The patriotic women and children of Syria must be helped, until the tide turns, which it will, if those of us who remain, learn the lessons and keep the faith.
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
“Indians!” Sitting Bull shouted. “There are no Indians left but me!” ~ Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West.
As you unpack your Cowboy and Indian set this Christmas morning, cast your mind back to the December 29, 1890 massacre of the Lakota people by the war criminals of the United States Army at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.
Now fast forward to modern Syria, whose liberators took Syrian women captive because they worked in a post office, selling postage stamps which probably had President Assad’s picture or, heaven help us, the flag of the heroic Syrian Arab Republic emblazoned on them. Simple women facing God knows what horrific fate because they were trying to survive the multiple Wounded Knees the Americans and their legions of lapdogs imposed on them and theirs.
Those women epitomise the dignity and bravery of those Syrian women, who endured and who I was blessed to meet on the very many occasions I stood amongst them. There are, for those who do not know, two forms of bravery. There is the pumped-up American Rambo bravery, which rampages around the world, putting to the sword anyone who looks at them askew. And there is the quieter and nobler bravery we see in the women of Syria and Palestine, who have had to not only suffer all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but to survive them so that future generations can breathe freedom and enjoy lives worth living.
I will start with four women, two Shia, one Latin Catholic and one Sunni I can name as they are either dead or no longer in Syria. These are the only good and relevant women I can name, as the others remain in Syria and could get their throats slit whenever their new masters felt like it.
Zeinab al Saffar is a pint-sized Lebanese journalist, who not only did the work of Titans on behalf of Syria’s women, but had to put up with the behaviour of oafish Irish showboaters in the process. Heaven help her and her South Lebanese village as Israel’s demolition crews destroy the little her neighbours had. Zeinab, like many Shias, is named after the Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter, a not inconsequential point as Damascus’ Sayyida Zaynad Mosque, which reputedly contains the mortal remains of Mohammad’s granddaughter, is a major place of pilgrimage, something Syria’s new rulers will no doubt end when they over run it.
When I asked a secular Sunni friend of mine knowledgeable in such things what was the security at the shrine like before NATO set their cannibals on Syria, she told me security had only been token, before NATO’s finest relentlessly targeted it with their never ending series of suicide car bombs.
The relevance of that to delicate Western palates like ours is that, though scum like Boris Johnson will visit such places and take selfies there, it means no more to them than does the toilet paper they wipe their fat backsides with. I mention Bojo, the church burning Zelensky’s friend, as that sleaze bag said the ruins of Palmyra, where reigned the Syrian warrior Queen Zenobia, could be rebuilt in virtual space for him and his fellow wasters to fawn over.
But that is like saying that Zion’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the holiest site in all of Christendom, which was home to the crucifixion and entombment of our Lord Jesus, could be recreated in Margate or some other run-down English holiday town. Although the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a global shrine, it is also a local one for the tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians, who cannot visit that church where their ancestors were baptised, confirmed and married for the last two thousand years. Syria’s Palmyra and Damascus’ Sayyida Zaynad Mosque are not dissimilar; they represent something grander and holier charlatans like Bojo and that Zelensky swamp creature cannot even begin to imagine, as such Hollow Men have no souls.
Not so prominent Tunisian journalist and former Al Jazeera anchor woman Kaouthar Bachraoui, who was very helpful to me, and who had the profoundest insights into the Arab psyche I could not hope to glean in a thousand years. Although Major General Maher Al-Assad and other prominent Syrian leaders begged for audiences with her, I am very appreciative both for the time she gave me and for the confirmation that Arab women are intellectual and humanitarian powerhouses.
Although I single out Kaouthar and Zeinab, I cannot name the hundreds of other Syrian Shia, Sunni, Christian, Armenian and Alawi women who inspired me, because their life hangs in the balance.
Not that all Syria’s countless heroes were Arabs. I am thinking in particular of the late Sr Brigid Doody, the Damascus-based Irish Salesian nun, who stayed at her post during a decade of non-stop rebel bombardment. Check out this short video of me interviewing her, and note that I quite rightly do not reveal the names of the donors for their safety.
