Solidarity with Syria

Theo Russell, Prof Majid and Andy Brooks share a joke

By New Worker correspondent

NEW WORKER supporters and members of the Arab community in London heard two stirring calls to stand by Syria at a New Worker public meeting last week. Prof Kamal Majid, the vice-president of the Stop the War Coalition and New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks spoke in detail about the moves of US-led imperialism and their Arab agents to overthrow the Assad government.

            The meeting was chaired by Theo Russell from the NCP London District, which has sponsored a number of New Worker public meetings in central London over the past year or so.

Prof Majid, a communist who writes on current affairs in the Arab media, covered the efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda to spread terror and sectarian division across Syria as part of the imperialist plan to replace the Syrian government with a puppet state, à la Libya, that would do the bidding of the Americans and Zionists.

Andy Brooks reported on the stand taken by the major trends within Syria’s communist movements in support of genuine reform but opposed to all attempts to tear up the new constitution. Both broadly agreed on the need to build solidarity with Syria’s progressive and democratic forces that have closed ranks around the Arab Socialist Renaissance Party (Baath) to end the violence and defend the gains of the Syrian national revolution.

 Kumar Sarkar, from Second Wave Publications, took the floor to raise the issue of the balance of forces in Syria and the class issues at stake in the current turmoil. Both main speakers said this would take hours to cover but, in fact, the questions were easy to answer.

As Andy Brooks pointed out imperialism can never solve the problems of the Arabs or indeed any other people in the world and it never claims to do so. It flies the false flag of “human rights” to justify neo-colonialist aggression and what it is doing in Syria is what it has done in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan and what it hopes to do in Iran if it gets half the chance.