Left Fascism on Syria on the Airwaves, Part II

This is an addendum or appendix to “KPFK’s ‘Indy Media on Air’ Brings Fascism to the Airwaves,” first published on April 23, 2018. It refers to an interview held by “Revolutionary Left [sic] Radio” with Rania Khalek in April about “Syria and U.S. [but not Russian] Imperialism.”

In parallel, Breht Ó Séaghdha’s interview with Assadist “journalist” Rania Khalek on “Revolutionary Left Radio” presents much the same conclusion [that is, Vanessa “Beeley and [Chris] Burnett’s affinities for the authoritarian-militarist campaign that the Assad Regime is currently engaged in to reconquer the country”]: that what would be best for the “ordinary working people of Syria” would be for them to submit to the fascist State that has been murdering them en masse for seven years (54:12-45). Unlike Beeley, Khalek, a Russia Today regular who has visited Syria “several times” in the past two years, acknowledges the March 2011 uprising against Assad, but like Beeley, she has little to say about the regime’s brutal suppression of these popular protests. Compared to Beeley, Khalek is a less enthusiastic Assadist, as she recognizes the regime to be an authoritarian police state, but she disingenuously trivializes the breadth and depth of this authoritarianism, declaring the regime to act “just like any other State” does. Khalek and Séaghdha present Assad as the “lesser evil” relative to the opposition, which is supposedly dominated by “rightist Islamists.” Furthermore, they frame the Syrian war as a U.S.-led regime-change operation and hold only the U.S., not Russia, to be guilty of imperialism.

Khalek’s perspective on the Syrian opposition, which apes that of Beeley and, indeed, Assad, is that essentially all of it is al-Qaeda or Daesh (ISIS/ISIL). Khalek specifically claims that the regions in which regime control collapsed over the course of the war were readily conquered by “Salafi jihadists.” This convenient narrative completely ignores the inspiring model of self-organization via the Local Coordinating Councils (LCC’s) which from Darayya to Aleppo democratically administered social and political life in zones liberated from regime control. It is especially galling in this sense to hear Séaghdha, who claims affinity to libertarian socialism, essentially silencing the life of the Syrian anarchist Omar al-Aziz, who inspired the LCC model and for this reason died in a regime dungeon in 2013.

In their discussion of the fall of Eastern Ghouta, which focuses primarily on the political orientation of the rebel groups present there, with no word about the reality of the vast human-rights violations amidst Assad’s effectively genocidal attack on the enclave, Séaghdha and Khalek give their audience the impression that these rebels are Da’esh affiliates. For Khalek, Jaish al-Islam is “effectively like ISIS,” whereas Faylaq al-Rahman is “effectively al-Qaeda.” Such takes are rather misleading, given that the former group formed part of the Islamic Front, which did not include Da’esh or al-Qaeda and in fact waged war against Da’esh in 2014, and that the latter has a non-Islamist orientation, being part of the more secular Free Syrian Army (FSA).¹

It is rather telling indeed that neither Séaghdha nor Khalek mentions the origins of the FSA through mass-defections from Assad’s military of soldiers and officers disgusted with their orders to shoot down ordinary Syrians, together with civilians willing to take up arms against the regime. Additionally, Khalek claims Jabhat al-Nusra as being the “largest group” in Eastern Aleppo before its brutal reconquest by the regime and Russia in late 2016, yet Joseph Daher reports that only 2.5-10% of opposition forces in the district belonged to al-Nusra at that time. Khalek cites the Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki’s infamous beheading on tape of a teenage Palestinian boy in 2016 as evidence of rebel atrocities, but neither she nor Séaghdha have a word to say about the regime’s indiscriminate destruction of the Yarmouk refugee camp for Palestinians, where more than a thousand civilians are still trapped as of this writing [early May 2018]. Ultimately, there is little sense in this interview that the extent of Assad’s brutal counter-insurgency encouraged support for apocalyptical-millenarian movements such as that of Da’esh.

The pair’s misrepresentations reach a climax when they turn to the April 7 Douma chemical attack. Séaghdha “finds it difficult” to find objective info about chemical-weapon use in the Syrian war, whereas Khalek claims that it’s “really hard to know” who carried out the chemical-weapons attacks that have been reported. Both speakers thus appear entirely ignorant of the United Nations’ findings that the regime has perpetrated at least 34 chemical-weapons assaults since 2011. There is no recognition here of the UN’s Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) holding Assad responsible for the April 2017 Khan Sheikhoun sarin gas attack. In fact, Séaghdha goes so far as to claim that chemical-weapon use “has not been proven” in Douma, and that it’s unclear “to this day” who is responsible. Yet this view overlooks the fact that the chemical weapons were dropped on Douma from regime helicopters, and that the rebels lack an air force. The host’s Assadist affinities are clearly revealed when Séaghdha asserts that the regime has been “fully cooperating” with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ (OPCW) investigation, given the reality that Russia and the regime have actively blocked access to the site of the attack.

As an estimated 200,000 detainees languish in Assad’s prisons, with at least 60,000 having perished due to genocidal conditions, the solidarity expressed by Burnett, Beeley, Séaghdha, and Khalek with the regime can only be described as fascist. This is a total contradiction to the liberatory tradition to which Burnett and Séaghdha lay claim as leftists; it is more consistent with the worrisome historical and contemporary support lent to neo-fascist third positionism and Stalinism. In this sense, the last word is for al-Shami: “I will never see people who place grand narratives over lived realities, who support brutal regimes in far off countries, or who peddle racism, conspiracy theories and atrocity denial, as allies [or comrades].”**

1Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 123-5.

**This thought by al-Shami also closed the original version of this essay.

Tags: al-Qaeda, Assad, Assadism, Bashar al-Assad, Breht Ó Séaghdha, Daesh, Douma, Eastern Aleppo, Eastern Ghouta, Faylaq al-Rahman, Free Syrian Army, FSA, Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki, ISIL, ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, Jaish al-Hur, Jaish al-Islam, Joseph Daher, Khan Sheikhoun, KPFK, LCCs, Leila al-Shami, Omar al-Aziz, OPCW, Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Rania Khalek, Revolutionary Left Radio, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Vanessa Beeley, Yarmouk