I was at a lecture of Haytham Manna’ (the Known Syrian pacifist opposition leader based in Paris and the spokesman of the Arab Commission for Human Rights and also spokesman of the National Coordination committee for Democratic Change).

Mr. Manna’ did not add anything new to what I, at least, know.

He repeated how he lost dear and close people to him in order to give himself the street credibility with the Syrian population, which is what everyone in Syria experiences on a daily basis.

Neither the Assad regime, nor the super powers, nor the regional powers, nor the local conflicting armed fractions, nor the simple Syrian in Syria see him as part of a/the solution, why is that?

I don’t doubt the good will of Mr. Manna’. But is this good will enough to soothe the troubled souls of Syria, especially after three years of a violent and bloody conflict that has cost the Syrians, more than 200 hundred thousand deaths, hundreds of thousands missing, more than five millions of internally and externally displaced, the Syrian tsunami has reached the shores of as far as Sweden and Belgium in the form of refugees fleeing the bloody reality of daily life. As a child I learnt that rivers flow from mountains because of rainfall and snowfall. I lived to see a river of blood flowing from the dry lands of Syria. I was imagining that while listening to Mr. Manna’ having his pacifist discourse.

This article is not about Mr. Manna’, it’s about freedom in its philosophical aspect and the process that leads to this freedom. We all know that liberty and freedom is not given, it is fought for. I never read a history of people who did not fight for their freedom. I think peoples who didn’t struggle they had their freedom taken away, were enslaved and forever disappeared and took the form of the conqueror and adopted their culture and religion and ways of life.

Hezbollah is not concerned about liberty, even though it is certainly a struggling factor in the Middle East. Hezbollah is serving an external agenda for Iran and the Wilayat al Faqih. TheAssad regime is not struggling for liberty, even though it has a form of struggle against imperialism. Bashar al Assad liberalized the market since he took over power. One could buy Coca Cola and could go to McDonald’s and Kentucky in side Damascus, so he’s not really struggling against capitalism either. It’s merely the historical condition that made him a neighbor to a neo-colonialist form “Israel”, which in its turn gave him many cards to play with and to bluff. The Assad regime is only fighting for its survival and not for the struggling people and countries against imperialism, and if the interest helps him consolidate his survival it will play the card of the struggle against imperialism and capitalism and world solidarity. It is politics. A top member and the till-recently president of the extreme right wing party of the Belgian party (Vlaams Belang) visited Assad in Syria around a year ago and called him an honest and heroic man. The communist party of Belgium has its ties with Assad regime as well because it’s part of a so-called global resistance against imperialism and capitalism. It is politics: extreme right and left could meet on Syria.

Given that every party in the conflict has its interests why do we blame Islamists and Mujahideen when they receive financial funding from Saudi and Qatar. Of course Saudi and Qatar are not part of any struggle, on the contrary they are working against any Arab progressive project. They are not standing up for Palestine and the Palestinians, so why would we believe that they are standing for the Syrian people? It is logic, one doesn’t have to doubt their regressive influence. It is a kind of hypocrisy to only see Saudi and Qatar now. Saudi, Qatar and most of the Gulf States were never struggling and standing up for the Arab world. But the Syrian revolution that has developed into a civil war chose to fight. After seven months of pacific manifestations, answered brutally and  heartlessly by the Assad regime, the movement chose to hold up the arms, I still don’t see any incoherence with that? Isn’t that somehow logic? If we see the regime and the people as two individuals in which one was trying during months to talk and use diplomatic channels while the other person (the regime) wanted to continue his old sadistic style of violating, beating up, and raping that person, why do we blame the people when they finally hold up the sword to talk the same language of the regime? Even if the sword was given by the devil (Saudi or whatever power)?

Are we afraid of radical Islam and Al Qaida? We have to know first that they are the creation of colonialism and imperialism, so the power behind Al Qaida which created Al Qaida must scare us and not Al Qaida. Al Qaida provides a framework for those who want to be solidary with the Syrian people and for those who do not want freedom among the extremists. It is nonsensical to suppose that only foreign fighters are only fighting in Syria now, even though I don’t doubt their existence. Hezbollah as a foreign element is fighting in thousands in Syria. Russia has a military port in Tartous, which is a foreign presence, and also there are thousands of Islamists from all over the Islamic world taking part in the conflict, didn’t a similar scenario happen during the Spanish revolutions also? But then the Europeans and even Arabs who fought in the resistance in Spain were called freedom fighters.

One thing I know, Peace will not happen in the Middle East unless the tyrants and colonists see a sword on the side of people and the colonized. As the famous author and Islamic scholar Al-Kawakibi said:

“If the oppressor doesn’t see on the side of the oppressed a sword, the oppressor would not have dared to oppress.”

Palestine now has a sad reality, because we, the Arabs, trusted the propaganda of our tyrants, and now the Palestinian situation is very complicated because of that, and it is our procrastination that has led to that, not only the external factors.

So the show must go on in Syria, let people continue what they have started: taking up responsibility of their own fate.