Sr Doody was not the only brave Salesian nun there. I am thinking, in particular, of Sr Carol Takhan Fachakh, who can be seen here receiving an award from POTUS First Lady Melania Trump. When I previously sent very considerable sums of money to those heroic nuns, they convened special meetings to decide how best to spend it on the countless mothers and new-born children who depend on them for survival. Sr Doody had me in her bad books because I paid for Syrian children to have life saving heart operations, whereas in the Sophie’s Choice world those brave nuns are forced to live in, the same amount of money could have kept far more children alive by supplying them with the basics Ireland’s sanctions deny them. If you have anything to spare, you can donate it here and I will see it gets to them either via the hawala system or other conduits that remain in place.
Not all heroes, of course, wear a cape or a nun’s veil. Those Syrian and Palestinian mothers, who depend on them for sustenance, are also heroes for, as the late Emperor Hirohito put it, bearing the unbearable.
And the Armenian women too. The photograph SCF use of me was taken in the border town of Kessab, when Turkish shelling had us pinned in on three sides. An Armenian mother, who had been made run literally for her life four times previous to that, was standing beside me. God knows what she has since endured and God knows what has become of her and thousands like her.
Kessab was a mess. Erdoğan’s rabble had destroyed or wrecked or robbed everything, including the doors and window frames. They even robbed the teddy bears of the little girls, who tagged along behind us as we examined the ISIS fox holes and retrieved the captagon and letters home to Australia they abandoned when the heroic Syrian Arab Army sent them packing.
Though those little girls overheard stomach-churning conversations no child should ever hear, on the plus side, they lapped up the karate lessons we gave them. When our lessons reconvened at 9 am the following morning, there was an army of little Bruce Lees and Jackie Chans already waiting for us, not because they all wanted to kick ass but because they wanted something, anything to do. Though they were delighted when I told them I would return with some break dancers in tow, those days are gone as NATO’s head hackers consider such frivolities haram. Much better, I guess, to be a suicide bomber, child sex bride or Yezidi sex slave but, I guess, to each their own.
There are so many other great Syrian women I met that I could wax forever about them. The architecture students of Damascus and Aleppo, obvious geniuses galore in their ranks, blown to kingdom come but their new rulers now dumb them down by making them feign prayers here, there and everywhere. The Alawite women, threatened with death by dodgy Melkite nuns for wishing to preserve their essentially harmless way of life. The Armenian mothers who got out from the frying pan of Dodge so the legs of their little children would not be blown off. The heroic Syrian women I met, who had their legs blown off, and who now face certain death at the hands of their liberators because they believed in a secular and tolerant Syrian Arab Republic.
And, of course, the great Sunni Asma Assad, who epitomises all that is best not only in Syrian and Arab womanhood, but in all that is best in humanity. Whatever one may think of Bashar Assad, he hit the jackpot with that Rose of the Desert. Not only is she a multi-cultural, smooth as silk polyglot, but she has the poised manners of a saint, as can be seen in the way she helped elderly Saydnaya nuns ascend inclines when the Assads visited their famous monastery on 8th September, the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is their big day and which I too was fortunate to enjoy, as the rebels rained their mortars down on us.
And, though Saydnaya Prison is back in the news because Assad apparently kept fifty million prisoners there for years on end for no apparent reason, as the first liberators at the scene there were the totally discredited crisis actors of MI6’s White Helmets murder gang, we can move on from Saydnaya’s now redundant debke dancers to equally nice things before wrapping up this tribute to Syria’s best and bravest.
And where better than the nearby city of Maaloula, where they speak the language of Mary of Jesus and where I got MEP Mick Wallace to donate a pile of football jerseys and to ref a game between the mini Ronaldos and Messis of that fabled town? Although some of the boys were not bad footballers, the little girls set up their own version of Liverpool’s famous Kop where they chanted Allah! Syria! Bashar al-Assad. Not quite up there with the best chants of English football but endearing enough in its own right.
And so, as John Lennon’s supermarket jingle reminds us, this is Christmas, when Palestinian and Syrian Christians would don their Santa uniforms and march along to the delight of Christians and Muslims alike. A simple and harmless Christmas treat that has been taken away from them, just like so very much more has been taken from them.
But all of that said, the game of life must go on until the last card is played. The patriotic women and children of Syria must be helped, until the tide turns, which it will, if those of us who remain, learn the lessons and keep the faith, like Zenobia did before us and like millions of those patriots left behind in Syria, continue to cling to in the black ISIS hell NATO have bequeathed them.
