It is hard to find words fit for publication to describe the reactions of the axis of Mumanaa – ‘Defiance' – to the fury of Western and Arab countries over Bashar al-Assad's chemical massacre in Ghouta, the agricultural belt surrounding Damascus. Assad and his allies want to exercise the ‘right' to kill Syrians with impunity. They do not see anything that requires responding in the murder of more than 1,500 Syrians, most of whom women and children – just like they see no reason to object to their use of explosive barrels against people queuing outside bakeries, bombing Aleppo with Scuds, and slaughtering the people of Daria, Hula, Jdeidet Artouz, Beida, Banias, and dozens of other Syrian cities and villages. The ‘ugly American' and his European and Arab agents have no right to object to the daily ordinary killing practiced by the Syrian regime against its people, as the advocates of Mumanaa proclaim [...]. The discourse used by the advocates of Mumanaa, a discourse full of hatred, bloodshed, and manifestations of an inferiority complex and excessive machismo, is not strange. Deriding the West, accusing all those who have different views of collaboration and treason, and using all kinds of obscenities, is but proof of a terrible inability to reconcile claims about resistance, patriotism, pan-Arabism, and honor, on the one hand, with the implicit realization that this body of claims is unsustainable without a set of gulags, torture, rape of women and children, and outright lying, on the other hand. Indeed, there is an organic relationship between the former ‘superstructure' and the latter devilish ‘paradigm.' The stark contradictions in the discourse of the advocates of Mumanaa were never worthy of discussions or deconstruction. Indeed, this discourse was nothing more than a superficial amalgamation of the leftovers of dying ideologies. Meanwhile, the true and only purpose of said discourse is to camouflage the fact that minorities – i.e. political, sectarian, and partisan – have taken control over the lives of our peoples using as a pretext a battle that whenever it draws closer, the more absurd it appears. To be sure, is there anything more absurd than accusing the Palestinian people, the primary party concerned with the cause, of treason, and its most representative factions of collaboration? All this is well known yet it is only half of the problem. The second half lies in the phenomena that the Syrian opposition has only aggravated. Two years and a half after the eruption of the uprising for the sake of which the Syrian people have paid hundreds of thousands of dead and injured and millions of refugees, the opposition is still unable to unite and produce a serious leadership. The opposition continues to dither in making a stance on the diseases that thrive in the liberated areas, such as al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The Syrian opposition has still not appreciated the ease with which such impairments can be exploited in the post-9/11 world and its fear of terrorism. This is something that the Assad regime has been able to do with the utmost skill, while some in the opposition volunteered to defend the groups that carry the same kind of exclusionary ideology of the regime, albeit with religious cover. The opposition appears like it was relieved to play the role of absolute victim. But the justice of the cause, the death of children, the displaced women, and the refugee camps are all not enough to formulate a modern discourse on the importance of revolution and the need to end the tragedy initiated by a regime that belongs to the middle ages. The arguments made by the Syrians linking their uprising to the concerns of the modern world are very rare, in contrast to a disturbing abundance of articles and studies that repeat ad nauseam what is known and recognized, namely, that the Assad regime is evil, and the Syrian people are oppressed! The Syrian revolution is today somewhere between these two positions. The verbal division over supporting or opposing the likely U.S. strike, is therefore nothing more than another form of a meaningless approach, in a world teeming with issues and challenges.
