Harry's Place

Speaking of Syria, Eliyahu Kamisher, a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, recently entered Syria and spent a week meeting opponents of the Assad regime, both secular and Islamist.
Writing at The Times of Israel, he makes the case that supporting the secular opposition (in its struggle against both the regime and the Islamists) is not [...]

The state-controlled Syria Times reports:

The Syrian President Bashar al-Assad cannot be described as a President of the Syrian State only, but he is a great leader for Syria, an Arab leader and a national hero as well.
This comes because he has qualifications that make others unqualified enough to assume the power of the Syrian presidency. [...]

Guest post by DaveM
With the Syrian uprising/conflict entering its third year, with an estimated 70,000 killed and over four million displaced, above and beyond the usual grotesqueness things are starting to get a bit weird.
Both Al Arabiya (here in English) and Al Jazeera (here in Arabic) reported that Syrian State TV broadcast the Sunni Jihadist/Al [...]

This is a cross-post by Shiraz Maher
The original defiance came without malice or forethought. A group of barely pubescent schoolchildren, buoyed by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, bought a can of spray paint. ‘The people want the downfall of the regime,’ they scrawled on the school wall, mimicking the popular slogan of protesters in [...]

First, via UN Watch’s email briefings, here is a report which is more surreal than surprising: 
GENEVA, March 13 - At the UN Human Rights Council on Friday, Syria accused Israel of violating human rights of children in the Golan, while diplomats met in another chamber on the same day to discuss a Syrian-drafted resolution, to be adopted [...]

It was two years ago today that we published our first post about the demonstrations that marked the beginning of the uprising in Syria against Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime.
Of course the regime was quick to blame it all on you-know-who.
After more than 70,000 deaths, it may be hard to recall that the uprising began non-violently [...]

A young boy in Aleppo, Syria, describes the destruction of his neighborhood and the deaths of his relatives (“we found my grandma in four pieces”) from a scud missile attack by the forces of President Assad.

Note how he struggles not to cry. (If it was propaganda he probably would have been encouraged to cry.)
As The [...]

Guest post by DaveM
“All the warfare is based on deception, the battle is won by catching enemy off guards.”
–Sun Tzu
“In war, truth is the first casualty.”
–Aeschylus
On the 16 February Hizbullah held a ceremony in Beirut honouring its “martyred leaders”– namely Sayyed Abbas Al-Mousawi, Sheikh Ragheb Harb, and Hajj Imad Moghniyeh. It was the usual hour-long [...]

Hojjat al-Islam Mehdi Taeb, a senior Iranian cleric and head of the effort to defeat the “soft war” against the Islamic Republic, has declared Syria to be “the 35th province [of Iran] and a strategic province for us.”
Taeb added: “[I]f we lose Syria, we cannot keep Tehran.”
This is a remarkably candid admission. Iran’s rulers clearly [...]

I suppose that’s what the “anti-imperialists” of the Left and the isolationists of the Right would call the brave people of the small and devastated town in northwestern Syria who have produced some of the most powerful and imaginative banners of the Syrian uprising.

While proclaiming their defiance of their own government, the people of [...]