RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/10/hts-is-no-liberation-movement/

The overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad’s despotic regime in Syria this weekend has been cheered on by the UK government as well as much of the mainstream media.

Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC One, deputy PM Angela Rayner said that she ‘welcomed’ the news of Assad’s fall. Yesterday, foreign secretary David Lammy celebrated the Syrian president’s toppling, telling MPs that Assad is a ‘monster’, a ‘drug dealer’ and a ‘rat’.

In a sense, the government’s response is understandable. No one should mourn the end of the Assad dynasty’s brutal decades-long rule. Furthermore, Assad’s fall deals another significant blow to his despotic backers, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia, depriving both of a key strategic ally. Lammy’s geopolitical analysis leaves a lot to be desired at times, but he is right to say that Assad’s defeat is a humiliation for both Moscow and Tehran.

Yet too often, this understandable happiness over the fall of the Syrian dictator has morphed into an endorsement of the Islamist forces that toppled him. Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, even went so far as to describe Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that led the offensive against Assad, as ‘a liberation movement’.

It’s enough to make you wonder if parts of the British state have mislaid their critical faculties. The HTS-led forces now vying to replace Assad should be viewed much more cautiously.

After all, HTS, which had previously been confined to the Idlib province in Syria’s north-west, is a Sunni Islamist paramilitary group. Its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, was once aligned with the Islamic State (ISIS), and headed up HTS’s predecessor movement, al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. In 2017, the US State Department put up a $10million reward for information that could lead to his capture. This came after its decision in 2013 to classify him as a ‘specially designated global terrorist’. Likewise, the British state lists HTS as a proscribed terrorist organisation, although the government has now mooted removing it from the list.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-the-uk-fantasy-cant-quite-replace-reality/

Britain, once the seat of a global empire and a proud civilization, is undergoing a world-historical societal transformation before our very eyes, and yet few have taken notice. In fact, even as this formerly great nation and erstwhile leader of the Western world suffers through its death agonies and last days as a free society, some are even celebrating its imminent demise. And still others are going even farther: amid the death throes of British civilization, they’re still up to their old game of posturing and playing the victim, as if they, not Britain, were in mortal peril. They even claim to have been victimized at the hands of dying Britain itself, as the nation of Shakespeare, Henry V and Churchill still had the will or the strength to get the better of anyone.

The Spectator on Saturday reviewed a new play called “Expendable,” which is playing until Dec. 21 at London’s renowned West End theatre The Royal Court. The play, according to The Spectator, is “an urgent bulletin from the front line of the grooming gang scandal in the north of England.” The Royal Court website is no less effusive, saying: “Playwright Emteaz Hussain‘s Expendable spotlights the often-overlooked voices of Pakistani women, delving into the shortcomings of law enforcement, politicians, and the media.”

Spotlighting the criminally overlooked voices of Pakistani women sounds like a capital idea. They could tell us about how the Qur’an directs men to beat women from whom they “fear disobedience” (4:34). They could tell us about how it devalues a woman’s testimony (2:282) and inheritance rights (4:11), and allows for the marriage, and even the divorce, of prepubescent girls (65:4). They could tell us about honor killings, the jailing of rape victims, and more.

All that, however, is not what “Expendable” is about. “The setting,” The Spectator tells is, “is a kitchen in Yorkshire where Zara is trying to keep her family together after her son, Raheel, was outed as a rape suspect by a national newspaper.” It’s not just the shame of the charge, it’s the attendant harassment: “White thugs dump parcels of excrement on their porch and Zara cowers under the kitchen table, too scared to answer the door. The racists have mounted a mass demonstration, supported by the cops, which causes local bus services to be cancelled.”