"I am amazed," wrote Fawaz Traboulsi on his Facebook page. His astonishment concerns the mumannah group’s positions on Palestine. "'With Palestine and against the Palestinians’ is the name of a recently established political movement in the region," Traboulsi wrote.
I have been observing a phenomenon, the existence of a sizable number of political and intellectual bystanders or spectators of the Syrian scene. They appear to be waiting for the right moment or event to provide the needed rationalization to jump into the Assad camp without remorse or inconvenience. These spectators are not hypothetical, but actual human beings, some of whom I know personally, and others whom I have been following through their columns, posts, and interviews via new social media, daily press and TV networks.
In the following edited translation of Abbass Beydoun's post (in Arabic) on January 30, the Lebanese poet, critic, and editor of the cultural pages of As Safir newspaper examines the dilemmas of choice existing between the regime and the opposition, as well as the issue of responsibility and the causes of violence in the Syrian conflict.
HAMA32 YEARS LATER. February 3 was the 32nd anniversary of the Hama massacre. One post caught my attention, as it asked a question that has become both familiar and justified since the onset of the Syrian Revolution: How could such a massacre take place without any mass condemnation, either Syrian, Arab or international? For whatever it is worth, the fault may lie in the absence of today's social media, among other forms of modern media technologies.
