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Children are dying of starvation and under bombardment in Moadamiyet al Sham (a.k.a. Moadamiyeh). The Shaam News Network (S.N.N), Radio Free Syria and other organisations and individuals are set to issue a joint press release to international media and humanitarian organisations calling for the immediate lifting of the siege on Moadamiyet al Sham and the urgent delivery of humanitarian aid to the town.
Please join us and include your name and/or the name of your organisation/group as a co-signatory. People are dying.
There is no time to waste.
This is the body of the press release to be issued, which is also being issued in Arabic (this will be posted soon).
For Immediate Release: September 28, 2013
Assad Regime Starving City’s Children To Death Daily
The humanitarian crisis of the century is emerging across Syria, particularly in the city of Moadamiyet al Sham where civilians, including children, are being to death as part of a conscious regime policy, dying on a daily basis.
On a daily basis, activists and citizen journalists are publishing videos and pictures of children starving to death in the city of Moadamiyet al Sham as the world endlessly debates the merits of removing chemical weapons from the Assad regime. As media organizations dedicated to revealing the truth about the Syrian revolution as well as giving a voice to the people living in Syria, we are collectively launching an awareness and action campaign to combat the horrific and deteriorating humanitarian crisis in the city.
For over 300 days now, the city’s residents have had no electricity because regime forces disconnected it as collective punishment for peaceful protests. For over 270 days for the same reason, residents have had no running water in their homes and no food or medicine has entered the city due to the ongoing siege by Assad’s forces. Furthermore, the Assad regime has systematically bombarded the city on a daily basis with warplanes, heavy artillery, tanks, rockets, mortar shells and chemical weapons, escalating the crisis to a situation of unimaginable horror.
Our organizations have created this alliance to provide credible information on the number of children and other residents of Moadamiyet al Shaam who have starved to death as well as to demand that the international community take action to break this inhuman siege before yet another entire city is wiped out by the Assad regime. Please await another press statement in the upcoming days detailing the documented cases of starvation, as well as providing action items to address the crisis. It is true that media organizations typically play the role of disseminating information rather than providing humanitarian relief, but we are convinced that this is the duty of every member of the human race regardless of religion, race, gender or ethnicity.
Sign below, and share your signed post widely (via copying and pasting your signed post to Facebook, along with the link to this original post).
Would you believe it? I certainly would. Hours after giving Assad the green light to kill people by any other means but chemical weapons, and hours after abandoning any plans to strike his regime, Assad kills people using chemical weapons... Again. This time gassing another suburb of his capital.
In the early hours of this morning, chemical weapon strikes were reported across the Jobar district, of a very similar nature to the previous chemical massacre in Ghouta, which claimed the lives of over 1400 people and wounded and injured thousands more. Early footage which has emerged shows people on oxygen machines, clearly injured and fighting for their lives - Ghouta seems to be being repeated all over again, with civilians choking to death, people suffocating on the streets, and other such horrific events.
One of the innocent young victims who's lives were so
tragically taken in the Assad regime's genocidal chemical
weapons attack in Ghouta, August 21st 2013. The victims
the world has abandoned in favor of the genocidal monster
who is slaughtering them.
Coincidentally (there are no coincidences in Assad's genocide) the location of the attacks is an area which government forces have determinedly been trying to enter for some time (the Jobar district of Damascus), without success. heavy fighting has flared for months. Now, it seems that the government has decided to punish the people in Jobar, armed or unarmed, for defying their authority and standing for their freedom.
What is abundantly clear is that Obama's bluff has been called by both Putin and Assad. His talk of a strike was boisterous enough, and seemed to cause Assad a lot of worry - to the extent that he relocated troops and weapons, frantically preparing for the alleged strikes. Many thought that the strikes would actually happen, and the selectively anti-war crew (who fume at the prospect of a possible US intervention, yet have nothing to say in the face of three years of Iranian, Russian, Iraqi, Hezbollah and Russian intervention in Syria) went into a frenzy.
