U.S. says Syrians built crematorium at prison to dispose of bodiesThe US

To get a sense of Iran's political scenes, here are two videos which I would like you to watch depicting campaign rallies for the two main candidates for the presidency in Iran. The first video is quite short and is from the Rouhani campaign. The other video is longer, from the Raisi campaign, but you can watch the few minutes and it will give you the requisite idea.

 

Those both appear to be large peaceful political rallies. What kind of change to they represent?

 

No outside countries were attacking Assad. He simply started killing his own people as his father had done before him.. The people Assad is killing in his prisons are Syrian dissenters.

 

The first video was from the Rouhani election rally in Tehran last week. He is the incumbent president running for reelection. His base of support is the moderate and reforrmist coalition. The slogans and circumstances are covered in this article in the NYT, which also includes a video clip of another Rouhani campaign rally.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/world/middleeast/iran-election-rouhani-khamenei.html
At Rouhani Rally, Daring Slogans and Reminders of Iran’s Political Ghosts

The second video was from the Raisi rally, Raisi being the conservative challenger in this race. A former prosecutor and high ranking judicial figure, Raisi's main slogans focus on jobs and economic issues. This video is from an English speaking foreign network showing another Raisi rally.

 

I posted a link with tens of thousands murdered, and while there may "only" be a few thousand in the gulag right now - thousands have been murdered over the past years - and continue to be. This does not include the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS being genocided in syria right now because of iran.

Like drawing cartoons?

Such as who?

Oh my goodness...

Like these:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2015/aug/03/iran-evin-prison-like-torture-chamber

"'I wonder if we are in a prison or a torture chamber’: summer is hell in Iran's Evin jail"

Are you trying to make me look good here?

I haven't even gotten STARTED yet on that cancerous dictatorship.

 

Why even waste your time on such posters? There's videos of the barrel bombs falling out of SAA jets, this is not even remotely debatable.

 

I FUNDAMENTALLY disagree - and so should you.

The West is nothing like that, and that's aboout 40 countries - 1/5 of the world's total.

NO ONE should have to suffer under a dictatorship, people are not animals and have a right to decide their own future, and to speak up about it. This is not the middle ages where there was a king to tell everyone what to do, say or how to live - those days are over.

It is the banal acceptance of such terrible situations, and the silence and tolerance for them, that allows them to exist. That saying about "evil can only exist if good men do nothing..." ring a bell?

 

Nor do they want to be ruled by the 50-year assad family dynasty.

 

You were being rational for awhile, don't fall down that well again. assad is massacring sunnis by the hundreds of thousands, with his puppet master iran moving shia in from other countries to steal their land and ethnically cleanse sunnis out en masse.

 

You keep pumping that iran-bought and paid for propaganda....nah, you're not a shill/water carrier for the regime, not at all.....

https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-9804-Iranian-elections-the-illusion-of-democracy#.WRy3ghQrbtc

"Of 3,000 candidates put forward by reformists, only 30 have been allowed to stand by the Guardian Council, a mere one in 100 of those wishing to stand.

It is worth remembering that these are candidates who are deemed “reformist” within the very narrow confines of that term in Iranian politics.

There are no candidates opposed to the regime, standing for the rights of women or actively promoting the right of Iranian workers to engage in free and open trade union activity.

Persistent reports in Iranian opposition media indicate that the powerful Sepah Pasdaran (the Guards Corps) are confident that at least 180 out of the 290 seats of the new Majlis will be filled with their candidates, carefully selected from within the ranks of their commanders and ideologists.

In total 40 per cent of the 12,000 hopefuls for parliamentary election, including a significant number of MPs in the outgoing Majlis, have failed to qualify.

“It is clear that many potential candidates have been excluded due to their political opinions,” he said.

“That hardly makes for an electoral process that can, in any normal sense, be described as free and fair.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/syria-assad-barrel-bombs_us_5787e043e4b0867123e0510a

“We used to watch horror movies. Now, we are living them,” a Syrian man says in a new BBC News video as he describes going to a cellar to take shelter from airstrikes.

The network’s chilling footage offers a glimpse into the war-torn nation’s ailing city of Darayya, which has been under siege by its own government for four years.

Blasts erupt as clouds of smoke engulf the opposition-held Damascus suburb, leaving bloodied wreckage and bodies in their wake. The use of barrel bombs ― deadly explosive devices that often contain shrapnel ― has been widely condemned by rights organizations, including the United Nations.

“We don’t have homes anymore,” a young boy explains in the video. “There is so much shelling all the time.”

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...they-drop-barrel-bombs-on-fellow-Syrians.html

Bashar al-Assad's airmen laugh as they drop barrel bombs on fellow Syrians
New footage obtained by al-Jazeera, shot on board a Syrian military helicopter, contradicts the dictator's claim that his forces have never used barrel bombs

 

Here are some actual facts from FOX news about the plight of Christians by the terrorists we were supporting indirectly:

Amid the conflict, Christian archbishops, nuns, clerics and church leaders have been systematically kidnapped and executed, suicide bombers have struck at Christmas celebrations and many of the faith’s most sacred sites and treasures haven been looted or destroyed.

