Many sources, including official sources, are now openly admitting Britain’s key but clandestine role in the regime-change war that deliberately destroyed Syria and actively worked with terr’rist groups to achieve that goal. This was of course strenuously denied at the time.
This comes as no surprise to me.
During my visits to Syria during the war as a guest of local Christian communities to try and understand the complex realities of the country and undertake a study of Christian-Muslim relations in the country (now published by Routledge), and when I was sharing publicly that the realities on the ground were much more nuanced and very different to what the British media was portraying, I was contacted at various times by figures within the foreign office, the British Embassy in Beirut, even a senior figure within the Israeli military (who, in a call that shocked me at the time, not only as good as admitted that they were supporting Al Q’da but even said that IS ‘may not be what you think they are’).
I was also invited to a clandestine meeting with senior Muslim Brotherhood figures at a hotel in London who told me with absolute confidence that what has happened now would happen, and that I should stop what I was doing. There was considerable evidence that my phone was being tapped and then there began a vicious media campaign, led by ‘The Times’, aimed at completely discrediting, twisting and misrepresenting my work, visits and statements.
Others who challenged the prevailing narrative and the war that was destroying the country were vilified in the same way. Those of us who experienced this treatment had no doubt that Britain was deeply involved from the start and had seen and heard evidence on the ground, but any suggestion of it in Britain was denied and ridiculed. (Sadly, some in Syria even thought, rather ironically but perhaps not surprisingly, that I was part of that British intervention and nearly got me arrested there!)
It is past history now, but as usual, this British collusion has helped destroy a nation, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and catastrophically alter a delicate, diverse, plural, cultural and religious landscape that had mostly peacefully existed for centuries.
… And now, our decades of unwavering support for the State of Israel has helped enable a horrific genocide in Gaza and an ongoing ethnic-cleansing in Palestine.
Will we ever learn from history? Or do selfish economic and political ‘interests’ always prevail over humanity, justice and international law?