However, during John Kerry's speech, he claimed, in a moment of bravado, that Assad could hand over all his chemical weapons to the international community within a week, to avoid being attacked. Cynically, Putin and Assad called his bluff; Assad agreed to the plan, and Putin volunteered to help him implement it. Obama being Obama, he immediately took them at their word and called off the planned strikes.
What happened, in the words of Lee Smith, was nothing short of an utter surrender to Putin by Obama:
Reset with Russia was originally a strategic priority for the Obama administration because it saw Moscow as the key to getting Iran to come to the negotiating table. Putin, from the White House’s perspective, was destined for the role of junior partner. Now Putin has turned “Reset” upside down. By helping Obama out of a jam with Syria, Putin has made himself the senior partner to whom the White House is now beholden. Accordingly, when Putin proposes the same sort of deal with Iran, with Russia having established its bona fides as an interlocutor for Syria, Obama is almost certain to jump at it.
What’s unclear is whether Obama understands that his foreign policy legacy will be to have ruined the American position in the Middle East, our patrimony of the last seven decades. If the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran signaled weakness, the Russian deal screams surrender.
In a single move, Putin has accurately noticed Obama's well-meaning, dithering nature, capitalised on it, and thus given himself the upper hand in every single key negotiating table in the future - he has made himself seem indispensable to Obama as a partner in negotiating in difficult situations (when his support for these regimes is actually the fundamental problem), and Obama will now, naively and gratefully, jump at the chance to involve him at every point in the future. He will think that he has no choice. In other words, Obama is willingly asking Putin to hamstring him. Putin has effectively undercut the United States' entire foreign policy in the region, with a simple gesture.
Hitler getting his brownshirt thugs to sow chaos on Germany's streets, and then claiming that he was the only solution to restore Germany's stability, immediately comes to mind.
Does nobody else see Putin's disgusting hypocrisy?
What's more, in regard to Assad's plan to give up his chemical weapons in return for not being attacked, Lee accurately summed up Assad's hollow promises in a single paragraph:
The Syrian government has accepted the proposal because they understand it is an empty formalism. As everyone knows, as even all but the most obtuse White House officials must also understand, Assad will not give up his unconventional arsenal because he cannot. The use of chemical weapons in a Damascus suburb August 21 is evidence that, contrary to the regime’s narrative, Assad and his allies are not routing the rebels. The district that was targeted is a strategically significant node that, among other things, is close to the Dumayr airstrip where the regime is supplied with direct flights from Iran. The rebels had held the territory for over a year, thwarting repeated attempts by Assad’s forces to retake it. Presumably, Assad calculated that given the importance of the area it was worth testing Obama’s red line to take it. Without chemical weapons, Assad fears he may lose the war.
Obama is the type of man, and leader, who believes that everyone shares his fundamental beliefs in peace, freedom, security and stability. He believes they speak his language, and will gladly engage with him. In his own way, Obama wants to believe that Assad is somehow terribly misguided and will see reason.
More young victims of the August 2013 Ghouta attacks. This is the regime
which Obama has given the green light to. It can kill civilians in any way it
likes, but chemical weapons are a red line. Why? Because they make him look
bad. It really is that simple.
His administration's plan is to somehow remove Assad the figurehead, and keep the brutal, murderous, totalitarian regime which he relies upon, under the facade of a "transitional government". Why? Because this regime is the best regime for safeguarding the interests of the US (which has long renditioned prisoners for torture in Syria, during the war on terror) and Israel, which has, ironically, long had its borders guarded by Assad. His regime is the devil they both know, and the US government would no doubt agree to drop Assad if they could keep the men behind him in place. What is in the interests of Israel, is in the interests of the United States. They worry more about chemical weapons falling into the hands of a minority of extremists with limited means, than they are about a genocidal regime (which kills hundreds of thousands of its own citizens) keeping them. Strange, isn't it?
