You can be forgiven for having missed the spat between Syrian exile, Rafik Shami and the former Christian Democrat MP, Juergen Todenhoefer.
In a nutshell, Todenhoefer claims that Assad is wildly popular in Syria, and that the evidence of massacres is a forgery. Shami has described Todenhoefer as “naive” and a “celebrity journalist”.
On the pages of Taz, Todenhoefer has hit back. This is his killer argument:
In recent decades, in my travels in the Arab world, I have not seen such deliberate deception. The truth has been massacred in the Syrian war thoroughly.
Dr. Ali Haidar is the leader of the opposition party within the Syrian SSNP. He is an ophthalmologist. This moderate party has existed since 1932. Since she was admitted in recent years because of the unofficial monopoly of the Baath Party, many of their actions were illegal, especially in demonstrations. Some party members were punished with imprisonment, some remain today.
…
Haidar told me he did not understand that the Western media could so easily manipulated by the rebels and al-Jazeera. The reality in Syria look quite different.
Yeah.
The SSNP is the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. It is part of the Baath-run “National Progressive Front”, of parties permitted by the regime.
It is a Nazi party, with a flag modelled on the Swastika.
Here is a little more information on the SSNP:
It is a party whose leaders, men approaching their seventies, send pregnant teenagers on suicide missions in booby-trapped cars. And it is a party whose members, mostly Christians from churchgoing families, dream of resuming the war of the ancient Canaanites against Joshua and the Children of Israel. They greet their leaders with a Hitlerian salute; sing their Arabic anthem, “Greetings to You, Syria,” to the strains of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”; and throng to the symbol of the red hurricane, a swastika in circular motion.
You’d think a German, in particular, might know all this.
(Hat Tip: Daggi Boidenberg)
Johannes in the comments says:
Todenhöfer has always been an admirer and defender of Apartheid rule by minorities, weither they were Afrikkaaners in South Africa, Sunnis in Iraq or Nusayris in Syria. His pro-Apartheid stand earned him his German nickname when, in the late seventies, veteran Social Democratic MP Wehner called him, during a debate on South Africa in the German parliament, “Herr Hodentöter”, literarilly “testicle killer”, but the proper translation would probably be “testicle shrinker” :D
