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Although the recent passing of Prince Karim Aga Khan, the 49th hereditary imam of the Ismaili Muslims, who traces his lineage directly to the Prophet Muhammad, is bad news for me, for the Irish horse racing industry as well as for the world’s 15 million Ismailis, it is particularly bad news for Syria’s hard-pressed Ismailis and other Twelvers. Although the CIA’s New York Times gives a longer and more critical summary of his extraordinary life, much of that is as tangential to my interests and concerns as would be the passing of any other playboy.

For me, the Aga Khan’s Development Network was one of the main networks to raise funds for Syria from the Irish stud industry and to influence those, like the late Queen Elizabeth, who were enthralled by it. This was in spite of Sinn Féin’s terror campaign against it, epitomised when notorious IRA criminal Kevin Mallon kidnapped the Aga Khan’s Shergar and, much to the amusement of his fellow IRA criminals, blew its brains out, when the highly strung thoroughbred stallion rared up on the veteran criminal, who claims his own vast wealth is a result of surprisingly good fortune at the bookies but who has always been a blight to Ireland and to the wider world.

The same cannot be said of the late Aga Khan, whose Aga Khan Trophy has been the highlight not only of the annual Dublin Horse Show but of the entire global show jumping calendar for the last century, so much so that the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, moved heaven and earth in vain attempts to attend it.

There are a number of lessons there for any pretend radicals in the room. Whereas Kevin Mallon epitomises the total fraud that is faux radicalism, the Aga Khan showed that ye must prudently gather ye rosebuds where ye may. Leaving the Aga Khan’s vast fortune, lavish lifestyle and the hundreds of hospitals, educational and cultural projects he funded throughout the developing world to one side, the fact is that the Aga Khan was a much better friend to Syria than were many of his light fingered critics and, although many of Syria’s Ismailis, like Syria’s other Twelvers, live in abject poverty, that is a matter of economic development, not as to whether the Aga Khan or anyone else has too healthy a bank balance.

The Beatles, of all folk, hit on this theme many moons ago when they sagely sang of Revolution and the frauds who promulgated it and not just with respect to Mallon’s contemptible mob, but also with the gangsters who now rule Syria and who are eyeing up Egypt for the kill. If there is anything comparable to what those savages have done to advance civilisation comparable to what the Aga Khan did over his long life, I am unaware of it.

Although the Qataris, the Turks and ISIS’s other bankrollers will throw a few coppers at Syria’s impoverished paupers, their token efforts will change nothing outside of a few hypocritical headlines in NATO’s legacy media. All of that notwithstanding, I am not totally despondent as the ultimate way forward is for the ordinary Ismaili, the ordinary Twelver, along with the ordinary Sunni, Christian and Druze to be empowered and to be masters of their own destiny.

Just as a goalkeeper must decide to dive to the left or to dive to the right to save a penalty, so too had Syria’s President Assad to decide to move to the right or to the left to save his country from its enemies. That now is water under the bridge and the task Syria must face is to get many goalkeepers to stand in the breach and to get many Syrians to move their country forward and to eventually rid it of the dogs of the Muslim Brotherhood.

If we look at the Aga Khan’s passing from the glass half full perspective, there is consolation even in his death for those of us who oppose the criminals of the Muslim Brotherhood. That consolation comes from knowing that the Muslim Brotherhood can no more prevail over the longer term in Syria or Egypt than can comparable criminal groups prevail in Ireland or Latin America. Even as I type this, I look back to my recent article on the annihilation of the Alawites, and Finian Cunningham’s interview with Syrian expert Dan Kovalik, and I feel confident that the tide will turn, not least because I am working to help it turn. And, though we do not have the financial firepower and formidable networks of the late Aga Khan, that is no bad thing, as we must now get the finger out, and not be dependent upon the Aga Khan or thugs like Kevin Mallon to do the heavy lifting for us.