Syrians claim that they are fighting "Zionist terrorists" in Eastern Ghouta. Arabs don't buy this any more.

As the world looks on in horror at the Syrian regime's merciless attacks on people in eastern Ghouta, which has claimed the lives of hundreds and accusations of Syrian use of poison gas, the regime is claiming that they are simply attacking bloodthirsty Zionist terrorists.

A Syrian apologist named Afraa Dagher wrote in conspiracy site Global Research last week:

Over 30,000 terrorists are located in this area which is one of the most dangerous terrorist strongholds in Syria, along with Idlib. Eastern Ghouta’s terrorist enclave presents an even graver danger than those in Idlib due to its proximity to the capital. This has been made all the more worrying as Damascus has always been the penultimate target of the original enemies of Syria, the western alliance and Israel.

Al-Ghouta is now home to factions of radical Islamists whose slogan is: ‘we are coming to slaughter you’. ...

The pain theses terrorists cause to our people everyday, could simply not be the product of a Syrian mind, it could only be a Zionist mind that could conceive of such a systematic plot to kill Syrians and destroy their lives. Syrians realise that a covert “Israeli” hand is behind the attacks on Damascus, a city that is not only Syria’s capital, but whose location is perilously close to the border of the occupier entity. Indeed, some of “Israel’s” covert actions are unmasked as blatant when Israeli missiles are fired at Damascus in tandem with Islamist missiles from al-Ghoutha.

Finally our Syrian Arab Army has to stop these terrorists – these armed terrorists who have every kind of advanced weapon, medicines and equipment that most regular Syrians no longer have. Sometimes these weapons were smuggled to them via the soft Turkish border and at other times via “Israel”.

 All the while, the Godfather of the terrorists, Israel has used its media machine to defend the terrorists saying President Assad decided to end the “rebellion” in al-Ghouta. Israeli media has claimed that these terrorists are “rebels” who are ‘innocently’ bombing our children because those children are in so-called “pro-regime” schools. It’s no wonder, as “Israel” continues to pursue its age old dream of creating a buffer zone in southern Syria controlled by the al-Nusra front terrorist group.

At the same time, western mainstream media rely on the White Helmets, a group aligned with the al-Nusra jihadists of al-Ghoutha telling lies that it is their hospitals which are flowing with blood. These are the same people who staged and propagated the discredited “chemical attack” in al-Ghouta in 2013. Indeed, Israeli media always simultaneously publishes the same fake stories coming  from the pro-jihad White Helmets.

As a Syrian, we in Syria recognize that every missile against our children, every attack against our homeland is an “Israeli one”, whether by “Israeli” planes and missiles or by terrorist groups covertly working with “Israel” in order to pursue “Israel’s” longtime goal of destroying Syria, irrespective of whether such groups call themselves al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, ISIS etc – all the while US coalition airstrikes kill our soldiers and civilians in Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa just as they killed Iraqis in Mosul. This is the reality for a people besieged on all sides.

Syria still thinks that blaming Israel is the way to unify Arabs against their enemies. (Iran still clings to that idea as well.)

But more and more Arabs are publicly acknowledging that this thinking has only contributed to their own problems. Jordan Times has an op-ed that says:

Today, extremists in the Middle East put on explosive vests and blow themselves up in houses of worship of other sects. To end this tragedy, perhaps we should start thinking of our conflicts not as a scourge inflicted upon us by the omnipotent Imperialist-Zionist conspiracies, but as problems of our making, which should be solved through reason.

 The author is Western-educated, of course. This kind of actual thinking needs to be put into Arab schools and universities if any real progress is to be made in the Middle East.

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