Right now, Obama may as well turn over the keys of the White House to Vlad. The leader of the free world is seemingly too plodding and indecisive to lead anything, and somehow desperately feels the need to have the backing of a totalitarian dictator (who's ironically on the side of the dictatorship Obama claims to be against) before he will do anything. He simply cannot see that Putin wants to protect Assad to safeguard Russia's interests (a naval base in Tartous and millions in arms deals), and so has no interest in working with him, and every interest in hindering him. He seemingly also cannot see that Assad is simply out to protect Assad and *brutal* family, and he will do it at any cost - even if it means destroying the entire nation, so he can be president of a bombed-out shell that was once a beautiful nation.
People of all ages (400 of them children) killed in the Assad
regime's chemical massacre in Ghouta, August 2013. Some
conspiracy theorists would have you believe that these people
were gassed by the FSA (many of them are FSA family members)
to put the blame on Assad and give the US an excuse to
intervene - they forget that the US is coming up with every
excuse possible NOT to intervene, and isn't exactly unfriendly
with the Assad regime.
When will he realise that Assad, Putin and their ilk don't give a toss for diplomacy and live by the law of the jungle? Obama respects words, signatures on pieces of paper, treaties, and rhetoric, albeit naively. The only thing that totalitarian basket-cases like Assad, Putin and dictators the world over respect is the use of force, and actions - not words. Obama's extensive talking has enabled Assad to kill, maim and terrorise millions - with every false promise from the (alleged) leader of the free world, Assad becomes that little bit bolder.
More children massacred by the regime's brutal chemical
massacre in Ghouta, August 21st 2013.
People ask why he risks using those weapons when he is "winning" the "war"? I was in Syria. I saw his crimes, and stayed with the revolutionaries there. The answer is that he is not winning the GENOCIDE at all - in fact, the rumor that he is winning is based on the fact that he re-took a small town on the Lebanese border called Qusayr... It took him over a month and the losses of hundreds of his men, and the intervention of thousands of Hezbollah terrorists from Lebanon just for him to take back a single town, too small to be called a city. Not really winning, is it?
He risks using the weapons because he knows that nobody will stop him, and that Obama is foolish enough to carry on talking, but will always balk at the thought of actually acting on what he says.
His message is also so confusing, that the American people, already ill-informed, have gone off the idea of a strike even more (not that it will probably happen now) - they know Obama wants to intervene, but he doesn't want to use boots on the ground, but he does want to strike the regime, but only to stop the use of chemical weapons, not end the regime (murder by bullets, bombs, napalm, phosphorous, artillery and jets bombing civilian areas are apparently all alright, however).
Assad, Putin and Obama are playing geopolitical chess games to keep the Assad regime in power. Everyone has a reason to keep him on his throne.Apart from Syrian people themselves. They are the only losers in this game.
Please, do not be inactive. Contact your government representatives (either at their office or via email), contact the media and humanitarian organisations), tweet extensively with hashtags (such as #Syria or #Assad, #Jobar, etc), write articles and post them on Twitter and Facebook, etc. It may not seem like much, but it is something to help, and lots of awareness can be raised. Maybe someone influential could even be encouraged to take greater steps towards intervening to end this genocide by the Assad regime.
Ben Allinson-Davies is a worker for Radio Free Syria, blogger, and film-maker, who spent over a week in Syria with the people there, including rebel forces. He is currently working on a documentary, with the aim of raising money for people affected by the genocide.
For well over two and a half years, there has been a war in Syria. Some will call it a Civil War, and yet… these same people who call it a civil war (despite having been repeatedly corrected by fighters on the ground that it is an Intifada, an uprising and a revolution) are now finally taking to the streets to chant, “No War – Hands off Syria” as if it is currently waiting for a war to start and are simply being targeted by the West for imperial expansionism. A variant on the theme, they shout, “Stop the War” and again, they don’t mean to in any way address the bombing that has destroyed most of Syria, they mean the air strikes that a very few Western leaders are threatening to do to a very limited amount of targets inside Syria. Why on earth would the Western leaders do something like this when for two and a half years they have not done anything more severe than “deplore” the use of barrel bombs and carpet bombing of residential areas? Because they had to in some way establish a point of no return and it randomly fell on the use of Chemical Weapons.
