After Assad: Ireland’s Role in Fueling Syria’s New Islamist Wave

The downfall of the al-Assad regime is being treated as a Syrian Berlin Wall moment within Irish diplomatic circles as evidenced by upbeat statements by An Taoiseach and similar signaling by the DFA.

Away from traditional Irish foreign policy stomping grounds in Lebanon and East Africa Dublin has played a small but measurable role in the thirteen-year-long slog of a conflict such as extending a line of funding to the Islamist-controlled Bab al-Hawa crossing.

From the hawkish Barry Andrews MEP who vocally pushed for a no-fly-zone in support of rebel forces during his tenure at GAOL to the mingling of Irish Trotslyists with Sunni militants, contrary to our national interest, Ireland has pushed and pushed for the demise of Baathism in Syria.

Increasingly subsumed to the backroom writ of the Democratic wing of the U.S. foreign policy establishment Syria has been ground zero in the weaponisation of Irish humanitarian networks similar to our recent blunders in Ethiopia and the backing of a doomed rebellion to the vexation of our traditional partners in Addis Ababa.

While Ireland has been spared the brunt of the Syrian exodus unlike Germany (a ballpark 2,500 Syrian refugees have been settled into the Republic) the conflict has also been a test run for semi-covet Islamic civil society networks operating in the orbit of Clonskeagh mosque.

Similarly, Cork’s Islamic Cultural Center is financed by the same Qatari coffers that have backed terrorism in the Levant for over a decade, which is a testament to the interwoven nature of Gulf money and Sunni extremism.

While it can be argued with some effect that the al-Assad regime had driven itself into the ground after decades of despotism neither Ireland, Europe nor Syria itself will likely benefit from the sectarian blackhole that will certainly emerge in the wreckage of the Baathist order.

A consequence of the neutering of Iran and Hezbollah and a geopolitical necessity to open a new front against Putinism in the Middle East, Assad is a victim of his tyranny as much as the billions thrown at him by a variety of enemy capitals from Ankara to Tel Aviv.

It’s back to the future season this Christmas with blowback expected to the citizenry and asylum departments of Europe following the collapse of one of the Arab world’s last semi-secular governments in Damascus.

While Ireland remains a relative backwater for state-funded Islamic extremism, at least in public, the two decades since the War on Terror commenced illustrates time and time and again how our lack of a security infrastructure.

Contrary to the jubilant tweeting from Iveagh House and the Department of Taoiseach Ireland’s interests lie with a safe, stable, and secular Syria and the wider Levant, something that we have lobbied specifically against with a foreign policy nexus increasingly captured by outside powers.

There is no positive spin for Ireland nor Europe in the days after the implosion of the Assad dynasty in Damascus with 13 years of dodgy aid work and blind negligence to the evolving problem of Islamism paving the way for another chapter of asylum madness.

rogue regime technocrat

@hamiolhs

American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s far-right Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal…..

Before the U.S.-Israel campaign to overthrow Assad began in earnest in 2011, Syria was a functioning, growing middle-income country……

In the immediate two days following the collapse of the government, Israel conducted about 480 strikes across Syria, and completely destroyed the Syrian fleet in Latakia.

Pursuing his expansionist agenda, Prime Minister Netanyahu illegally claimed control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and declared that the Golan Heights will be a part of the State of Israel “for eternity.”….

Jeffrey Sachs: How the US and Israel Destroyed Syria and Called It Peace

The violence of for-profit health care’s megastructure can only be overcome through collective resistance campaigns………… ..

… Massive Profits and CEO Pay
UnitedHealth Group is a massively profitable corporation.

From 2021 to 2023 it took in nearly $1 trillion in revenue and nearly $60 billion in profits.

Last quarter it generated over $100 billion in revenue and $6 billion in profits. It ranks fourth on the Fortune 500 list of top U.S. companies…………..

…..UnitedHealth and other health insurance companies are part of a larger apparatus of corporate rule that must be combated through collective action focused on building the power needed to achieve systemic change.

To take on this megastructure, we will have to build our own counterstructures, like grassroots and labor single-payer campaigns, debtor organizations, trade unions and tenant groups, and engage in confrontational political efforts and general strike

It’s clear we are living in a period of rising anti-systemic feelings and widespread anger at corporate profiteering over every aspect of our lives, from health care to housing to work.

The time is ripe for building the collective organizations and capacities we need to challenge the structures that reward and enable corporate CEOs’ abuses.

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Behind UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Is a Larger System of Corporate Rule