The Greatest Lie Being Told About Syria

Monday, 3 September 2012

The Greatest Lie Being Told About Syria

Posted by Richard Edmondson at 9/2/2012 8:20 PM

Christian blogger Stephen Sizer has been posting some very interesting material on Syria lately, with a special focus on Syrian Christians. Sizer is author of Zion’s Christian Soldiers: The Bible, Israel and the Church, and pastor of a church in the UK. You can visit his blog here.

Syria: The Lies Being Told

Elizabeth Kendall is an Australian religious liberty analyst and advocate. Her front page article for Evangelicals Now, "Syria: The Lies Being Told" corroborates interviews with Syrian Christian leaders.

Without a doubt, the greatest lie being told about the Syrian conflict is that it is being waged by President Assad against 'the Syrian people'.

This is pure propaganda. in December 2011, just three months into the crisis, the Qatar Foundation conducted a major poll inside Syria to assess the level of support for Assad…..the results revealed that 55% of Syrians supported President Assad and 68% of Syrians disapproved of the Arab League sanctions. So the main division in Syria is not between Assad and the rest, but between Sunni Islamists and the majority of Syrians…..

Western governments are supporting the Islamists. What started out as a non-sectarian protest movement was quickly hijacked by sectarian Sunnis. Demanding regime change and Sunni rule, they rejected all talk of reform and refused to negotiate. The chaos in Syria presented all those interested in countering ascendant Iran with a golden opportunity to take a massive bite out of the strategic Shi-ite crescent. The Syrian conflict evolved into a regional proxy war. The US, NATO and Turkey have allied with Sunni Arab Saudi Arabia and Qatar to pursue regime change in Syria believing it to be the best way to isolate and wound their grand nemesis: Iran.

The West has long known that the Syrian opposition was being inflitrated by international jihadists……. In April 2011 the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch and all the East warned that fundamentalist Muslims were calling for Jihad, Christian villages were being attacked and churches receiving threatening letters. ….. Who will stop international Islamists from establishing little emirates in towns they control, where sharia will be enforced and from where Christians will be forced to flee? The battle for Aleppo is critical. It is home to swaths of loyalist Sunni Arab and Kurdish business elite as well as some 250,000 Christians. Jihadists will doubtless attempt to infiltrate Christian districts, not only to kill Christians but to draw the regime's return fire into those districts. Great for propaganda.

A summary of her article has been re-posted on numerous conservative evangelical blogs such as American Anglican, Virtue Online and Anglican Mainstream.

See also Elizabeth Kendall Religious Liberty Monitoring

Interview with a Syrian Christian:

In the video below, Sizer interviews Rev. Adib Awad, a Syrian Christian who three months ago attended a conference in Iran aimed at establishing an interfaith dialogue between Syrian Christians and Iranian Muslims. Now think about the significance of that for a moment. Syria is under attack from the “Christian” West, and Syrian Christians are reaching out to Muslims in Iran. According to Sizer, Awad was raised as a child with Bashar Al-Assad and knows him well. Today Awad is the General Secretary of the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon. In this interview he discusses the attacks on his country by the terrorist gangs armed by the West.