Making new friends. The right wingers who love Assad
by digby
I don’t know how relevant this is, but I didn’t know about it and I thought it was quite interesting:
[N]ow pro-Assad media outlets have found a new way to influence the American debate. Assad supporters’ claims have repeatedly been republished unquestioningly by right-wing commentators in the United States, who share their hostility toward both Sunni Islamists and the Obama administration. It’s a strange alliance between American conservatives and a regime that was one of America’s first designated state sponsors of terror, and continues to work closely with Iran and Hezbollah.
“There is evidence — mounting evidence — that the rebels in Syria did indeed frame Assad for the chemical attack,” conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh told his audience on Sept. 3. “But not only that, but Obama, the regime, may have been complicit in it. Mounting evidence that the White House knew and possibly helped plan the Syrian chemical weapon attack by the opposition!”
Limbaugh’s cited an article by Yossef Bodansky on Global Research, a conspiracy website that has advanced a pro-Assad message during the current crisis. “How can the Obama administration continue to support and seek to empower the opposition which had just intentionally killed some 1,300 innocent civilians?” Bodansky asked.
[…]
Right-wing American partisans have not been shy about simply copy-and-pasting claims made in pro-Assad media outlets when it suits their interests. For example, the website Jihad Watch, which is run by leading Islamophobe Robert Spencer, repeated a claim by the Arabic-language al-Hadath that Syrian rebels attacking the Syrian town of Maaloula “terrorized the Christians, threatening to be avenged on them after the triumph of the revolution.”
[…]
Other stories in such publications, of course, would never see the light of day in the U.S. media. Al-Hadath, for example, features a section dedicated to news about Israel titled “Know Your Enemy” – a strange match for the American right-wing, to say the least.
As I said, I don’t know that this means much except that it points out the complexity of the situation and how inadequate American political philosophy is to understand it.
What do you do when “good guys” vs “bad guys” doesn’t apply (or there’s no way to adequately define what that might mean?) I’d guess working for a ceasefire and then working the problem one step at a time is the only way to approach it. More violence certainly isn’t going to help.
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