1 min read
Hundreds gunned down in the streets. Jails packed to overflowing. A ruthless dictatorship brutalising its own people in order to cling on to power. As a description of recent events in Bashar Assad's Syria, you'd be hard pushed to paint a clearer picture.
But let's be fair, there are always two sides to a story and we must not rush to judgment. Enter Alastair Crooke, the one time MI6 spymaster who, in distinctly un-Bond-like fashion, converted to Islamism and is now director of the pro-Hizbollah outfit called Conflicts Forum which proudly boasts that it is "Listening to political Islam, recognising resistance."
Crooke may well be listening to political Islam, but he's hardly recognising resistance. Here's how he characterised the recent protests in Syria in the web version of Foreign Policy magazine:
"The protest movement in Daraa so far has failed to take root in the cities. The number of anti-demonstrators that turned out in Damascus, Aleppo, and Hama, three of Syria's four largest cities, numbered in the hundreds and not the thousands, while the pro-demonstrations in those cities were massive."
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