The castle of Krak des Chevaliers, just west of Homs, which was the fortress for the Knights Hospitaller during the Crusades, and the famed Catholic Monastery of St. Elian, home to a 5th-century tomb, are among the notable sites that have been ravaged.



For centuries, Syria was a melting pot of different religions and ethnic groups, where a Sunni Muslim majority lived in relative peace with Alawites, Christians, Shia Muslims, Ismaili, Druze, Kurds, Turkmen, Armenian, Yazidi and others.

“Christians and Muslims lived in the same neighborhoods, we fasted together for different religious holidays,” said Malak Al Hussaini, a 24-year-old post-graduate student from near Raqqa, who now lives in Damascus. “But these terrorists are mutilating the minds of people.”

Hussaini -- a Muslim -- served as a translator at a Christian Armenian Church before it was reduced to rubble in the fighting.

“We lived in harmony,” she lamented. “And now, ISIS takes minorities at checkpoints, women are taken as sex slaves and men are killed or forced to convert to the Islamic version of ISIS… We don’t know when this will stop.”​

 

To counteract the propaganda spitted out by some on this forum, here is a video of Virginia Senator Black who said: "We have never done anything more loathsome or despicable than what we're doing in Syria."

He discusses with Janice Kortkamp the situation in Syria, where Washington is actively arming and funding Al Nusra (Al Qaeda) by combining them with the moderates, and then using this to exterminate the Syrian population.

 

IOW, the same kind of bland shuck and jive that politicians have been selling forever everywhere.

 

I am familiar with Arendt, but I did not think she made a very strong case that evil was really all that banal. I have wondered if it was that attitude that encouraged her relationship with the odious Martin Heidegger. The West's record of replacing tyrants with model Western democracies is a total failure or close to it.

 

Look up the definition of genocide. Massacres are not "genocide". Few atrocities rise to the level of genocide as I suspect you know. I have yet to see any compelling evidence that the Assad regime has engaged in program designed specifically to cleanse Syria of Sunnis. Have you got any?

 

assad/putie boy/iran are targeting sunnis, and iran is transferring shia from other countries into syria. About 500K to 1 MM are dead, almost all sunnis by the regime and its allies. That more than qualifies.

 

No it doesn't meet the definition. Have you read The Problem From Hell, Powers? Or Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt? Check the definition of genocide. The US and its allies killed far more Germans and Japanese during WW II - this was not genocide or even a war crime.

 

I don't know about "bland" necessarily, as politicians differ in their abilities to inspire people even if they don't differ all that much in what actually motivates and informs what they will be doing. But I can't disagree with the rest of your statement. Indeed, what is ironic is that two countries which are ideologically so apart, namely the US and Iran, in reality aren't that different in terms of how their politics works. They just have interest groups whose agendas are often in exact opposite. In America, in my eyes at least, the Israel Lobby controls US foreign policy in alliance with the military industrial complex. You can talk about everything else, but what is really dear to them is ultimately taboo for any mainstream public discourse. Everyone who wants to become president in the US has to show and claim fidelity to Israel, or else they have no chance. In Iran, the anti-Israeli lobby and the Iranian military industrial complex decide Iran's national security agenda and saying anything except the orthodox line on Israel is very much like saying anything other than the opposite orthodox line on Israel in the US. In Iran, the religious right have a lot of influence over one of the factions, namely the principalists, while in the US the religious right has similar hold over the Republicans. Like in Iran and those who are most passionate in supporting the reformists, many of the supporters of the Democrats are driven in part by their hostility to religion and the religious right (and, for many among them, their hostility to the Israel Lobby and the military industrial complex). And just like politics and elections in the US, were the candidates really go at it against one another but ultimately the policies don't change as much as the heated rhetoric might suggest, it is the same in Iran. All the mud slinging and vitriol and the passion for one or the other candidate notwithstanding, the most significant changes are those that come slowly and overtime and not overnight.

 

NO - unfortunately - I think that you ARE - but
I am not sure if you are aware of your amiss

There is after all, this THING called "Willful Ignorance"

 

Who said outside countries were attacking Assad Ms Straw-woman.

Outside countries armed the Islamist Jihadist rebels. Some of these Jihadists came from outside countries.

Often countries kill traitors within their midst .. and there are a whole lot of traitors in Syria. Scum of the earth who deserve death.

 

Syria is a proxy of Iran.
The Saudis, Turks, Israelis, Gulf States, and US want Assad removed. Margot is simply posting their propaganda.

 

Assad is way better than the alternative - extremist Islamist Jihadists.
That is why the people came out in droves to re-elect him.

Did you even bother watching the video ? or is ignorance too blissful ?