarity with insurrectionists

Al-Qaeda sides with protesters in Syria

Sydney Morning Herald, 

14 Febraury, 2012

AL-QAEDA has proclaimed its solidarity with anti-government protesters in Syria in a video message urging the Muslim world to support efforts to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, global head of al-Qaeda since the death of Osama bin Laden last May, issued the call to arms in an eight-minute video entitled Onwards, Lions of Syria posted on an Islamist website.

Egyptian-born Zawahiri urged Muslim states, including Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan, to come to the aid of Syrian protesters, who he called on not to ally themselves with the Western powers or the Arab League.

''Our people in Syria, don't rely on the West or the United States or Arab governments and Turkey,'' Zawahiri said. ''You know better what they are planning against you. Our people in Syria, don't depend on the Arab League and its corrupt governments supporting it.''

The Arab League is expected to meet next week to discuss forming a joint United Nations-Arab mission to Syria following the failure of a team of UN monitors to quell the violence, now entering its 11th month.

Arab nations have thrown their full weight behind the Syrian opposition movement, calling for a joint UN peacekeeping force to be sent to the country.

At a crisis meeting in Cairo, the Arab League agreed to take exceptional measures to halt Dr Assad's violent repression of protesters.

It voted to scrap its observer mission to Syria, severed all diplomatic relations with the Assad regime and reinforced economic sanctions. The League called for the opening of ''communication channels with the Syrian opposition and providing all forms of political and material support to it''.

In a landmark decision, it asked the UN for support in sending a joint peacekeeping force. Arab League Secretary-General Nabil al-Arabi urged ministers to move quickly to end the ''vicious cycle of violence''. The Syrian regime immediately rejected the resolution ''categorically''.

The UN-Arab team proposed by the League would replace the 170 Arab observers deployed in December and recalled last month. Mohammed al-Dabi, the Sudanese general who led the mission and was accused by opposition activists of bias towards the regime, resigned yesterday.

The announcement marks an urgent effort to end the bloodshed after Russia and China used their UN Security Council veto to block an Arab-drafted and Western-backed plan to have Dr Assad replaced by a transitional government.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday it was up to the Security Council to take action on the Arab League's call for a joint peacekeeping mission.

In a phone conversation with Mr Arabi, Mr Ban ''stressed that action on the specific requests of the league will be a matter for the Security Council to consider'', according to a statement posted on Twitter. Russia and China have previously vetoed UN initiatives that sought a solution to the Syria crisis.

In Homs, activists say hundreds of people have been killed in a week of intense, renewed shelling by government forces.

The conflict has claimed more than 5400 lives.

Someone else (not just me) says it.

Our foreign policy on Syria is the same as al-Qaeda's – something isn't right here

Rev Peter Mullen

the Telegraph,

13 Febraury, 2012

Al-Zawahiri, chief of al-Qaeda, has pledged his terrorist organisation’s support for the rebels in Syria. How reassuring to see therefore, that our very own Foreign Secretary, William Hague, and al-Qaeda are on the same side. Quite a triumph for foreign policy that: discovering that we share one of the main aims of the international jihadist gang we have been trying to exterminate for the last decade.

Naturally, the bien pensants, the neocons and the obsessive democrats in the West – notably in the BBC and whole sections of the press – are all on the side of the Syrian rebels. They always salivate juicily at the prospect of a dictator being brought down. It’s a pity that these wishful thinkers don’t have a little more foresight – or even better memories.

For they imagined the downfall of Saddam would restore the fertile crescent to conditions resembling the prelapsarian Garden of Eden. But after nine years in which hundreds of thousands have been killed, Iraq is a worse hell hole than it was when Saddam was running the show. The West’s no fly zone, designed to help the Libyan revolution, was a military success. The only trouble is that the triumphant revolutionaries have turned out not to be tweeting democrats, arranging utopia on their mobile phones, but quite as savage as the regime which they displaced.

The protesters are back in Egypt’s Tahrir Square a year after the uprising that was supposed to have got rid of the tyrant Mubarak has managed to leave the corrupt generals still firmly in charge. Unrest continues – largely unreported – in Bahrain and Yemen.

The West’s simplistic backing for the Syrian rebels looks like the triumph of ignorance over experience. For the fact is that Syria is full of minorities – Christians, Kurds, Jews, Armenians – who are telling us plainly that they are in mortal dread at the prospect of the fall of Assad. 

One of the Christian leaders in Syria quoted an old Arab saying, “Forty years' tyranny is better than one night of anarchy.” Ironically, if and when Assad does fall, it will be Israel – the West’s bête noire – that takes in the refugees from the triumphant Islamists.

I recall the Iranian revolution, the 33rd anniversary of which is currently being celebrated by the Islamists’ deployment of boats rigged out for suicide bombings in the straits of Hormuz and a promised announcement from Ahmadinejad that his murderously repressive and hostile regime has made “Important progress in the nuclear field”. Yet, back in 1979 when the Ayatollahs took over in Iran there was rejoicing among those same wishful thinkers in the West. Why? Because the Islamists had brought down the pro-Western Shah.

Our besetting problem arises out of the fact that too many influential people in the western governments and mass media hate the West even more fiercely than they hate the West’s enemies.