News and Commentary

These Trump Supporters Are Now Big Fans Of Syrian Butcher Bashar Assad

   DailyWire.com

It was truly hysterical to observe some of President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters turn on him after he launched airstrikes against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Now some Trump supporters are seemingly embracing the brutal dictator.

The ever-bombastic and fiery Ann Coulter raised eyebrows on Wednesday evening when she declared on Tucker Carlson Tonight that Assad was “one of the better leaders” in the Middle East, a notion she expounded upon in her Wednesday column.

“Assad is one of the least bad leaders in the entire Middle East,” wrote Coulter. “He’s not a murderous thug like Saddam, has no rape rooms, isn’t into jihad, protects Christians and is fighting ISIS. He provided us with intelligence on al-Qaida after 9/11. He does not have crazy Islamic police slapping women around or throwing gays off buildings. (That would be our beloved ally, Saudi Arabia.)”

Columnist Katie Hopkins tweeted out the following around the time of the airstrikes:

The odious neo-Nazi Richard Spencer tweeted out a photo of the Assad couple with hashtag “#StandWithAssad.” Another contemptible neo-Nazi, David Duke spat out multiple Assad-loving tweets calling the dictator “a modern day hero” and declaring “GOD BLESS ASSAD!”

Other alt-right figures, like Mike Cernovich and Paul Joseph Watson, gave implicit support of Assad by claiming that he’s the guardian of Christians.

Now that the nauseating pro-Assad writing from Trump supporters is out of the way, here are the facts about what genocidal butcher Assad is: (H/T: news.com.au)

The media is state-controlled, the internet is censored and Syria remains a de facto single-party state with only Assad’s Ba’ath Party holding effective power.

The Assad regime has also been accused of using barrel bombs to kill civilians and destroy infrastructure, something Assad has denied.

Assad is also suspected of green-lighting the sarin gas attack that killed more than 1400 civilians in 2013.

Most recently, an Amnesty International report revealed 13,000 were secretly hanged at a military-run Saydnaya prison in Syria.

The Assad government also came under the spotlight last week after horrific footage shocked the world after a chemical attack killed more than 80 people in Khan Sheikhun, a rebel-held town in the northwestern Syrian Idlib province.

Coulter is cherry-picking Assad’s record; she is correct that Assad provided the U.S. with intelligence after 9/11 but it’s only natural that Assad would want a Sunni Islamic terror group exterminated given that he’s part of the Alawite Shia clan. She conveniently leaves out the fact that Assad harbored Saddam Hussein loyalists during the Iraq War and allowed “military equipment and jihadi fighters to cross into Iraq,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Additionally, nowhere in Coulter’s column does she mention Assad’s alliance with Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, all of which are enemies to the U.S.

As for Cernovich and Joseph Watson’s argument that Assad protects Christians, it’s certainly true that Syrian Christians have long viewed Assad as key to their survival in the country, which is why many Christians back Assad out of fear that he could be replaced by Sunni fundamentalists who could target Christians. That is certainly a valid concern, which is what makes Assad’s ousting a thorny issue.

However, it’s worth noting that Assad’s brutality against his own people has been a detriment to Christians as well, as one Syrian Christian explains:

If anything, Putin and Assad’s bombing and starvation campaign has made Syria more dangerous for Christians. The barrel bombs dropped by their military machine on Daraya and towns across the country cannot offer our Christian community protection. The thousands of Syrian children unable to attend schools, and the thousands facing starvation due to Assad’s kneel or die policy, cannot offer Syrian Christians peace of mind.

As one Syrian patriarch warned, “There is no safe place left in Syria. The future of Christians in Syria is threatened not by Muslims but by … chaos… and the infiltration of uncontrollable fanatical, fundamentalist groups.”

In other words, between Assad’s butchery on one side and the radical Sunni Islamists among the other side, Syria is simply not safe for Christians anymore, causing the argument that Assad protects Christians to be rendered moot.

It is one thing to argue that ousting Assad risks him being replaced by Sunni Islamist extremists; it’s quite another to embrace the barbaric dictator and argue that the U.S. should look the other way from his butchery. The aforementioned Trump supporters showing warmth toward Assad is truly appalling and disgusting.

Follow Aaron Bandler on Twitter.

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