Mick Hartley

After his Corbyn protest, Peter Tatchell spells it out – The Stop the War Coalition is more interested in fighting the West than fighting for Syrians:

The Stop the War Coalition (STWC) is in moral meltdown and in the throes of a rebellion by many of its longtime supporters – including me – over its one-sided Syria protests and its persistent failure to listen to appeals from democratic, anti-war and civil society activists inside Syria. The air strikes by presidents Assad and Putin on apartments, markets, hospitals, schools, mosques, civil rescue teams and aid convoys are war crimes that echo Guernica, Dresden and Cambodia. So where are the protest marches by Britain's leading anti-war organisation?…

The Syrian war has, so far, resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being killed and more than 11 million people being displaced, wounded, or tortured – most of them civilians. A staggering 11.5 per cent of the entire population have suffered injury or death. In what could be seen as a bid to deflect criticism from the Assad tyranny, STWC has portrayed Isis as the main threat to Syrians. This is nonsense.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), Assad’s forces were responsible for 96 per cent of the more than 180,000 civilian deaths, including more than 18,000 children, between March 2011 and November 2015. Isis certainly is murderous but it accounted for only 3 per cent of civilian fatalities, with 3 per cent of civilian deaths due to other military forces, including rebels and the US-led coalition. You’d never know this from reading the blogs on the STWC website.

An updated report last month by the SNHR documented that the civilian death toll since 2011 has now risen to 202,973, and that 188,729 of these fatalities can be attributed to Assad’s forces. This exposé was dismissed by many coalition supporters as “Western propaganda.” Some smeared the SNHR as “CIA stooges” and “agents of imperialism.” The SNHR report also revealed that 86 per cent of the 23,863 children killed, and 88 per cent of the 22,823 women killed in the conflict, were murdered by the regime, which was also responsible for 99 per cent of the 12,836 deaths under torture.

In a survey of Syrian refugees in Germany, conducted by Syrian NGOs under the supervision of the Berlin Social Science Centre, 70 per cent said they fled Syria to escape Assad, not Isis. But the coalition prefers to shout against Isis.

The Russians, who ostensibly came to Syria to fight Isis have, in fact, massacred more civilians than the Isis terrorists. They are in Syria as an army of occupation, propping up a fascist regime; echoing the way the US intervened in Vietnam to sustain the Saigon tyranny. Russia is the new imperialist thug on the block, but the anti-imperialists of STWC look the other way and do nothing….

So why, exactly, is the coalition willing to rally against so many diverse injustices but not against those by the Syrian and Russian regimes?

Because of course, as with so much of what the left's now become, they're only interested in attacking the West. Or the Jews.