It is beyond all reasonable doubt that the Syrian regime (which had admitted they possessed these weapons and have the only means to have implemented their use on a massive scale this August, exposing 15,000 people, including the elderly, women and children, to lethal nerve gas while in their beds) used Sarin Gas against its own people. Many more details about its acquisition will come out in the future, but at the current moment, over 1,500 have succumbed to it immediately (including hundreds of infants and children) and thousands more who have been exposed have had to deal with its very dangerous effects. So, I would think that any human being would be against the use of this weapon, considering it to be an atrocity that should not be ignored or even in the slightest way defended.
But what has instead happened? After the international news agencies, refusing to support the revolution also due to the fear that the western public has of any change of regime in the Arab world and an allergy to revolutions in general, finally displayed a fragment of the visual evidence of people suffocating to their deaths, their bodies writhing in pain or struck by uncontrollable spasms, the solidarity world started to move. But how did it happen that instead of condemning the atrocity, they are rallying around the Syrian regime and demanding the contradictory “no war” and “stop the war”. It seems that the western solidarity industry (yes, that part where people make a living as “activists”) again has been working overtime to keep its overwhelmingly white, male, western and older pundits on their pedestals. From these pedestals, they lament of the terrible hypocrisy of the very West (where most of them thrive and are “alternative media stars”. (Hint: the Syrian people sure have very little use for them, if they even know who they are).
The Western activists who have not opened their mouths in support of the popular revolution that they have pretended to have supported for the Palestinians but when push comes to shove, even over 1,600 Palestinians murdered by the Assad regime and tens of thousands sent into further exile, have been silent and uncaring, are disgusted by the hypocrisy of their own leaders. This is the argument they use: The West didn’t come in and in any way strike those who were using chemical weapons against the Palestinians, so the West is comprised of freedom hating hypocrites. And this position begs the question: does this mean that if the US and the West had acted in this way for Palestine, it would not have been intervention, but something else instead? And if it is something else, what would they classify it as? Could it be exactly what the Syrians who are besieged in many parts of Syria and subject to ethnic cleansing and massacres have been begging for? This seemingly contradictory stance (intervention for Palestine is considered as “good”, intervention for Syria is considered as “evil”) is at the core of what I will call “the Waffle Syndrome”. Waffling on a position and changing it according to a specific point of view fuelled not by a revolutionary vision of liberation and freedom, but by an ideological position of “anti-west” activism and money to be made in a cause that has long ago entered into the discourse thanks to the hard work of many activists (in primis Palestinians and Arabs, with the support of some Westerners who run the gamut from pan-arabists to anarchists, Marxists and anti-imperialists).
If the sudden interest in the death of Syrians (which of course, if you follow the discourse of these pundits, will only start when NATO bombs the living daylights out of Syria, so the “humanitarian” thing to do is to wash “our dirty hands that have always been evil” of it and stay out now… in stark contrast with the calls to support the Intifada and Arabs that were part of the discourse until the Arab Spring actually happened!) is going to do anything for Arab-Western relations, it is going to heighten the distrust not only of the West, which never does what it says it will, or which uses the pain of other people as a means to get involved in international disputes, but it is going to bring the level of hatred for western ACTIVISTS who are showing now, like never before, that they have not got a grasp on even the very basic and core ideals of revolution or struggles to liberate oneself from an oppressor.
