The following is an excerpt from a report which appeared today courtesy of Reuters:
“Tens of thousands of Syrians demonstrated in central Damascus on Wednesday in show of support for President Bashar al-Assad, who is battling a six-month uprising against his rule in which the United Nations says 2,900 people have been killed.
“America, out, out, Syria will stay free,” chanted the crowd, many of them carrying pictures of Assad and Syrian flags. They also shouted slogans warning the European Union not to intervene in their country.”God, Syria and Bashar,” they sang.
State television described the government-backed rally as a “million-strong march … supporting national independence and rejecting foreign intervention.”
At the start of the demonstration a man holding the flags of Russia and China — which both vetoed a European-drafted resolution against Syria at the United Nations last week — flew over the crowd, suspended from a helicopter by rope.”
The time has come for those of us in the anti-imperialist movement to make sure that the lackey’s who lead the anti-war movement here in Britain are not allowed “to do a Libya”. The Syrian opposition has now formed a National Council, based in Istanbul. This body, together with the British-promoted Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, is now, in the wake of events in Libya, calling more stridently for NATO military intervention. Just as with the Benghazi contras in their first days, they had initially, and hypocritically, claimed to be opposed to foreign intervention, just long enough to suck in a few gullible people, and allow some of the pieces of the imperialist jigsaw to be fitted together. Now these traitors to their nation and people are loudly calling for the imposition of a ‘no fly zone’, the very mechanism that was cynically abused to launch a genocidal war against the people of Libya.
Clearly the threat to Syria is now grave. However, the Syrian government retains strong and broad support from the popular masses. It also has powerful regional support, for example from Iran, from Hizbullah in Lebanon and from the forces led by Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq. As for NATO, any celebrations are premature, as the fire of Libyan resistance will, without doubt, shortly be burning beneath their feet more fiercely than ever.
Regrettably, one place from which neither the Syrian nor the Libyan people can expect any support is from the so-called leaders of Britain’s Stop the War Coalition, whose antics have long since passed from the cowardly to the treacherous. The main page of Stop the War’s website contains not a single reference to Syria. Perhaps, given their role over Libya, it is just as well. A new anti-imperialist and anti-war movement needs to be built in Britain, one that stands foursquare for the defeat of imperialism and for the victory of all those forces fighting against it.
Red Youth and the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) pledge every possible effort to build such a movement.
Hands off Syria!
Victory to Assad!