While Bashar al-Assad’s brutal conduct of his war to regain control of Syria has turned much of Arab public opinion against him, many devotees of the Palestinian cause have either ignored his behavior or rushed to his defense. The resulting schism came to a head when Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the venomous anti-Israel website Electronic Intifada, reacted with scornful indifference to a picture of a wounded Syrian child. Jamie Palmer writes:
Given the reckless cynicism with which Electronic Intifada has used images of dead children [for political purposes, Abunimah’s] hypocrisy was resonant. Beneath his irritation and indignation, there seemed to lurk a certain resentment that Syrians were usurping the Palestinians’ rightful claim to be the world’s most pressing human-rights emergency.
As the row escalated, the left-wing blogosphere divided. Other writers at Electronic Intifada, Salon, and [the hard-left website] AlterNet who chimed in to support Abunimah’s opposition to a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone in Syria suddenly found their mailboxes and Twitter accounts filling up with furious accusations of treachery. . . . Then [the notorious anti-Semite] Max Blumenthal inflamed the row still further with an endlessly long two-part “exposé” of the Syrian opposition.
In part one, Blumenthal described a network of sinister groups, anonymous donors, wealthy exiles, government agencies, media dupes, and other interested parties conspiring to manipulate Western public opinion. . . . It was the usual boilerplate conspiracy theory, purporting to reveal that things are not as they appear, heavy on insinuation and ominous atmospherics, light on rigor and substance, and all informed by a generally adolescent misanthropy.
But in part two, Blumenthal sought to discredit the [Syrian] White Helmets, a volunteer group of citizen first-responders who risk death to rescue survivors of aerial bombardment. . . .
[It’s worth pointing out that] the anti-imperialist left’s position on Syria has been perfectly consistent with its previous history. During the cold war, the New Left considered capitalist democracy nothing more than a new kind of fascism disguised as freedom, while Zionism—in keeping with the Soviet anti-imperialist line—was a Western colonialist plot. Any regime, no matter how backward or barbaric, which opposed this twin threat was rewarded with reflexive sympathy, especially (but not exclusively) if that regime happened to be left-wing.
Read more on Tower: http://www.thetower.org/article/the-pro-palestinian-left-is-tearing-itself-apart-over-syria/