When push comes to shove, when the most widely condemned atrocities are added to atrocities that started from shooting peaceful protesters and arbitrary arrest and torture of civilian political opposition and even of children, leading up to the absolute destruction of most of Syria where the majority live (leaving the minority who sustain the bombing of their own country by their own leader unscathed because it maintains their privilege- similar to the theory of “if you want an omelette, you have to break a few eggs” of imperialist memory) it is clear that the bulk of the activists stand by the perpetrator of the crimes and against the common people, the refugees and the unarmed. They are following the hasbara (Israeli propaganda that knows it is propaganda and a narrative) tricks used against the Palestinians, accusing them of using their homes and people as human shields for terrorists. It is a new version of hasbara, but applied to the Syrian people: claiming to be with the Syrian people but selectively ignoring any crimes against them except for the few that the Syrian regime and propaganda machine want them to be scandalised by, specifically if they are backed by flags with Islamic or Islamist slogans. The problem is not that Assad is bombing the Syrian country into oblivion and driving one quarter of its population into refugee status. The problem is that there are evil foreign agents who will impose their will on Syria. They are imperialists and Islamists, and in a three-card-shuffle, these two diametrically opposed entities are scratching one another’s back, as if they have the same goal and interests. As far as the Wafflers are concerned, they are the same, and they use the same reactionary rhetoric that the hasbarists use against the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
But what is worse than the lack of interest of the “activists” and their support of the regime “because the alternative is worse FOR THE SYRIANS”, if you follow their rhetoric? It is the hypocrisy they have regarding the very issue of intervention and the role of the international community.
They have not seemed to have ever taken the streets or set the internet on fire with their calls against intervention in Syria before. They seem to ignore that for years there has been foreign intervention in Syria, that Russian weapons and experts, troops from Iran and Hezbollah, have been waging the war already, fuelling it and at times even bringing their own soldiers home in flag draped boxes. Are they unaware that Russian intervention has also used the tool to advance their personal agenda and interests, the tool that every single one of us for years had believed was the “original sin”: the UN Veto of a resolution condemning an act of war or imposing a restriction on intervention. It seems that the arms embargo against the revolutionary Free Syrian Army has been in force while there has been no such restriction in arming the regime. If it is a civil war, it is indeed alimented with great gusto by the Russians by means of the unethical tool of their power to impose their will by means of a veto. It is this waffling and hypocrisy that will deepen the gulf of “misunderstanding” between the people of the Arab world and the “caring” West, which is represented by impotent leaders or reactionary, counter-revolutionary activists who are expert navel-gazers.
PLEASE don’t tell the Syrians things will get bad once they start getting bombed. They might think you are insane.
Because, when it comes down to it, the counter-revolutionaries are going to scream bloody murder when a protester in Berkeley gets pepper spray in her eyes by the cops and at the same time defend the ruler in a regime where rule of law and democracy has never been in force, there is some heavy-duty orientalism/superior thinking going on. Evidently, a single protester in the USA is worth more, or the belief that Americans deserve full rule of law and justice but Syrians just must persevere because they have to resist “Western Imperialism” is rife. And why is this idea so common? Because (as usual) the Western activists have a great deal of trouble accepting that maybe they don’t know better than “the other” what’s better for them. They impose their fears on them, their ideology is naturally “revolutionary” but it does nothing in the slightest to back the revolution, and in fact, uses the terminology that the reactionary right/hasbarists have been using against the Palestinians for decades. They say that they would really support the Syrians, but they “know” that the Islamists are worse than Assad. How do they know this? Because they watch Press TV (run by an Islamic Theocratic state that incidentally finances Assad’s regime because it is holding back the majority rule in Syria, which would likely be democratic or in the lack of that, Sunni dominated) and they read who I have been referring to for years as the “fat white male western pundits”.
For years, I have managed and run various sites for Arab freedom causes, and for years, I have placed at the top of those sites articles and commentary written by Arabs. I believe that if you are able to serve a cause, the first task is to listen, then if you can, amplify the voice of the oppressed. But, while the names I published and translated on my site were overwhelmingly Arab, the names getting the big circulation on the web and doing the well-paid speaking tours were non-Arab, many times they were actually Israelis (ostensibly speaking “for” the Palestinians), almost all the time they were male, the educated élite of punditry and most of them were at least a generation older than those who were marching in the streets for their own rights. It was a rare thing to see the actual protagonists saying, “this is what I think, this is what I want, this is what I want from you”.
All of that has changed so much recently. There is a vast range of articles written by Syrians about their situation, by Palestinians about their situation as “double refugees” and by Arabs around the world who want to express solidarity with those of their language/culture and often religious affiliation. More than that, any week of the year, you can see the posters from the marches INSIDE Syria. Yes. After two and a half years, they are still marching in their streets and expressing what they want. They are not props set up by anyone, they are not the pawns of someone else’s interests, they are THOSE WE ARE SUPPOSED TO LISTEN TO AND EXPRESS SOLIDARITY WITH. What are they saying? Are they begging for the world to ignore them and let them sort it out on their own? No. In fact they are saying what they have been saying since the beginning, “if you don’t help us, we will be killed”.
Can the message get any clearer?
Are you prepared to understand what kind of help they have been begging for from the start? They have been first of all asking for protection from the bombs. That means that those who are in the streets in the West have ignored for two and a half years that an entire population has been bombed night and day and that hundreds of thousands of them have lost everything they had. How could the “No War” people have missed this? Oh, that’s right, they have been listening only to the well-paid, popular, fat, white, western guys who get money from Press TV or Al Manar to tell them what is happening in Syria. They don’t actually have to LISTEN to Syrians or watch their videos that they load with constancy despite the difficulties, because they WANT us to know and to do something. They have been asking for the lifting of the arms embargo against the Free Syrian Army, which they recognise as their liberation force. The first commander of the FSA said (two years ago) that if the FSA were armed adequately, they would finish the revolution in a matter of weeks with no direct foreign intervention. He also said that if this did not happen, there would be other forces around who would not wait to form militias and enter into Syria, without the same revolutionary goals, and definitely not with an interest in a Syria for all of its people, even those who currently support Assad.
I suppose the most ironic part of the waffling hypocritical “activism” world that woke up now to “stop a war” that they aren’t even sure exists or not, and if it does, what kind of war it is, is that they claim to be anti-Zionist, but when for the first time a true threat to the Zionist state has been uttered by the regime and some of its supporters (Iran and Hezbollah) as the Syrian regime Army Generals warned “in case of attacks on Syria, ‘Israel will burn’ and that if Syria weakens, ‘certain irresponsible groups’ will be formed that would endanger Israel,” they don’t seem to understand the actual regional dynamics – or else they really don’t want anything to threaten Israel, whose own “security” has always trumped Arab rights and Arab lives.
Now, here is the core of the hypocrisy. Evidently, a Syria that accepts the provocations of Israel without responding, that accepts for decades the occupation of Syrian soil and helps to actually displace once again more Palestinians and to engage in a “scorched earth” policy with regard to what is supposed to be a threat to Israel (Syria itself), is considered as “resistant”. It is considered as an idea that is beyond the pale to bring Israel into any kind of conflict, and if there is such a thing, it can only be considered “irresponsible”. Israel has got to be left alone, not even a slap on the wrist, the Syrian regime is the one that sees to their protection, they are their border guardian not only throughout the decades, but more than ever now that Syria might actually lose Assad as its leader.
The expansion of the conflict is not what anyone wants, and in fact, Assad has seen to it to be the exact party not only to maintain the Israeli status quo, but to also keep any kind of anti-west or anti-pluralism elements at arm’s reach. If nothing else, this statement alone shows the fundamental flaw of the reasoning of at least a portion of the “solidarity activists against the war”. Now, not only will they be used to enhance the totalitarian, Arab-hating and Islamophobic forces in the area, but they will be given the legitimacy that they don’t get from their own people. Once again, Imperialism Wins! The Westerners know BETTER! And there is an important lesson to be learned, and repeated by any kind of “oriental despot”: massacre your own people in their sleep and the “solidarity” champions will make a hero of you.
By Mary Rizzo, an Italian-American activist and fellow member of Radio Free Syria.
